Tortillas and Tomatoes: Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada (review)

Tanya Basok's study examines the economic conditions that organize the availability of a migrant labour force from Mexico for the expanding agricultural greenhouse industry in southwestern Ontario. Basok discusses the mechanisms by which workers displaced and made increasingly destitute, in part by the neoliberal changes occurring in the rural economies of Mexico, are brought in under the Canadian government's Commonwealth Caribbean and Mexican Seasonal Workers Program. In Canada, these workers must labour under unfree conditions, a number of them in the fruit and vegetable producing greenhouses in the Leamington, Ontario area, where much of the empirical data for the study is collected by both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Through this program, farm owners are able to secure the guaranteed workforce they structurally require for the maintenance and profitability of their ventures. Basok shows that other government programs designed to funnel workers with Canadian permanent resident or citizenship status into the greenhouse sector have not been as effective or popular with either workers or employers. Unsurprisingly, for potential employees the work is found to be socially isolating, physically demanding and not adequately paid. Of import here is that Basok, through her interviews with greenhouse operators, shows that the migrant farm worker program best suits employers' needs because unlike citizens and permanent residents who cannot legally be bound to a particular site of employment, temporary migrant workers can be made to work practically whenever the farm owner requires them to — or face deportation and/or a lack of further job opportunities the following years. Basok argues that it is this desire for unfree workers that drives the Commonwealth Caribbean and Mexican Seasonal Workers Program and not the vulnerability of farming in Canada per se. Yet, while Basok addresses the structural necessity of unfree farm workers to greenhouse agricultural production in Canada, she fails to examine how a structural analysis is applicable to other aspects of this industry, for instance to shaping the failure of Mexican government officials to protect and advocate for migrant workers. Examining how farm owners in Canada may contribute to such a non-response is not considered.

Basok's contribution is to synthesize a number of studies (unfortunately many of them are not discussed or cited) done both on the farming sector and on the structural appeal that unfree labour conditions hold for employers. What is therefore of more use is her data collection of farming operations and how farm owners' everyday lived experiences of the industry are socially organized. Unfortunately, her ethnographic work on the migrant farm workers themselves is more of a composite than revealing of the varied and complex experiences of Canada's unfree labour recruitment program. Although this book is part of McGill-Queen's series on Studies in Ethnic History, Basok does not discuss processes of racialization or ethnicization to the formation of this unfree labour force.

This book will be useful as a supplementary text to scholars of labour market restructuring, migration and citizenship who are interested in the significant part that the Canadian state plays in neoliberal reforms. It will be particularly useful to scholars of late capitalism interested in how conditions of unfreedom are being extended to ever more workers around the world through national state (im)migration policies.