Abstract
Being on call without being on the clock is an important but underappreciated source of insecurity among low-wage workers. Drawing on fieldwork with 20 agricultural workers of the Texas-Mexico border region, this paper identifies several stages where workers are made to wait without pay and links these stages to economic precarity. These intervals occur at the local bus station, a hub for recruitment and departure, at home in both the US and Mexico, during travel to distant work sites, and in seasonal lodging. Workers use the Spanish colloquial term ‘dioquis’, which they define as ‘being without doing’, to describe such uncertain periods of waiting which are required for them to work. Through dioquis, a liminal state, employers displace industry risk onto workers, leading to long-term instability. Expanding the implications of dioquis, the paper reveals the significance of temporal uncertainty for the marginalized across other contexts of work and waiting.
On a sweaty mid-July morning, I run into Juan Luis 1 near some benches outside the brick and stucco Brownsville, Texas, bus station. We greet each other and exchange pleasantries. It has been a year since I last saw him. The 60-year-old sports a blue button-down shirt flowing over black dress pants. His face, slightly leathered with time, glistens with sweat in the sun. After we say hello, I ask him about his recent work trip to the Midwest. As he starts to chat with me, his sunny demeanor juxtaposes with the content of his story. The trip did not go well.
Brownsville’s downtown fans out around the bus station, its courthouses, police and fire stations, and parks interspersed with run down mom-and-pop shops. The streets feed into International Boulevard which streams south into Matamoros, Mexico, a few blocks away via Gateway International Bridge. A speckling of well-worn local restaurants mingles with fast food, abandoned buildings, and rows of discount stores for shoppers across borders – mayordeo y menudeo, ropa usada. Faded, dusty buildings recall a Spanish colonial past. Juan Luis and I start walking west down Adams Street, toward the heart of downtown, and away from a cluster of men with loosened collars, the warm wind grazing their skin.
The bus station is a trans-border gateway to points north in the US and points south in Mexico. In two years living in Brownsville as an advocate, and my return for fieldwork, I saw workers gather outside regularly – meeting with compañeros, or compadres, trading lines on and signing up for agricultural jobs throughout the US, and seeking local day labor. For long-distance workers like Juan Luis, the bus station is a network hub: a recruitment center, information exchange, and pathway for agricultural jobs in the Midwest, Southeast, and elsewhere. It is a place of waiting.
As we reach my car and I drive to a nearby office, Juan Luis fills me in on his recent Midwest journey. He and a group had traveled to Iowa to detassel corn. Facing decrepit, overcrowded barracks, they found work in Minnesota, but the contractor had rushed them in the fields and refused them water. Now they were back home, shaking off the rattling defeat and waiting for the next outing.
Juan Luis is in between seasons. He has time to sit down and tell me his life story, his labor history. Most of the other interviews proceed in a similar way: I meet up with workers during this down time between seasons. During these gaps, they tell me their stories.
Juan Luis was born in 1955 in Harlingen, Texas, a sleepy city around 25 miles north of Brownsville. Both lie in the region known as the Rio Grande Valley, situated on the northern bank of the river that demarcates the US from Mexico. He lived his early life in Matamoros, until at 15 his grandmother and mother passed away. ‘I found myself alone … so I went back to Texas.’ He stayed with relatives in Brownsville and then outside Houston for two years of high school, but ‘I never learned a thing … nothing stuck.’
Juan Luis’ father had done agricultural work in the US a generation earlier alongside Braceros. Though Juan Luis had done manual work in Mexico since age 13, he hadn’t fancied himself a farm worker. He laughs, ‘I wouldn’t have gone into it if I had known it.’ But at age 17, without English skills or much education, he followed his father’s path: onions in New Mexico, ‘then later to Florida, in tomato, to Pennsylvania, Indiana.’ He found the first jobs through relatives, but landed others in downtown Brownsville, ‘where they would bring people to work in tomatoes’ in Florida. ‘Later I started going to Indiana and Iowa’, working in corn detasseling and packing; and in lemons, oranges, strawberries, and other crops across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. He also worked locally in the Valley. Decades ago, he and others would wait for troqueros to pick them up where the current bus station stands. Back then, the space was covered with palms and shrubs. ‘There were a lot of guys that would bring people from here in trucks, to work in hoeing, cabbage, chili, to remove weeds.’ Much of that work has disappeared from the Valley: ‘there’s a machine for almost everything now’, and the local economy has shifted toward more retail work (Santa Ana, 2017).
