No Soy Welferero: Undocumented Latino Laborers in the Crosshairs of Legitimation Maneuvers

Abstract

California urban and agricultural centers rely heavily on Latino migrant laborers, regardless of their legal documented status. In the delivery of social services, and in the mass media, popular consciousness, and formal legal understandings and arrangements, Latino laborers are viewed as either legitimate voluntary low-wage workers or illegitimate undocumented workers not entitled to the same civil rights as US citizens. Their de facto second-class status becomes a central component of their social identity, with the structural conditions of their lives internalized, resulting in limited agency and poor social and health outcomes. The lived experience of structural vulnerability prefigures the actions and efforts of undocumented Latino contingent workers. In this article, the capacity for Latino laborers to maneuver and negotiate the travails of everyday life is explored.

Key Words:

• altered subjectivities
• ethnic discrimination
• Latino undocumented workers
• legitimation maneuvers
• social justice

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research for this article was generously supported by the California Office of AIDS Research Study ID 03-75702 and the backing of Dr. Juan Ruiz and Assunta Ritieni, MHS for our study, HIV-Related Risk Behaviors and Associated Perceptions among Latino Urban Day Laborers and Rural Migrant and Seasonal Workers in the Agricultural Sector.. I am especially indebted to my primary Co-Principal Investigator, Dr. Alex Kral, currently the director of the West Coast Research Triangle International (RTI). I am also indebted to my ethnographic research team members Nasheili Gonzalez and Luis Guzman, and Andrea Scott formerly of the UCSF Urban Health Study Program and the Clinica de Salud en el Valle de Salinas (CSVS). The SFSU Cesar Chavez Institute was instrumental in anchoring our research efforts with special thanks to Rafael Diaz, Miguel Casuso, and Sahar Khoury. Numerous reviewers from service providers and activists to anonymous peer reviewers provided constructive critiques, with special acknowledgement to Elizabeth Cartwright, Daniel Cearly, Arturo Castillo, David Diaz, Laurie Hart, Laura Guzman, Dannhae Herrera, Jonathan Karpf, Nadine Khoury, Felix Kury, James Mannah, Amilcar Mayan, and Renee Saucedo.

Notes

Biopolitics does not apply solely to political exiles or those escaping political persecution but to a wide category of immigrants and exiles. Although Fassin (2001) dealt with the “sans-papiers” movement, otherwise those narrowly considered as people who had settled legally in France for long periods and others who are undocumented (3), he is actually referring to varied approaches all immigrants who are bodily differentiated according to suffering and racialized bodies, the distinction of which is important to the state according legitimacy or illegitimacy to such bodies.

Structural and symbolic violence are invisible in that the former refers to how the political-economy operates to harm and constrain vulnerable populations, and the latter refers to ways those who are harmed and constrained come to accept their station in life as natural. The use of the concept of the structurally vulnerable is purposely evoked to make visible those who have been harmed and constrained as they reflect in their bodies the ravages of structural and symbolic violence in practice.

A dilemma day laborers face is the limited extent they can actually negotiate the terms of the jobs they are offered. Although San Francisco was the site we interviewed day laborers seeking jobs, often the jobs they acquired took them far away from San Francisco. Depending on the type of job offered, days of work, and promises of steady work or good income it was not uncommon for day laborers to find themselves working some great distance from San Francisco. For example many jobs involve moving business or household goods from San Francisco to other locales, without a guarantee of being able to physically return to their original job seeking site in San Francisco. Regardless of whether they agreed to be stranded, the exchange of information regarding towns and cities, suburbs, and rural areas where day laborers were stranded became part of the stock of knowledge that circulates among day laborers. I am familiar with a well-known day laborer site in Concord—a prominent suburb of San Francisco more than 30 miles and nearly an hour away. Day laborers have been known to circulate between these sites that constitute a web of known day laborer sites that are talked about in terms of safety, types of jobs most common acquired, and the social networks that can be relied on.

All quotations were originally recorded in Spanish and translated into English.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Quesada

JAMES QUESADA is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California, USA. His research work mainly focuses on structural violence as it pertains to transnational Latino migrants in California and Central America.