Ethnicity, well-being, and the organization of labor among shade tobacco workers.

The cultivation and processing of shade tobacco in the Connecticut River Valley (United States) is highly specialized and labor intensive and is dependent on a multi-ethnic workforce of migrant farm workers from Latin America and the West Indies. Production is structured through an ethnically reified division of labor, constituted by historical migration patterns, English language ability, and racially informed perceptions of what constitutes a "good worker." Regardless of position, these workers find themselves geographically and socially isolated and subjected to hazardous and exploitative working conditions. This article will explore the effects of these conditions on workers' physical and emotional well-being. Using Foucault's notion of governmentality, the article demonstrates the ways in which these deleterious effects are embedded in workers' internalizing of race and ethnicity as naturalizing principles for self-regulation and the organization of work and in neoliberal forces that produce a surplus of temporary, highly mobile workers from the global south.

The Effects of Problem Drinking and Sexual Risk Among Mexican Migrant Workers on Their Community of Origin.

Although the financial remittances sent by male Mexican migrant workers residing in the United States can result in higher standards of living for their families and home communities, out-migration may lead to increased migrant problem drinking and sexual risk behaviors, which may in turn impact these same communities of origin. Based on semi-structured interviewing (n=60) and participant observation in a migrant sending community in central Mexico and a receiving community in the Northeastern United States, this paper explores the effects of out-migration on HIV risk and problem drinking among United States-based migrants from a small agricultural community in the Mexican state of Puebla. We argue that problem drinking and risky sexual behaviors among these migrant workers have had significant consequences for their home community in terms of diminished remittances, the introduction of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, and loss of husbands or kinsmen to automobile accidents. Moreover, although rumor and gossip between the two communities serve as a form of social control, they may also contribute to increased problem drinking and sexual risk.