Midway through recounting his history – we’re in a borrowed office a few blocks from the bus station – Juan Luis gestures to the coffee in front of me. It’s been sitting there, unlike his. I struggle to multi-task. ‘Drink it … look, yes, take your time, there’s no rush.’ Settling into the conversation, he is in no hurry. At the bus station that morning, he got a lead on an upcoming job: ‘over there, someone asked me if I wanted to go to Colorado, with a group of 15, to work in corn detasseling.’ Right now, though, he is in between jobs.
During these periods, Juan Luis stays in Mexico with his wife. There he can support them (his children are grown) on annual earnings of $12,000 on a good year. He is trying to adjust her legal status so he can bring her to the US. Many fronterizos like Juan Luis who have legal status or US citizenship are nonetheless affected by immigration and border restriction through mixed status families. Juan Luis would like to stay in the US, but he can’t afford rent or to bring his wife here. So he crosses back and forth most days: walking on foot over the bridge to reunite with his compañeros at the bus station, learn about new jobs and sometimes obtain a day’s work in construction. ‘I come and go [voy y vengo]’ – a refrain I heard frequently.
Juan Luis moves across nations and states, his movements patterned by waiting and working. His history extends across the national border and other physical, legal and cultural boundaries. The other 19 agricultural workers I spoke to similarly wait for work at home bases in Brownsville, in Matamoros, or between the two. The experience of waiting displayed at the bus station follows them across borders and inter-state. Displaced from local work, they struggle to make a livelihood at great distances and uncertain tempos.
What is the relationship between uncompensated waiting in the labor process and precarity? This study uncovers the role of wait time in shifting risk onto workers, leading to short- and long-term economic instability. Workers wait at the bus station while at home between crops, pursuing unstable day labor to survive between seasons. They wait on the road to work states, spending time and money to reach fields and packing plants. Then, they wait to enter the fields, often in run-down motels or barracks, depending on weather, crop output and other factors. Workers bear seasonal risk through a triangular structure where employers outsource recruitment, housing, transport, and pay to contractors.
What kinds of experiences does waiting give rise to? At various stages of waiting, workers lack control over how long. Many use the colloquial term dioquis to describe these intervals. Dioquis loosely means to no avail, in vain, or without result (Wordreference.com, 2016), expressing uncompensated waiting periods throughout the labor process. Dioquis produces economic uncertainty: workers cannot predict how much they will earn in a given season, week, or even day because they cannot pinpoint how long they will be working, how long waiting. Facing this uncertainty, the border becomes a resource: some are pressed to live in Mexico for economic survival in the off-season to subsist on low wages, and all draw on resources on both sides. Dioquis affects how workers experience the social spaces of both work and home.
This article unpacks workers’ experiences of waiting, drawing on life history interviews and long-term engagement with a community of binational workers. Below, I conceptualize dioquis in the literature on time and waiting, uncovering the power dynamics of being made to wait. I conceptualize these periods of waiting as ‘liminal’ in space and time to shed light on the relationship between waiting and economic precarity. I situate the case in the social space of the borderlands, review data and methods, and show how a triangulated employment relationship pushes risk onto workers, structuring dioquis into the labor process. Then I analyze workers’ narratives of being without doing across four intervals: waiting to leave, moving to work, waiting to work while at work, and, ultimately, waiting to retire. I conclude by identifying other forms of precarious work punctuated with dioquis and technology’s role in scheduling uncertainty. Finally, I connect the analysis to a broader set of experiences of temporal domination (Reid, 2013) – of being made to wait – faced by the marginalized.
Waiting, liminality, and precarity in the labor process
Dioquis: waiting, power, and productivity
Dioquis illuminates the difference between coming to work – or the delivering of labor power, ‘the set of mental and physical capabilities exercised in the labor process’ (Burawoy, 1979) – and working, or the transformation of labor power into labor (p. 139) central to Marx’s theory of capital. The distinction between coming to work and working is blurred across several dimensions: agricultural workers occupy spaces and times that don’t clearly constitute ‘work’ but which are required for them to obtain work. Workers are dioquis while waiting to leave for work, waiting to get to work, and waiting to begin or resume work.
