Seasonal and Temporary Migration: The Subsidy to Capitalism of the Irish in Britain and the Mexicans...

8/3/2019 Seasonal and Temporary Migration: The Subsidy to Capitalism of the Irish in Britain and the Mexicans in the United

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Seasonal and Temporary Migration: The Subsidy to Capitalism

of the Irish in Britain and the Mexicans in the United

States (2011)

Tamar Diana Wilson, UMSL Research Affiliate

Abstract: This paper looks at the labor subsidies

historically provided by Irish immigrants to

Britain and by Mexican immigrants to the United

States. It is argued that distinctions must be

made between seasonal and temporary work for

understanding the different types of subsidies

provided to core capitalist countries. It is

suggested that anthropologists who study immigrant

groups can benefit from looking at the subsidy

group members provide to their host countries.

This paper attempts to give an historical overview of

the subsidy to capitalism provided by Irish workers in

Britain and Mexican workers in the United States.

Temporary and seasonal workers have provided a subsidy to

capitalist industry and capitalist expansion. Meillassoux

(1981), in a study of the recurrent migration of African

peasants, provides an elaborate theoretical analysis of the

subsidy to capitalism provided by a semi-proletarianized

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peasantry. He argues that the value of labor power is

composed of three elements, viz. sustenance of the workers

during periods of employment (i.e. reconstitution of

immediate labor power; maintenance during periods of

unemployment (due to stoppages, ill-health, etc.);

replacement by breeding of offspring (Meillassoux, 1981:

100, Italics in original). For those workers fully

integrated into a core capitalist economy maintenance and

replacement of the laborer takes place within the

capitalist sphere of production though the provision of a

social wage or fringe benefits, such as unemployment or

disability insurance. When workers are paid only a direct

wage, as are recurrent migrants, for example, their

maintenance and reproduction takes place outside the

capitalist sphere of production (Meillassoux, 1981: 102-3),

often in the peasant economy. This economy thus serves to

subsidize the costs of the laborer and hence the capitalist

enterprises that employ him/her. Recurrent employment in

the capitalist economy may be temporary or seasonal.

Seasonal work, though temporary, differs from other

temporary work in a number of ways. Seasonal means that

the laborer is hired over and over again during peak months

of the year. The work is recurrent and is typified by

agricultural field work during sowing and harvesting

seasons. Its workforce is often, though not always, linked

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to small or subsistence farmers who need to earn an income

away from their farms in the origin country. Circular

migration is characteristic of the seasonal workforce.

There are also seasonal fluctuations in some industries,

such as construction, track work on the railroads, and

garment manufacturing, which I will refer to here as

temporary. Temporary work may last from days to months or

years and may be temporary because of the needs of the

employer of the needs of the worker. Temporary workers, for

example, may be target earners who are assumed to be

motivated by the accumulation of money with which to

fulfill goals in the home country (Portes and Bach,

1985:8). In the case of construction, once a project is

finished, the laborer may or may not be employed on another

site. If he wishes to continue working in construction he

may need to find another employer. During economic

recessions work available in construction often diminishes.

Both seasonal and temporary work on the part of small or

subsistence farmers typifies the ongoing nature of

primitive accumulation. Seasonal workers, rather than being

target earners may need annual income just to continue

their farming enterprise.

Irish workers took part in both types of work in

England from the beginning of the 19th century. Mexican

workers also took part in both types of work, after the

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border moved northward at the end of the American-Mexican

War in 1848. In this paper I will address the phenomenon

of seasonal and temporary work in both countries. Temporary

migration sometimes evolves into semi-permanent or

permanent residence in the receiving country (Chavez, 1998

and others). Unlike the small subsistence farmer who

subsidized his farm by seasonally working on the

capitalized farms of others, those who engaged in temporary

work often, but not always, had no foot on the land.

Temporary migrants often depended on the labor wives and

children left behind, if they did have a foot on the land.

Seasonal Agricultural Work

Most of the theorizing in the 1970s and 1980s about

Mexican migration to the United States was centered on the

phenomenon of the high percentage of recurrent and/or

temporary migrants characteristic of large numbers of rural

communities in traditional sending regions in Mexico (e.g.,

Burawoy, 1976; Durand, 1988; Lpez Castro and Zenedejas

Romero, 1988; Massey, 1987; Massey et al, 1987; Mines,

1981; Reichert and Massey, 1979; Roberts, 1981; Shadow,

1979; Stuart and Kearney, 1981; Wiest, 1973, 1979; Wood,

1978). Most theories of international migration assumed

that low-cost labor migrants were temporary, or at least

had started out being so (e.g., Bonacich, 1972; Castles and

Kosack, Gmez-Quiones, 1981; Meillassoux, 1981;

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Piore, 1979; Portes and Walton, 1981; Sassen-Koob, 1978,

1981; see also, Solien de Gonzlez, 1961). Although whether

they worked for lower wages than the non-migrant population

is debatable, they were a low-cost labor force because in

times of unemployment, disability, or retirement they

returned to their places of origin, thus placing no

pressure on whatever social wage existed (e.g., Wilson,

2000). Furthermore, natives tended to monopolize the more

highly skilled and better paid jobs in a segmented labor

market.

