Abstract
Every year, around two thousand Huichol families migrate from their homelands in the highlands of northwestern Mexico to the coastal region of Nayarit State, where they are employed on small plantations to pick and thread tobacco leaves. During their four‐month stay, they live, work, eat, and sleep in the open air next to the tobacco fields, exposing themselves to an unknown cocktail of pesticides all day, every day. In this article, I describe how these indigenous migrants are more at risk to pesticides because historical and contemporary structural factors ensure that they live and work in the way of harm. I discuss the economic, social, political, and racial inequalities that exist in their every‐day environment and how these forms of structural violence are mitigated by their intersection with local cultural contexts and their specific indigenous lifeworld.
Highlights
Medical Anthropology QuarterlyIndigenous people worldwide are especially vulnerable to higher rates of maternal, infant, and child morbidity and mortality, heavy burdens of preventable infectious diseases, malnutrition, an increasing burden of social and life style–related diseases, the effects of environmental contamination, and a generally lower life expectancy (Gracey and King 2009)
There in the sierra everything is good, you pick up this and that and the only thing you get is cold
I draw on the “violence continuum” (Bourgois 2002)—structural, everyday, and symbolic forms of violence—to discuss how social, political, and racial inequalities ensure that these migrants are at risk from their continual exposure to pesticides and how their indigenous culture and lifeworld interact dynamically with these structures, confounding their effects on well-being
Summary
Indigenous people worldwide are especially vulnerable to higher rates of maternal, infant, and child morbidity and mortality, heavy burdens of preventable infectious diseases, malnutrition, an increasing burden of social and life style–related diseases, the effects of environmental contamination, and a generally lower life expectancy (Gracey and King 2009) These health problems are caused by the particular nature of inequalities that affect them, the result of a combination of classical socioeconomic deficits and indigenous specific factors related to colonization, globalization, migration, loss of language, and culture (King et al 2009). The largest proportion of ceremonial activity is confined to their highland communities and sacred sites, migrant workers bring their costumbre to the tobacco plantations The visibility of their cultural and spiritual practices and beliefs serves to reinforce racist attitudes, as the local population is reminded of how their indigenous neighbors retain a pre-modern, pagan life style, which, to their mestizo employers, is a symbol of primitiveness. I argue that the health problems and risks that Huichol tobacco migrants experience are compounded by the specific forms of violence that operate against them as an indigenous group and are sustained by their naturalized understanding of the risk, a knowledge seated within a context of everyday violence and mediated through a complex cosmological world-view and its corresponding form of social organization
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