The capacity to make someone wait implies power (Schwartz, 1975: 18 ). Dioquis reveals a lack of power (Gasparini, 1995: 32) in the employment relationship. Similarly, the poor are often made to wait for resources. Javier Auyero uncovers how, by making the poor wait and submit to arbitrary timelines in state assistance offices, the Argentine state creates ‘patients’ rather than empowered citizens. The state dominates the poor through ‘the manipulation of the time of those in need’ (2012: 60). Just as the Argentine poor are made to wait indefinitely for crucial support, agricultural workers’ time is devalued through being made to wait (Schwartz, 1975) for work essential to their livelihoods.
Globally, the economically marginalized endure parallel periods of waiting on the margins of working life. In stark contrast to the neoliberal emphasis on efficiency and speed (Gasparini, 1995; Lahad, 2012), those with less power are often made to wait. While time has sped up for many working at breakneck speed in the financial core of global capitalism, time has slowed for those who have lost the ability to make a living within the system (Mains, 2017, O’Neill, 2017). In the post-industrial landscape ‘some are left struggling more than others to make the next productive event happen’ (van den Berg and O’Neill, 2017: 5).
Dioquis expresses the experiences of workers between productive events: those seeking to work who are made to wait. This is distinct from those who have dropped out of the labor force altogether. While modern industrial agriculture has long been focused on immediacy and synchronic precision, the inherent uncertainty of seasonal crops requires that some wait.
Dioquis as a liminal state
Workers endure dioquis within particular spaces and times. These periods are transitional, or liminal: they exist at the boundary between ‘work’ and ‘not work’. Liminality describes ‘threshold’ situations where individuals find themselves ‘betwixt and between’ different social structures or states (Turner, 1982; Van Gennep, 1960). Individuals at the limens do not know how long they will have to wait before passing to the next stage or category (Lahad, 2012). Thus liminality characterizes the life stage of a single woman defined by society to be of marriage age yet waiting indefinitely to get married (Lahad, 2012: 179), as well as the ambiguous position of an immigrant who does not know whether or when she will acquire permanent legal status or have to leave the US (Menjívar, 2006). Temp workers and contractors who lack a long-term relationship within an organization occupy a liminal structural position within a firm (Beech, 2011; Borg and Soderlund, 2015), and consequently exhibit ambivalence over work identity, organizational commitment (Garsten, 1999), and belonging (Barley and Kunda, 2004: 175).
Resonating with these usages, dioquis indexes a set of experiences between work that are spatially, temporally, and categorically liminal. While dioquis, agricultural workers wait for unknown durations in spaces that they experience only as temporary, unaware of how much work they will have and thus how much they will earn. They also straddle a series of categories: residents of the US vs. Mexico (while in the borderlands), workers vs. non-workers (when seeking and waiting to leave for work, on the way to work, and when waiting to work in other states), places vs. transitional ‘non-places’ (Augé, 1995) (while in transit between home and work), denizens vs. outsiders (while in other states), workers vs. retirees (while waiting to be able to retire in older age).
When workers reside in the borderlands between seasons, residential liminality can become a resource: some survive unstable earnings by living in Mexico, where dioquis is cheaper and easier to maintain (Burawoy, 1976; Chávez, 2016: 156). They draw on resources from both countries, revealing how the border offers opportunity along with constraint (Chávez, 2016). Liminality constrains when they cannot draw on US resources or fully incorporate as residents, living at the margins of two countries. Leaving for work, they remain enveloped in a liminal state: when they travel informally through means that can save money but subject them to danger, and later in temporary dwellings where they wait to work in the Midwest, Southeast, and elsewhere. Down the road, liminality affixes to the retirement stage: without sufficient social security credits, workers must wait to stop working, betwixt and between work and retirement.
