Amateurs without Borders: The Aspirations and Limits of Global Compassion

assistant professor at nearby Cal StateFresno, she is not likely to be gone soon. She describes the difficulty of writing a dissertation and book and teaching while the phone still rings for help and support. One can ask whether worker families in the strawberry industry have mostly suffered or benefited from their links to this system. In my previous position as a Professor of Sociology at University of California-Santa Cruz, I had numerous students who were children of strawberry workers. Many of them told stories of the injuries their parents or grandparents suffered in order to make a better life for them. The stories reminded me of the stories told by the older members of my own family, like the story behind my grandfather’s missing fingertip. However, it is worth asking whether this is a necessary story about American social mobility: does mobility have to be built on the injured bodies of a sacrificial generation? We are now in a time where the pool of labor has shrunk. Perhaps we need an economy that can grow healthily along with healthy workers. We can also ask under what conditions and with what people the methodology Saxton describes should be used. Many of us study groups and institutions that don’t need our help, and which we are more likely to see as on the power side of the equation. I do try to put myself in the shoes of the young workers in the local economic development agency I study, but I don’t see myself advocating for them, either as representatives of their points of view or as workers. They can take care of themselves. It’s unclear, in Saxton’s description of the methodology she has chosen, whether or not it is reserved for the marginalized, or even whether others besides the marginalized are worth studying. And what about other groups who call themselves activist scholars, like the vegan scholars demanding an end to livestock production (Broad 2019)? What should we ask of them in terms of method? The California strawberry industry is facing a challenging future as the chemicals, the water, and the labor pool it depended on slip from its grasp. It unlikely that the baskets of golfball-sized fruit that fill supermarket bins will be there ten years from now. The stories that Saxton and others tell about the sacrifices required, of humans and of nature, to grow this fruit lead us to ask: isn’t it time to let the season-less strawberry go?