Although there was recurrent and temporary migration

from Mexico to the United States prior to the Great

Depression in the 1930s, there was also settlement.

Recurrent immigration was formalized via U.S.-Mexico

accords, first with the importation of contract laborers

during and after World War I, then during the Bracero

Program (1942-64) of World War II, the Korean War, and,

under pressure from growers, for some years afterward. A

flow of recurrent and temporary undocumented workers

paralleled those recruited under six month contracts by

formal programs. Nonetheless, many of these sojourners

became settlers, as daughter communities were formed that

augmented the strength and growth of network ties between

sending village and receiving community (Massey, 1987;

Chavez, 1992; Cornelius, 1992).

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After the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-48, and largely

through various types of fraud and swindling, extensive

Mexican land grants on the U.S. side of the new border were

taken over and other available lands monopolized.

Eventually, a small minority of people owned huge expanses

of land (McWilliams, 1971: 15-24). Intensive farming of

these immense tracts of land had begun by 1860

(McWilliams, 1971: 49). Initially sown primarily in wheat,

a crop symbiotic with the raising of vast herds of

livestock, with the arrival of a network of railroads and

refrigerated cars, wheat was replaced by fruit. The fruit

industry was ascendant from 1892 to 1900; thereafter it

displaced (for some decades) by the cultivation of sugar

beets (McWilliams, 1971:81). Growers in California and

other states had focused on the cultivation of sugar beets

after the passage of the Dingley Tariff Act in 1897, a

legislative initiative that imposed heavy duties on

imported sugar (McWilliams, 1971: 83). In Southern

California the sugar beet crop was tended almost

exclusively by foreign labor, estimated to be 1/4 Japanese

and 4/5 Mexican (McWilliams, 1971: 87). After the passage

of the tariff on imported sugar, Mexicans were also sought

in the sugar beet fields of Michigan and by 1930 they

constituted that states principal labor force in the sugar

beet industry (Haney, 1979: 141-42). As Alvarado and

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Alvarado (2003: 14) tell us: Companies such as Michigan

Sugar, Columbia Sugar, Isabella Sugar, and Continental

Sugar recruited these people in Texas cities such as El

Paso and San Antonio and in the central states of Mexico.

The first trainload of Mexican workers arrived early in

1915 (Ibid.). After World War I, they were also found in

the beet fields of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, and Idaho

(Gonzlez, 2000: 133; Garca, 1996: 33). By 1922 Mexican

betabeleros (beet workers) composed 33 percent of workers

in the beet fields, and by 1927 they formed 75 percent, or

about 20,000 field hands, in this work force (Garca,

1996:14). Approximately 59,000 betabeleros toiled in the

beet fields from Colorado to Ohio in the late 1920s: At

this time they composed more than three-quarters of the

beet workers in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, Iowa

and the Dakotas (Gonzlez, 2000: 134).

Native Americans, roaming tramps, and Chinese

immigrants initially formed the agricultural labor force in

California; the Chinese were a majority in the fields until

the first Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (McWilliams, 1971:

104). Japanese farm workers began to be imported in 1890

and 30,000 were employed in the California fields by 1909

(McWilliams, 1971: 105-6). East Indians began to appear as

field hands in 1907 and continued in this employment until

their immigration was proscribed in 1871 (McWilliams, 1971:

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117,119). After Japanese immigration was halted with the

Gentlemens Agreement of 1908, growers began depending on

Filipino and Mexican laborers. None of the field hands

were treated well. As Mitchell (1996: 93) puts it, after

the exclusion of the Chinese:

Farmers eventually turned to Japanese, Filipinos,

Asian Indians, and white men, families, women,

children, Hispanics, Mexicans, and any other

embodied bit of labor power they could get their

hands on, adapting their theories of natural

inferiority along the way to suit the specifics of

the group in question

The greatest influx of Mexican field workers began

during World War I (partially due to U.S. Department of

Labor recruitment) and by 1920 at least half of all

agricultural field laborers in California were Mexican

(McWilliams,1971: 124; see also Mitchell, 1996: Ch. 4).

Between 1918 and 1920 approximately 250,000 Mexican

laborers crossed the border legally to seek employment

(Cardoso, 1979: 19). Many of them became farmworkers.

