The Work-Wellbeing Paradox: Exploring the Emotional and Bodily Dimensions of Intersectional Capitalism among Latinx Immigrants

• In Event: 40203 - Work and Mental Health

Abstract

Marginalized immigrants from Latin America are overrepresented in precarious work and experience high rates of unemployment in the United States (U.S.). Though job precarity and unemployment negatively impact the health of all workers, financial pressure resulting from job insecurity and lack of employment, as well as workplace abuses, are significant determinants of the mental and physical wellbeing of Latinx immigrants and their families. Most recently, the global COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated Latinx immigrants’ experiences of exploitation and work uncertainty/exclusion. It also expanded dimensions of precarity tied to bodily integrity, creating an additional threat to long-term physical health through workplace COVID-19 exposure. In this paper, we leverage the insights of critical intersectional scholars to situate the wellbeing and experiences of work of marginalized Latinx immigrants in the United States before and during the COVID-19 pandemic within the broader systems that have conditioned these embodied realities to begin with. We analyzed interview data from the Immigrant Wellbeing Project (IWP), a community-based participatory research project based in New Mexico. We find that participants’ experiences of work reflect the ways in which intersectional capitalism operates at the individual and family-levels by exploiting immigrant labor and restricting socioeconomic mobility. Additionally, we find that participants’ intersecting narratives of work and wellbeing reveal a complex paradox wherein work provides the means for survival as well as inflicts emotional and bodily subjugation. We contend that this paradoxical relationship between work and wellbeing is by design. These narratives reflect the sociopolitical location of marginalized Latinx immigrants within a hierarchized U.S. economy that situates their labor as necessary and their bodies as expendable. Further, we argue that the impacts of work on their emotional and bodily health must be understood as embodied manifestations of intersectional capitalism.

Authors

• Bianca Ruiz-Negrón, University of New Mexico-Albuquerque

• Alejandra Guadalupe Lemus, University of New Mexico-Albuquerque

• Susana Echeverri Herrera, University of New Mexico-Albuquerque

• Alejandro Tovar

• Aurora Arreola, New Mexico Immigrant Law Center

• Julia Meredith Hess, University of New Mexico

• Jessica Rose Goodkind, University of New Mexico-Albuquerque