Juan Marinez, the coordinator of this panel and Farm Worker Coordinator of the Office of Outreach, USDA, and I are examining a social phenomenon that seldom gets much publicity and research attention. In many rural areas across the nation, in and out of the U.S. southwest, immigrant and American-born Latinos are becoming crop producers. Latinos outnumber other immigrant groups, such as Cambodians and Ethiopians, who are also entering farming in large numbers over the last two decades. How these new entrepreneurs made the challenging and very difficult transition from farmworker to farmer needs to be examined, and models that will help others to do the same must be developed. Available anecdotal information suggests that hard work, mentorship relationships with ex-farm employers, sharecropping experience, and guidance and assistance from county and federal agricultural extension programs are important factors.
Similar information indicates that immigrants tap onto existing social capital in their networks.
They draw on the resources of kin and friends, and in doing so, obtain money, information, services, and other forms of assistance. In this area, as with the development of human and social capital, is an opportunity to improve the plight of immigrants and farmworkers one that is not costly and with the potential of contributing to the growth of Latino businesses and to the employment of others. Now, I will turn my attention to the most difficult and perhaps polemical of the areas that need to be explored in order to prevent the emergence of an underclass among Latinos in rural America. Mines and Alarc n are well aware that implementing these labor practices is a challenge, especially given the rising competition from food producers around the world. However, they argue that the current system of low wage and high turnover agriculture will place these U.S. growers in economic peril in the future, if not altered.