ABSTRACT
This chapter stems from a larger study on South-South migration, where over 400 interviews were conducted with migrants, their families in Nicaragua, government officials from Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and key informants, which also included over one year of participant observation on pineapple, cassava, and coffee farms and processing centres. This chapter argues that a crop's production structure demands certain forms of social organization. The traditional production dynamics on the coffee farm funnels socially disconnected vulnerable Nicaraguan migrants into Costa Rica and provides them with minimal resources. The coffee farms do this by pulling in experienced migrants from elsewhere in Costa Rica and connecting them to new and inexperienced migrants, resulting in the creation of social networks that allow for new migrant integration. An ethnographic examination of migrant worker flows and the socio-economic mechanisms will illuminate how workers navigate into and through different agricultural systems in a context where official labour data are scarce.
