Neoliberal Ethos and Crop Colonization in Globalized Intensive Fruit Growing in Chile: Hyperprecarious Work in Rural Women Seasonal Workers

The problem addressed by the presentation is the relationship between the transformations derived from the global economic and productive restructuring and colonization of "star" crops such as cherries for export in rural territories, motivated by the exponential growth of a demanding consumer market (Chinese New Year celebration), as part of an ethos neoliberal, and the material and emotional conditions of the work(s), observed over time, of Chilean rural seasonal workers (currently including Latin-American migrants), using feminist gender and intersectional theory and the theoretical approach of mobilities. The research that is the basis of the presentation seeks to understand the social, cultural, political, demographic and labor implications of the colonization of crops in rural territories that offer employment under constraint and modeling of time, which are forged in the biographical trajectories of the work of seasonal women in orchards and packing, through the knowledge of their representations, practices and genealogies of the intergenerational transfer of the trade, the exercise of salaried work, the arrangements with reproductive work and displacements that occur in their purpose. The main hypothesis is that the circuit of external demand and intensive production of cherry agribusiness, which colonizes territories by monocultures, has effects not only on nature, but also on the hyper-precariousness of work, since by concentrating the use of land and labor supply under constraints, modeling the organization of time and space of the feminized working population, tends to reproduce, from the perspective of structural gender violence, a ductile workforce, ignored and undervalued, and with poor mobility, which, in the case of women, would paradoxically be accompanied by changes in traditional gender identities when they emerge from private confinement and access a salary. The research uses a qualitative paradigm, whose information collection techniques are genealogical questionnaires, in-depth biographical interviews and ethnographic observation.