The Invisible Farmworker: Racial Political Economy, Policy Development, and the Second Dimension of Power

The US agriculture industry has long been reliant on inequalities that intersect race and political economy. Farm policy further accentuates these inequalities as most farmworkers were excluded from New Deal labor and economic statutes due to pressure from Southern Congressmen and agricultural interests. Since then, the agricultural workforce has shifted from being overrepresented by southern Blacks and European immigrants to undocumented residents and migrant workers from Mexico and Central America. As with Black workers before the 1960s, most of these current farmworkers do not have civil or labor or voting rights. Our paper seeks to explain this inequality. We focus on policy development, emphasizing the intersecting roles of race and industrial agricultural interests as embedded within congressional and administrative institutions. We leverage theories of the second face of power and path dependency to highlight the agenda control of agricultural committees in Congress. We also highlight the role of the twentieth-century Bracero Programs and broader developments in the racial political economy to nuance the conventional narrative of the New Deal as a critical juncture for farmworker policy.