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

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

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

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;

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. 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). A

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

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:

117,119).

After Japanese immigration was halted with the

Gentlemens Agreement of 1908, growers began depending on Filipino and Mexican laborers. were treated well. None of the field hands

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

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 MexicanAmerican 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

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 maldistribution 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: 5253). 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 After

least some of his sons about the same time.

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. 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, The

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. months, or years. It can last for days, weeks,

It can be temporary due to employer Temporary workers may be small

needs or workers desires.

farmers hoping to capitalize their farms or subsistence farmers in need of additional income, and thus semiproletarianized, 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

30

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

33

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

34

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.

For a history of the land reforms up until the present decade see Vzquez Castillo (2004).

Bibliography, Mexico. Alvarado, Rudolph Valier and Sonya Yvette Alvarado. 2002. Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Michigan. Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Burawoy, Michael. 1976. The Functions and Reproduction of Migrant Labor: Comparative Material from Southern Africa and the United States. Sociology. 81(5): 1050-1087. Caldern, Roberto R. 2000. Mexican Coal Mining Labor in Texas and Coahuila, 1880-1930. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Cardoso, Lawrence A. 1979. Labor Emigration to the American Journal of East

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Southwest, 1916 to 1920: Mexican Attitudes and Policy. Pp. 16-32 in George C. Kiser and Martha Woody Kiser, eds. Mexican Workers in the United States: Historical and Political Perspectives. New Mexico Press. Chavez, Leo R. 1992. Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Albuquerque: University of

Immigrants in American Society. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Cornelius, Wayne A. 1992. From Sojourners to Settlers: The Changing Profile of Mexican Immigration to the United States. In U.S.-Mexico Relations: Labor Market

Interdependence, ed. Jorge A Bustamante, Clarke W. Reynolds, and Ral A. Hinojosa Ojeda, 155-195. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Durand, Jorge. 1998. Circuitos Migratorios. Pp. 25-50 in Tmas Calvo and Gustavo Lpez, coordinators. Movimientos de Poblacin en el Occidente de Mxico. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacn. Gamboa, Erasmo. 1990. Mexican Labor and World War II: Braceros in the Pacific Northwest, 1942-1947. Austin: University of Texas Press. Garca, Juan R. 1996. (CHECK CITATION)

Mexicans in the Midwest 1900-1932.

Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Gmez-Quiones, Juan. 1981. Mexican Immigration to the United States and the Internationalization of Labor.

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In Mexican Immigrant Workers in the U.S., ed. Antonio Ros Bustamante, 13-34. Studies Research Center. Haney, Jane B. 1979. Formal and Informal Labor Recruitment Mechanisms: States in Mexican Migration into MidMichigan Agriculture. Pp. 141-150 in Fernado Camara and Robert Van Kemper, eds. Migration Across Frontiers: Mexico and the United States. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York. Hewitt de Alcntara, Cynthia. 1976. Modernizing Mexican Agriculture: Socioeconomic Implications of Technological Change, 1940-1970. Geneva: UNRISD (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development). Lpez Castro, Gustavo and Sergio Zendejas Romero. 1998. Migracin International por Regiones en Michoacn. Pp. 51-79 in Tmas Calvo and Gustavo Lpez, coordinators. Movimientos de Poblacin en el Occidente de Mxico. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacn. Massey, Douglas S. 1987. Understanding Mexican Migration to the United States. American Journal of Sociology. 92(6): 1372-1403. Massey, Douglas, Rafael Alarcn, Jorge Durand, and Humberto Gonzlez (1987). Return to Aztln: The Social Process Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano

of International Migration from Western Mexico. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.

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McBride, George M. 1971 (1923). The Land Systems of Mexico. New York: Octagon Books. McWilliams, Carey. 1971 (1935). Factories in the Fields. Santa Barbara and Salt Lake City: Peregrine Publishers. Mines, Richard. 1981. Developing a Community Tradition of Migration: A Field Study in Rural Zacatecas, Mexico and California Settlement Areas. La Jolla: Center for U.S.Mexico Studies, University of California, San Diego. Mitchell, Don. 1996. The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers

and the California Landscape. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reichert, Joshua and Douglas S. Massey. 1979. Patterns of U.S. Migration from a Mexican Sending Community: A Comparison of Legal and Illegal Migrants. International Migration Review. 13(4): 599-623. Roberts, Kenneth D. 1981. Agrarian Structure and Labor Migration in Rural Mexico, Working Paper No. 30. La Jolla: Program in U.S.- Mexican Studies. University of California, San Diego. Portes, Alejandro and Robert L. Bach. 1985. Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. Portes, Alejandro and John Walton. 1981. the International System. Labor, Class, and

New York: John Wiley.

Shadow, Robert D. 1979. Differential Out-Migration: A

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Comparison of Internal and International Migration from Villa Guerrero, Jalisco (Mexico). Pp. 67-83 in Fernando Camara and Robert Van Kemper (eds.) Migration Across Frontiers: Mexico and the United States. Albany: Institute for Meso-American studies, State University of New York. Simpson, Eyler N. 1937. The Ejido: Mexicos Way Out. Chapel Hill: University of North Carlonia Press. Stuart, James and Michael Kearney. 1981. Causes and

Effects of Agricultural Labor Migration from the Mixteca of Oaxaca to California. La Jolla: Program in U.S.- Mexican Studies. University of California, San Diego. Tannenbaum, Frank. 1929. The Mexican Agrarian Revolution. New York: The MacMillan Company. Taylor, Paul S. 1934. County, Texas. Carolina Press. Thompson, Wallace. 1921. The People of Mexico: Who They Are and How They Live. New York. (Cited in McBride, 1971) Vzquez Castillo, Mara Teresa. 1994. Land Privatization An American-Mexican Frontier: Nueces

