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ABSTRACT
Undocumented Latina/os often describe their lives as ‘la lucha’, the struggle. To make ends meet ‘hay que batallar’, one must battle, work hard to ‘salir adelante’, get ahead. La lucha is interpretable as a frame that demarcates how undocumented Latina/os employ the performance of economic tasks to establish both individual and collective identity in the United States. Although claiming positive elements of racialised stereotypes as coping mechanisms and racialised illegality have been separately theorised, they have not been brought together in a theory of self. I use W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of ‘double-consciousness’, the sensation of “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” that articulates Black Americans’ experience of racism to illuminate how the lucha frame resolves a conflict resonant in undocumented Latina/o identity. In the words of undocumented Latina/os from interviews in a Texas city, I illustrate how double consciousness reveals the simultaneity of uplift and collective struggle. It illuminates through la lucha the linkage of the context of the ‘struggle’ to internalization of the hard worker archetype, engaging these contradictory perspectives in a single identity. The existential elements of la lucha highlight need for policy addressing the liminality of undocumented life and instability of precarious work.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Yolanda Padilla, Javier Auyero and Magdalena Villarreal for their guidance during my initial development of these ideas. Several awards helped support this research, including the Society for Social Work & Research (SSWR) Doctoral Fellows Award, National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Eileen Blackey Award, P.E.O International Doctoral Award, the Austin Branch of the American Association of University Women and a UT Austin Graduate School Fellowship. Data from the first two years was collected as part of a study in collaboration with Monica Faulkner at the Texas Institute for Child and Family Wellbeing at UT Austin and Jodi Berger Cardoso of the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. Additionally, thank you to Jaime McDowell, Robin McDowell and Abel Thompson for constructive comments on early drafts. Responsibility for the ideas in the article are the author's alone.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Pseudonyms are used instead of participant names to ensure confidentiality.
2 I use undocumented to refer to people living in the United States without official authorization. Although people who hold several temporary immigration statuses are also in precarious situations as they do not have a pathway to citizenship (e.g. DACA, TPS), I do not include them in this conceptualization of undocumented as they do not face the same level of everyday risk of detention and deportation.
3 I use ‘American’ here to refer to the United States as it is the term used colloquially to refer to work identity and ethic, as well as name its hoped for outcome, the ‘American dream.’
4 Bracero, from the Spanish ‘brazo,’ arm and understood to mean ‘farmhand,’ was adopted to refer to the program. Revisions to the INA codified the program (Public Law 414, 1952).
5 Codified as 8 U.S.C. § 1357(g). Added to the INA by section 133 of IIRAIRA.
6 Briefly replaced with the Priority Enforcement Program in 2014, then reinstated in 2017.
7 Despite the justifications given to protect jobs, recent studies have found that these deportations in fact ‘reduced demand’ for other jobs held by native-born citizens, likely further depressing wage and increasing unemployment (Lee, Peri, and Yasenov Citation2017).
8 The estimated number of undocumented Latina/os in the U.S. at the time of data collection.
9 Maquiladoras are factories on the US-Mexico border structured to take advantage of the tax code that allows tax-free import of raw materials for processing/assembly in Mexico by (lower cost) Mexican labor and then tax-free re-export of final products to the United States.