COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 25 LUMI ZÚNICA / GETTY IMAGES, CHRISTA NEU, ADOBE STOCK “The majority of my research participants have an equivalent of an eighth-grade education, so they are limited in terms of employment opportunities,” Jones explains. In addition, many workers are willing to make the journey because it allows them to support family members back home. There is also social prestige among peers, in that they can appear to others in their community that they are doing well. “Typically, the migrant workers come home in November from cutting sugarcane, and they have money to buy Christmas presents and such. It seems like they are living well,” Jones says. “Others want to do the same, and that’s how you end up with these networks of workers willing to do the job.” Northeast Brazil has historical parallels to the American South, Jones explains: “In the United States, following colonization and during the time when they were importing enslaved humans from Africa, this occurred mainly in the plantation economy of the South, while in Brazil, it was the northeast region. At that time, the northeast was the main area of sugarcane cultivation and was where you had the concentration of enslaved Africans.” Over time, says Jones, as the broader economy developed, the needs of the northeast were disregarded in a manner similar to the way imperialist fields, they are constantly monitored to meet quotas, and sometimes workers literally drop dead on the job,” Jones says. The Associated Press reported at that time 18 harvesters had died of exhaustion in Sao Paolo state between 2004 and 2007. The harvesters wield machetes all day, hacking down the tough stalks of sugarcane. Protective gear is often improvised, and injuries are frequent. In addition, workers generally must live far from the plantations where they work and, after arriving there, can face another long drive to reach the actual worksite. Some harvesters rise as early as 3 a.m. to prepare their food for the day and get to work on time. Living arrangements are cramped and communal usually, with men piled into dormitories and families living in crowded tenements. Beyond the complexity underlying the conditions and motivations of the workers, Jones unearthed a disturbing anomaly in her interviews with the seasonal workers, a phenomenon called internal migration. She describes this as “social and political exclusion among the economically marginalized.” For the traveling workers, this manifests as the feeling of being a foreigner at home. Outsider parallels In researching what the migrant workers were up against, Jones looked at the movements of populations from one region to another within large, pluralistic nations. Like many big countries, Brazil has significant differences from region to region, she says. The traveling workers from the northeast, however, endured far more alienation than citizens within other nations of comparable size and diversity. “My research participants felt like they had gone to another country, so I thought those parallels warranted the same type of study that I would do with international migration,” she explains. In interviews with Jones, workers from the northeast reported being treated with derision by locals in the south and being followed in stores by clerks who treated them as thieves. “Migrants who enter other countries are not the priorities of those countries, but these Brazilians were at home in their own country,” says Jones, “and felt their fellow Brazilians had no regard for their lives and that the government was not protecting them.” Despite the hardship, workers continue to make the trip from the northeast to the sugarcane plantations because the employment, though seasonal, pays better than what they would be able to earn closer to home. Terry-Ann Jones
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