Immigrant Farmers Research Articles

Chimpanzees in the Ntakata and Kakungu Areas, Tanzania

Surveys were carried out for chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii, in the areas of Ntakata (300 km2 between the Mkamba River and the Lubalisi River, 05°45′–06°15′S, 30°00′–30°15′E), and Kakungu (200 km2 between the Lubalisi River and the sources of the Rubufu River, 05°55′–06°15′S, 30°00′–30°15′E), Tanzania, during the dry seasons of 2001 and 2003. The predominant vegetation was savanna woodland with forest patches (mainly along watercourses and hillsides). Population information was obtained by sightings and sleeping-nest counts. In the Ntakata area, chimpanzees occur in Ntakata, Mlofwezi, Kapalagulu (05°52′S, 30°02′E), and Mpulumuka (5°58′S, 30°11 ′E) and in the Ntakata-Kapalagulu Hills (Fig. 1). No evidence was forthcoming for their existence in Ikubulu, Lunfampa, Kakundu, Kabufisa, and Kamafiga, nor the plains of north of Kapalagulu Hill and the entire Lugufu basin. In the Kakungu area, they occur at Kakungu itself (05°58′S, 30°03′E) and Kalobwa in the Kakungu-Kalobwa Hills. With evidently large home ranges, densities were found to be low in the 500-km2 area between the Ntakata-Kapalagulu Hills and Kakungu-Kalobwa Hills — everywhere less than 0.05(0.048) individuals/km2. Hunting (by immigrant farmers and refugees), besides habitat loss (logging, firewood, and clearing for agriculture) are believed be causing a steady decline of chimpanzee populations in the region.

Beliefs About Poverty and Opportunity Among Mexican Immigrant Farm Workers1

This study examined attributions for poverty and beliefs about upward mobility among 124 Mexican immigrant farm workers. The effects of gender and length of United States residency were also analyzed. Despite living in poverty and perceiving racism as a significant problem, respondents expected upward mobility for themselves and their children. Consistent with previous research on low-income and ethnic minority attributions (Bullock, 1999; Hunt, 1996; Kluegel & Smith, 1986), structural explanations for poverty were favored over individualistic causes, however, considerable support for individualistic causes was also expressed. Gender and length of residency were not predictive of immigrants’ beliefs about poverty. Implications for future research are discussed.

Important or Impotent? Taking Another Look at the 1920 California Alien Land Law

Opposition to Japanese immigration led to Alien Land Laws that barred Japanese immigrants from buying or leasing farmland. Although there is general agreement that the 1913 California Alien Land Law had little impact, historians and social scientists have differed over the effectiveness of the 1920 initiative, which closed loopholes in the earlier law. Census data show a decline in Japanese American agriculture over the short and long run, which cannot be fully explained by the agricultural downturn of the 1920s. This evidence indicates that the 1920 California Alien Land Law had negative consequences for Japanese immigrant farmers.

UNA MUJER SIN FRONTERAS

Making strategic choices regarding her class and ethnic identiÞcation for the cause of social justice, Luisa Moreno was the most visible Latina labor and civil rights activist in the United States during the Great Depression and World War II. Vice-president of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA-CIO), this charismatic Guatemalan immigrant organized farm and cannery workers across the Southwest, achieving particular success among Mexican and Russian Jewish women in southern California plants. In 1939 she was also the driving force behind El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Espa–ola (the Congress of Spanish-speaking Peoples), the Þrst national Latino civil rights assembly. A feminist and leftist, she faced government harassment and red-baiting in the late 1940s, especially for her past Communist Party membership.

Mexican Workers and U.S. Agriculture: The Revolving Door

Western U.S. agriculture is an industry that has shaped and been shaped by a peculiar labor policy: seasonal workers were outsiders who looked to agriculture for jobs, not careers. They did not plan to remain farm workers, and the industry and community in which they worked and lived did not see them as long-term settlers. The immigration and integration policy, in effect, was to recruit new workers willing to accommodate themselves to seasonal employment, and to avoid their integration in agricultural areas. Thus, for most immigrant workers, economic mobility required geographic mobility. However, the major policy issue is not how to enhance the upward mobility of immigrant farm workers and their children; it is how U.S. agriculture should gain access to immigrant farm workers.

