Legitimizing segregation, subsidizing captivity: Mexican state presence in corporate housing policy for farmworkers

In Mexico, agroindustrial enclaves are hyper-segregated landscapes where transnational business groups build and restore overcrowded barracks, militarized bunkhouses, and other precarious housing developments for seasonal agrarian laborers. Disguised as employment benefits, corporate social responsibility practices, and social development initiatives, these agribusiness housing policies have functioned for decades as labor and spatial control measures against migrant farmworkers. Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic and historical research in Mexico, the article questions these apparently stateless landscapes and policies by spotlighting the systematic actions of government agencies in reproducing agribusiness housing models of precarity, rule, and isolation. The article presents two case studies, a segregationist barracks system in a sugarcane valley and a captivity model of agricultural fields in a grape-exporting desert, to analyze the essential presence of the Mexican state in legitimizing and subsidizing these regional agribusiness housing policies. Bridging anthropological studies of state formation, critical border studies, and the tradition of studying the segregation and settlement of migrant farmworkers in Mexico and worldwide, this article contributes an ethnographic analysis showing that the state is neither absent nor negligent in the everyday operation of violent corporate housing policies. On the contrary, government agencies at different levels administer, monitor, and make legible the segregation and captivity of workers within contemporary agrarian capitalist geographies.