Although these migrants were recruited under the first

bracero program of 1917-1921, many Mexicans entered the

United States illegally, and during the winter Mexican

workers, documented or not, would return to Mexico or seek

work in U.S. urban centers. Growers made it known that

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they valued Mexican workers because 1) of their

disappearance in the winter and 2) those in the U.S.

illegally could more easily be deported than other foreign

laborers who came to the U.S. legally (McWilliams, 1971:

125). Though growers contended that their Mexican workers

left the state after the harvest, McWilliams (1971: 148-49)

contends that most hibernated: in cities and towns where

urban taxpayers paid for their presence and essentially

subsidized the farms. Weber (1994: 53-54) also claims that

many Mexican Agricultural workers were recruited from Los

Angeles and from communities such as Brawley and Calexico

in the Imperial Valley, bordering on Mexico and itself a

notable agricultural area employing much of the Mexican-

American and Mexican immigrant population. Many had

originally come in the 1880s from Michoacn, Jalisco,

Aguascalientes, Zacatecas and Guanajuato, as well as other,

border, states (Weber, 1994: 49). Mexicans worked in the

Louisiana cane fields in the 1890s and composed the

greatest percentage of workers in the Texas cotton fields

by the 1910s (Zamora, 1993: 22). The expansion of

agriculture led to the recruitment of Mexican farm hands to

the Midwest, the Great Plains, and eventually to the

Northwest states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho

(Martnez, 2000: 4, 17; Gamboa, 1990).

Cotton was also grown in California: it occupied a few

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thousand acres prior to the 1880s, when it was replaced by

fruit trees, and was then re-introduced in the 1900s

(Weber, 1994: 19). In 1929 cotton was valued at 24 million

dollars annually and was the fourth most important crop in

the state (Weber, 1994: 21). Weber (1994: 23) points out

that Cotton-growing followed the pattern already

established in California of large, highly capitalized and

mechanized farms worked by low-paid migrant workers.

Most of these migrant laborers were Mexicans: on

cotton farms over 300 acres they often constituted 95

percent of the work force (Weber, 1994: 35). Weber (1994:

35) maintains that only a small proportion came directly

from Mexico; most came from Mexican communities surrounding

Los Angeles, the Imperial Valley and Texas. By 1926,

however, most originated in Mexico and moved step-wise into

the California fields.

There were several differences between the situation

of migrant workers in England and the United States,

especially California. First, by 1926 there was an

Agricultural Labor Bureau in Californias San Joaquin

Valley, that had four major tasks: to recruit workers and

distribute workers evenly across the Valley to avoid a mal-

distribution of labor; to set and enforce a standardized

wage rate to prevent competitive bidding and depress wages;

to prevent or settle strikes or walkouts; and to represent

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agricultural interests in dealings with the federal

government over immigration policy (Weber, 1994: 39). No

such entity existed in England; the Irish had to deal with

individual farmers and not a group attempting to set wage

rates in vast farming areas. There is no history of Irish

agricultural workers in England attempting to form unions:

their interests were in Ireland and in paying their rents.

They tended to return to Ireland, rather than settling out

as some Mexican migrant workers did in the United States.

There was no need for the English farmers who employed them

to worry about immigration legislation, for after the Act

of Union, Ireland was considered an integral part of Great

Britain.

Many of the Mexican workers who picked cotton had had

a variety of jobs before taking on that employment:

Robert Castro, of the Boswell ranch, had worked on

the railroads in Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas,

before settling in Corcoran, California. Juan

Magaa, originally a laborer on the Tierra Negras

hacienda in Guanajuato, labored on the Mexican

railroads and in 1918 began working for the

Southern Pacific Railroad before picking cotton in

the San Joaquin Valley in 1927 (Weber, 1994: 52-

53). I

In Texas as well, cotton pickers sometimes had a varied

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employment history. Citing Paul Taylor (1934), Zamora

(1993: 17) summarizes the careers of two workers:

One of them had come to Texas from Tamaulipas in

1890. He worked as a cowboy, trackman, miner and

candy maker in his travels through Oklahoma,

Missouri, and Pennsylvania. The second worker had

been a trackman, miner, stevedore, and sugar beet

worker in California, New Mexico, Colorado,

Pennsylvania, and New York.

Although the Irish held multiple jobs in England and

often migrated only temporarily to hold them, from most

accounts the majority (but not all) of seasonal

agricultural workers worked only in agriculture and then

returned to harvest the potatoes on their small farms or

plots of land (Johnson, 1967; Harris, 1994; OGrda, 1973).

There was a flow of Irish migrants, based in English urban

centers, who worked seasonally in agriculture and

seasonally in the building trades and on the public

construction works, however. Collins (1976: 48) notes that

some of the Irish who worked in England on building sites

and as general laborers and whose migrations were

temporary rather than seasonal often worked in the

harvest. In general, their careers do not seem to be as

varied as those of some Mexican workers, although as time

went by a pattern of seasonal migration among Mexicans with

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small properties (pequeo proprietarios) or ejido rights

(ejidatarios) developed and paralleled that of the Irish

agricultural laborer, especially during the bracero

programs of 1917-1921 and 1942-1964 and continuing, though

diminishing, until today. A pattern of recurrent migration

was formalized the first time during World War I, when the

U.S. Department of Labor imported laborers for a period of

six months. If the worker broke his contract by leaving

his employer prior to the expiration of his contract, he

could be deported. Originally employed almost exclusively

in agriculture, President Herbert Hoover extended the list

of industries that could seek Mexican workers to include

railroads, coal mines and construction work on government

projects (Garca, 1996: 20). President Wilson, under

pressure from employers, continued the temporary labor

recruitment program until 1921 (Garca, 1996: 20)a year

the United States entered in recession. The imposed pattern

of recurrent migration pattern became the pattern of choice

not only of legally contracted workers but also the

undocumented for at least 50 years.

