Rural mobilities and agrarian labor. Conceptual strengths and empirical contradictions in Argentina

Abstract

Social theory and studies of social spaces have been built in the West in a dichotomous key since its inception. Post-industrial societies and the late capitalism that we attend show the heuristic constriction of binomial views. This is manifested both in the conceptual narrowness and defining vagueness of the rural and the urban -impacting in the territorial analyzes, of labor markets, of population, of spatial transformations and, therefore, also in the forms acquired by spatial mobility (daily, seasonal or more stable settlement)-. In agricultural activities, it has been a key indicator of the breakdown of these dichotomies, not only the construction of daily urban trajectories of workers, but also the processes of relocation of packaging plants or pre-industrial stages in export products (both in fresh as processed). This article proposes the conceptual discussion on the so-called rural mobilities and will anchor their disruptions in the empirical evidence collected in different places in Argentina that escape the logic of production in the so-called Pampas region.