The Devil's Fruit: Farmworkers, Health, and Environmental Justice

THE DEVIL’S FRUIT

MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: HEALTH, INEQUALITY, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Series editor: Lenore Manderson

Books in the Medical Anthropology series are concerned with social patterns of and social responses to ill health, disease, and suffering, and how social exclusion and social justice shape health and healing outcomes. The series is designed to reflect the diversity of contemporary medical anthropological research and writing, and will offer scholars a forum to publish work that showcases the theoretical sophistication, methodological soundness, and ethnographic richness of the field.

Books in the series may include studies on the organization and movement of peoples, technologies, and treatments, how inequalities pattern access to these, and how individuals, communities and states respond to various assaults on wellbeing, including from illness, disaster, and violence.

Carina Heckert, Fault Lines of Care: Gender, HIV, and Global Health in Bolivia

Joel Christian Reed, Landscapes of Activism: Civil Society and HIV and AIDS Care in Northern Mozambique

Alison Heller, Fistula Politics: Birthing Injuries and the Quest for Continence in Niger

Jessica Hardin, Faith and the Pursuit of Health: Cardiometabolic Disorders in Samoa

Beatriz M. Reyes-Foster, Psychiatric Encounters: Madness and Modernity in Yucatan, Mexico

Sonja van Wichelen, Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology

Andrea Whittaker, International Surrogacy as Disruptive Industry in Southeast Asia

Lesley Jo Weaver, Sugar and Tension: Diabetes and Gender in Modern India

Ellen Block and Will McGrath, Infected Kin: Orphan Care and AIDS in Lesotho

Nolan Kline, Pathogenic Policing: Immigration Enforcement and Health in the U.S. South

Ciara Kierans, Chronic Failures: Kidneys, Regimes of Care, and the Mexican State

Stéphanie Larchanché, Cultural Anxieties: Managing Migrant Suffering in France

Dvera I. Saxton, The Devil’s Fruit: Farmworkers, Health, and Environmental Justice

THE DEVIL’S FRUIT

Farmworkers, Health, and Environmental Justice

DVERA I. SAXTON

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Saxton, Dvera I., author.

Title: The devil’s fruit : farmworkers, health and environmental justice / Dvera I. Saxton.

Other titles: Medical anthropology (New Brunswick, N.J.)

Description: New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Series: Medical anthropology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020020470 | ISBN 9780813598611 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813598628 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813598635 (epub) | ISBN 9780813598642 (mobi) | ISBN 9780813598659 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Migrant agricultural laborers—Health and Hygiene— California. | Pesticides—Health aspects—California. | Pesticides— Environmental aspects—California.

Classification: LCC HD1527.C2 S32 2021 | DDC 363.17/9209794—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020470

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Dvera I. Saxton

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

In memory of my dad, Ronald L. Saxton.

And dedicated to the people of the Pájaro and Salinas Valleys.

CONTENTS

Series Foreword by Lenore Manderson

Abbreviations

Introduction: Becoming an Engaged Activist Ethnographer

1 Engaged Anthropology with Farmworkers: Building Rapport, Busting Myths

2 Strawberries: An (Un)natural History

3 Pesticides and Farmworker Health: Toxic Layers, Invisible Harm

4 Accompanying Farmworkers

5 Ecosocial Solidarities: Teachers, Students, and Farmworker Families

Conclusion: Activist Anthropology as Triage

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

SERIES FOREWORD

LENORE MANDERSON

Medical Anthropology: Health, Inequality, and Social Justice aims to capture the diversity of contemporary medical anthropological research and writing. The beauty of ethnography is its capacity, through storytelling, to make sense of suffering as a social experience, and to set it in context. Central to our focus in this series, therefore, is the way in which social structures, political and economic systems and ideologies shape the likelihood and impact of infections, injuries, bodily ruptures and disease, chronic conditions and disability, treatment and care, social repair, and death.

Health and illness are social facts; the circumstances of the maintenance and loss of health are always and everywhere shaped by structural, local, and global relations. Social formations and relations, culture, economy, and political organization, as much as ecology, shape the variance of illness, disability, and disadvantage. The authors of the monographs in this series are concerned centrally with health and illness, healing practices, and access to care, but in each case they highlight the importance of such differences in context as expressed and experienced at individual, household, and wider levels: health risks and outcomes of social structure and household economy, health systems factors, and national and global politics and economics all shape people’s lives. In their accounts of health, inequality, and social justice, the authors move across social circumstances, health conditions, and geography, and their intersections and interactions, to demonstrate how individuals, communities, and states manage assaults on people’s health and well-being.

