Abstract
The role of the Mexican farmworker in the emergence of “the best city to live in” has been given little attention. Drawing on Marx’s concept of living labour and that central category of filosofía de la liberación, exteriority, this chapter traces the journey of the Mexican farmworker from a moment ante festum to a moment post festum by analyzing the three situations of living labour—as described by the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel—in relation to the migrant that departs from rural Mexico, is subsumed, emerges in the agricultural fields of Idaho, then is disavowed by capital, deported to the nothingness outside of the Totality. In the final section of this chapter, we consider the Mexican farmworker’s specific exteriority as a way of identifying transcendent—in that they go beyond/transcend the given system—values from which the new might emerge.
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Notes
- 1.
The H-2A programme is a US visa programme that enables agricultural employers to hire nonimmigrant foreign nationals to fill temporary, seasonal agricultural positions that employers are unable to fill with domestic labour.
- 2.
The translation of the Latin ante/post festum is after/before the feast/festival. For Marx, these indicated moments before or after the subsumption of living labour into capital.
- 3.
Voice of my guitar when I wake up in the morning, wanting to sing its joy to my Mexican land, I sing to your volcanoes, to your meadows and flowers, that are like talismans of the love of my loves, beautiful and dear Mexico, if I die far from you, let them say that I'm asleep, and bring me here.
- 4.
Pitayas and garambullos are varieties of cactus fruit not found commercially in the US; Nopales refers to the cladode, or pad, of the cactus.
- 5.
Puro brazo, literally “pure/all arm,” indicates an objectified determination of the Mexican migrant as a thing whose value resides in being a worker.
- 6.
Corporalidad viviente refers to a living, unitary Being with material and spiritual needs; en comunidad indicates that this Being is never an individual, is always already embedded in a family and community.
- 7.
While Quijano employs the term conquerors to describe the Europeans that arrived on the shores of this land, it should be stated that a shift to the use of the term “invaders” has taken its place to indicate that the struggle against colonization, as the cultural matrix that Quijano describes, continues.
- 8.
Pueblo is usually translated as “people,” however, following Dussel’s theoretical treatment of pueblo (Dussel, 2018), we prefer not to translate it as such because of the added meaning that pueblo cites—e.g. pueblo refers to the victims of modernity, it also connotes community as well as the history of Latin American struggle against empire.
- 9.
The literal translation is Indian, however, because of the difference in meaning between the Spanish and English, I have chosen to retain the former in this chapter.
- 10.
On potato fields.
- 11.
The camps later became the labour camps where bracero workers were housed, and later still, they became low-income housing and a central site for the emergence of gangs on the periphery of Boise, sites where Brown bodies are policed and surveilled.
- 12.
“The amnesty” is what we refer to as the process of naturalization created by IRCA.
- 13.
Speaking of my past, speaking of my life, not all is how it appears, I’ve also struggled, I come from humble people and there’s many sad moments impossible to forget, poor parents, they worked too hard, their purpose was to provide us with a mouthful, a dose of tenderness for dessert, we were poor but very fortunate.
- 14.
Even though the old man isn’t with us, we need to work hard, we need to find a way in life, to get our tortillas…don’t let it get to your head, if one day you're well off, work hard for the family, whenever you can offer your help…
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Martinez, A. (2022). From Nothingness to the Necropolis: The Ontological Journey of the Mexican Farmworker. In: Ritchie, G., Carpenter, S., Mojab, S. (eds) Marxism and Migration. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98839-5_8
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