The History Of The Strawberry Sharecrop Market

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Santa Maria, a city located in California, is in the heart of the strawberry sharecrop market. With working in fields being extremely demanding, sharecropping businesses exploit the vulnerable. In today’s times Mexican immigrants, and in particular women, children, and teenagers are exploited every day in fields across the country. Mexican immigrants play a vital part in igniting capitalist agriculture, especially in strawberry agriculture, and are not compensated fairly for their work. With slavery being outlawed in the United States it is amazing how the Mexican immigrant field worker has not been advocated for, because their rigorous field work as well as their extremely low pay, closely resemble slavery. Sharecropping has been a trade that for hundreds of years anthropologist have tried to understand. Sharecropping was at the core of the world economy. Sanchez writes in her article California Strawberries: Mexican Immigrant Sharecroppers, Labor, and Discipline “Sharecropping was a very important mechanism of economic development because it facilitated the expansion of imperial powers colonizing Africa, America, and Asia” (Sanchez 16). The need for labor as well as land was the reason countries like England and the United States colonized so …show more content…

The Bracero Program started in 1942 was a deal between the United States and Mexico. Sanchez writes “North America imported thousands of Mexican peasants who came to work in North American agriculture under the terms of temporary contracts. California became the major employer of braceros, as they came to be known, and the strawberry industry was heavily dependent upon them”. This deal was the pioneer in Mexican immigrants dominating the labor portion of the agriculture industry. However, due to the exploitive nature of the Bracero Program the program was terminated in 1962 because of the pressure of newly formed labor

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