As medical anthropologists have long illustrated, the relationships of social context and health status are complex. In addressing these questions, the authors in this series showcase the theoretical sophistication, methodological rigor, and empirical richness of the field while expanding a map of illness, social interaction, and institutional life to illustrate the effects of material conditions and social meanings in troubling and surprising ways. The books reflect medical anthropology as a constantly changing field of scholarship, drawing on diverse research in residential and virtual communities, clinics and laboratories, emergency care, and public health settings; with service providers, individual healers, and households; and with social bodies, human bodies, and biologies. While medical anthropology once concentrated on systems of healing, particular diseases, and embodied experiences, today the field has expanded to include environmental disaster, war, science, technology, faith, gender-based violence, and forced migration. Curiosity about the body and its vicissitudes remains a pivot of our work, but our concerns are with the location of bodies in social life, and with how social structures, temporal imperatives, and shifting exigencies shape life courses. This dynamic field reflects an ethics of the discipline to address these pressing issues of our time.

Globalization has contributed to the complexity of influences on health outcomes; it (re)produces social and economic relations that institutionalize poverty, unequal conditions of everyday life and work, and environments in which diseases grow or subside. Globalization patterns the movement and relations of peoples, technologies, knowledge, programs, and treatments; it shapes differences in health experience and outcomes across space; it informs and amplifies inequalities at individual and country levels. Global forces and local inequalities compound and constantly load on individuals to have impact on their physical and mental health and on their households and communities. At the same time, as the subtitle of this series indicates, we are concerned with questions of social exclusion and inclusion, social justice, and social repair—again, both globally and in local settings. The books will challenge readers not only to reflect on sickness and suffering, deficit, and despair but also on resistance and restitution—on how people respond to injustices and evade the fault lines that might seem to predetermine life outcomes. The aim is to widen the frame within which we conceptualize embodiment and suffering.

Dvera I. Saxton’s The Devil’s Fruit captures this focus on the social, economic, and political production of inequality and injustice in the United States. The title (La fruta del diablo in Spanish) refers to the strawberries that break the backs and spirits of underpaid, unsupported, and unregulated migrant food workers. Hunched over matted rows, these workers plant, weed, and harvest fruit for the growers, grower-shippers, and massive multinational corporations that supply some 30 percent of the world’s (super)market. The year-round availability, variety, quality and affordability of these strawberries, and blackberries and raspberries, for consumers in the United States and globally, depends on synthetic fertilizer, toxic pesticides, and poorly paid labor. The result is a production system that is both brutal and potentially lethal.

The Devil’s Fruit is unapologetic and inspiring. Drawing on her work in the fertile Pájaro and Salinas Valleys, stretching south from San Jose and along the central coast of California, Saxton describes the horrendous conditions in which people live and work. But in this devilishness there is also positive action. In this book, as in her life’s work, Saxton troubles, riles, and chafes at the inequalities in this market system and its indifference toward those who work in it. She writes of her outrage with the system and pays close attention to the working conditions and the cost to people’s health, well-being, and survival: cardiometabolic disease, depression and anxiety, long-term degenerative conditions, and stillbirths. She shows also how engaged and activist ethnographic ethics, methods, and approaches can be used to support activist laborers. Saxton argues that her engagement as an activist anthropologist comes from a place of care. Her anthropological practice is through caring labor, sometimes the most prosaic, in people’s everyday lives and their work in social movements for environmental health and justice. This is not dramatic, flamboyant or game-changing care work, but sustained and deeply committed support to others in their own fights for justice and in their everyday life.

The Devil’s Fruit provides a model for a new anthropology committed to questioning and disrupting the ideologies, policies, systems, and structures that perpetuate inequalities and responding and reacting to the problems with which anthropologists are confronted in the field. Saxton asks, What forms can activist research in medical anthropology take? She unfolds the ways in which anthropological approaches, methods, and relationships work to reveal injustices. But she also provides us with a way to meld activism into our work as anthropologists and our everyday lives, and thus captures an ethics of practice in engaging with our research participants, and collaborators. In The Devil’s Fruit, Saxton offers us sparkling prose, powerful ethnography, and passionate analysis, but also—and most important—provides us with a powerful model for how we might work at a time of profound inequality and upheaval.