MADHERUKA AND SHANGWE: ETHNIC IDENTITIES AND THE CULTURE OF MODERNITY IN GOKWE, NORTHWESTERN ZIMBABWE, 1963–79

In colonial Southern Rhodesia, administrative officials often couched the rhetoric of ‘modernization’ in ethnic terms. They regarded immigrant Madheruka master farmers as the embodiment of modernization because they had been exposed to forces of modernization in their areas of origin, while both officials and immigrants alike regarded indigenous Shangwe as backward and primitive. This article argues that the construction of Madheruka and Shangwe ethnic identities dates primarily to the early 1960s, with the coming of immigrants and the introduction of cotton. Shangwe defined the immigrants as madheruka, a term whose origins lay in the eviction of the immigrants from crown land by colonial officials in the 1950s, while Madheruka termed the indigenous peoples shangwe, or backward. Each group perceived itself differently, however, Shangwe claiming that the term Shangwe referred to a place rather than to their ethnic identity and Madheruka claiming to belong to authentic Shona groups. The guerrilla war of the 1970s witnessed an attack on modernity as the guerrillas and their sympathizers regarded immigrant farmers as colonial collaborators.

Negotiating survival: undocumented Mexican immigrant women in the Pacific Northwest

Current analyses of Mexico–U.S. migration theory generally are based on socioeconomic contexts and decision-making processes of male respondents. Further, limited data available on undocumented Mexican immigrant women mainly address the Mexico–U.S. border area, and adjacent U.S. urban centers. Our qualitative study focuses on undocumented Mexican immigrant women residing in central Washington State, where the regional economy is dominated by agribusiness development and dependent on immigrant and migrant farm labor. This paper assesses propositions of neoclassical economic and social capital theories of international migration in explaining the women’s migration decision-making processes. Project data indicate that while the Pacific Northwest has been a primary migration destination for sometime, it now may be increasingly a second-stage U.S. migration site, following initial migration to more traditional destinations such as California.

The First Years of the Journal of Biological Chemistry

The First Years of the Journal of Biological Chemistry

The water of life: a century of confusion

Each morning I give thanks for growing up in America, being a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons (ACS), and serving on the faculty at Wayne State University, the only school to be honored with three Scudder Orators who spent their entire careers at one institution. Their backgrounds say something about all three entities: Dr Alexander Walt, an immigrant who left his homeland because of apartheid to become my chairman and our president; Dr Anna Ledgerwood, a daughter of tenant farmers from the state of Washington, who became my longterm partner; and now, myself, the son of immigrant farmers—no kings or queens, just working bees. Most Scudder Orations have dealt with philosophical, societal, or trauma system issues. Because my political acumen is lacking and my philosophical leanings are so far off the main stream that I believe that Adam and Eve came to earth on a spaceship, I have decided to discuss my favorite topic, namely, the pathophysiology of hemophagic shock and the resultant protein fluxes. The Lucas clan emigrated from the West Coast of Ireland, where the “water of life” is known by the Gaelic term “uisce beatha.” As one traveled across the Irish Sea to the East Coast of England, the “water of life” took on a new meaning one century ago when the great English physiologist, Ernest Starling, published his famous equation now known as the Law of the Capillary:

Britain to America: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Immigrants to the United States

From 1820 to 1860, the United States and Great Britain were the two most closely interconnected countries in the world in terms of culture and economic growth. In an important addition to immigration history, William Van Vugt explores who came to America from Great Britain during this period and why. Disruptions and economic hardships, such as the repeal of Britain's protective Corn Laws, the potato famine, and technological displacement, do not account for the great mid-century surge of British migration to America. Rather than desperation and impoverishment, Van Vugt finds that immigrants were motivated by energy, tenacity, and ambition to improve their lives by taking advantage of opportunities in America. Drawing on county histories, passenger lists of immigrant ships, census data, and manuscript collections in Great Britain and the United States, Van Vugt sketches the lives and fortunes of dozens of immigrant farmers, miners, artisans, skilled and unskilled laborers, professionals, and religious nonconformists.