Seasonal agricultural work from Ireland to England may

have begun as early as the 1730s (OGrda, 1973: 49).

Among other crops they harvested were fruit, turnips,

beets, and other vegetables, hops, corn and hay (Jackson,

1963: 72). By 1841, on the eve of the Great Famine,

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almost 60,000 migrant harvesters were enumerated in Irish

ports on their way to Britain (OGrda, 1973: 52). Often

the seasonal agricultural migration began in Ireland, with

a shuttling between the pastoral south-west and arable

south-east of the country, before the workers continued on

to England (Collins, 1976: 48). Permanent emigration from

western Ireland, the poorest region of the country, became

marked in the 1870s and 1880s; previously the western

so-called Congested Districts had been one of the major

sources of seasonal agricultural migration, both internally

in Ireland and to England (OGrda, 1973: 70, 76). Despite

increased permanent or semi-permanent emigration to

England, as late as 1921, the summer casual labour force

in English and Welsh agriculture still numbered 207,000

(Collins, 1969: 465).

Landholding and seasonal migration

In Ireland, seasonal agricultural migration was an

integral part of subsistence and small farmers strategy to

pay the rent on their plots of land. As OGrda (1973: 61)

puts it, recurrent seasonal migration from Ireland to

England was a crucial part of the search for subsistence.

Such a migration in which the payment of rent pushed people

into partial proletarianization in the agricultural

fields of England lasted until the 1880s and even later in

some parts of Ireland (OGrda, 1973: 55-56, 63). Kerr

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(1942-43:379) distinguishes between the seasonal

agricultural workers and temporary workers who were

employed on road, canal, railroad and any other public

works construction: these jobs also attracted Irish

peasants from the countryside (see also Collins, 1976: 48).

ODowd (1991: 40), in her well researched book on Irish

harvest laborers points out that: In the years before the

famine and especially during the bad decade of the 1830s,

it was the agricultural labourers, cottiers and any member

of the farming community who did not own a viable holding,

who made up the bulk of the migratory labour force.

Johnson (1967: 98) elaborates on the profile of the typical

seasonal vs. temporary migrants:

During the nineteenth century the movement

reflected the chronic under-employment found among

the cottiers, holding only a patch of land, and

among the sons of small farmers. Unmarried

landless labourers were also involved, but in the

absence of the ties of a holding, their movements

did not have the regularity of the normal harvest

migration. They were more likely to become semi-

permanent emigrants, returning to Ireland only for

short periods, perhaps every few years

The author continues, underscoring that recurrent seasonal

agricultural migration fit the farming cycle in Ireland

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well:

After the busy weeks of spring there was a lull in

agricultural work. Assisted by his family a cottier

would plant his potatoes, cut his annual

requirements of turf and perhaps sow an oat crop,

and then be free to cross to Britain at the end of

June. Similarly the small farmer could spare at

least some of his sons about the same time. After

the bulk of the grain crop had been gathered in

Britain, these migrants would return to Ireland in

time to save the main potato harvest, bringing with

them the cash to pay to November rent (Johnson,

1967: 99).

In other words, due to the landholding system in

Ireland, seasonal agricultural labor both internally and

across the Irish sea became an integral part of the Irish

peasant economy. Prior to the Great Famine of 1845-1851

agricultural employment in England was more important than

that in Ireland; in that period 93 percent of holdings

consisted of less than 30 acres (Woodham-Smith, 1962: 32).

There had been a constant subdivision of land, with often

absentee landlords leaving their holdings in charge of

middlemen who, with the blessing of the landlord, portioned

out plots of land to small farmers who worked them.

Resident landlords also resorted to this portioning of

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land. As Harris (1994) describes the system:

Priority for most great landlords was to be sure of

their rents, to get them punctually, and with as

little trouble as possible. To achieve this with

minimal expenditure of capital and energy, they had

in earlier times divided the estates, letting them

out to middlemen who in turn often sublet, so that

between the owner of the soil and the actual

occupier there might be as many as three or four

persons, each obtaining a portion of rentals which

grew higher at every succeeding transaction. . .

Because of the lack of local employment, the landless

depended on getting at least a small plot where potatoes

could be grown to feed self and family (Woodham-Smith,

1962: 32). And one or another small farmer, needing help to

pay his rent, would allow one or more of the landless to

occupy part of the land he rented. Woodham-Smith (1962: 32)

writes of this continual sub-division that:

The consequence was the doom of Ireland. The land

was divided and sub-divided again and again, and

holdings were split into smaller and still smaller

fragments, until families were attempting to exist

on plots of less than an acre, and in some cases

half an acre Farms had already been divided by

middlemen and landlords but the sub-division which

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preceded the famine was carried out by the people

themselves, frequently against the landlords will.

