Justicia for Migrant Workers Joins Food Chain Workers Alliance

By Whitney Witthaus

 

Evelyn Encalada and the grassroots advocacy organization Justicia for Migrant Workers (J4MW) have a request that carries demands of the culturally, economically, and legally repressed who are precariously perched between Canada and the sender communities in Latin America and the Caribbean. What they need: “Recognition of farmworkers as full-fledged human beings, not just workers.”

The movement to change the use of migrant workers solely as “economic units” to treat them as human beings has been met with rampant “repatriation,” also known as deportation, before the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program or the Low Skilled Workers Program’s established end date. From the event that incited the creation of the J4MW in 2001, when 20 Mexican workers were repatriated following a labor dispute, to the 2010 wildcat strike in Ontario in which 100 migrant workers, who were owed between $100-$6,000 in stolen wages, were repatriated, worker-led advocacy has been punished with deportation.

The workers have confronted these issues with solidarity and the weaving of worker and worker-family centered networks. With their “Harvesting Freedom” campaign, J4MW used the 50th anniversary of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program to call for permanent immigration status for migrant farmworkers in Canada, which featured a nearly 2,000 -mile pilgrimage from Leamington to Ottawa.

Their commentary and advising on labor and immigration policy are accompanied by a reimagined, supplementary militancy, a sort of radical emotional organizing. As Encalada explains, “international protocols are important, but asking workers what they need has so much meaning,” facilitating a mutual exchange of inspiration, empowerment, and the “opening up of hearts” that policy doesn’t provide.

Connecting migrant women in particular has been a monumental triumph of the group, leading the way for human expression of the rights they want to claim and the vital fact sometimes overlooked by the nitty gritty of policy that “as women, we also have the right to be happy.”

Solidarity as action, with its lively and sociable dimensions, has proved an illuminating strategy. At a recent Mother’s Day event held by J4MW, migrant women who have emigrated from other countries cultivated strength together, as the holiday passed and their children remained in homes millions of miles away. As J4MW emphasizes, the realities of migrant labor harm whole family units, not just the individuals participating physically in the labor. Filling new roles, managing households, and adapting to a new form of emotional labor, families are thoroughly steeped in the difficulties that characterizes farm labor today.

Exploring the balance between constructing public awareness and strategizing in other ways among the workers affected, Encalada offers insight coming from a history of multipronged approaches, including film-making, trips to the United Nations, and plenty of speaking engagements. “Be more radical in asks to consumers. Consumers need to know, but we need to move beyond responsible purchasing and revolutionize the food system to bring it back to community, to nonprofit. It’s not lack of awareness,; it’s structural alienation from the workers we’re interdependent on.”

Moving past the isolation and competition that marks our neoliberal reality, communities can and should be brought together, but Encalada  isn’t quite sure what that looks like in practice. She continues powerfully, “When touring the film Migrant Dreams, and over the history of this 16-year effort, there are repetitive and new waves of ‘I can’t believe this,’ but I’m tired of listening to that, I’ve listened to that for 16 years. What does it look like to shatter the worlds that are allowed to be parallel? That requires more than talk.”

As J4MW continues to explore and attempt to shatter the strata of society that contain and isolate the people we rely on to continue living and eating, we are delighted to welcome them to the Food Chain Workers Alliance.