Nora KOMPOSCH, Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland
Migrant farmworkers, mostly from Morocco, work in Huelva's strawberry fields under poor conditions to harvest fresh fruit for all of Europe. While Huelva is Europe’s largest strawberry-producing region, migrant farmworkers' concerns regarding their sexual and reproductive health remain often invisible. They live separated from their families in their home countries for months, receive poor wages, work long shifts, are provided with inadequate work equipment, and are exposed to reproductive health risks through endocrine perturbator pesticide use and sexual assault at work. Most Moroccan women who are getting recruited for the seasonal work arrangements in Spain are married and have young children. This guarantees the Spanish state that the seasonal workers will return home when their contract expires, and employers fear less resistance from workers due to their family dependencies and financial necessities.
Drawing on affectual methods in a multi-sited ethnography, I explore the questions of how family can be lived during such seasonal work arrangements abroad and how such labor affects the female workers’ health as well as their family life and family planning. Listening to migrant workers accounts on their reproductive and family life, I delineate the reproductive geopolitics in Huelva’s strawberry industry. In this presentation, I seek to discuss the entanglements between circular migration arrangements, the working conditions in Huelva’s strawberry production and the female farmworkers’ reproductive lives. This requires expanding the reflection and to include the impacts of working conditions in general and how these are negotiated by NGOs, unions, and transnational actors.
Mots clés : Family|Migration|Spain|Seasonal Labor|Reproductive Geopolitics
A103837NK