A01=Angela Stuesse
african american workers
american migrants
american workforce
Author_Angela Stuesse
black and immigrant labor
black workers
Category=JBFH
Category=JBSL
Category=JHBL
Category=JHMC
chicken processing
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
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
Product details
- ISBN 9780520287211
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 26 Jan 2016
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Angela Stuesse is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Learn more about Dr. Stuesse here: www.angelastuesse.com/bio/
