Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern: The new American farmer: Immigration, race, and the struggle for sustainability
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Laura‑Anne Minkoff‑Zern: The new American farmer: Immigration, race, and the struggle for sustainability Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2019, 195 pp, ISBN 978-0-262-53783-4 Andrew Flachs1 Accepted: 13 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
The most recent agricultural census recorded that 95.4% of the nearly 3.4 million U.S. producer farmers were white (USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service 2019). While this statistic masks the contributions of Asian, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous growers uncounted by and illegible to the USDA, it broadcasts the structural challenges of succeeding as a nonwhite farmer. Against this narrative, LauraAnne Minkoff-Zern’s The new American Farmer centers the experiences of Mexican immigrant farmers who persist and thrive in rural America through small, diversified farms. Examining how Latinx immigrant farmers face structural disadvantages in their access to land, capital, labor, markets, and state resources, Minkoff-Zern asks how such farmers stay in the US and cultivate a smallholder agrarian dream. An expansive study of farmers, project directors, extension agents, and USDA staff across five states, this book is a valuable contribution to new scholarship on cooperative organizing and alternative farming (Penniman 2018; Reese 2019; White 2018) focused on the contributions of nonwhite farmers building an alternative agrarian future. “New American farmer” is a phrase that evokes white back-to-the-landers featured in popular press (Galanes 2017; Pollan 2006) even as it erases the racialized capitalism that reproduces a hierarchy of work, land tenure, and legibility where the statistic above is possible. These new, immigrant, Latinx, American farmers exist. Yet American institutions define citizenship, state resources, and land access through whiteness, and have maintained that order through the labor of racialized others and the seizure of Indigenous lands. * Andrew Flachs [email protected] 1
Department of Anthropology, Purdue University, 700 W. State Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
Minkoff-Zern establishes the historical and institutional context necessary to understand this erasure across the first three chapters, deconstructing the meritocratic metaphor of the “agricultural ladder” where farmworkers can ascend from laborer to owner. Instead, she argues that sharecropper and tenure laws designed to prevent Black ownership came to marginalize Mexican immigrant laborers dispossessed by hacienda landlords and later by NAFTA. This emergent racial hierarchy created an economic expectation that growers should be able to exploit the labor of workers, with the social corollary that both parties should accept that hierarchy as natural and inevitable. No wonder, then, that farmers who do manage to climb this ladder are undercounted in the agriculture census and thus under-supported. Frustrations with paperwork and institutional oversight cause difficulties for smallholder alternative agriculture elsewhere in the US (Guthman 2004), Guat
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