Strawberries and Technologies
How Media Transforms Farmworker Communities in Southern California
Two sides of the digital revolution in California farm country
Cloth – $110
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Paper – $35
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eBook – $110
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Publication Date
Paperback: 04/27/2027
About the Book
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.
* Publication of this book was supported in part by the University of Illinois Press Fund for Anthropology.
About the Author
Carlos Jimenez Jr. is an associate professor in the College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences at the University of Denver.Reviews
“Strawberries and Technologies gives us a taxonomy as elegant as it is urgent—rooting, blossoming, uprooting—to track how farmworkers turn phones and frequencies into infrastructure for dignity. This is ethnography with dirt still on its boots and signal still in its bars.”—Héctor Beltrán, author of Code Work: Hacking across the US/México Techno-Borderlands
“Despite being essential to the livelihood of the nation, indigenous and immigrant farmworkers are often invisibilized and thought of as disposable. In this admirable book, Carlos Jimenez foregrounds these communities’ daily practices through carefully observed, richly detailed, and deeply personal ethnographic accounts. Offering a powerful counter to the hyped notion that digital automation will displace workers, Strawberries and Technologies demonstrates how farmworkers mobilize digital media to organize labor, sustain community, and build communication infrastructures beyond corporate and state control.”
—Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, author of Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.-Mexico Underground
“Jimenez digs deep into Oxnard’s fields and harvests a revelatory study that tracks how farmworkers seize smartphones, social feeds, and Radio Indígena 94.1 FM to grow comunidad, agency, and futures untold. The revolution, it turns out, will be streamed, scrolled, and broadcast . . . in Mixtec!”
—Frederick Luis Aldama, coeditor of Snapshots: Teaching Los Bros Hernandez
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