Scratching Out a Living (eBook)

Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South

Angela Stuesse (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016
336 Seiten
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-96239-2 (ISBN)

Infos

How has Latino immigration transformed the South? In what ways is the presence of these newcomers complicating efforts to organize for workplace justice? Scratching Out a Living takes readers deep into Mississippi's chicken processing plants and communities, where large numbers of Latin American migrants were recruited in the mid-1990s to labor alongside an established African American workforce in some of the most dangerous and lowest-paid jobs in the country. As America's voracious appetite for chicken has grown, so has the industry's reliance on immigrant workers, whose structural position makes them particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Based on the author's six years of collaboration with a local workers' center, this book explores how Black, white, and new Latino Mississippians have lived and understood these transformations. Activist anthropologist Angela Stuesse argues that people's racial identifications and relationships to the poultry industry prove vital to their interpretations of the changes they are experiencing. Illuminating connections between the area's long history of racial inequality, the industry's growth and drive to lower labor costs, immigrants' contested place in contemporary social relations, and workers' prospects for political mobilization, Scratching Out a Living paints a compelling ethnographic portrait of neoliberal globalization and calls for organizing strategies that bring diverse working communities together in mutual construction of a more just future.

Inhalt

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Southern Fried: Globalization and Immigrant Transformations
2. Dixie Chicken: Racial Segregation, Poultry Integration, and the Making of the “New” South in Central Mississippi
3. The Caged Bird Sings for Freedom: Black Struggles for Civil and Labor Rights, 1950–1980
4. To Get to the Other Side: The Hispanic Project and the Rise of the Nuevo South
5. Pecking Order: Latino Newcomers, Receptions, and Racial Hierarchies
6. A Bone to Pick: Labor Control and the Painful Work of Chicken Processing
7. Sticking Our Necks Out: Challenges to Union and Workers’ Center Organizing
8. Walking on Eggshells: Illegality, Employer Sanctions, and Disposable Workers
9. Plucked: Labor Contractors and Immigrant Exclusion
10. Flying Upwind: Toward a New Southern Solidarity

Postscript
Home to Roost: Reflections on Activist Research

Notes
References
Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 26.1.2016
• Reihe/Serie: California Series in Public Anthropology
• Reihe/Serie: California Series in Public Anthropology
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Mikrosoziologie
• Schlagworte: African American workers • american migrants • american workforce • black and immigrant labor • black workers • chicken processing • Ethnic Studies • exploitative labor practices • hispanic american studies • industrial food production • Latin American Immigrants • latinx immigration • latinx in the us south • mississippi labor • Neoliberal globalization • poultry industry • race and labor • racial inequality • racial inequality in the us • Working Class • working class inequality
• ISBN-10: 0-520-96239-7 / 0520962397
• ISBN-13: 978-0-520-96239-2 / 9780520962392