Dioquis as emblematic of precarity
Being made to wait without knowing for how long perpetuates workers’ marginal status in society (Schwartz, 1975). The uncompensated waiting periods between paid work affect economic outcomes within each season and across workers’ careers, increasing economic precarity. The concept of precarity can describe a broader set of experiences under global capitalism – within and beyond shifts in the structure of work – where ‘the boundaries between life and work have qualitatively changed’ (Arnold and Bongiovi, 2012: 13). As more and more people across industries and class experience ‘alternative’ work arrangements, geography and space become increasingly important dimensions of labor markets (Kalleberg, 2009: 5). Some move to find work, like migrants that journey to global cities (Sassen, 2007), or agricultural workers that traverse multiple borders. Others displaced from work stay where they are and face the painful absence of activity (O’Neill, 2017).
In the post-industrial economy, many vulnerable workers experience the blurring of the boundaries between work and life in uncompensated waiting periods that are integral to obtaining paid work. In what follows, I show how dioquis increases precarity within workers’ short-term ‘timescapes’ and longer-term ‘time maps’ (Snyder, 2016). The goal is twofold: to provide a close-up view of how dioquis impacts this particular group of workers, and to highlight a broader phenomenon that is emblematic of precarity: involuntary waiting under contemporary capitalism. I identify parallels to dioquis in old and new forms of work, and in waiting imposed in other contexts on those with less power (Schwartz, 1975).
Placing workers’ lives in the borderlands
Policy changes have impacted borderlands residents’ opportunities and movements, from the Bracero Program in the mid-20th century to 1986’s Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) and intensified border militarization since 1996 (Chávez, 2016). The Brownsville and Matamoros-based workers I spoke to are US citizens and legal permanent residents, groups comprising 31 and 21 percent of farm workers in the US, respectively (Hernandez et al., 2016: i). While many legalized their status under a provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), several adjusted through a relative and others were born in the US. According to Veronica, 2 the south Texas migrant agricultural stream tends to be more documented than the US farmworker population as a whole (of whom approximately half are estimated to be undocumented; Hernandez et al., 2016: i). Many older workers benefited from IRCA, and other workers ‘have just grown up in south Texas … poor – with limited English skills’ and education, sometimes having traveled with migrant families as children. Despite their freedom to live in the US, family and economic circumstances constrain them, demonstrating how both individual and structural conditions shape the range of strategies available to border residents (Chávez, 2016).
Contra formulations of transnationalism as linkages between immigrant communities and geographically distant communities of origin (Levitt, 2001; Smith, 2006), borderlands communities exist in a contiguous cultural, social, and economic network (e.g. Paredes, 1958; Morganthaler, 2005). Unlike those who settle permanently in the US interior, fronterizos exist as hybrids, or ‘transmigrants’ (Chávez, 2016: 156). Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) identifies a hybrid borderlands identity or mezcla marked by the conflict of state power and violence, but also resistance.
Enacting agency, workers draw on resources and networks across the border (Chávez, 2016: 161), strategizing within the liminal border space. Between seasons, around half stay in Brownsville, the rest in Matamoros. All have resided in the borderlands for their whole life or for many years. Borderlands residents have historically survived on low US wages by reproducing themselves and their families in Mexico, with the disparity enabling US employers to pay poverty wages (Burawoy, 1976; Mitchell, 2001; Ngai, 2004). Yet many in my sample draw on the US for some resources and Mexico for others, involving both countries in labor force maintenance and renewal (Chávez, 2016: 156). Those who stay in Mexico generally do so to support families – who often cannot freely cross – on annual salaries between $5,000 and $15,000 (Martin, 2012). The informal economy, as in day labor originating at the bus station, can be a source of income. 3
Waiting workers pursue precarious seasonal work because they lack economic opportunities at home. Brownsville was ranked the second poorest city in the US by some measures in 2013, while nearby McAllen, Texas, topped the list (Cohen, 2011). Recent economic growth in Texas and the Rio Grande Valley in particular has not provided opportunities for all residents. The jobs created by the so-called ‘Texas Economic Miracle’, Veronica explains, ‘by and large are minimum wage jobs in the service sector which aren’t even full time jobs’. Further, growing service jobs like call center work are inaccessible to monolingual Spanish speakers with little formal education, like Juan Luis.
