"Stabbed in the Back by the Country We Call Home" Fractured Belonging Amid Pandemic Precarity

• In Event: 30620 - Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 12: Migration, Transnationalism, and Inequality

Abstract

The first couple of years of the COVID-19 pandemic underscored the fragile relationship between immigrants and precarious employment. The pandemic saw changes in work and politics that affected vulnerable, precarious groups (Chavez et al. 2024; Fan et al. 2021; Valdez et al. 2022; Zelalem et al. 2022). For migrant workers, this manifested in a “ripple-effect” of issues from being the focus of political scapegoating and congressional targeting, to legal exclusion from social services, to intensified, exploitative working conditions as well as greater viral exposure (Bazurli and Campomori 2022; Mengesha et al. 2022). While researchers have highlighted these growing disparities since the pandemic, the ways in which migrants and their families understand and navigate these times have been less studied. In this paper I analyze thirty-seven cases of Californian migrant workers and their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic through semi-structured interviews. I introduce the term fractured belonging to characterize the emergent and heightened sense of non-citizenship and othering that migrant workers and their families felt during the COVID-19 pandemic given sudden changes in areas of family stability, employment, income, legal status, and politics. I argue that to understand how belonging is navigated amidst precarity, researchers must critically situate the concept of precarity into historically mediated and status-based experiences, especially for vulnerable groups. For migrant workers, these included political and legal precarity, familial vulnerability (Logan et al. 2021), and precarious labor or material conditions (layoffs, hour cuts, unsecure employment).

Author

• Timothy A Perez, University of California-Santa Barbara