ABBREVIATIONS

THE DEVIL’S FRUIT

INTRODUCTION

Becoming an Engaged Activist Ethnographer

We must act in solidarity with those rendered vulnerable by a pathogenic system and strive against the oppressions.

—Elizabeth Cartwright and Lenore Manderson, Diagnosing the Structure

We want our stories to be pedagogical, to teach a better version of what is common sense so that a better version of society can be demanded

—Amrah Salomón J., Telling to Reclaim, Not to Sell

I entered a small industrial warehouse space in downtown Watsonville, California. The smells of smoldering sage and copal—an aromatic tree sap—hung in the air. Murals of figures with brown fists held high and Indigenous and Mexican American artwork decked the walls inside and out. Bicycle wheel rims and inner tubes hung from the ceiling, and an assortment of tools spilled out of boxes and repurposed filing cabinets in a semiorganized chaos.

I arrived at the Pájaro and Salinas Valleys on California’s Central Coast, about a hundred miles south of San Francisco, in the summer of 2010. Finding hidden farmworkers (Holmes 2013; Mitchell 1996) required engaging with a number of different communities. One of these was the Watsonville Brown Berets, whose meeting place is the warehouse described above. They are a group of young Chicano/a and Mexican activists, many of whom are also the children and grandchildren of farmworkers. Some do farmwork themselves to make ends meet, to support sick and elderly relatives, or to fund their college educations. In addition to seeking participants for my research, I also sought a community to foster my own health and well-being as I adapted to a new place.

Why would the Watsonville Brown Berets, let alone farmworkers, want to work with me, a white woman from Pennsylvania on her path to a doctoral degree in anthropology? As Melissa Checker observed during her fieldwork with African American environmental justice organizers in Georgia, people don’t always need an anthropologist, but they often do need other things: tutors, mentors, rides, graphic and web designers, list serve managers, grant and press writers, and volunteers to set up tables, collect signatures, or clean up after events (2005, 193). In other instances, folks want a new friend (Powdermaker 1966).

FIGURE 1. The Watsonville Brown Berets protesting the use of methyl iodide, 2011. (Photo by the author.)

I ended up doing many of the things on this list and more, as the Berets reversed my request for help and connections. A few weeks after my initial visits with them, a young member, Joaquin, asked if I could help with the group’s efforts in the campaign against methyl iodide, a highly toxic fumigant that kills pests, from rodents to nematodes, prior to transplanting crops. Fumigants are also employed to kill pests on harvested products before they are imported or exported.

Methyl iodide is carcinogenic and toxic to the respiratory, neurological, endocrine, and reproductive systems, and it is also attributed to miscarriages, stillbirths, and developmental problems (Froines et al. 2013). Growers of strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, lettuce, and cut flowers—products that at the time of my research dominated the landscapes of the Pájaro and Salinas Valleys—were keenly interested in methyl iodide. Their previous fumigant of choice, methyl bromide, was in the process of being phased out globally via the United Nations Montreal Protocol due to the chemical’s role in depleting the ozone layer (Gareau 2013; Guthman 2019).

Science and public health data, as well as observations in farmworker communities, demonstrate a number of chronic, detrimental, and potentially deadly health effects linked to soil fumigant and other pesticide exposure (ATSDR 2020; Gemmill et al. 2013). The major ecological transformations induced by the growth and expansion of California’s industrial agriculture have had and continue to have profound, irreversible, harmful, and deadly consequences, especially for the state’s rural residents, including many im/migrant farmworkers and their families. A striking example of the harm comes in the form of preterm birth, as well as birth defects, stillbirths, and miscarriages; these affect communities with higher rates of exposure to toxic substances through the air they breathe, the water they drink, the dust that accumulates on their bedroom floors, and their proximity to hazardous waste and highways, among other causes (Padula et al. 2018). Many policy makers with firm pro-life stances routinely overlook these toxic assaults on child and maternal health in rural communities buttressed by industrial agriculture. These environmental conditions and outcomes are not natural phenomena, and they are not God’s will; nor are they acceptable costs of doing business. They are rooted in toxic policies and unjust social and economic political hierarchies. As geographer James Tyner states, One’s exposure to death is more and more conditioned by one’s position in capitalism (2019, x).

