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  • Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont by Teresa M. Mares
  • Megan A. Carney
Teresa M. Mares, Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. 240 pp.

Anthropologists are increasingly studying the ways that food systems intersect with patterns of human migration. Across sub-fields, such as the anthropology of food and nutrition and medical anthropology, ethnographers have been engaging with questions of food insecurity and human mobility from the macro-contexts of multilateral trade agreements (e.g., Galvéz 2018) and industrial agricultural production (e.g., Holmes 2013) to the intimate spheres of feeding and eating (e.g., Carney 2015). Teresa Mares's Life on the Other Border makes a significant contribution to this literature by utilizing a community-based ethnographic lens to study the experiences of immigrant farmworkers in Vermont's dairy industry. The result is a refreshingly nuanced and complex portrait of the lives of these individuals and the broader transnational social networks to which they belong.

Based on more than six years of "community-based ethnographic research" (3), Mares draws on multiple forms of empirical evidence, such as interviews, surveys, and participant observation in community garden settings, farmworkers' homes, and public places of activism. Throughout the text, Mares probes the "politics of visibility." She argues that, "Within agricultural regions, hegemonic whiteness, or more specifically the reproduction of whiteness, is enabled by the exclusion and marginalization of non-white bodies" (4). She demonstrates how a politics of visibility at once shields immigrant farmworkers from the view of consumers, upholds a [End Page 1651] bucolic (and mostly white) depiction of Vermont's agriculture, and makes Latinx people hypervisible and vulnerable to surveillance in a non-traditional migrant destination.

Mares brings attention to the injustices incurred by farmworkers whose "labor contributes to the livelihoods of farmers and the well-being of consumers across the food chain" (2) while reminding us that despite Vermont's ostensibly progressive politics, it remains a border state and its status as such threatens those without formal authorization to be in the United States. Rather than perpetuate the invisibility of immigrant laborers in Vermont's dairy industry, Mares foregrounds their struggles and illuminates "examples of resiliency and autonomy within marginalized communities that are typically rendered invisible by those in power" (25).

This invisibility also extends into the ways that immigrant farmworkers' daily struggles with food procurement and preparation are obscured through existing survey instruments to measure food insecurity in the United States. Based on her own implementation of the USDA Household Food Security Survey Module with 100 Latinx farmworkers, Mares rightly derides "the assumptions underlying how we define and measure food insecurity" (58). While her critique of this particular survey instrument is not necessarily new, the discrepancies she observes between her qualitative data and survey data further justify existing calls for going beyond the "realm of quantifiable data" in working "for real solutions and opportunities for justice in our food system" (84).

In Chapter 1, Mares challenges current thinking that Vermont is a state devoid of Latinx migrants by presenting the lived experiences of farmworkers and the myriad vulnerabilities they face as brown bodies in a border region. Chapter 2 presents Mares's survey findings on food insecurity in farmworker households and compares these results against data collected through interviews and observations. She then pivots from the concept of food security to food sovereignty in Chapter 3 to introduce Huertas, a project that "supports migrant farmworkers in planting home kitchen gardens" (89). Calling for a more expansive definition of food sovereignty that bridges both structural and individual-level actions, Mares draws on her experiences as co-director of Huertas and working alongside farmworkers, student volunteers, and interns to implore us to reconsider the garden as a site of autonomy and resistance. She writes, "In this political climate, it seems that gardens are even more necessary, even as they might seem more trivial amidst the massive threats to immigrant well-being and [End Page 1652] safety" (117). Chapter 4 steers our attention to the roles of service providers in working to improve food access, health, and overall well-being of Vermont...

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