Tomatero Circuit of Southern Appalachia–South Florida

Abstract

Drawing on the voices of tomato industry workers, this paper offers a multi-sited ethnographic view of largely unrecognized practices in the conventional, field-grown, fresh-market wholesale tomato industry in the southeastern United States. Tomato industry workers—including agricultural cooperative extension agents, farmers, labor contractors, marketers, and harvesters—present their distinctive perspectives on production-exchange relations, shifting political economic identities, and what I call emerging redistributive practices found throughout a southeastern U.S. tomato circuit. I argue that two specific emerging redistributive practices take place while the tomatoes are technically still in the production stage in certain conventional tomato fields: (i) pinhooking and (ii) buying the field. Studying these practices helps us better understand the complexities of the southeastern U.S. tomato industry. By looking at tomato enterprises that plant, cultivate, harvest, transport, and/or market produce, this paper presents a body of evidence that counter-constructs the racialized stereotype concerning Mexicans and Mexican Americans’ contributions to agriculture in the southeastern United States. It shows how an ethnographically informed picture of a regional tomato industry circuit reveals commonly unrecognized features of social change, enterprise, production-exchange relations, and redistributive practices. It concludes by suggesting that these enterprise arrangements and practices could support the creation of more equitable regional food production systems.