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At 10 a.m., I arrived at “Campo Los Soles,” a 2000-acre field of grapes with temperatures up to 122° Fahrenheit and 20 miles from Hermosillo City, northwestern Mexico. The 2000 acres are completely fenced with barbed wires, and private security employees are watching the limits of the property day and night. Its main entrance is a 35-foot-high arch with the words “Los Soles” above two closed gates, a security checkpoint cabin, and corporate advertisements with Mexican and US agribusiness brand logos. Its owner is a corporation with dozens more campos agrícolas (literally “agricultural fields”) in Mexico and sales offices in the United States, reaching its crops to grocery store chains in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Surveilling Carefully
Before allowing me to access Los Soles, the private security employee showed me the “Rules of Access to the Production Unit,” asked me to sign the “Visitor Registration Control,” and gave me a visitor’s badge. After two miles of a dirt road with barbed wires on both sides, I was already inside Los Soles. The extensive size of the grape fields and road dust completely blocked the visibility of what could be outside this campo agrícola.
In the parking area, I met two corporation representatives who started pointing out the facilities and services that, they said, “we offer to the workers,” such as a Catholic chapel, a grocery store, a dining hall, a basketball court, and a laundry room. Close, there were also the packinghouses, the administrative offices, and the dorms, showers, and restrooms divided for males and females. Looking around, I was struck by how lines of trees, metal wire fences, and concrete walls divided all these areas of Los Soles. After listing the facilities, one of the corporation representatives looked at me and proudly asked me, “It is like a city! Don’t you think?”
We were waiting for the arrival of the agricultural laborers in the “rest area,” a series of pergola roofs with square tables and benches below them. The clock approached 1 p.m., and the corporate representatives explained that with lunchtime in a few minutes, approximately four hundred migrant workers would arrive. Yet this was a small number compared to the pick of the harvest season, they specified: “We usually received up to 2,500 people only in this field.”
At noon, groups of fifty agricultural laborers started to get off yellow school buses. They walked to make a line outside the dining hall, without any shade, while private security employees watched them and asked them to maintain the order to pick up their food and enter the dining hall. Around thirty minutes later, the four hundred farmworkers left the dining hall and approached the rest area. However, some groups only spent a few minutes resting because their one-hour break had almost finished, and they had to take the same buses to return to the vineyards where they had been working since dawn.
Other groups of migrant workers, who had already finished their working day, spent a couple of hours in the rest area, and I could talk more with them about their journeys and birthplaces. These conversations were fragmented and occurred in an atmosphere of mistrust and surveillance because the field supervisors remained near us almost all the time. However, the sporadic non-supervised conversations and my mentioning that I have family and friends from the regions the workers came from provoked moments of trust to talk more openly about their living and working conditions in the campos agrícolas of Sonora.
Throughout the next four hours, I talked in intervals of ten or twenty minutes in an informal way with male farmworkers between 18 and 55 years old. They were from different regions of the southern Mexican states of Chiapas and Puebla, and one person told me he was from Guatemala. Most were recruited in their hometowns and hired with four- or six-month contracts. The few female agricultural laborers rested below trees and other pergola roofs. I noticed that, unlike in the vineyards, almost all workers in the packinghouse and dining hall were women.
Strategically Misinforming
Migrant farmworkers’ knowledge about campos agrícolas and the desertic landscapes of Sonora depended on whether this was their first time coming or not. The younger workers who inhabited Los Soles, most of whom had just turned 18 years old, seemed to share similar perspectives. One young man described it this way: “It is my first time here. It was tiring, traveling for two days by bus to get here.” Also, I asked them if they had been to any city or town in Sonora, and they mentioned, “We have been here for about two months, but we have never left. We have not been outside of the field.”
That narrative differed from the older migrant workers, usually between 25 and 55 years old, who more often had worked at Los Soles as well as other campos. In particular, I met Guillermo and Joaquín, who were recruited in the northern mountains of Puebla but, in other years, have gone to Sonora on their own. They gave precise details about the distinctions between facilities, harvest seasons, weather, regions, and corporations. I asked them how frequently they went outside a campo agrícola when they came to Sonora, hired by a corporation.
First, Guillermo explained:
“When the campo hires you, you have less control of yourself. If you want to stay here for more or less time, it is not allowed. You would have many problems with them. They tell you when you can stay here, not more or less time.”
Joaquín was more specific about the situation of going or not outside a campo:
“The problem is that having cars or motorcycles within the campo is not allowed. How will you go to another place? Any other place is really far […] Besides, I prefer to stay inside because there have been people who left the campo and were robbed or threatened on the roads by armed people.”
