Organizing Transnational Love among Mexican Migrant Farmworker Women

By Evelyn Encalada Grez

Temporary Foreign Worker Programs in Canada not only structure flexible labour regimes for diverse industries but in the process also induce subjectivities and ways of being among “non-citizen” migrant workers. To a great extent, people are commodified as “just in time” workers and reduced to units of production. In this presentation I turn Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program and to the frontiers of the intimate and affective to demonstrate how the seasons and particularities of agricultural production in Canada, state policies and the global economy impact migrant women’s emotions, desires and sexuality. Women manage a “transnational family economy” that is based on the management of their emotions and love across borders. By turning to the intimate and interiority of migrant women’s lives we can discern their resistance and negotiations of multiple subjectivities beyond the migrant worker subject. This affective frontier also elucidates what is being called upon migrant women as transnational/global subjects but also of transnational organizing and research for activist-researchers alike.

Filed under: Community Events, Dissertation, Migration, Sharing