Renegotiating gender and class in the berry fields of Michoacán, Mexico

Abstract

This article examines the renegotiation of gender and class in a rural Mexican community where economic crisis in the sugar industry led foreign agribusinesses to promote blackberry and raspberry production for export and hire primarily women as berry pickers. Analysis focuses on the transition from a sugar economy where mostly men worked in the cane fields to non-traditional agricultural exports when women entered agricultural waged labor in unprecedented numbers. This restructuring of the regional economy raises important questions regarding the marginalization of differentiated subaltern groups and the nature of new sets of power relations between transnational agribusinesses, berry growers, and waged workers. I analyze the contradictions of this changing social field that connects Northern consumers, transnational company executives, berry growers, and waged laborers in a web of differential power relations as they reverberate along the commodity chain from campesino households to the global market.

Análisis de dos modelos de gobernanza: los sistemas agroalimentarios locales de zarzamora en México y de mora en Colombia

“…Los efectos ambientales y sociales de esta forma de gobernanza son diversos: en el caso de Los Reyes, se pueden observar cambios drásticos en el paisaje como producto de la reconversión agrícola, la formación de empresas de producción, transformación y servicios aglomeradas en torno a las grandes empresas agroexportadoras, a la manera de un cluster, así como el rentismo y el crecimiento de la población asalariada en el territorio, lo que plantea demandas de mejores salarios, capacitación y seguridad social (Chollet, 2011;Paleta, 2012).…”