These past experiences also taught them about the far distances from Los Soles and other campos to the closest hospitals, stores, and bus stations. However, the corporation did not provide such information, and younger and more inexperienced farmworkers did not even know the locations of nearby urban centers.
Sonora’s extreme weather was a frequent theme in conversations with farmworkers in the rest area of Los Soles. The pergola roofs were not large enough to fit all the people in the rest area, so many workers were resting below trees or next to walls where there was a shadow at that moment of the day. Around 3 p.m., I talked with a group of four farmworkers, and they explained to me the different challenges to adapting and enduring this desertic landscape.
They mentioned how the companies never provide them with specific clothing to protect themselves from the sun, so they always have to buy neck bandanas, caps, long-sleeved t-shirts, and sunglasses. I asked them if the fields had shaded areas; they said “no, never” and described how common it is to hear workmates fall and faint during workdays due to heat strokes. Carlos, hired in his hometown in the highlands of Chiapas for the second time, specified: “Here, the water containers are hot, so we have to buy small bags of ice every day in the grocery store of the campo.”
Carlos also explained his problem during the nights when the heat is unbearable:
“I have had problems with the guards because they do not allow us to stay outside the dorms after 10 p.m. […] The dorms have tin roofs, and the fans rarely work. Inside, it becomes an oven, especially when one is up to the top of the bunk.”
Justifying Confinement
Throughout the day in Los Soles, field supervisors and administrative employees explained campo’s rules to me. They spent time justifying the reasons for a norm applied toward migrant workers that they assumed I would think could be excessive or problematic. They framed the explanations with phrases such as “we need to solve problems due to farmworkers’ behavior” and “it is because we care for them.” In particular, a field supervisor told me:
“Motorcycles or taxis are not allowed to enter to prevent the introduction of drugs and alcohol. […] We care about their safety.[…] We had to install more fences and hire more guards to maintain nighttime safety in the dorms. It is for security reasons; you know how things are now in Sonora.”
At 5 p.m., the corporation representatives invited me to see the dining hall, the grocery store, and the health center before leaving Los Soles. First, we arrived at a building that looked like a warehouse where, at its entrance, there was a big sign on a wall:
“Rules of the Dining Hall:
- Bring your ID of the campo.
- Dress appropriately.
- Deposit waste in the cans.
- Service will be denied to people in an inconvenient condition (drunk or drugged).
- Please wash your food utensils (cup and spoon).
Working men, remember that we are a team and should respect each other.”
Inside, the dining hall was divided into three areas: the kitchen and food store, the hall with tables for farm and packing workers, and separated at the back, a small dining room exclusive to engineers, nurses, and administrators. A corporation representative detailed the services of the dining hall:
“There are three meals each day. The food is hot, varied, and nutritious. […] We decided to limit the number of tortillas per worker for each meal to reduce waste and improve their health.”
Later, we walked to the grocery store. At the door, two signs read, “prohibited to enter with backpacks” and “prepaid phone cards for sale.” Inside was frozen; it was the only place with air conditioning I noticed in Los Soles. The shelves and fridges had processed food. A field supervisor told me, “Having a grocery store here is good. Farmworkers do not have to go out this way, and we prevent them from bringing in alcoholic beverages.”
The health center was our last stop on the walking tour. In one of the two nursing services offices, I asked the nurse what would happen if an emergency occurred. The nurse said, “The company takes workers to the nearest hospital. The health center is more for checking their health when they arrive and consulting services.” Before leaving, one of the nurses asked the corporation representatives if they could buy “more electrolyte drinks and band-aids because farmworkers asked a lot of both.” They said they would check if buying more was possible.
Around 6 p.m., at the main entrance of Los Soles, the private security employee requested the visitor’s badge, and I returned it to him. He opened the fences and allowed me to leave Los Soles.
Conclusion
Los Soles is one of the hundreds of campos agrícolas in Mexico where migrant laborers produce the crops that end up on the tables of grocery store chain consumers worldwide. However, campos agrícolas represent more than just another link in the global food supply chain. They embody how human captivity could be masked as corporate efficiency and labor safety. From deploying barbed wires, checkpoints, and guards to restricting tortillas, outside dorm hours, and life-or-death information, my supervised ethnography reveals how transnational corporations implement a spectrum of spatial controls against farmworkers. Campos agrícolas are spatial models seeking to control the everyday movement of workers. They are international value-producing spatialities where the confinement and surveillance of migrants are central pillars to comply with standards of fair trade and socially responsible production. My ethnography as a visitor of Los Soles showed only the surface of how spatial labor controls are executed, confronted, and camouflaged within the contemporary plantations of northwestern Mexico.