DISSERTATION SUMMARY

 Care Remittances: Farmworkers' Hemispheric Information Practices Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic

The golden age of globalization marked by the rise of free-market policies and contraction of public social services has triggered a massive transformation in cultural and political exchanges across borders, impacting expressions of community, care, identity formation, and political participation. The COVID-19 pandemic deepened these hemispheric practices as diaspora groups bargained for the most basic access to public goods and safety nets to cope with structural vulnerabilities across political regimes. The crisis of care experienced among transnational networks has invited transdisciplinary scholars, including the public policy discipline, to better understand the social and political ramifications brought by these new labor-intensive regimes in an era of restrictive immigration laws in the global north. Despite the evolution of comprehensive literature, few studies have attempted to study these patterns from the standpoint of information flows as a jolting factor in migrant care practices. After all, information is at the heart of public service provision due to its intrinsic role in facilitating responsive policies to the needs of the governed. Yet, the institutional challenge to deliver culturally appropriate and linguistically relevant resources to migrant communities amid the pandemic became striking, meriting additional attention. I root my contribution on the premise that information is an inseparable component informing migrants' practices within and beyond the state. Migrant remittances and the in-kind contributions shared back home are often treated as a conversation of development or member-to-member negotiation. However, focusing on how everyday people practice a praxis of care in response to information and care vacuums left by nation-states has the potential to explain why current policy is failing transterritorial communities.

My dissertation articulates how one migrant diaspora, farmworkers, dealt with information asymmetry using various information-sharing, resource-exchange, and subsistence tactics to weave a patchwork of institutional and collective care that ensured their well-being transnationally. Farmworkers' classification as “essential” at the start of the pandemic contrasted sharply with their traditional portrayal as "unskilled" immigrants in the industrialized global food labor system. These labels devalue the ancestral farming and foodway knowledge farmworkers possess. I challenge the myth that farmworkers are information-poor by developing a care remittance model that argues farmworker knowledge networks draw on a moral economy of information that emphasizes confianza or trust. Through a mixed-methods analysis based on the community-engaged Oregon COVID-19 Farmworker Study (OR COFS), I argue farmworkers evaluated their access to care remittances and institutional resources to deal with food insecurity and obtain medical attention stemming from their COVID-19 exposure. Transnational farmworker households used a variety of information channels and information brokers. They frequently acted as active organizational agents themselves in their transborder communities. Through their relational patterns and mutual aid efforts, farmworkers drew on an archive of knowledge about interwoven narratives of belonging and racial formations to inform their political evaluations across nations and create agency even when they are afforded limited political rights. Understanding these information practices among farmworkers, who remain largely on the margins of political power, can not only yield more ethical policy outcomes but can also build cross-national solidarity to stop the reproduction of exploitative labor demands.

In Chapter 1, I provide readers with an overview of the contemporaneous ways in which remittances have been understood as social and political transnational practices and justify why farmworkers are a pertinent group of study. I describe the collective history of structural oppression, cultural traditions, and political and economic struggles that make immigrant farmworkers a distinct group bound to their home and host countries. I connect the current care chains and social remittances theoretical work to my concept of “care remittances,” broadly defined as an intergenerational hemispheric system of knowledge informed by lived realities that facilitates migrant interventions to negotiate and supplement basic provisions of services necessary for the welfare of relatives across borders within and beyond the state. Through the exchange of subsistence practices, resource exchange, and mutual aid strategies, the model is based on a moral economy of trusted information positioned by information brokers that guide everyday monetary, affective, and political strategies according to structural and cultural contexts. To make this argument, I draw on feminist and Indigenous epistemologies and employ concepts from information studies, ethnic and transnational studies, and care chain literature. My goal with such interdisciplinary research is to actively engage with the myriad global immigration and labor policy-making impacting the farmworker diaspora to live a fair quality of life. I articulate how this project responds to recent calls for engaged, transdisciplinary applied research from scholars such as Peggy Levitt, Jørgen Carling, Félix Krawatzek, Lea Müller-Funk, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, and Beverly Mullings, who call for scaling up applied research that can better seam the boundaries of transnational coproduced care through a multidimensional understanding of information mobility and capacity building.

