Labours of Love: Family, Human Rights, and Worker Invisibility in Seasonal Mexican Farm Worker Agricultural Migrations to Canada, 1974–Present
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article provides a focused review of the history of seasonal and “foreign” farm labour migration in Canada, and in particular the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). It underscores how Mexican migrant workers in particular have been portrayed in Canadian narrative discourses, drawn primarily from political and journalistic sources in Canada in the postwar period. Extended to Mexico in 1974, the SAWP has a longer history of managed agricultural migration in Canada that is also introduced. The article discusses leitmotifs linked to the history of temporary migration between Mexico and Canada: the fundamental place of family and gender relations; the trope of the male migrant as “breadwinner” (despite the later emergence of women migrants in the program); Mexican officials based in Canada and their role in mitigating labour disputes and unionization efforts among the seasonal migrant class in Canada; and the subjective, “subaltern” stories of migrant workers uncovered through an oral history case study carried out in British Columbia and Manitoba from 2012–2015. It introduces other thematic problems including exclusion/invisibility, human rights, patterns of remuneration, and “complementarity” in farm work, in a context of prior reliance upon the managed internal migration of First Nations’ harvest workers in both Ontario’s and Manitoba’s agricultural sectors.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".