1 Back to the Root? Mexican Immigrant Farmers, Ethnographic Romanticism, and Untangling Food Sovereignty in Western Oregon Among the alternative food movements ascendant in the US in recent decades, anthropologists praise food justice (FJ) and food sovereignty (FS) activists for focusing on both the ecological maladies of agroindustry and wider racist and capitalist structures in ways that have often eluded the largely white, middle class actors usually identified with alternative food. While work on these movements has been carried out with various U.S. populations (Raster and Hill 2017; Taylor 2018), Mexican immigrants have a special importance because of the centrality of Mexican labor in agriculture since the Bracero period (Peña et al. 2017; Agyeman and Giacalone 2020a) and the rising significance of Mexican and Mexican American farmers amidst the rapidly aging Anglo farm population (Minkoff-Zern 2019; Calo and De Master 2016). Efforts by Mexican immigrants to establish successful agrarian livelihoods in the US take on added interest and urgency in the Trump era, with xenophobic racism and militarized immigration policy reaching new heights. Both activist and academic formulations of food sovereignty emphasize the entanglement of agrarian traditions, sustainability, labor rights, and immigration justice issues in food systems, and this alignment between activists and academics is heightened by FS scholars’ identification with the movements they study (Cadieux and Slocum 2015; Holt-Giménez and Wang 2011). However, viewed through a literature largely focused on an activist minority, this structural analysis can slip towards a naïve faith that individuals and communities with strong traditions of smallholder production are naturally inclined towards equitable and sustainable agriculture (Peña et al. 2017). This can result in odd conclusions; for example, hundred-acre, apparently