Carlos Jimenez: Strawberries and Technologies, Kartoniert / Broschiert

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Starting in the 1970s, a shift to labor-intensive specialty crops encouraged Mexican migrant workers to settle permanently and build thriving communities around Oxnard, California. Today, their use of mobile phones, community radio, and other media and digital tools provide unprecedented opportunities for the workers---but also threaten their livelihoods and communities.

Carlos Jimenez Jr. looks at the lives of farmworkers living at the intersection of agriculture and digital technologies. As he tells the workers' stories, Jimenez shows how technology like non-commercial radio and autonomous robots offer chances to create, experiment, dream, develop new skills, and participate in civic life, yet also power the automation that may replace their jobs. The simultaneous processes of stabilization with visibility, and destabilization with invisibility, drive an ongoing evolution that continually redefines contemporary farmworker life.

Enlightening and richly detailed, Strawberries and Technologies provides an on-the-ground report of the surprising role of digital communication in farmworker communities.