Each level paid rents to the person who had subdivided the

land he controlled in an ascending hierarchy. Land was

also lent to laborers in a sharecropping system known as

conacre: the owner or occupier prepared the soil and the

hirer planted, weeded, cared for and harvested the crop

(Woodham-Smith, 1962: 34). Land was consolidated after the

evictions for non-payment of rent during the famine, and

the deaths and emigrations of others, more than a million

fleeing the horrendous conditions in Ireland (Cf. e.g.,

Daly, 1994; Donnelly Jr., 1995; MacManus, 1974; Morash and

Hayes, 2000; OGrda, 1999; OSullivan, 1997). The number

of farmers with 1 to 5 acres declined from 181,950 in 1945

on the eve of the famine, to 88,083 in 1951 when the famine

ended, to 11,608 in 1926 (See Table 1). It can be seen that

generally, the number of smaller farms (less than 15 acres)

declined, while the number of farms over 15 acres

increased. Almost in tandem with the decline of the

smaller farms, the numbers of those who migrated to England

and Scotland as agricultural laborers decreased.

The land-holding system in Mexico evolved over time

from the concentration of property in large haciendas to

gradual land redistribution after the Mexican Revolution

(1910-1917), partially in the form of selling off small

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plot of land from the haciendas but most notably with the

restoration of ejidal (communal lands) to villages where

they were most usually individually tenured (but

inalienable) and worked by the family labor force. The

existence of the traditional ejido lands had been

undermined by the Constitution of 1857 which outlawed

corporate ownership by Church or village (Simpson, 1937:

23-24). Some villages did manage to retain communal lands,

a few even after President Porfirio Daz in 1889 and 1890

issued two circulars declaring all village lands must be

divided and titled to individuals and enlisted the state

governors to aid in this process (Simpson, 1937: 29).

However, any leftovers from the pre-Colombian land system

were essentially destroyed by these efforts.

As in Ireland, the pre-revolutionary hacendados (land

owners) were absentee, spending most of their time living

in a city, but returning for planting and harvesting

seasons (McBride, 1971: 29). On the verge of the

revolution, in 1910, almost one-half of the rural

population was living on haciendas under conditions of debt

peonage (Tannenbaum, 1929: 34). Regarding how free workers

were converted to debt peons, Simpson (1937: 39) tells us:

The method was simplicity itself: an advance would

be made to a worker on the occasion of some special

celebration (a marriage, birth, religious festival,

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or whatnot) or credit for clothes or food would be

extended at the tienda de raya [company store]and

the trap was closed. For, as long as the worker

owed his employer a single centavo, he could not

leave the estate, or, if he did leave, he could be

brought back by force. Moreover, debts could be

handed down from father to son Once the tentacles

of debt had wound themselves around the body of the

worker, escape was practically impossible, even

onto the second and third generation.

This peonage was reinforced though the company store,

whereby tokens rather than money were paid to laborers,

tokens which had to spent on overpriced goods. In these

stores credit was extended that led the resident laborers

to even greater debt (Simpson, 1937: 38; Tannenbaum, 1929:

34).

The situation of debt peonage led some to escape the

hacienda by emigrating, most probably permanently, to the

United States (McBride, 1971: 32). Meanwhile landless

villagers and peasants with only sub-subsistence or

subsistence plots of land sought wage-work on the haciendas

during the peak harvest season, when resident peons could

not supply sufficient labor (McBride, 1971: 32, 137). They

may also have engaged in seasonal, circular migration to

the United States, with some of the landless remaining

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permanently there. McBride (1971: 32) tells us that prior

to the Mexican Revolution in 1910 the U.S. Bureau of

Immigration reported that there was an annual average of

10,320 Mexican immigrants to the United States in addition

to seasonal migration. He cites Thompson (1921: 67) to the

effect that, given the open border of the time, the numbers

of Mexican laborers entering the United States may have

actually reached 100,000 a year (McBride, 1971: 33). The

pool of potential permanent emigrants was large. The

percentage of heads of families with no individual

properties was over 98 percent in Guerrero, Hidalgo,

Mxico, Morelos, Oacaca, Puebla, Quertaro, Quintana Roo,

Tlaxcala, Veracruz, and Zacatecas. All the other states

ranged between 92.3 and 97.7 percent landless except for

Baja California, with the lowest rate of landlessness, at

88.2 percent of heads of household (McBride, 1971: Table 1,

Ch. 6, p. 154).

After the Revolution, and with the distribution of

ejido lands, a problem similar to that of the peasant in

Ireland remained: the land distributed to heads of

household was either inadequate in terms of size,

fertility, or rainfall to support a family or it was

undercapitalized. This led to seasonal and temporary

migration to the United States or elsewhere within Mexico

as small farmers sought work outside of their planting and

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harvesting seasons. Often this seasonal work was circular,

as when peak periods in southwestern U.S. agriculture

required laborers year after year.

