Abstract
As Latina/o immigrant workers have done throughout US history, particularly those from Mexico and increasingly Central America, they continue to work dirty and dangerous jobs in the United States. In recent decades, we have witnessed the settlement of Latinas/os in the southeastern portion of the country as they take up jobs in the service and manual labor sectors. Vanesa Ribas’ fieldwork takes us to such a worksite, dubbed Swine’s, in Clark County, North Carolina, where predominantly Latina/o and African American workers carry out backbreaking labor in cutting, sorting, and packing up pork for shipment around the world. Ribas carries out 23 extensive, in-depth interviews with an assortment of workers (mostly Latinas) as she works a job herself for 16 months on the frenzied production lines at Swine’s.
In framing the South as a ‘new and maturing destination’ (p. 7) for Latina/o immigrants, Ribas analyzes how these newcomers shift and disrupt the Black/White racial binary in the contemporary United States. Specifically, the author breaks ground with her study of Latina/o-African American relations as they interact in the workplace. The author fills the existent gap in the racial attitudes and beliefs literature that offers little research based on participant observation, particularly within the workplace, with a study that ‘treats work as a field of human life rich in meaning-making through interactions across vertical and horizontal relations defined by the particular social roles, statuses, and relationships being examined …’ (p. 9). Indeed, the workplace is a site at which the process of incorporation occurs for Latina/o laborers, and this process leads to enmeshment into a social system stratified by race, class, and gender. Ribas offers the theoretical concept of prismatic engagement to model how interactions between exploited workers of color frequently distorts the way they perceive and construct each other. Moreover, the study demonstrates how White racism drives this distortive process that serves to reinforce racial fault lines between immigrant and native-born workers of color.
The study unpacks the complex ways in which workers of color create and maintain boundaries, as they perceive each other through the prism of Whiteness. The most deeply grooved boundary between Latina/o workers and their Black colleagues is uncovered in how Latina/o employees frame African American workers as lazy, held to lower work standards, and able to acquire less demanding jobs at Swine’s. Therefore, these Latina/o laborers from Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico not only reify racist views of Blacks that, in part, originate from their variant points of origin but also serve to continue the racist project that ‘devalues Blackness universally’ (p. 66). Conversely, while Black workers do not wholeheartedly take a liking to their Latina/o co-workers, they are much less likely to perceive them in primarily racial terms.
Ribas takes her impressive set of data not only to answer questions on racism and racialization but to also tackle issues of inter-minority competition within the US labor market. As Latina/o workers now form a significant portion of North Carolina’s meat-processing labor force, the study delves into matters of ethnic competition for work and whether Central American and Mexican worker serve to displace Black workers. According to Ribas’ data, African American employees rarely perceive Latinas/os as an economic threat and understand that, as one respondent stated, ‘they [immigrants] come here to work and whatever’ (p. 164). Yet, Latina/o workers at Swine’s maintain a racialized resentment of Black workers that poses them as ne’er-do-wells fortunate enough to have easier, less demanding jobs. Time and again Latina/o workers perceive Blacks negatively and in racial terms, while White supervisors are seen more favorably and often referred to as ‘Americans’.
Ribas pays careful attention to issues of legal papers (lack of them), deportability, and the disposability that Latinas/os face every day at Swine’s. Even for those immigrants with legal status, the powerful racist caricature of all Latinas/os as undocumented people casts a long shadow over the entire group. While Latinas/os perceive themselves as disadvantaged vis-à-vis Black workers, they, in fact, possess an advantage in the hiring process since they are deportable. However, once they enter into the work organization, the advantage is stripped away as they become the most disposable of employees – a reality with which African American workers do not contend. Meanwhile, African American workers remain subjected to the continued devaluing of Blackness in which their Latina/o co-workers take part. Furthermore, Ribas’ analysis and data from an interview with a Black respondent takes note of African Americans’ struggle as second-class citizens.
Ribas concludes with a keen observation that notes how calls for immigration reform, while obviously necessary, rarely link such initiatives to workers’ rights. She advances an impassioned argument for legislation that protects workers across the board. To implement protective legal cover for everyone on the job, regardless of citizenship status, could go a long way toward easing the racial tension within a workplace such as a meat-processing facility in Clark County, North Carolina, where workers are constantly abused and degraded. Indeed, the hard-working, exploited set of Latina/o and Black workers at Swine’s deserve so much better.