The influence of personal protection, environmental hygiene and exposure to pesticides on the health of immigrant farm workers in a desert country.

Farm workers in developing countries tend not to use protective measures while handling pesticides. This study investigates the use of personal protection equipment and the practice of safety and hygiene procedures in the handling of pesticides in agriculture. Through a multi-stage sampling technique, one-fifth of the farms in a region were selected and all the farm workers at these farms were included in the study. A comparison population matching in age, socio-economic status and stay in the region was selected. A specifically designed questionnaire was used to collect information on the use of protective measures and the practice of safety and hygiene during work and on the disposal of empty pesticide containers. Blood pressure and erythrocyte acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity were measured in the exposed and the unexposed populations. Protective equipment was worn by a minority of farm workers - gloves, by 35%; work coveralls, by 36%; a scarf to cover the nose and mouth, by 39%; and shoes at work, by 79%. With regard to personal hygiene measures, 83% of the workers changed clothes after work and the same proportion took a shower after work; 63% and 46% drank and ate while at work respectively; and 11% used articles of domestic use in the preparation of pesticides on the farm. Most of the farm workers (96%) were asked to prepare pesticides for spraying by the foreman and 61% were asked to spray the pesticides on the crops. AChE activity was highly significantly depleted in the exposed population as compared with the unexposed population. AChE depletion was found to be negatively associated with the use of gloves, of work coveralls, and of a scarf to cover the nose and mouth and with the implementation of safety and hygiene procedures on the farm. AChE depletion was positively associated with the frequency of pesticide spraying.

生存機構としての村落社会

This study discusses various survival strategies adopted by a village in a newly reclaimed rice field area of Tsugaru in northern Japan, where the farmers have long suffered from crop failure and famine. The way social relationships between individuals and between groups in the village functioned in various survival strategies are diachronically examined. A swamp along the lower Iwaki river was developed extensively in the Edo era by the Tsugaru-han (the feudal clan) to make new rice fields. Because of low productivity and unstable harvest in the newly reclaimed rice fields, Shinden-byakusho, the immigrant farmers who settled in the region,had to support themselves by working away from home. Such subsistence can be named as “sally type” or “base type”. Even such lifeway was, however, destroyed by frequent crop failure and famine. After each famine, new villages were reestablished by new immigrant farmers. With this historical background, the social relationships between villagers are voluntary and flexible. They are an accumulation of lateral social connections, rather than a stratified vertical relationship. Such social groups have supported the “sally” or “base” type life of the rural society, which relies on one-crop agriculture and cash income by labor away from the village. These groups function in adjusting the social relationships in the village, while their flexible nature allow people to escape the village when necessary.

カリフォルニア州ターラック地域における日本人移民の植民活動と移民社会

カリフォルニア州ターラック地域における日本人移民の植民活動と移民社会

The Use of Bi-national Networks to Supply New Immigrant Farm Workers to Californian Agribusiness

The Use of Bi-national Networks to Supply New Immigrant Farm Workers to Californian Agribusiness

The Use of Bi-national Networks to Supply New Immigrant Farm Workers to Californian Agribusiness

The Use of Bi-national Networks to Supply New Immigrant Farm Workers to Californian Agribusiness

Japanese Immigrant Farmers and California Alien Land Laws: A Study of the Walnut Grove Japanese Community