In sum, seasonal agricultural work took on the same

role in subsidizing the peasant economy in Mexico as it did

in Ireland, but largely so only after the Mexican

Revolution of 1910-1917 when the large haciendas were

slowly broken up and sold in small plots or turned into

ejido lands.1

Notably, the greatest distribution of ejido lands took

place well after the Mexican Revolution under the

presidency of Lazaro Crdenas (1934-1940). Shortly after

his massive distribution of land two contradictory

tendencies developed. First, the Green Revolution

technology was introduced into Mexico, which entailed a

package of genetically altered hybrid corn accompanied by

pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers to be applied on

mono-cropped and preferably extensive areas of land. Such

an agricultural revolution led to the marginalization of

small farmers, many of whom became landless and others

merely subsistence producers, while larger farmers captured

its benefits (Hewitt de Alcantara, 1976). Eventually, a

differentiation of the peasantry was to be seen, as some

were marginalized off the land and became proletarians,

others remained semi-proletarians who migrated seasonally

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to earn an income and still others passed into the class of

capitalist farmers.

Second, by 1942 the Bracero Program was put in place,

which formalized seasonal migration to the U.S.

agricultural fields and captured the labor of many

subsistence farmers or their sons. Even small farmers who

did not need outside income to survive, took part in the

program or crossed as undocumented workers, in order to pay

back loans, capitalize their farms through the purchase,

for example, of a tractor, to upgrade their housing, to

finance a wedding, or to buy livestock.

Women and children in the fields

It was not only men who worked in the U.S. and British

fields: women and children were also present. California

growers considered family labor the most desirable; besides

working in the fields women cooked and cleaned for their

families, thus excising the need to hire cooks and

bunkhouse cleaners. According the Mitchell (1996: 101) this

led growers to provide more adequate housing. In Texas,

from the early 1900s, women and children worked in the

fields beside their menfolk to make use of the familys

full earning power (Zamora, 1993: 26). Growers as a whole

encouraged the migration of family units because it made

workers less mobile, that is, less prone to move in search

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of better wages and working conditions on other farms and

in nearby towns or cities (Zamora, 1993: 26). Some women

cooked meals or did laundry for single men if their

childcare activities made it difficult to go to the fields;

others simply took their children with them (Weber, 1994:

59, 63). Mexican women and children can be seen in the U.S.

agricultural fields today.

Hadley (1947: 164, 178) recounts that from the

earliest times Irish women worked as harvesters in

Scotland, although young women sometimes traveled without

families but in groups assembled by gaffers in Ireland,

who contracted for work in the fields sequentially with a

number of English farmers. ODowd (1991: 261), however,

sustains that: There were no significant numbers of female

seasonal workers until the post-famine years but the women

did support the men by traveling with themor going away

from the home area to beg [for] food and money to keep

themselves and their children alive until their men

returned home. This latter pattern would have been

prohibited in Mexico, where women were confined to the

household under the command of fathers or husbands or in

the case of these latters migratory absence, a brother or

mother. Begging would have contradicted the myth of the

male breadwinner, endorsed even today by most Mexican

families, despite womens increasing presence in the labor

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force. Nor would they have been encouraged to travel alone,

even in all female groups, away from their menfolk.

Temporary Migration

Temporary work differs from seasonal work in that is

not necessarily recurrent. It can last for days, weeks,

months, or years. It can be temporary due to employer

needs or workers desires. Temporary workers may be small

farmers hoping to capitalize their farms or subsistence

farmers in need of additional income, and thus semi-

proletarianized, but they may also be landless proletarians

based in either rural or urban locales at origin who access

one job after another in core capitalist concerns.

Typical of employer driven temporary work is

construction, whether of houses and buildings, public works

such as sewerage and irrigation systems, roads, bridges,

aqueducts and canals, and railroads. Depending on weather

conditions these forms of temporary jobs could be seasonal

as well. In temperate zones, for example, winter snows may

make construction of buildings and public works impossible.

Some types of manufacturing, such as garments, have peak

seasons during which they take on temporary workers to fill

market demands. During wars, as well, a temporary work

force may be employed (and imported) to replace citizens

who are drafted into the military. Notably both Irish

workers in Britain and Mexican workers in the United States

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sought, or were actively recruited into, the array of both

temporary and seasonal jobs. Although their overall

proportion of workers in the destination economies during

peacetime may have been low, they provided a high

proportion of workers in those sectors where temporary work

was typical.

Many of the jobs held by the Irish temporary workers

in England were and are held by Mexicans working in the

United States. Mexicans, for example, helped build and

maintain the railroad system first in the Southwest and

then the Midwest and beyond (Garcia, 1996). They also

worked in the Texas coal mines (Caldern, 2000). Here, I

will concentrate on the Irish case. Writing about the Irish

migrants, Harris (1994: 5) tells us that

While migrants sometimes settled permanently, for

most it was primarily a sojourner migration, one in

which they left home with an intention to return.

