Made in Baja: The Lives of Farmworkers and Growers Behind Mexico's Transnational Agricultural Boom

In Made in Baja, Christian Zlolniski tracks the social and environmental dislocations wrought by transnational agriculture in San Quintín, Baja California, and Indigenous residents’ determined efforts to claim political, economic, and human rights in the export enclave. For Zlolniski, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Arlington, the post-1980 history of San Quintín is a microcosm for broader patterns engendered by the neoliberal turn in new agricultural frontiers. To map this terrain, Zlolniski redirects the insights of anthropologists, geographers, and historians—like David Harvey, Arjun Appadurai, E.P. Thompson, and Thayer Skudder—on technoscapes, place-making, capitalist temporality, and working-class culture to study production zones where Indigenous, ethnically marginalized laborers constitute the primary workforce. Drawing on a decade's worth of interviews with activists, executives, and Mixtec, Triqui, and Zapotec migrants, Made in Baja sketches a vivid, deeply affecting picture of the human and ecological costs of Canadian and US consumers’ insatiable appetite for boutique fruits and vegetables cultivated in what Zlolniski aptly dubs “agro-dystopias.”To contextualize the modern export boom, Zlolniski unpacks the rise and fall of A.B.C. Farm, a Greek outfit supported by Dole and Del Monte. Since Baja's mission period, San Quintín's arid climate had thwarted settlement. But A.B.C. Farm, like other corporations enthralled by technological fetishism, banked on innovation to meet the ends of production. This meant modernizing irrigation methods and shifting to greenhouse cultivation. As small growers found it harder to compete, a new labor recruitment system took hold. Soon, camps filled with Oaxacan pickers dotted the region. Afterwards, agribusiness giants—like Driscoll's subsidiary, BerryMex—set up shop. They promoted a rationalized work culture designed to redress Indigenous laborers’ ostensibly innate irresponsibility. The managers’ attitude, Zlolniski emphasizes, smacked of racism and utter oblivion to the material realities that motivated harvesters’ behavior.For farmworkers and the landscape they inhabited, the new regime was transformative. In Colonia Santa Fe and Colonia Arbolitos, local contracting networks were supplanted by agencies, such as Global Outsource Group, that exploited communications technology (e.g., Skype) to depersonalize recruitment. Workers also marshaled digital platforms, like WhatsApp, to protect themselves from shady growers. Inside greenhouses, heat, long hours, a lack of protective clothing, and exposure to harmful chemicals damaged workers’ bodies and psyches even as the piece-rate wage system slashed their remuneration. Women, as Zlolniski perceptively demonstrates, suffered these consequences most acutely. In response, laborers turned away from the accommodationist politics of traditional unions, such as the Confederation of Mexican Workers. Increasingly, they embraced local and transnational activist groups, like the Front of Indigenous Binational Organizations, grounded in interethnic and communal solidarity.Admirably, Made in Baja rejects the stereotypical categorization of Indigenous workers as apolitical, temporary migrants. As the author astutely notes, corporations lean on this fiction to withhold meaningful benefits. Instead, Zlolniski carefully charts colonia residents’ tactics for promoting settlement and securing autonomy: occupational heterogeneity, non–labor market activities, and participation in programs run by the National System for Integral Family Development. As the Mexican state's myopic reliance on export agriculture constrained opportunity, cyclical migration to the United States via clandestine channels and under the auspices of the H-2A program remained invaluable. At the same time, San Quintín's environment paid a heavy price. Desalination plants, built for the exclusive benefit of large corporations, amplified what Zlolniski calls “watercide”: the creation of aridscapes and inequitable access to potable water.Made in Baja models an especially productive methodology for unraveling the philosophies of growers and farmworkers alike. Throughout, Zlolniski skilfully integrates evocative testimony from managers, laborers, and union leaders. For all, notions of pride are central. In highlighting the rhetoric these actors deploy to describe their place in the transnational agricultural regime, Zlolniksi fleshes out the tensions—between autonomy and dependence, self-reliance and precarity—of the neoliberal age in a remarkably animated, lucid manner.Significantly, these trends are not unique to contemporary agro-capitalism in the US–Mexico borderlands. Developments in Baja, Zlolniski asserts, mirror those in Mediterranean and Central American production zones. Historians of neo-colonialism will be struck by the parallels between San Quintín's fate and that of other export enclaves in twentieth-century Latin America: the displacement of small-scale cultivators; US companies’ infantilization of local laborers and faith in technological fixes; workplaces dominated by surveillance; the violent transformation of the natural landscape; and the exploitation of a racialized working class.Zlolniski's meticulous portrait of San Quintín thus illuminates enduring continuities in US–Latin American relations and the extent to which neoliberalism has inflamed asymmetrical power dynamics that stoke inequality between the Global North and South. In this context, migration and transnational ethnic solidarity emerge as critical methods of survival and resistance. Given its impressive scope, sharp interventions, and importance for understanding the shape of the global economy, Made in Baja will be of great interest to scholars of neoliberalism, ecology, food studies, and Latin American migration.

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