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Two of the five acts defined as genocide by the United Nations’ Genocide Convention of 1948 are causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. The material erasure of foods, foodways, and food systems under colonialism and the representational erasure of those same foodways and food systems from the historical record serve as genocidal elements designed to destroy the culture of colonized populations.

Native peoples of North America have developed foodways over centuries of living in relationships with particular landscapes. These foods have emerged from detailed knowledge of the landscape gained through careful observation over the generations. This knowledge includes maintaining a sustainable relationship with the environment to ensure consistent food sources in some unforgiving landscapes. The advent of contact with European settlers in North America and the eventual insertion of Native peoples into a global capitalist economy dramatically affected Indigenous people’s relationship with the environment, impacting access to food using precontact mechanisms. Colonization of Indigenous peoples throughout North America altered their access to healthy, culturally appropriate foods in many ways, leading to severely degraded health in Native communities. Beginning in the early 21st century, Indigenous people throughout North America began to reclaim and rejuvenate precontact foodways in a quest to repair physical and emotional well-being, connect more deeply with ceremony, reanimate local economies, heal damaged environments, and ultimately work toward food sovereignty.

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.

The average employment of hired workers in US agriculture is about 1.5 million. Farm labor markets are significantly different from most other labor markets. For example, they are spread out over a wide geographic region, and the demand for labor depends upon a number of factors, including weather, wages, and the price of goods in some cases. Due to the seasonality of agricultural production and job turnover, some 2.5 million people are employed for wages on US farms sometime during a typical year. The employment of hired farm workers is concentrated in three interrelated ways: by geography, commodity, and size of farm. The 10,000 largest fruit and berry, vegetable and melon, and horticultural specialty (FVH) farms in California, Washington, Florida, and Texas account for over half of US farm worker employment, including a third in California. Two million farm workers, 80 percent of the total, are employed on crop farms. The National Agricultural Worker Survey (NAWS) finds that 70% of non-H-2A guest workers on US crop farms are Mexican-born men who have settled in one US place. Some 60 percent of these Mexican-born crop workers are unauthorized, making over 40 percent of non-H-2A crop workers unauthorized. If we consider all farm workers, including H-2A guest workers and hired workers employed in animal agriculture, the unauthorized share is lower, between 30 and 40 percent. Most settled Mexican-born farm workers have US-educated children who shun their parents’ seasonal farm jobs. According to US Census data, since the turn of the Great Recession, the non-citizen Mexican immigrant population has been declining, while the total number of Mexican immigrants started declining in 2016 (see Figure 1).