Ariana Avila

Current literature on food insecurity among farmworkers focuses on the lack of access to food. Although farmworkers in Immokalee, a small, unincorporated town in Southwest Florida, face similar challenges, my project examines how immigrant farmworkers and their families (primarily from Haiti, Guatemala, and Mexico) enact and sustain networks of food care inside and outside of a local community garden to address food apartheid, defined as the structural racialized inequities in the US food system. This proposed project will advance anthropological theories of care and the embodiment of food apartheid in Immokalee. I will ethnographically examine: 1) how farmworkers and their families embody food apartheid; 2) how racial capitalism and U.S. immigration status contribute to food apartheid, and 3) How do farmworkers and their families enact multiple networks of food care?