Borderfields: Agrarian Transnationalism, Seasonality, and Climate Change across the US and Mexico

This dissertation, Borderfields: Agrarian Transnationalism, Seasonality, and Climate Change across the US and Mexico, is an in-depth ethnographic study of ejidatarios’ transnational migration patterns in the context of climate change. My analysis of these ejidatarios reveals that climate change is not just a planetary phenomenon; it is also a transnational one, embedded in relationships with agricultural lands on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Currently, dozens of farmers called ejidatarios migrate 1,200 miles back and forth between agrarian communities like Marimiles—located in the Mexican coastal state of Nayarit—and Mecca, California to participate in Southern California’s grape economy between March and October. These seasonal movements between Marimiles and Mecca are made possible by past and present U.S. immigration policies and visa programs like the Immigration and Reform Act of 1986. On one hand, these policies have provided ejidatarios the financial means to maintain ownership of their ejido lands in Mexico and to continue planting beans despite fluctuating crop prices and undesirable farming conditions produced by climate change. On the other hand, by working in California’s agrarian sector—where temperatures are increasingly rising— ejidatarios are also exposed to changing labor conditions in the U.S., which in turn impacts their ability to continue with their planting seasons in Mexico. Combining feminist and environmental anthropology, migration studies, borders studies, and multidisciplinary approaches to land, I illustrate how climate change, through circular migration, has become a collective experience that constitutes bordered spaces and conditions beyond geographic proximity to national boundaries. I use the term “borderfields” to capture how land—such as ejido land in Nayarit and vineyards in California—climate change, and daily life amalgamate through a bordered nexus that I argue is also a climatological one. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate how climate ...