Local/Global Encounters: Living Life on the Margins
The Gaze of Surveillance in the Lives of Mexican Immigrant Workers
Lynn Stephen
Abstract
This article focuses on the embodied experiences and memories of Mexican immigrant agricultural workers as objects of surveillance on the US-Mexican border, the agricultural fields and labour camps of Oregon, and in processing plants. Key to understanding these experiences and memories is the floating nature of the border as the legality of border crossers is continually contested through the way they are structurally inserted into the transnational power relations of development and commercial agriculture and culturally interpreted as 'illegal'.
Development (2004) 47, 97-102. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100003
Keywords
United States; Mexico; farmworkers; immigrant workers; border controls