Chapter 2 sets the groundwork for this research by drawing on the growing body of political remittance literature to further theorize how the care remittance framework, when applied as a knowledge system, can facilitate the diffusion of information that establishes democratic and public welfare expectations based on a historically informed Campesino culture across various political regimes. The chapter draws on qualitative interviews to contrast the role of community organizations in the U.S. against the traditional style of clientelistic networks back-home as information brokers negotiating the distribution of goods. I contend that in response to low wages that do not meet basic needs without public or private assistance, farmworkers exchanged strategies on how to access institutional resources and developed their own economies of subsistence when the former is not reliable either due to immigration status, cultural exclusions, or clientelist modes of public resource distribution. I also bring attention to how third-state actors, including the farmworker diaspora themselves, are under increased pressure to intervene on behalf of the state as a result of decentralization and austerity policies that have constrained the state's ability to respond. I specifically conclude care remittances functions as a mutual aid project that enables people to satisfy their basic needs while fostering a shared understanding of the inequities at the root of public provision gaps.

Chapters 3 and 4 lay out my vision for what follows in this analysis. Chapter 3 starts with an overview of the food customs and knowledge that Mexican subsistence farmers offer the two countries, set against the backdrop of economic decline and rising food instability brought on by the pandemic globally. I argue the considerable loss of pay suffered by Oregon farmworkers put an end to monetary remittances as the primary strategy for gaining access to capitalist food markets back-home for this specific low-wage diaspora group. Analyzing a subset of the OR COFS survey data through a linear regression analysis, I find food insecurity, lost work time, and the presence of children in the home were all statistically significant negative predictors of monetary remittances. I supplement these results with qualitative interviews to demonstrate how cash-strapped farmworkers and their families back home compensated for the loss of income and turned to traditional milpa-based diets, communal food sharing strategies, and other subsistence practices to combat food insecurity. The struggle of transnational farmworkers to maintain their food independence raises questions about migration-to-development models and the effectiveness of nation-state efforts to address the rising hunger in an era of mass food production.

In Chapter 4, I discuss how farmworkers negotiated COVID-19 health treatment both in the U.S. and back home by applying the concept of “care remittances” in conversation with contemporary migrant and community health advances. This literature contextualizes the worsening medical attention crises during the first lethal global COVID-19 waves, allowing me to highlight the informal methods transnational farmworker households undertook to overcome medical care obstacles to meet their health needs. This chapter explains how misinformation campaigns, conflicting pandemic policies, and historical medical trauma exploited barriers to health treatment, increasing hospitalization avoidance due to fear of dying while residing in diaspora and away from family. I use the accounts of three Oregon farmworkers to gain insight into how families tapped their social networks to exchange information about the health effects of COVID-19 and challenge the cultural and quality relevance of health institutions by implementing joint strategies with their transnational households to patch over health care voids. As I discuss, care remittances and institutional resources act in conflict but also in tandem, meriting a larger conversation about the need to develop new ways of thinking about the crucial role of trusted networks in dispelling misinformation and addressing care gaps in future policy debates.

In Chapter 5, the subject of participatory action research is discussed in relation to its role in representing the voices of agricultural workers in deliberative policy-making processes that result in generative constructs of citizenship critical to crisis response. Specifically, the chapter discusses the methods employed for this research and the OR COFS to patch over long-existing data voids about farmworkers necessary for policy action. I apply the care remittance framework to the participatory research methods dependent on reciprocity and a moral economy of information that prioritizes community members as the ultimate knowledge holders. I discuss the epistemological importance of promotoras, community members with specialized training, as information brokers in this model of co-produced research through trusted networks of confianza and the impact of community-engaged research as a strategy to mobilize research that prioritizes community-driven change.