Layered Disparities, Layered Vulnerabilities: Farmworker Health and Agricultural Corporate Power On and Off the Farm

This dissertation explores the relationships between immigrant farmworker health, on-the-farm practices and the off-the-farm structures of agribusiness, and state policies governing immigration, labor, environment, health care and social welfare in Central Coast California. These structures articulate with long-standing race-ethnic, gender, and labor hierarchies that perpetuate and exacerbate a long legacy of capitalist violence responsible for (re)producing multiple layers of farmworker disparities, vulnerabilities, and social and environmental suffering for migrant farmworkers. These are documented as syndemics--layers of diseases and harmful social conditions relations, and as chronicities of disease and suffering that worsen over time within individual bodies and communities. Oftentimes, mainstream health and social service providers identify these problems as individual, cultural, and or behavioral in nature, failing to address structural violence and vulnerabilities and thus perpetuating health disparities. An interrogation of the workers' compensation insurance and pesticide approval systems in the state of California highlight processes of contestation that persistently negate the social and environmental suffering and embodied knowledge of sick and injured farmworkers. A number of social services, non-profits, philanthropic and corporate social responsibility projects are funded by the agricultural industry. While mitigating some suffering, such projects and programs fail to address the root sources of health inequalities and de-politicize farmworker health. To conclude, alternative, non-capitalist solutions are explored that foster trans-worker solidarity and respect and that ensure that farmworkers' health, welfare, and survival needs are met.