I had been hailed (Gilmore 2008) by the Berets and their farmworker kin and neighbors to direct my anthropological attention to these and other human and environmental harms. My decision to get involved came in part from a feeling that our work as anthropologists is more meaningful when we use our knowledge and skill … to benefit those we study who want our assistance (Doughty 2012, 78). In The Devil’s Fruit: Farmworkers, Health, and Environmental Justice, I describe the inhumane and toxic conditions and treatment endured by im/migrant farmworkers. These are literally built into the design of California industrial agribusiness, which I argue fits the definition of what Peter Benson and Stuart Kirsch call a harm industry—that is, capitalist enterprises that are predicated on practices that are destructive or harmful to people and the environment: harm is part and parcel of their normal functioning (2010, 461).

The Devils’ Fruit not only describes the features and facets of this harm industry but also explores activist ethnographic work with farmworkers in response to health and environmental injustices. I argue and demonstrate how and why dealing with devilish—as in deadly, depressing, disabling, and toxic—problems requires intersecting ecosocial, emotional, ethnographic, and activist labors. Through my own work as an activist medical anthropologist, I have found that these caring labors of engaged ethnography take on many forms and go in many different directions. I critically and reflexively describe and analyze the ways that engaged and activist ethnographic methods, frameworks, and ethics align and conflict, yet in various ways help support still ongoing struggles for farmworker health and environmental justice in California. These are issues shared by other agricultural communities in the United States and throughout the world.

Some of the questions I explore and seek to address include the following: What are the different forms that engaged and activist anthropology can take when fundamental things like community and worker health and well-being, exposure to toxic substances, and other environmental injustices are at stake? What methodologies in our ethnographic tool kits have activist potential? What does it feel like to do activist anthropology? In the words of medical anthropologists Hansjörg Dilger, Susann Huschke, and Dominik Mattes, how do our encounters through research with human well-being and suffering challenge anthropologists and their interlocutors to reflect on their own ethical and moral [and activist] values and position[s]? (2015, 2). What are the risks and limits of these different approaches and positions? Above all, how and why do anthropologists care? And is caring—as a feeling, as social and emotional work, as a political commitment, a research methodology, a moral stance, and an action—enough (Durham 2016; Heidbrink 2018; Scheper-Hughes 1992)?

I hope that readers can relate to the stories and approaches described throughout The Devil’s Fruit through their own work. I want us to think about how these ongoing and evolving questions shape all sorts of engaged anthropology and other work: How can anthropologists respond and react to problems that are traditionally only documented and analyzed? How can anthropological methods such as following the object or participant observation be reconfigured and mobilized to support social, health, and environmental justice? What kinds of pragmatic (and not so pragmatic) solidarity can anthropologists engage in? What forms can activist research in medical anthropology take?

And how long does it take? Notably, my involvement with and concern about farmworker and environmental health did not cease with the completion of my research project. Upon my arrival to the Pájaro and Salinas Valleys in the summer of 2010, community members were intensively involved in a campaign against a class of pesticides that is of grave concern for farmworker health. Soil fumigants, including the hotly contested methyl iodide, are among the most dangerous of the many toxic pesticides used in California and global agriculture. While farmworker, advocate, and environmental justice groups successfully contributed to the voluntary retraction of methyl iodide from the U.S. market by the parent company Arysta LifeScience in 2012, thousands of other agricultural chemicals with concerning health and ecological effects remain in use on farms all over the world. Routine exposure to toxic pesticides is one among many of the multilayered health hazards and social and environmental injustices that farmworkers endure, from the lingering threat of detention and deportation experienced by undocumented im/migrants and their families to the risks of sustaining permanent and life altering disabilities from workplace injuries. Contemplating life in a permanently polluted world (Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo 2018) can make this work challenging, but this means our responses as engaged scholars and citizens must be multilayered, dynamic, and creative. I mean for this book to serve as a testament, one of many more that have preceded and those that continue to emerge, as to why harm industries must be critiqued and dismantled so that new arrangements and relationships that are healing and healthful for people and the planet can exist. Alone, The Devil’s Fruit is but one granito de arena (grain of sand) as the Spanish-language metaphor goes, in ongoing conversations about research as activism and activism as research. It builds on over a century of activist anthropology for health and environmental justice, a history that is not shared often enough.

MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND ACTIVISM: EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING

Activism is perpetually misaligned and misunderstood. When you see or hear the words activism or activist, what comes to mind? Do you think of a passionate crowd of protesters, armed with signs and banners, yelling chants and marching boldly along city streets? Do you see people chained to buildings or performing other acts of civil disobedience? Do you think of the folks who made them breakfast, or those who managed the logistics of such a massive public demonstration? Do you think of the people who stayed behind afterwards to clean up the detritus? What about the reporters who document and write about these stories?

Do you think of famous historical figures, like César Chávez or Dolores Huerta, who played significant roles in establishing the United Farm Workers (UFW) union and fought for farmworkers’ rights in the 1960s and 1970s? Do you think of the thousands of mostly nameless striking workers who joined them and whose lives were at stake (Bardacke 2011), or those who marched with their children? Do you think of their wives and mothers, who made them tacos, tamales, and burritos for lunch in addition to joining them on the picket lines and along march routes hundreds of miles long, like the one in 1966 organized by the UFW that went almost three hundred miles from the grape town of Delano in the Central Valley to the California state capitol in Sacramento?

Do you think only of elected officials who campaign? Do you think of the people who help get them elected, who fetch their coffee, make runs to the print shop, and otherwise take care of them? Do you think of the people who run but lose their races to more dominant opponents?

Do you think of anthropologists? Do you think of yourself, going to school, learning histories, skills, and methods that may enable you to solve problems or help people? Do you think of other people—teachers, mentors, parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles—who have taught you things, informed your values and your sense of moral and social responsibility?

There are so many different kinds of labor, emotion, and motivation that are involved in activism. Not all of them are immediately visible or acknowledged, but they are all vitally important.

I made a conscious decision to get involved in ongoing activist efforts in the Pájaro and Salinas Valleys, and especially those focused on farmworker health and environmental justice. It became difficult for me to isolate the real-time concerns of farmworkers—pesticide exposure, housing insecurity, occupational injuries, workplace mistreatment, im/migration, and economic and social inequalities—from efforts to advocate for safer and more ecological farming practices, affordable housing, inclusive and quality health care, educational equity for youth, and im/migrants’ rights. These issues are intersectional and multilayered.

Empirical and methodological frameworks that isolated variables from one another literally made no sense to me. They certainly did not capture the nuances or emotional weight of farmworkers’ stories and lived experiences or what I was observing and feeling myself.

Activist redirections in my work were inspired by compañerísmo (Pine 2013; Scheper-Hughes 1995)—that is, friendships and working partnerships with farmworkers, their families, and other community members, such as students and teachers, who were related to farmworkers or otherwise involved in their lives. What Andrew Jolivette (2015) and others refer to as research justice often starts through these kinds of friendships between people who know and care about one another (L. Martin 2015, 40) and who are willing to help one another throughout life. I asked farmworkers questions, and the more time we spent together, they and their children started asking me questions: What may have caused this rash on my skin? How do I get into and do well in college? Where can I find food for my family while I’m out of work over the winter? I did my best to address these questions, but some of them I could not answer.

We exchanged stories, food, and advice. We continue even now to check in with one another through phone calls, text messenger chats, and occasional visits. My compañeros/as worry about me as a woman living and working on her own without her parents or family nearby and no spouse or children to keep me company. I worry about my compañeros/as when they get sick or injured, encounter legal troubles, struggle in school, endure unspeakable traumas, and face the consequences of new harmful policies including increased policing and immigration raids in their communities.

These commitments and bonds made me more attentive to the multiple power dynamics and multilayered inequalities and disparities affecting the everyday lives of farmworkers and their families (Saxton 2013). Direct involvement, engagement, and activism are not just a question of what kind of anthropology I want to do or what theory I will apply. I cannot separate my ethnographic approach from my own personal and professional ethics, values, and relationships (Hale 2006). After all, we are not just anthropologists; we are humans too. Activist research became a way for me to express and enact care and concern for the people and communities I work with—now including my students at Fresno State University.