Most returned in six weeks or from three to four

months. Others stayed for a few years, some for

their work lifetime, and some fewer stayed

permanently.

This also describes the pattern of Mexican migration to

the United States since the latter part of the 19th

century.

Since Britain industrialized earlier than the United

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States, and since the United States was not fully formed

until after the mid-19th century, Irish workers were found

in construction of private and public works and in mining

and iron works earlier on than Mexicans in the United

States.

In Britain the workers who constructed the railroads

were known as navvies. This was a shorting of the term

Navigatororiginally referring to those who between 1745

and 1830 built a vast system of canals, as long as 4,000

miles in extent, for transportation purposes within Britain

(Cowley, 2001: 13; Redford, 1964: 150); these canals were a

necessary accompaniment to the Industrial Revolution. Among

both canal and railway navvies there were many Irish-born

workers. The building of railroads began the same year as

the inland navigation system, or system of canals, was

completed. By 1845, at the height of railroad

construction, 200,000 men were employed on the tracks

(Cowley, 2001: 13).

Some of the Irish navvies had begun their working

careers in Britain as seasonal harvesters (Cowley, 2001:

18). As agriculture became mechanized and less labor was

needed on British farms, seasonal laborers from Ireland

began seeking alternative forms of work as casual

labourers in mills and factories, mines, construction

projects and Public Works the last of which included

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major state-sponsored civil engineering projects such as

transport networks, dams and reservoirs, docks and

harbours, and public utilities (Cowley, 2001: 34). They

also helped build warehouses, residential areas, train

stations, foundries, mills, and roads (Busteed et al, 1997:

28).

As concerns railroad construction the Irish, like the

Mexicans in the United States who worked on the tracks,

were unevenly distributed throughout Britain. They formed

only 1 percent of the workforce on the South-Eastern

Tunbridge Wells-Hastings Line in 1841, but 76.9 percent on

the Edinburgh & Bathgate, Glasgow Extension in 1871. In

England itself they composed 54.5 percent of workers on the

Border Union Line in 1861 and 50.2 percent of workers on

the Border Counties Line in the same year (Cowley, 2001:

55). Coleman (1976: 27) underscores the dirty and dangerous

nature of railway building that involved excavating,

tunneling, blasting and bridge building among other chores.

Jackson (1963: 80) also underscores the drudgery of

railroad construction in the 19th century:

Without the advantages of a mechanical drill,

bulldozer, mechanical shoveller and tunneller which

perform Herculean tasks today, an army of

labourers, many of them Irish, worked with immense

effort and at great risk to rapidly develop a

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system of communication that proved indispensable

to industrial expansion.

Many of the railroad workers, like the peons on

Mexican haciendas, were tied to their employers through a

truck store, where they bought commodities with tickets

that represented a draw on future wages. As in the

haciendas company stores prices were higher than

elsewhere, but additionally short weights were used and

the goods offered there were generally badrank butter,

poor bacon, watered beerbut the man had no choice. The

ticket was good there and nowhere else, so he could shop

there or starve (Coleman, 1976: 89). As in the hacienda

stores as well, workers could become indebted to the owner.

By 1851, after the Irish famine years, there were

727,326 migrants from Ireland in Britain; in 1861 there

were 806,000. Many continued on to the United States,

Canada, and Australia and by 1901 their numbers had dropped

to 632,000 (Cowley, 2001: 34). Of those who migrated to

Britain between 1876 and 1921, many joined the British

armed forceswhich contained an estimated 25,000 Irish-born

in 1876; nonetheless, great numbers were found in

construction, railroad or otherwise (Cowley, 2001: 92).

Redford (1964: 150) relates that: In many places the Irish

almost monopolized the lower grades of work in the building

trades. Among their jobs were putting up and taking down

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scaffolding, carrying bricks and mixing cement. In

Manchester, by the mid-1830s, all 750 bricklayers laborers

in the city were Irish, having replaced the English workers

typically employed at the turn of the century (Jackson,

1963: 85). The highest paid jobs belonged to the skilled

English workers in a segmented labor market pattern.

The same segmented labor market was found in the

Lancashire cotton mills, where the Irish performed

unskilled labor while the English were spinners; such

segmentation did not exist in Scotland, however, because

native workers there avoided entering the factories

(Redford, 1964: 151). As early as 1841, prior to the great

famine, 191,500 Irish born lived in the county of

Lancashire, a number equivalent to 37 percent of the

520,000 Irish migrants in England and Wales (Harris, 1994:

133).