Chapel Hill: University of North

in Mexico: Urbanization, Formation of Regions, and Globalization in Ejidos. New York: Routledge. Weber, Devra. 1994. Dark Skin, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal. Berkeley: University

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of California Press. Weist, Raymond E. 1973. Wage Labor Migration and the Household in a Mexican Town. Journal of Anthropological Research. Vol. 29: 180-209. _______1979. Implications of International Labor Migration for Mexican Rural Development. Pp. 75-97 in Fernando Camara and Robert Van Kemper (eds.) Migration Across Frontiers: Mexico and the United States. Albany:

Institute for Meso-American studies, State University of New York. Wilson, Tamar Diana. 2000 (June) Anti-Immigrant Sentiment and the Problem of Reproduction/Maintenance in Mexican Immigration to the United States. Critique of Anthropology 20(2): 191-213 Wood, Charles. 1981. Structural Changes and Household Strategies: A Conceptual Framework for the Study of Rural Migration. Human Organization. 40(4): 338-343. Zamora, Emilio. 1993. The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas. College Station: Texas A&M.

Bibliography, Ireland Belchem, John (2000) The Liverpool-Irish Enclave. Pp. 128-146 in Donald M. MacRaild, ed. The Great Famine and Beyond: Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.

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Busteed, Mervyn (2000) Little Islands of Erin: Irish Settlement and Identity in Mid-Nineteent Century Manchester. Pp. 94-127 in Donald M. MacRaild, ed. The Great Famine and Beyond: Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Busteed, M.A., R.I. Hodgon and T.F. Kennedy. (1997, 1992). The Myth and Reality of Irish Migrants in MidNineteenth Century Manchester: A Preliminary Study. Pp. 26-51 in Patrick OSullivan, ed. The Irish in the

New Communities. Volume 2. The Irish Worldwide: History, Heritage, IdentityThe Irish Worldwide: History, Heritage, Identity. London: Leicester University Press. Coleman, Terry (1976, 1965) The Railway Navvies: A History of the Men Who Made the Railways. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books. Collins, E.J.T. 1976. Migrant Labor in British Agriculture in the Nineteenth Century. The Economic History Review. 29(1): 38-59. Cowley, Ultan (2001) The Men Who Built Britain: A History of the Irish Navvy. Dublin: Wolfhound Press. Daly, Mary E. 1994 (1986). The Famine in Ireland. Dundalk: Dundalgan Press. Donnelly, James S., Jr. 1995. Mass Eviction and the Great

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Famine. Pp.155-173 in Cathal Pirtir (ed.) The Great Irish Famine. Dublin: Mercier Press. Handley, James E. 1947. The Irish in Modern Scotland.

Oxford: B.H. Blackwell Ltd. Harris, Ruth-Ann M. 1994. The Nearest Place that Wasnt Ireland: Early Nineteenth-Century Irish Labor Migation. Ames: Iowa State University Press. Jackson, John Archer. 1963. The Irish in Britain. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Johnson, J.H. 1967. Harvest Migration from NineteenthCentury Ireland. Institute of British Geographers Transactions, No. 41: 97-112. Kerr, Barbara M. 1942-43. Irish Seasonal Migration to Great Britain, 1800-38. Irish Historical Studies. Vol. 3: 365-80. Mayhew, Henry (1985, 1861-62) London Labour and the London Poor: Selections by Victor Neuburg. London: Penguin Books. Mayhew, Henry (1968, 1861). London Labour and the London Poor. Vol. III. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.

MacManus, Seumas. 1974 (1944). The Story of the Irish Race. New York: The Devlin-Adair Company. Meillassoux, Claude. 1981. Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Morash, Chris and Richard Hayes (eds.) Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the Famine. Dublin and Portland, Oregon: Irish Academic Press. ODowd, Anne. 1991. Spalpeens and Tattie Hokers: History and Folklore of the Irish Migratory Agricultural Workers in Ireland and Britain. Press. OGrda, Cormac. 1973. Seasonal Migration and Post-Famine Adjustment in the West of Ireland. Studia Hibernica. Vol. 13: 48-76. OGrda, Cormac. 1999. Black 47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. OSullivan, Patrick, ed. The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage, Identity. Volume 6. The Meaning of the Famine. London and New York: Leicester University Press. Redford, Arthur (1964, 1926) Labour Migration in England 1800-1850. Manchester: 2nd edition. Royle, Edward (2003, 1997). Modern Britain: A Social History, 1750-1997. New York: Oxford University Press. Woodham-Smith, Ccil. 1962. The Great Hunger: Ireland Manchester University Press, Dublin: Irish Academic

1845-1848. New York: Old Town Books.

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Bibliography of labor migration in general Bonacich, E 1972. A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism: The Split Labor Market. American Sociological Review 37(3): 547559. Meillassoux, Claude. 1981 (1975). Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Piore, Michael J. 1979. Birds of Passage: Migrant Labour in Industrial Societies. London: Cambridge University Press. Portes, Alejandro and John Walton. 1981. the International System. Labor, Class, and

New York: John Wiley.

Sassen-Koob, Saskia. 1978. The International Circulation of Resources and Development: The Case of Migrant Labour. Development and Change. 9(4): 509-545. _________. 1981. Toward a Conceptualization of Immigrant Labor. Social Problems. 29(1): 65-85. Solien de Gonzlez, Nancie L. 1961. Family Organization

in Five Types of Migratory Wage Labor. American Anthropologist. 63(3): 1264-80.

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