Strong, young, male, foreign bodies at work. Paraguayans in Argentina’s farm forestry

PIZARRO, CYNTHIA ALEJANDRA

Congreso; International Forum Migration Bridges in Eurasia: Migration as a Resource for Sustainable Development; 2023

This paper examines the juxtaposition of inequalities in the forestry labor market in the delta of the Paraná River in Argentina. Forestry has traditionally been one of the most masculine rural activities. In the area studied, most of the farmers are men. Workers are also men, but there is a hierarchy among them: managers and machine operators are locals and, at the lowest rank of the ladder, chainsaw operators and those who do manual work are mainly Paraguayan migrants. They are reckoned for their strength, but they suffer the impacts of extremely harsh working and living conditions. The stereotype of the “good Paraguayan forest worker”, which is also part of their own ethnic pride, both catalyzes and is the result of three types of inequalities: vital, existential, and material. We characterize the macro-structural conditions with reference to the second labor market theory. We consider some meso-structural features such as recruitment strategies and presuppositions that naturalize Paraguayans’ subalternity appealing to racialization and masculine mandates. At the micro-structural level, we analyze their aspirations, which not necessarily confront subalternity.The study is based on the analysis of ethnographic records of in-depth interviews and participant observation which were undertaken between 2012 and 2019.