As students, what we learn in the classroom sometimes sends confusing messages about what anthropology is, can be, or should be (F. V. Harrison 2010, 6–7; Kehoe and Doughty 2012). It took me a while to see caring as an asset to research. Care is often defined in positive ways when we express it through our interpersonal relationships. However, as social scientists, we may be encouraged to segregate our personal and professional lives, our caring sides from our empirical inclinations as scholars and researchers. Roy D’Andrade (1995) has argued that engagement in anthropology muddies the validity and objectivity of ethnographic research. Neither anthropology, nor any other social, life, or physical science, can be truly objective. Power and inequality shape the lives of the communities we work with, and they shape our lives and work, as anthropologists and humans, activists and otherwise (González and Stryker 2014; Hale 2008; Nader 1972; Pels 2014).

Our anthropological ancestors did empirical social science work, developed deep and empathetic relationships with research participants, and sometimes participated in activism and advocacy efforts (Lamphere 2018; Low and Merry 2010; Nader 2017; Price 2004; Silverman 2007). Many histories of activist anthropologists are partially or totally obscured, devalued, or selectively forgotten (Doughty 2012; Price 2004). They’re akin to the black sheep in our families that no one talks about. Anthropology’s bad ancestors, to borrow from Indigenous ethnic studies scholar-activist Amrah Salomón J. (2015, 186), did activism that was not limited to the extraordinary, hypervisible, loud, and dramatic. They are our intellectual kin who not only documented oppressions and inequalities but actively challenged them through their work.¹

The truth is, activism is a significant part of the history of anthropology and, more specifically, the subdiscipline of medical anthropology, which is concerned with issues of health, illness, and healing cross-culturally. Generations of anthropologists have used their knowledge, tools, perspectives, positions, and privileges to [engage, document, promote and support] cultural diversity, social justice and environmental sustainability, even against formidable odds (Veteto and Lockyear 2015, 359; see also Kehoe and Doughty 2012). Critical medical anthropology (CMA) approaches to research formation, methods, data collection, and analysis in particular have significant activist potential. Questions posed by CMA-engaged scholars have included: How do we diagnose social problems and structures (Cartwright and Manderson 2011; Foley 1999; Kleinman and Benson 2006; Quesada, Hart, and Bourgois 2011)? Should we wait for history to be made, or take affirmative stances on issues that we know jeopardize human rights and welfare (Sanford 2006; Scheper-Hughes 1990)? How can we intervene more directly as mediators or brokers, or more affirmatively as activists, in clinical and social work spaces (Kline 2010; Scheper-Hughes 1990)? How can we make reflexivity and engagement less self-centered and more politically productive (Boyer 2015) for health and environmental justice efforts? How else can we use ethnographic methods and relationships to imagine and create alternative socially and ecologically just futures (Burke and Shear 2014), and an anthropology that is politically committed and morally engaged (Scheper-Hughes 1995, 410)?

What would happen if we do nothing (Unterberger 2009, 11) in situations of injustice and harm, resigning ourselves to be voyeurs of oppression, violence, human suffering, and ecological destruction? The nineteenth-century physician-anthropologist Rudolf Virchow could not sit by and do nothing. He documented how food shortages exacerbated a rapidly rising death toll amid a typhoid epidemic afflicting impoverished peasants in Upper Silesia, then part of the Prussian Empire (Taylor and Rieger 1985). His positioning as a medical doctor, anthropologist, and outspoken political activist helped Virchow understand that disease and illness could not be assessed or addressed in isolation from the broader contexts and forces shaping everyday lives. Context for Virchow included things like the environment, food, culture, kinship, work and home life (Ackerknecht 1953)—variables that have continued significance in the lives and well-being of twenty-first-century farmworkers.

Virchow did not stop at writing down what he saw. He also publicly challenged German state and church leaders to do something about the grave social inequalities he observed. Virchow knew that reducing poverty and food insecurity were the only viable means of curing typhoid. This proposal stood in stark contrast to the endemic scapegoating of the poor for their own sickness and suffering and political interventions that did nothing more than haphazardly distribute medicines. Hunger and poverty made people more structurally vulnerable (Quesada, Hart, and Bourgois 2011) to succumbing to diseases like