Disciplining Space: Racism, Illegality, and the Regulation of Informal Labor

• In Event: 032 - Section on Latino/a Sociology Paper Session. Criminalization, Violence, and Social Harm Affecting Latino Communities

Abstract

Thousands of day laborers solicit work daily in major cities throughout the United States and represent some of the newest sectors of the informal economy. While studies have demonstrated the role of local forms of policing day laborers, few have explored how internal racial divisions among workers serve to discipline their own solicitation practices. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with Guatemalan and Mexican day laborers in Oakland, California, this paper analyzes how state and non-state actors render day laborers a sector of the population to be simultaneously monitored, cared for, and policed. I first demonstrate how these laborers’ employment solicitation practices renders them visible to both federal immigration officials and local agencies intent on regulating informal labor. Then I focus on how day laborers regulate themselves by analyzing the role of race and racism between indigenous Guatemalan and non-indigenous Mexican day laborers. I reveal how anti-indigenous racism shapes how workers organize themselves at hiring zones, and impacts their relationship with the host community. I argue that migrants’ experience of illegality must be seen as coterminous with other forms of difference that produces new modes of discrimination not solely reducible to legal status.

Author

• Juan Carlos Herrera, University of California-Los Angeles