The illegal and the dead: are Mexicans renewable energy?

This article reflects on the production of injury and death among Latino workers in the agro-industrial food complex, with attention to systemic relationships between the United States and Mexico in the post-North American Free Trade Agreement period, which has been characterized by waves of new labor migration that directly enhanced US agricultural profitability. The article draws parallels between literatures on labor productivity and new writings on energy and sustainable agriculture. It examines the usefulness of embodiment as a dialectical approach to eco-social theory, and the concept of "body politic," or a politics of moral ecology, as a means of reasserting the human shape of production systems that have become deformed by the impersonal calculus of neoliberal capitalism.