‘Forgetting’ to survive: Black Jamaican masculinities in Canada’s seasonal agricultural worker program

Abstract

This article contributes to the debates on masculinities and their use of ‘forgetting’ as agency by examining how Black Jamaican farmworkers transform and adapt themselves to survive the layers of oppression experienced in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). This is set against the understanding that Jamaican migrant farmworkers have long internalized some of the dominant narratives of masculinity in terms of being the main source of economic provision and head of the home, which serves as major reference points in their negotiations and performance of masculinity. But there is a marked suppression of dominant patriarchal tenets, which sees the farmworkers ‘transgressing’ gender expectations/practices in the process of social reproduction. Therefore, the transnational spatial (re)arrangement in which the farmworkers find themselves challenges the hetero-normative logic in which they have supposedly been socialized in Jamaica and the institution of patriarchy that informs their masculinity. I find that the process of ‘forgetting’ utilized by migrant workers influences and informs the performances and representations of gender in the SAWP, marked by the suspension of specific masculinities at least while workers are in Canada. Unlike other studies which focus on farmworkers experience of the present, the research population is made up of Jamaicans migrant workers – now living in Jamaica – with previous SAWP experience in Ontario.