Meanwhile, economic transformations have taken work away. Elise, another attorney, links the 1994 passage of NAFTA to the decline of agriculture and manufacturing jobs in the Valley. Job opportunities have dried up for the region’s aging agricultural workers: ‘Citrus orchards have been paved over … that industry has shrunk,’ and drought has devastated many local farmers (Oliver, 2013). Factory jobs, like a Levi-Strauss plant, are also gone. Valley agriculture has declined with growers ‘settling out’ and global outsourcing. Veronica notes that American growers ‘have decided to buy fields in Mexico.’ The Valley has fewer agricultural fields and is becoming ‘a place where people do repacking. Imports and repacking,’ culminating in Mexico’s construction of a ‘superhighway’ up from Michoacán and a proliferation of packing sheds in the Valley. As a place where Mexican produce is repacked for shipping throughout the US, the border is literally liminal: a site for products, like people, in transition.
The local labor market reflects the decline of manufacturing and the rise of service work since the 1970s (Sassen, 2007). Southern border militarization – increasingly sophisticated technologies, infrastructure, and policing deployed to close the border to people – occurred alongside the opening of the border for goods and services following NAFTA (Massey and Pren, 2012). As border militarization discouraged circular migration, NAFTA displaced farmers and others north seeking work (Fernández-Kelly and Massey, 2007). Many workers connect the decline of local agriculture, and lack of work in the Valley, to their seasonal migrations hundreds or thousands of miles away. 4
Research methods
I conducted approximately nine weeks of direct fieldwork, including participant observation, interviews, and follow-up discussions in summer 2015 and 2016. This field work was deeply informed by observations and relationships formed during two years as an advocate with the farmworker community prior to graduate school. During this time, I conducted outreach in Brownsville and across agricultural camps and lodgings in Indiana. I observed and interacted with workers in waiting in both settings. I learned about their experiences in detail, in and out of work. While this analysis relies largely on ethnographic interviews, the questions I asked were driven by my long-running observations of and interactions with workers. Observing workers in the social space of the borderlands and the in-between spaces they traverse during the labor process – the spaces of dioquis – provided enough ethnography for thick description of their experiences.
I recruited workers in person at the bus station, which provided access to those I had not known previously. I also conducted participant-observation there several times a week. Additionally, I snowball sampled from prior relationships with agricultural workers in Brownsville. Along with the interviews and participant observation, I socialized informally with some workers at the bus station, local restaurants, or elsewhere downtown.
Primary data feature 20 respondents from Brownsville, each with at least five years of experience in migratory agricultural labor. In summer 2015 I conducted life and labor history interviews with 18 workers between 42 and 79 years old. Interviews explored workers’ migration and labor histories and experiences of recruitment, transportation, housing, work, wages, family, health, and the border. I also conducted interviews with key informants, including one advocate with 40 years and two attorneys with 10 years each of relevant experience. In August 2016 I conducted follow-up discussions with five workers, three of whom had participated in the original study and two who met the same criteria, based on availability. 5 The group discussions, loosely modeled after Dodson et al.’s ‘interpretive focus groups’ (Dodson et al., 2007; Dodson and Schmalzbauer, 2005), aimed to involve participants in interpretation and revision and to disrupt – to the extent possible – hierarchies of power between researcher and researched (Dodson et al., 2007). In each discussion, I shared my findings and workers gave input, confirming and refining my data.
Interviews were conducted and analyzed in Spanish, with selected quotes translated into English. I coded and analyzed interviews and field notes in ATLAS.ti. I took an abductive approach (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012), engaging background knowledge of theories and ‘socially located, positional knowledge’ (p. 173) while transcribing, coding, and analyzing the data. I developed the core argument about waiting during the labor process as a liminal experience that increases precarity through iteration between theory and data. The latter provided the emic term – in workers’ own words – for the experience I had observed at the bus station and in Indiana: dioquis. By analyzing dioquis, I take up Bruce O’Neill’s call (2017) to analyze the meaning of the absence of activity on its own terms, unpacking the consequences of being made to wait on the lives of poor people – what Megan Reid (2013) coins ‘temporal domination’.
Waiting to work and the structure of employment
Dioquis: Being without doing
In the word dioquis, workers express the significance of uncompensated waiting to the labor process. Alfonso, 66, reveals how precarious waiting is built into each agricultural season. Even when he works several seasons in a row he still faces lag-periods between jobs: ‘Here [detasseling] begins in May, […] from May to June. And later … we have around two or three months dioquis, without working, and then we go to Indiana in July.’
