Farmworkers and the Alternative Food Movement in U.S. Debates about Citizenship, Immigration, and Agricultural Labor

Abstract

This article draws on lessons from the Bracero Program to examine the problematic ideologies of race and citizenship that circulate in the alternative food movement today. It argues that a worker-centered transnational solidarity movement will better address the inequities and vulnerabilities that farmworkers continue to face than the conscious consumerism of the alternative food movement with its racialized discourse of Jeffersonian agriculture and its neoliberal investment in anti-obesity rhetoric.