MIGRATION, WORKER EMPOWERMENT, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF STATE AGRICULTURAL LABOR REGIMES: AN HISTORICAL COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY OF CALIFORNIA AND NORTH CAROLINA (1880-2022)

In this dissertation, I compare the historical development of state agricultural labor policies and practices in California, a traditional migrant destination, and North Carolina, a new migrant destination. I identify the factors which shaped the emergence of a more protective environment in California and a more precarious environment in North Carolina. I then identify how these contrasting state contexts affect the health and well-being of Latino migrant farmworkers in each state today. Drawing on archival data, field observations, and 37 interviews with farmworkers in California (n=22) and North Carolina (n=15), I develop a labor regime model to explain how the different state sociopolitical cultures developed, and how they impinge on the health and well-being of migrant farmworkers and their families. I demonstrate how the development of agricultural labor regimes is intimately tied to systems of agricultural production, migration patterns, and their implications for worker empowerment. Foreign-born and domestic migrants have been recruited to work on California’s industrial farms since the late nineteenth century. These migrant farmworkers have engaged in cross-ethnic collective resistance against employer abuse for 130 years. Their efforts have been instrumental in constructing the more protective agricultural labor regime we observe in California today. In North Carolina, the harsh conditions associated with the disjointed system of tenant farming, sharecropping, and plantation production in North Carolina served as a deterrent for potential migrants and pushed many Black agricultural workers out. This isolation from outsiders, combined with the mass exodus of Black agricultural workers – whose solidarity and strong labor consciousness made them the most likely to organize and collectively resist – constrained the potential for worker empowerment until the 1990s. This resulted in the consolidation of employers’ hegemony over the North Carolina’s political apparatus and the precarious labor regime we observe in the state today. I demonstrate how these state agricultural labor regimes have implications for the health and well-being of migrant farmworkers and their families. These findings enhance our understanding of how migrants’ labor market incorporation is embedded in the sociopolitical histories of the places where migrants live and work.Doctor of Philosoph

The Persistent Southern Disadvantage in Us Early Life Mortality, 1965‒2014

Background: Recent studies of US adult mortality demonstrate a growing disadvantage among southern states. Few studies have examined long-term trends and geographic patterns in US early life (ages 1 to 24) mortality, ages at which key risk factors and causes of death are quite different than among adults. Objective: This article examines trends and variations in early life mortality rates across US states and census divisions. We assess whether those variations have changed over a 50-year time period and which causes of death contribute to contemporary geographic disparities. Methods: We calculate all-cause and cause-specific death rates using death certificate data from the Multiple Cause of Death files, combining public-use files from 1965‒2004 and restricted data with state geographic identifiers from 2005‒2014. State population (denominator) data come from US decennial censuses or intercensal estimates. Results: Results demonstrate a persistent mortality disadvantage for young people (ages 1 to 24) living in southern states over the last 50 years, particularly those located in the East South Central and West South Central divisions. Motor vehicle accidents and homicide by firearm account for most of the contemporary southern disadvantage in US early life mortality. Contribution: Our results illustrate that US children and youth living in the southern United States have long suffered from higher levels of mortality than children and youth living in other parts of the country. Our findings also suggest the contemporary southern disadvantage in US early life mortality could potentially be reduced with state-level policies designed to prevent deaths involving motor vehicles and firearms

“Outside the Skin”: The Persistence of Black–White Disparities in U.S. Early-Life Mortality

Research on Black&ndash;White disparities in mortality emphasizes the cumulative pathways through which racism gets &ldquo;under the skin&rdquo; to affect health. Yet this framing is less applicable in early life, when death is primarily attributable to external causes rather than cumulative, biological processes. We use mortality data from the National Vital Statistics System Multiple Cause of Death files and population counts from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Result Program to analyze 705,801 deaths among Black and White males and females, ages 15&ndash;24. We estimate age-standardized death rates and single-decrement life tables to show how all-cause and cause-specific mortality changed from 1990 to 2016 by race and sex. Despite overall declines in early-life mortality, Black&ndash;White disparities remain unchanged across several causes&mdash;especially homicide, for which mortality is nearly 20 times as high among Black as among White males. Suicide and drug-related deaths are higher among White youth during this period, yet their impact on life expectancy at birth is less than half that of homicide among Black youth. Critically, early-life disparities are driven by preventable causes of death whose impact occurs &ldquo;outside the skin,&rdquo; reflecting racial differences in social exposures and experiences that prove harmful for both Black and White adolescents and young adults. &nbsp;</p

Birth and prenatal care outcomes of Latina mothers in the Trump era: Analysis by nativity and country/region of origin.

We examined whether and how birth outcomes and prenatal care utilization among Latina mothers changed over time across years associated with the Trump sociopolitical environment, using restricted-use birth records from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). To assess potential variation among subpopulations, we disaggregated the analyses by maternal nativity and country/region of origin. Our results indicate that both US- and foreign-born Latina mothers experienced increasingly higher risks of delivering low birthweight (LBW) and preterm birth (PTB) infants over the years associated with Trump's political career. Among foreign-born Latinas, adverse birth outcomes increased significantly among mothers from Mexico and Central America but not among mothers from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and South America. Levels of inadequate prenatal care utilization remained largely unchanged among groups who saw increases in LBW and PTB, suggesting that changes in prenatal care did not generally explain the observed worsening of birth outcomes among Latina mothers during the Trump era. Results from this study draw attention to the possibility that the Trump era may have represented a source of chronic stress among the Latinx population in the US and add to the growing body of literature linking racism and xenophobia in the sociopolitical environment to declines in health among Latinx people, especially among targeted groups from Mexico and Central America