Carnal Framings: Race, Class and Citizenship in a Multi-racial Worker Center

• In Event: 3468 - Race and Labor and the 50th Anniversary of the Memphis Strike

Abstract

This paper investigates the internal effects of national frame shifts on labor organizations, taking the case of a Chicago-based U.S. worker center with a mixed African-American and undocumented Latin American migrant membership. In the mid-2000s, the center was gradually confronted with the rise of the immigration rights movement. The brief historical window opened by the 2006 mass street protests for immigration reform generated sudden change in the discursive opportunity structure facing the Chicago group, a worker center organizing agency day laborers. Whereas the group had previously made the “day labor worker” its central mobilizing figure, it was now increasingly making immigrant rights its top priority and master frame. As the giant migrant marches in 2006 generated huge hopes among many activists concerned with reinvigorating progressive movements, a new immigrant-centered discourse threatened to dispossess black members of their implicit but traditional centrality within inner city organizations for which immigration had not previously been a theme of choice. That frame shift, rather than job competition, ethnoracial animosity or organizational heterogeneity, primarily accounted for the rapidly exacerbating cleavages within the group. Based on extensive participant observation both in day-labor agencies and in the worker center, this study illustrates the discursive conditions under which racialized emotions can travel from the sphere of employment to that of protest. It emphasizes the multi-scalar layers of material, symbolic, linguistic, emotional and bodily contexts that give frames and frame shifts their political potency and intimate significance for the actors involved. It calls for further recognition of the carnality and multiple embeddedness of collective action frames in labor studies, which matter to social movements not only for their external performance, but also for their internal cohesion.

Author

• Sebastien Chauvin, University of Lausanne