Book Review: They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields: Illness, Injury, and Illegality among U.S. Farmworkers

Guest post by Andrea Delgado, a Master’s student in Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include the archaeological past in 21^st-century modernity; intersections between economic development and cultural heritage; undocumented migration to the US; and indigenous languages. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree from Harvard College.

Review of  They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields: Illness, Injury, and Illegality among U.S. Farmworkers by Sarah Brownen Horton (University of California Press, 2016).

Sarah Horton’s captivating book They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields provides a powerful insight to the hidden hardships of migrant farmworkers in the Californian Central Valley. Drawing from research conducted between 2008 and 2016, Horton explores the many interrelated reasons behind the high rates of heat strokes among farmworkers. She artfully integrates ethnographic narratives with broader historical, legal, and political explanations to argue that heat illnesses are embedded into the system and culture. By highlighting migrants’ structural vulnerability and systemic exclusion, Horton has crafted an extraordinarily compelling book that will forever change the way you look at a melon in the supermarket.

The book’s organisation propels the reader forward as each of the eight chapters grows in complexity and emotional intensity. After providing a broad overview of the issue of heat illness among mistreated farmworkers in the introductory and first chapters, Horton then takes a step back and examines how worker behavior is shaped by both the history and policy of immigration and labour. Subsequently, she turns to the issue of illegality to show how the law further exploits migrant farmworkers. The last three chapters are devoted to chilling narratives of migrants’ battles with hypertension, heat illnesses, and kidney failure.

In Chapter 1, Horton transports the reader to the fields of the Central Valley where workers pick fruit for long hours in direct sunlight and receive few breaks for water or shade. She effectively uses the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of “symbolic violence” to show how male farmworkers internalise arbitrary social inequalities and push themselves to keep working in the heat out of fear of appearing weak, unmanly, and effeminate. Her seamless incorporation of Spanish jargon for frailty and inability gives voice to the migrants’ normalised gendered perceptions of labour. Other terms such as quemarse – “to burn up” – objectify their bodies as dispensable items in the field. Indeed, migrants blame their own bodily limits for heat stroke, rather than the broader legal, political, systemic, and migratory contexts. In perhaps the most powerful phrase of the whole book, Horton uses migrant vocabulary when she comments that “a farmworker’s jugo – “juice” – is depleted so that a melon’s is preserved” (p. 44). Her jarring observation unforgettably denounces a system that values product over human life.

In the following chapter, Horton uses the historical backdrop of contemporary Central American migration to show how legal and labour policies created – and benefited from – the exclusion of migrants. Between the 1940s and 1960s, the Bracero Program imported over 4 million men from Mexico to work in the southwest US with temporary legal status. This program created a class of “exceptional workers” (p. 71) who were excluded from citizenship, health care, and other systems. Given the widespread participation in the migratory work program, many younger generations of Mexicans continued to migrate for work even once the program had concluded. Now without permanent legal status, migrant workers have limited access to many services normally taken for granted – air travel, a trip to the doctor’s, and compensation for overtime work. Horton’s historical review of labour policy effectively contextualises the systemic exclusion of migrants, which she continues to portray and criticise.

In Chapter 3, Horton expands upon the effects of labeling migrant workers as undocumented. Whereas previously migrant workers participated in the Bracero Program, now the same workers are characterised by the illegal act they committed – crossing the border without papers. In deeming them as “illegal,” the US legal and political systems exclude migrant workers from a variety of health and work benefits. Horton thus argues that the recent criminalisation of undocumented migration effectively institutionalises the “superexploitation” (p. 89) of migrant workers. Without legal status, many “ghost workers” must borrow the Social Security number of a legally-present relative in order to obtain work, illustrating the great symbolic capital of citizenship papers among a class of excluded migrants. Her ability to enter into both legal and political discourses, while not leaving behind ethnographic narratives, is impressive.

The three subsequent chapters comprise the harrowing heart-rending crux of her argument. Through narratives of migrants’ everyday lives – battling hypertension, kidney failure, stress, uncertainty, and systemic exclusion – Horton brings the hidden, abused bodies of migrant farmworkers out of the shadows. In Chapter 4, Horton simultaneously brings to life and condemns the “master stressors” (p. 97) of tough work and undocumented legal status. The intense stories of migrant workers suffering from hypertension provide a rare glance at their stressful daily lives.

While migrants face the interrelated issues of hypertension and heat illness, their limited access to opportunistic health care worsens the situation. Horton explains in Chapter 5 how migrants obtain “collateral diagnoses” (p. 127) of their life-threatening chronic conditions only when checkups are required for work certification. Due to their limited access to formal health care, migrant workers with kidney failure often are diagnosed once the disease has already reached its end stage. Through the distressing narratives in Chapter 6, Horton illustrates how migrant bodies accrue value with deterioration, since medical coverage is only available once the body has already expired. Her intimate, detailed accounts of migrants’ battles with health issues elicit sorrow, empathy, and urgency for change.

In the concluding chapter, Horton purposefully frames her research to argue for five concrete actions to improve conditions for migrant farmworkers. She proposes giving agricultural workers standard labour protections; granting legal status to the undocumented to relieve one master stressor; actively promoting migrant workers’ rights; reforming health care; and including worker safety provisions in company and national stipulations. Although she does not delve much into contemporary politics throughout the book, Horton’s conclusion ambitiously synthesises her findings into a compelling call-to-action.

Horton’s book comes at a critical moment to enter into discussions about undocumented migration in the US. It represents a substantial contribution to exposing the hidden reality of migrant farmworkers’ stressful lives, and also highlights potential areas of policy and law reform. Her in-depth analysis of the legal, historical, and cultural causes of migrant exploitation makes her work a relevant and eye-opening read for anyone who consumes produce in the US.

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style)

Delgado, A. (2017) Book Review: They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields: Illness, Injury, and Illegality among U.S. Farmworkers. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2017/07/book-review-they (Accessed [date])