dation.2 To support this latter contention, a careful analysis of Japanese immigrant sources recently demonstrated the oppressiveness of the laws from a Japanese immigrant perspective.3 Still, the ques tion of whether the laws adversely affected all Japan ese farming communities in the same way, or whether they had a distinct impact on each, remains open. To answer this question, more studies of spe cific farming communities will have to be under taken, with special attention to local economic conditions that influenced Japanese immigrants. The Walnut Grove Japanese community offers an excellent illustrative example. Japanese immigrant farmers settled in Walnut Grove in the late 1890s, established a unique Japanese-white relationship, and coped with the alien land laws within the con text of the local political economy. Walnut Grove is situated in the Sacramento River Delta. Known as kawashimo, which means down stream in Japanese, this rural community includes the vast acreage of Grand, Andrus, Tyler, Staten, and Ryer Islands. Preceding the influx of Japanese immi grants, Chinese laborers had come to the area in the 1870s to work on the construction of the levees around the inland islands. With the completion of reclamation, the Chinese then entered agriculture as farm laborers and tenant farmers. White landown ers, who controlled the local political economy, relied upon Chinese immigrants to do the back breaking work of reclamation and farming, a rela tionship that set the basic pattern of race and class relations in the Delta.4 When the Japanese arrived in the region, they became a part of this exploitative relationship with white landowners.

Chronic exposure to an environmental hazard: risk perceptions and self-protective behavior.

The risk perceptions and self-protective behavior of 282 immigrant farm workers (all of Mexican origin) in response to pesticide exposure were examined. Several variables were predicted to influence reactions, but some deviations from past studies were expected because cultural or socioeconomic factors could modify risk responses. In keeping with predictions, greater risk perceptions were associated with beliefs that past harm had occurred, future harm to self or offspring was likely, precautions were less effective, and cancer-causing agents were mostly unavoidable. Self-protective behavior was most likely for those receiving risk information, having greater perceptions of control over health and the occupational situation, and believing that precautionary methods were effective. The discussion considers variability in responses to chronic risk and the broader perspective offered by environmental hazard studies.

Ethnic Groups and Knowledge Systems in Agriculture

Previous articleNext article No AccessEthnic Groups and Knowledge Systems in AgricultureMiriam J. WellsMiriam J. Wells Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Economic Development and Cultural Change Volume 39, Number 4Jul., 1991 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/451906 Views: 5Total views on this site Citations: 11Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1991 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Branka Krivokapic-Skoko, Carol Reid, Jock Collins Rural cosmopolitism in Australia, Journal of Rural Studies 64 (Nov 2018): 153–163.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.01.014Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, Sea Sloat A new era of civil rights? Latino immigrant farmers and exclusion at the United States Department of Agriculture, Agriculture and Human Values 34, no.33 (Nov 2016): 631–643.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9756-6José L. García-Pabón Risk Concerns among Latino Farmers in Missouri: An Approximation, Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 33, no.11 (Jun 2011): 15–28.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2153-9561.2011.01044.xMartine Audibert, Jacky Mathonnat, Marie-Claire Henry Social and health determinants of the efficiency of cotton farmers in Northern Côte d’Ivoire, Social Science & Medicine 56, no.88 (Apr 2003): 1705–1717.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-9536(02)00164-8Daniel Mountjoy Ethnicity, Multiple Communities, and the Promotion of Conservation, (Jan 2010).https://doi.org/10.1201/9781420041385.ch15John A. Cross, Douglas Jackson-Smith, Bradford Barham Ethnicity and Farm Entry Behavior, Rural Sociology 65, no.33 (Oct 2009): 461–483.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-0831.2000.tb00039.x EndnotesEndnotes, (Jan 2000): 227–288.https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012287155-9/50039-8Elisabeth J. Austin, Ian J. Deary, Gavin J. Gibson, Murray J. McGregor, J. Barry Dent Attitudes and Values of Scottish Farmers: “Yeoman” and “Entrepreneur” as Factors, Not Distinct Types1, Rural Sociology 61, no.33 (Jan 2010): 464–474.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-0831.1996.tb00629.xDaniel C. Mountjoy Ethnic diversity and the patterned adoption of soil conservation in the strawberry hills of Monterey, California, Society & Natural Resources 9, no.44 (Jul 1996): 339–357.https://doi.org/10.1080/08941929609380979DAVID BUTZ SUSTAINING INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES: SYMBOLIC AND INSTRUMENTAL DIMENSIONS OF PASTORAL RESOURCE USE IN SHIMSHAL, NORTHERN PAKISTAN, The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 40, no.11 (Mar 1996): 36–53.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.1996.tb00431.xJack Kloppenburg Social Theory and the De/Reconstruction of Agricultural Science: Local Knowledge for an Alternative Agriculture1, Rural Sociology 56, no.44 (Feb 2010): 519–548.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-0831.1991.tb00445.x

