Immigrant and migrant farm workers from Mexico and other countries are large and growing in number and in importance to U.S. agriculture, but they often are not counted in the decennial census due to high mobility, illegal status, and/or unconventional housing. This report is based on ethnographic research conducted in California's Santa Maria Valley, an active agricultural area rich in labor-intensive cultivation of prime vegetable and fruit crops. Calculations of crop acreage, man-hours of labor required for each crop, and full- and part-time agricultural employees are verified and augmented by information gained from comprehensive interviews with immigrant and migrant agricultural workers concerning their migratory and employment histories, housing arrangements, and relationships to Mexican communities.

The report concludes that routine census procedures can only result in a significant under-reporting of numbers of immigrant and, particularly, migrant farm workers in Santa Maria and, by extension, in other regions of the country which rely heavily upon imported labor; that many immigrant and migrant farmworkers have good reason to fear exposure to government representatives and thus will attempt to remain hidden from them; and that lack of adequate housing contributes to difficulties in locating and enumerating this population. The most important step toward resolution of these problems and many related issues would be reform of U.S. immigration policy which would recognize, legalize, and protect imported migrant workers. Absent such enlightenment, however, more accurate enumeration and description of this population can be accomplished if bilingual and bicultural census workers are trained to patiently and repeatedly approach their households and unconventional dwellings using ethnographic research methods. Under current conditions, this will require a radical redefinition of the terms "residence" and "household" in the context of the census. And, although the timing of the national census is not ideal for identification of the largest number of migrant farm workers, follow-up studies should be performed at peak employment periods. Such surveys, thoroughly performed, would yield rich rewards in information about the farm-working population as well as provide an essential cross-check to standard census data.

At times, rural agricultural communities have been viewed as chronically impoverished, overgrown labor camps with few prospects for improvement. The common wisdom is that costly public assistance will be needed to ensure the social integration of poor, undocumented, unskilled, uneducated, non-English-speaking, foreign-born farmworkers and their families.

Over the past 40 years, the city of San Jose, in the Santa Clara Valley of northern California, has experienced explosive population and economic growth, fueled by the development of the high-technology industries. Along with the need for large numbers of engineering, technical, and managerial workers, the rapid industrialization of the Santa Clara Valley generated a huge demand for workers in unskilled, low-wage occupations, especially in the manufacturing assembly and maintenance service sector. This vast supply of unskilled, low-wage jobs played a central role in attracting immigrant workers to the region, especially from Mexico and Central America. As Latino immigrant workers have settled in San Jose, there has been an expansion of low-income urban enclave, especially in the Eastside where most of these workers live. In contrast to urban slums resulting from economic decline, these poor immigrant enclaves are the relatively new result of the successful, but highly unequal, economic development generated by the so-called Silicon Valley’s high-technology industries.

This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork; it seeks to describe and analyze the experiences of a group of Mexican immigrant workers and families who live in low-income barrio in San Jose that we call Benfield. The study reveals that Mexican immigrant workers, both legal and undocumented, in Benfield are concentrated in precisely those labor-intensive, low-income jobs that since the early 1980s have proliferated at one of the highest growth rates in the region. We argue that the use of immigrants as a source of flexible, disposable labor in several light-manufacturing and service industries in Silicon Valley is the primary factor that keeps a large segment of immigrant families trapped in poverty, despite there being more than one full-time worker in the family. We show that the subsistence of immigrant workers and their families depends on several strategies for coping with poverty: extended households and dense social networks; informal income-generating activities supplementing the low wages in the formal sector; and material and economic assistance from charities and, residents are eligible, government institutions.

We argue that in the absence of state and local government policies, today’s Latino immigrant poor could become further impoverished and their communities evolve into areas of concentrated poverty. The challenge is to develop a comprehensive set of coherent, well-orchestrated state policies that address not only the complex consequences but also the root causes of the problems that afflict working poor immigrant families and the barrios where they live. Our policy recommendations have two goals: first—and this is the main front where the battle against the growth in the number of working-poor immigrants must be fought—to decrease the comparative advantage of exploiting undocumented immigrant labor, second, to develop specific state policies tailored to low-income Latino immigrant communities, policies that, in light of the economic and demographic changes that have been taking place in California over the past few decades, are long overdue.

Capitalist agriculture, not family farming has dominated the California agricultural economy throughout its history and unlike the rest of the nation has relied upon the interchangeability of numerous migrant and immigrant groups whose employment opportunities were limited. An examination of the history of California agribusiness highlights four periods in which the labor force is mainly single/unattached males, or family units. This dissertation examines the social and economic consequences of the changing use of labor in California agribusiness and the impact of these changes on women farm workers and their families.

Mexican-origin and Dust Bowl families are the only two family groups who have labored in California agribusiness during the twentieth century. The historical importance of women farm workers has been neglected in the literature of California agriculture, as well as the importance of family and household strategies in the initial incorporation of women into agricultural wage work. I document the contributions of Mexican-origin farm working women within the context of their historical experiences, along with the strategies that they and their families utilized, making the family viable as an important labor unit despite the disruptions and complexities of a pattern of changing labor in California agribusiness. I focus on the role of women in California agribusiness and their importance in the settlement process, family maintenance, and community development. Women enter wage labor out of extreme needs of the family and at times as heads of households, and their income is essential to the survival of the family. Their entry into wage work adds substantially to their workload as they continue their domestic role in addition to their role as wage worker. They and their families acquire substantial benefits from the women’s involvement in community building and networking with institutions that are available to them, particularly if they acquire English as a second language.