Document Details

Global

restructuring is dramatically reshaping how women and men around the

world relate to agriculture. While gender analysis has been central to

research on labor‐intensive, corporate agriculture in the global South,

it is rarely invoked in the literature exploring these trends in the

North. Moreover, research on gender in agriculture in high‐income

countries has tended to focus on women in family farms, despite

extensive restructuring of the sector that has increased demands for

waged laborers. This article speaks to these limitations by tracing the

incorporation of Mexican women into the Canadian agricultural sector as

temporary migrant workers. In exploring the lived realities of these

women, it reveals workplaces characterized by highly gendered,

racialized employment relations and illustrates how temporary migrant

worker programs further entrench existing structures of labor

segmentation in agriculture. While temporary migrant worker programs

have brought greater flexibility into the Canadian agricultural labor

market by enabling a particular set of employment practices that rest

on gendered, racialized subjectivities, these processes are by no means

uncontested by the actors they seek to command.