The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America

This volume represents one of the first efforts to harvest the rapidly emerging scholarship in the field of American rural history. Building on the insights and methodologies that social historians have directed toward urban life, the contributors explore the past as it unfolded in the rural settings in which most Americans have lived during most of American history. The essays cover a broad range of topics: the character and consequences of manufacturing and consumerism in the antebellum countryside of the Northeast; the transition from slavery to freedom in Southern plantation and nonplantation regions; the dynamics of community-building and inheritance among Midwestern native and immigrant farmers; the panorama of rural labor systems in the Far West; and the experience of settled farming communities in periods of slowed economic growth. The central theme is the complex and often conflicting development of commercial and industrial capitalism in the American countryside. Together the essays place rural societies within the context of America's Great Transformation.

Changing Land Occupance Patterns and Ethnicity of a Japanese-American Rural Community

Although a considerable quantity of literature from various disciplines of the social sciences and humanities has focused on the role and characteristics of Japanese immigrant farmers in American agriculture and rural society, rather few studies have contributed to understanding of land occupance patterns of this ethnic group from the viewpoint of cultural or settlement geography. This paper is an inquiry into changing ethnicity shown in the land occupance patterns of Japanese immigrant farmers and their descendants based upon cultural geographic considerations, through a case study of a Japanese-American community in the Livingston area, California. The vicinity of Livingston, an incorporated town in the northern San Joaquin Valley, has long been an area of active Japanese colonization, known as the site of Yamato and Cressey Colonies, from the beginning of this century. The author made a field survey from February to May, 1984, observing farmhouse forms, farmstead layouts, field patterns, and entire spatial layouts including community buildings, roads, and canals, as well as interviewing farm operators and their family members.In this Japanese settled area, we can recognize four different stages of land occupance pattern development; I: pioneer era (1906-1914), II: first establishment and prosperity by the first generation (1915-1941), III: abrupt dislocation during wartime (1942-1945), IV: reestablishment and prosperity by the second generation (1946-present).The first stage was the period when the settlers had to adapt to the environment to survive; small and rough farmhouses, few farm buildings on the farmstead, emergency truck farming as the main source of income, and no community buildings. These situations corresponded to the unstable economy at the pioneering stage and the immature society, the majority of whose members were single men. Through this period community organizations had not been fully established, but were on their way to development under the ethnic background.During the second stage the community reached the first establishment and prosperity by the work of the first generation (Issei); the new colonial style farmhouses were built, a definite farmstead style with barn, tankhouse, and Japanese-style bathhouse was developed, vines and other fruit trees matured, community buildings such as the Colony Hall and church were constructed, and roads and canals were expanded. The society attained full growth by an increase in the number of members with families under the developed economy. Ethnic cooperation was highly developed through this period; social, religious, and cooperative agricultural associations were organized.The third stage was the wartime when settlers of Japanese ancestry were evacuated from the region and most of their farms were managed by a trustee organization.The fourth stage is the period when the community was rebuilt after World War II and reattained prosperity in the hands of the second generation (Nisei); houses were reconstructed or remodelled in modern styles, new farm buldings such as large equipment sheds or crop storage buildings constructed, farm size was enlarged and field units of individual farms were dispersed spatially and became larger in number. The church was rebuilt, large cooperative facilities such as packing sheds or crop storage buildings were newly constructed. Through this period the agricultural economy of the community has been enlarged and the Nisei family society has grown up. The community organizations have strengthened their economic character, and their ethnic background has been retreating gradually; an increasing number of non-Japanese members have come to live in the community and join the cooperative farmers' association.Through these four stages, the Japanese-Americans in the community have principally possessed strong ethnic affiliation on the basis of their residential propinquity in a small area.