The Bittersweet Truth of Strawberries Among Farmworkers in Watsonville
Social Sciences
Anthropology 194M: Advanced Topics in Medical Anthropology
The essence of my paper is to explore the social and economic forces that marginalize Latino immigrant farmworkers into exhausting and harmful conditions. My papers discusses why immigrant workers are exposed to harmful pesticides and body positions that produce chronic pain. Instead of medicalizing their situations, such as giving a medical treatment, it is also important to understand the role of economic and political structures have on their bodies. My paper examines how immigration status positions many Latino immigrant workers into exhausting jobs and through generations, their US-born children will experience different conditions because their status is different from their parents. However, it is important to discuss the outcomes among immigrant workers, their lives should not be exposed to dangerous conditions because of their immigration status. That is, there should not be a generational progression, but a momentary one—one that calls for current theories and actual practice. The paper examines how immigration status plays a powerful role among farmworkers in Watsonville, California. Their conditions give us insight on structural vulnerability and structural violence—frameworks defined throughout my paper to support my observations in these camps.