The Irish were also employed in building ships,

widening or deepening harbors, and loading and unloading

cargo (Redford, 1966: 150; Mayhew, 1968: 290). In 1834,

3,500 Irish were working on the Liverpool docks and by

1851 probably one-half to three-quarters of all the dock

labour was Irish (Jackson, 1963: 86; see also Royle, 2003:

72). Writing in 1861, Henry Mayhew (1968: 290) estimated

that 200,000 persons may have been employed on the London

docks alone, and many of these were casual or seasonal

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laborers from Ireland. The temporary and seasonal nature

of the work was due to the following:

From 500 to 800 vessels frequently arrive at one

time in London after the duration of a contrary

wind, and then such is the demand for workmen, and

so great the press of business, owing to the

rivalry among merchants, and the desire of each

owner to have his cargo first in the market, that a

sufficient number of hands is scarcely to be found.

Hundreds of extra labourers, who can find labour

nowhere else, are thus led to seek work in the

docks (Mayhew, 1968: 312).

The Irish also performed rough labor in the coal

mining and iron industries, especially in Scotland and

northern England (Redford, 1964: 153). Collins (1976: 56)

points out that the wages of the Irish were lower than

those of native-born Englishmen: in Lancashire they earned

60 percent of the wages of native workers in 1851, and

between 60 and 70 percent of the wages of native workers in

Lincolnshire in 1867. As Harris (1994: 183) observes: By

filling the lower echelons of the work force, and by

willingly undertaking employment that others resisted,

Irish migrants enabled the English work force to move into

higher occupational brackets. This included the migration

of Irish women into domestic service.

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Apart from waged labor, in Manchester, Liverpool,

London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, among other cities, there

was a notable concentration of Irish migrants in petty

trade, whether ambulant vendors or working from stalls.

They hawked a variety of goods, including fish, fruit and

other foodstuffs, old cloths, mats, knick-knacks and other

commodities (Redford, 1964: 154; Jackson, 1963: 90; Mayhew,

1985: 140).

Being the closest port to Dublin, Liverpool was one of

the major destinations of the Irish. By 1841, the Irish-

born composed 17.3 percent of the citys population, and in

1851, with the flight from famine, 22.3 percent (Belchem,

2000: 132; Cowley, 2001: 343). Although there was an Irish

middle class of journalists, doctors and lawyers as well as

a group of Irish merchants in that city (Belchem, 2000:

132), they were far outnumbered by laborers, many of whom

viewed their sojourn as temporary. As concerns Irish

migration to England in general, Harris (1994: 8) tells us:

Arriving, frequently as wage cutters and strikebreakers,

the Irish were prepared to accept whatever would enable

them to earn enough to fulfill their aspirations, chief of

which was to earn enough to remain in Ireland. When they

did not spontaneously appear, pushed by necessity like the

Mexicans in the United States, they were advertised for by

employers (Jackson, 1963: 799). As the gangers who

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assembled seasonal agricultural crews from among their

network members, gangers on construction projects, for

example, did the same (e.g., Coleman, 1976: 57; Collins,

1976: 52; Cowley, 2001: 25).

Conclusions

Because Irish and Mexican seasonal agricultural

laborers were a mobile and cheap labor force, the fruits

and vegetables they harvested were available at a lower

cost than they would have been had native workers been

employed, or had the agricultural labor force been fully

proletarianized. Their labor in the fields and orchards

thus provided a subsidy to the wages of the urban

proletariat, and hence to the capitalist firms that

employed them. In many cases their cheapness hinged on

their foot in a sub-subsistence or subsistence plot of

land, from which they migrated seasonally to seek

additional income in the Mexican case, or to pay their

rents (and also procure additional income) in the Irish

case. Those with a foot on the land did not expect all of

their necessities to be covered by the wages they earned,

as is the case for those who are fully proletarianized.

Thus they enabled a constant primitive accumulation based

on an articulation of the peasant mode of production with

the capitalist one that they entered to find wage work.

Notably, the cost of the basket of goods necessary for

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survival as a fully proletarianized wage worker can be

related to pressures for higher wages and unionization. It

can be speculated that it was mainly those Mexicans who

were landless who were most interested in unionizing

activities in the fields, a phenomenon absent among the

Irish seasonal workers in Britain. Temporary workers, on

the other hand, may or may not have had a foot on the land,

and may or may not have eventually become semi-permanent or

permanent migrants. They provided a subsidy to the

receiving economy because they were raised elsewhere, and

often returned to the origin country in times of illness,

unemployment, or retirement. Thus, they did not depend to

the same extent as the native proletariat on the social

wage.

These historical insights are important in

understanding the structural role of immigrants today and

most importantly their subsidies to core capitalism.

Anthropologists working with immigrant groups should be

aware of and investigate the types of subsidy their study

population is providing to the host society. For example,

HB-2 agricultural workers are seasonal workers, and those

who have green cards may work only temporarily, if

recurrently, in the United States. Semi-permanent and

permanent settlement, however, have become more common

among Mexican workers, for example, because of the

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strengthening of border controls. More permanent

settlement has occurred among the disposed Irish workers

for centuries.

Endnotes

1. Because pressures from supranational lending

institutions following neo-liberal policies the Agrarian

Reform Law, Article 27, of the Mexican Constitution, was

rescinded in 1992. The ejido has since become privatized.

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