Social Transformation and Differential Inclusion: A Study of the Mobility and Labour of Indigenous People in the Agricultural Fields of Oaxacalifornia

Abstract

This paper investigates how, amid broader processes of neoliberal social transformation, changes in agricultural production systems and processes of borderisation have influenced the mobility of Indigenous people and their labour across the Mexico-US border. Drawing from primary and secondary research with Mixtecos in Oaxaca and their countrymen and women who have settled as migrants with an irregular status in California, the article traces how the value of Indigenous labour has been redefined along the neoliberal ideal of the worker-citizen in ways that (re)produce their differential inclusion. This study shows that the simultaneous abandonment of small-scale agriculture across Mexico, and the development of industrial agriculture in the Californias, cemented the devaluation of their labour as “unproductive” and “inefficient” in Oaxaca while it led to their essential incorporation as migrant workers in the industrial fields. Likewise, I show that parallel efforts to restrict the mobility and increase the deportability of economically needed, but otherwise unwelcome migrants in the US further subordinated their labour as “illegal” and “low-skilled” in California.