Summary

Racial hierarchies have defined US agriculture from its beginnings, structuring access to land and imposing boundaries between farmers and farmworkers. Racialized exclusion from other economic opportunities and from the full protection of the law have been key factors curtailing farmworkers’ opportunities for upward mobility within agriculture. Despite these barriers, farmworkers have consistently attempted to move up the agricultural hierarchy and establish themselves as independent farmers.

In the wake of the Civil War, formerly enslaved Black workers sought to acquire land to farm. Some succeeded, but their ability to advance was severely limited, and many remained trapped in debt peonage or sharecropping arrangements. Despite widespread anti-Asian sentiment and legal prohibitions on land ownership in the late 19th and early 20th century, some Asian immigrant farmworkers in California and in other West Coast states established themselves as successful orchardists and truck farmers. As agribusiness came to increasingly rely on Mexican farm labor in the early 20th century (a trend that accelerated and expanded geographically from the Second World War onward), Mexican workers’ immigration status as Bracero guest workers or undocumented migrants often kept them mobile and legally barred from putting down roots.

As more Mexican farmworkers began to settle in the latter part of the 20th century, increasing numbers of them found ways to access farmland. Others achieved economic mobility by transitioning from seasonal to year-round jobs, occupying more specialized and responsible roles, becoming labor contractors, and establishing nonfarm businesses to supply growing immigrant communities. Studies of class mobility among Mexican immigrant farmers reveal not only the barriers they have faced, but also the resources that these farmers have used to seek advancement, including their experience in agriculture, access to labor, and capacity to self-exploit their own labor. The turn to agriculture is not purely a financial decision, but also reflects personal and cultural values and aspirations, and links some farmers into wider social movements organized around the concept of food justice.