The recursive violence of reform: A century of failed interventions in migrant farmworker housing

Abstract

Despite extensive documentation and repeated reform efforts spanning more than a century, migrant farmworkers in the United States continue to face severe housing-related health inequities. Drawing on extensive archival research (1910-2024) and contemporary ethnographic fieldwork at labor camps on Maryland's Eastern Shore, we examine why interventions to improve farmworker housing conditions have consistently failed to create meaningful change and how different institutions have understood and responded to these conditions over time. Through systematic analysis of government documents, policy analyses, advocacy reports, media coverage, and ethnographic observations, we trace how housing conditions actively produce and maintain health inequities through their role in agricultural labor systems. Our findings reveal four recurring yet ineffective reform approaches: calls for improved standards, demands for enforcement, educational initiatives, and appeals for more research. We identify three structural factors that perpetuate these inequities: housing's function within racial capitalism, where spatial organization enables worker control and exploitation; the coordination between state policies and business interests through what we term the "Food Para-State," which systematically undermines reform efforts; and public health's role in accepting and furthering worker control, which normalizes inequities while expanding surveillance. The COVID-19 pandemic, during which agricultural workers faced infection rates four times higher than the general population, exemplifies how these structural factors transform housing conditions into mechanisms of health inequity. This analysis contributes to theories of structural determinants of health by demonstrating how housing conditions serve not merely as social determinants but as active mechanisms for producing and maintaining health inequities in agricultural labor.

Keywords: Health inequities; Historical ethnography; Housing; Migrant farmworkers; Racial capitalism; Social determinants of health.