Voices in the fields. Migrant farmworkers during COVID-19 in Spain and new forms of activism for dignity

The health crisis has revealed many of the structural and endemic problems that have existed in the agriculture sector in Spain over the last two decades: the high volume of foreigners in an irregular situation, the miserable informal settlements and substandard housing in which they are forced to "reside", and the extreme physical and social vulnerability of the workers, including those employed under official seasonal labor mobility schemes. These structural problems have traditionally been ignored by the administration, whose policies have focused on managing the mobility of migrants while neglecting the needs of migrant workers present in the territory. During the health crisis the emergence of the narrative on their "essential role", which was incorporated in the political discourse, together with the visibility of their poor working and living conditions, have generated, promoted or consolidated several struggles based on what we can call the right to live in dignity. In the Spanish case these struggles have been caused by three types of tensions that have become particularly intense during the Covid-19 pandemic: the tension between essentiality and disposability, between temporality and permanence, and between an active and a passive citizenship.