Whose work is real work? A triple labor framework for sustainable development initiatives

Abstract

Sustainable development initiatives that seek to ameliorate global crises require new forms of organization and ways of working for participants. Using an alternative food system initiative in Chiapas, Mexico as an ethnographic case study, this article identifies three forms of labor—physical, organizational, and emotional—that emerge within such projects and explores how these labor forms interact in ways that impact the long‐term success of such endeavors. Mujeres y Maíz is a development initiative that seeks to protect Mexico's heirloom maize and the lifeways it supports by building connections between food producers and consumers. Together, tortilla makers and organizers mobilize multiple labor forms to build new economically and environmentally beneficial alternative food systems. These varied labor forms constitute collective wealth‐in‐people. The group's collaborations require embodied culinary knowledge and physical labor, organizational labor to access resources, and emotional labor to gird trust and cooperation. The analysis of these three types of labor shows how tortilla makers and organizers evaluate each other's different skill sets, shaped by class, race, and gender histories, in their collaborative and understandably contentious development work. The resulting triple labor framework is useful for diagnosing and negotiating tensions that impact the transformative potential of development initiatives within food systems and beyond.