My research focuses on racism as a fundamental element to explain how agricultural corporations exploit and seek to control migrant farmworkers and how the Mexican state promotes and legitimizes these business strategies. The study examines federal programs, philanthropic foundations, and agricultural complexes that also function as temporary homes of agroindustrial laborers. My research question is: How are private and state social policies toward temporary migrant workers who inhabited agricultural complexes implemented in Hermosillo, Sonora?

I will interview government employees, foundations employees, and agribusiness managers. I will also employ landscape observation of agricultural complexes and conduct “situational analysis” of public events organized by agricultural corporations or government agencies. Furthermore, I will analyze marketing material made by corporations, agribusiness magazines, local news about farmworkers, and operational rules and reports of federal programs.

The research engages with three debates: articulation between racism and capitalism, everyday racial state formation, and agrarian capitalist labor organization. I contribute by locating racism at the heart of agrarian capitalism’s accumulation process by studying ethnographically the relations between migrant laborers, agricultural business corporations, and government employees in Northwestern Mexico.