“The Splendid Gifts of God to the South”: Struggles for Control on Tennessee Plantations by Tristan Call Dissertation Subm

“The Splendid Gifts of God to the South”: Struggles for Control on Tennessee Plantations By Tristan Call Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Anthropology May 8, 2020 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Lesley Gill, Ph.D. Beth A. Conklin, Ph.D. Markus Eberl, Ph.D. Joe Bandy, Ph.D. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. Introduction: Looking for Farms, and Finding Plantations………………………...1 Anthropology of Shitty Rural Jobs………………………………………………..10 Methods of Research………………………………………………………………29 Layout of the Dissertation…………………………………………………………33 II. “No Man's Land”: Dispossession and the North American Plantation………..…..38 The New Deal, Expulsion of the Sharecroppers, and the Invention of ‘Agriculture’……………………………………………………………………….41 Trail of Tears in Reverse: Mesoamerican Migrants Enter the Plantation South…...52 III. Overwork and Dispossession in Tennessee's ‘Nursery Capital’…………………..60 Cycles of Dispossession in Middle Tennessee…………………………………….62 Finding a Nursery Job: March 2013……………………………………………….64 What Makes Nursery Jobs Shitty? ………………………………………………...72 The Deportation Regime and Migrant Consciousness…………………………..…97 “My Life is the Loading Dock”: Boredom and the Length of the Workday…......102 Boredom and Exclusion from Town……………………………………………...106 Nursery Capital and Hyper-exploitation………………………………………….114 IV. Captive Labor and the State on 21st-Century Plantations………….……………..119 Rural Workers in a Regulatory ‘No Man’s Land’……………………………..…124 “Why Doesn't the Government Do Something?”: Hiding Captive Labor in Plain Sight………………………………………….…………………………….133 Legal Services for Captive Workers: the ‘Para-state’……………………………144 Regulation, De-regulation, and Hostile Neglect: Clearing the Path for Employer Totalitarianism…………………………………….…………………..149 The Guestworker Trap: Corporate Landscaping, Fish Farms and Captive Labor…………………………………….………………………………156 How Does Employer Totalitarianism Transform Class Relationships in Rural Tennessee? …………………………………….………………………………...168 V. “You Can Take More Pain”: Overwork, Suffering, and Class Formation in Tennessee Agriculture………………………………….………….171 “How the Poor Suffer” ………………………………….……………………….174 The “Accumulation of Differences” on Tennessee Plantations………………….179 ii “Estamos Acostumbrados”: Overwork, Ethnic Pride, and the (Un)Making of Class………………………………….………………………………………196 Captive Labor, Racial Solidarity, and the Struggle Against Suffering………….201 Migration and the ‘Disorganization’ of the Americas…………………….……..210 VI. Conclusion: Captive Labor, Attacks on Immigrants, and Class Politics Today…213 Review of Main Arguments...…………………………….…………………...…215 The Machinery and Purpose of Mass Deportation Under Donald Trump……….220 Political Compromise and the Differentiation of Labor…………………………223 Rural Class Struggle and Consumer Alliances…………………………………..225 Identity, Class, and Agriculture………………………………………………….227 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………...231 iii CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Looking for Farms, and Finding Plantations In the spring of 2013, I went looking for farms, hoping to better understand the lives of workers who plant, tend, and harvest crops in rural Tennessee. I figured that the easiest way to learn would be to work some farm jobs myself, live in the on-farm worker barracks, and move with the season along with the people I met there. Though my parents were skeptical of the plan (hadn’t I gone to graduate school to get an office job or something?) and some friends thought the segregated reputation of Tennessee agriculture would make it difficult for me to make the transition to fieldwork, finding work on a farm turned out to be a remarkably straightforward process of meeting a labor recruiter and then showing up to the field the next day with boots on. During my first weekend searching for a farm recruiter, in the Warren County nursery region 80 miles southeast of Nashville, I stumbled upon a monument honoring “The Farmer” in the parking lot behind the McMinnville town square. Dwarfed by the county water tower overhead, across a parking lot from the empty produce sheds used by McMinnville’s weekly farmers’ market, the granite tombstone-shaped monument displayed a chiseled image of a farmer on foot, guiding a plow behind two draft horses. Beneath, an inscription reads: We Honor You, the Farmer Every Human Being Depends On You The World is Built Upon Your Toil And Your Products When You Prosper Men Are Happy When You Fail All Men Suffer 1 You Live with Nature Where Brains, Brawn, and Toil Supplies Man’s Primary Needs You are Both a Capitalist and Laborer You Pioneer and You Gamble Without You Mankind Would be Extinct Farmer! We Honor You The monument’s hyperbolic prose reflects the deep, almost instinctive romanticism with which many rural Tennesseans revere agrarian life. On the outskirts of town, though, the ‘farmers’ referenced by the monument were hard at work putting up Spanish-language ‘now hiring’ banners proclaiming “NECESITAMOS TRABAJADORES” (‘We Need Workers’), dodging I-9 (work authorization) audits, and lobbying Congress to provide a pipeline of low-cost immigrant workers to fill ‘jobs Americans won’t do.’1 Those workers themselves, some Black and white but mostly indigenous and mestizo2 from Mexico and Guatemala, found themselves considerably less honored as they went about supplying ‘man’s primary needs.’ The popular mythology of the Southern countryside rests on this contradiction: agrarian life is a source of liberation, independence, and physical and cultural nourishment; but it is also a source of suffering, captivity, and degradation, escaped by those who are able and endured by 1 See, for example, contemporaneous articles in the nursery industry publication Grower Talks (Zurko 2012; Regelbrugge 2013) 2 In this dissertation I use ‘indigenous’, ‘mestizo’, ‘Latino’, and at times ‘Hispanic’ as terms of self-identification used by various groups of working-class people from Mesoamerica who currently perform the majority of labor- intensive field work in US agriculture. In general, by ‘indigenous’ I mean those who come from recognizable ethnolinguistic groups (i.e. Maya from Guatemala and Chiapas, Purepecha from Michoacan, Zapoteco from Oaxaca, or Nahuas throughout Central Mexico); by ‘mestizo’ I mean ethnically-mixed people with substantial indigenous ancestry; and I use ‘Latino’ as an identifier of Spanish-speaking Latin Americans in the United States. Periodically I use ‘Hispanic’ (or hispano) as a term of self-identification used by many indigenous, mestizo, and Latino people in the United States. Largely I have avoided using the term ladino (a term for ‘westernized’ indigenous people common in Guatemala and Chiapas) unless it is introduced in a specific conversation. 2 those who are desperate. Both versions are true, depending on which parts of the picture you’re looking at; the key difference between these opposite truths hinges on whose freedom and whose exploitation counts; that is, who benefits and who suffers in today’s plantation economy. One of the goals of this dissertation is to expose and reverse the sleight-of-hand that conflates ‘ownership’ with ‘toil’ and exploitation with ‘prosperity.’ Rather than celebrating the image of a white landowner plowing behind his draft horses, I pursue the trail of landowners sitting at desks filling out loan applications to banks and relying on labor recruiters to secure underpaid indigenous and mestizo migrants for the bulk of their actual ‘toil’. With one eye on the elites whose effort built and continue to maintain the South’s plantation system, I focus most closely on the daily lives of the tens of thousands of migrant workers who make possible the profit- maximizing strategies of elites who rely on their labor. This dissertation will explore how the mixed forms of labor control imposed on exploited rural workers by their employers and reinforced by state regulators affect those working people’s ability to build class alliances across difference and make common cause to challenge their degrading treatment. By ‘class,’ I mean an evolving relationship among diverse groups of dispossessed working people, on the one hand, and their collective relationship with the elites who control the land, put them to work, and monopolize the fruits of their labor, on the other (Thompson 1963). Throughout the following chapters, I examine how working people’s daily experiences of degradation and loss, and their interactions with the elites who put them to work, structure their assessment of the viability and desirability of these class alliances across differences like race, gender, nationality, language, industry, and citizenship. In this chapter, I will review the key approaches used by anthropologists and fellow travelers to understand the origins, everyday experience, and possible future of exploited 3 plantation labor. Beginning with the insights (and limitations) of the recent boom in critical medical anthropology (Holmes 2013; Horton 2016; Saxton 2018), I will then explore how advances in the global study of migration (especially concepts of ‘deportability’ and the ‘production of illegality’ introduced by Nicholas DeGenova and others) helps to broaden our view beyond the limited perspective of North America’s invented ‘immigration crises’ and redirect our attention to collaboration between employers and the state in the making and unmaking of class relations among their migrant employees. I will then evaluate how recent ethnographies

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