"Empire of the Everglades": Industrial Agriculture, Migrant Workers, and the Nature of the Modern food System

Abstract

Taking a longue durée view over the 20th century, “Empire of the Everglades” examines how the consolidation and contestation of the corporate food system and industrial agriculture in South Florida transformed the region from a “river of grass” into an expansive commodity-production hub and moved the region’s farmworkers to build community and organize for change. It bridges the local and global to show how South Florida’s sugar and vegetable growers generated profits by anchoring the region to corporate food supply chains through economic and political organization, the deployment of environmental management technologies that remade the vast Everglades ecosystem, and the construction of new systems of migrant labor recruitment that spanned the Americas. In uplifting the region’s farmworkers’ experiences and organizing, this dissertation also illuminates the resilience of migrant farmworkers and their communities and powerful moments of solidarity amid poverty, exploitation, and social and legal exclusion. Over time, farmworkers built organizations and civil society networks to counter the sector’s means of labor control and forged new community resources and movements for corporate accountability and environmental justice. Examining class formation and conflict in the Everglade’s agricultural sector as it unfolded in a changing environment and amid shifting agribusiness practices and immigration patterns, this work reveals how the corporate food system worked to externalize the costs of low-priced food on the environment, workers, and rural communities, as well as the dynamism and impact of the state’s under-examined farmworkers’ movement.