While Alfonso uses dioquis to refer to time spent between jobs at home in Brownsville, 43-year-old Antonio deploys it to describe waiting to work while at work. Several years ago, he was in Georgia working in onions, but only got three to four hours of work a day. Shut up in a run-down trailer and isolated from town, waiting took its toll on him: R: I’m dioquis, I know what’s waiting for me. Being dioquis. I: Dioquis? R: Dioquis, being without doing anything. And … I’m not making money.
Other workers use dioquis to reference undefined waiting periods throughout the labor process. According to Danilo, being dioquis is bad because ‘there’s no money.’ Tomás adds, ‘You’re not doing anything, you’re not making money. There’s no work; that’s why they say, “We’re dioquis.”’
Workers endure the uncertain timing of seasonal work far from home because borderlands economies do not accommodate their labor power. Economic transformations have not only transferred more risk onto many workers; they have also shifted the kinds of jobs available to particular people in particular locations, requiring some to travel great distances, negotiating dioquis across seasons and states.
The farm labor contractor
A triangular employment relationship reinforces an uncertain tempo of work and waiting. Agricultural labor is typically organized through farm labor contractors (FLCs), who recruit workers prior to each season, often at the downtown bus station or by word of mouth. Growers outsource payment, housing and transport to FLCs and frequently fail to ensure their legal compliance – though they are jointly liable. Workers receive verbal or written contracts for a given season, which must legally include certain information about the work, pay, transportation, and housing.
FLCs often act at odds with workers to meet grower demands for labor within each unpredictable season, financially motivated to say whatever necessary to recruit workers to fill grower contracts. They provide growers with labor power at the ready, while workers bear the risks of uncertain crop output. As intermediaries between employers and workers, contractors enact a transfer of risk from the former onto the latter, akin to the temp agency (Smith, 1998; Smith and Neuwirth, 2008).
Workers consistently work fewer hours than promised and face wage, housing, and transport violations. Along with over-recruitment and seasonal unpredictability, contractor abuses cause problems. As Oscar, 59, puts it, ‘they offer you one thing here, and over there no, they give you another.’ Per Eliseo ‘here, when we depart from here, they speak real pretty, they give you a contract that’s for [hourly work] – once we arrive there, it’s by contract [by acre].’ Others have been promised pay per acre only to receive an hourly rate.
For Oscar, the conflict between workers and FLCs boils down to a relationship of sale: Nah, but the thing is that … they bring us from here, and they go and they sell us … They pay [the FLCs] for bringing us … they give them money for gasoline and … for us, right? … but they take money from us, they charge us for a ride … We’ve gotten judgments against people who have repeatedly – the same contractor – ripped workers off, and who a federal judge has said owes our clients money … There are some people on there who have peonage convictions … who – were adjudicated or pled guilty to – human trafficking or slavery. Who have been allowed to go back and get farm labor contracting licenses again, because you can get a farm labor contracting license so long as you have not been convicted of a felony within the last five years.
Waiting to leave
Workers spend a lot of time waiting. First, they wait in between seasons, as in Alfonso’s ‘two or three months dioquis’. Departure dates are uncertain and can shift. Workers also confront uncertainty over whether they will be hired, when they will leave, and what job might follow.
One morning in early June, I catch up with 69-year-old Epifanio outside the local HEB grocery store on downtown Brownsville’s Elizabeth Street, which runs perpendicular to and abuts the international bridge. In between jobs, he has several crops on his radar: R: we’re going to go to Iowa … this year God willing. I also did an application … for the RedGold tomato plant … [in] Indiana … Let’s see if in June they send me something to say if I’m going to work over there. I’m going to wait … I: Oh … how many weeks [is the detasseling season]? R: Well like a month … And if there’s a chance we’ll stay for corn packing …
My interactions with Antonio display this unpredictable timeline. I first meet him outside the bus station, and then chat with him the next day in a park a stone’s throw away. Uncertain when he will leave for corn detasseling in Iowa, he is dioquis: And … I’m waiting now … for him [the contractor] to actually tell me … the date and the time – so that I can get myself ready … I don’t want for him to tell me tomorrow, ‘let’s go already’, and I can’t do the things here … that I have to do.
As Antonio and I are chatting, a colleague in his thirties or forties approaches. He and Antonio confer. Antonio asks if he knows when they will leave for corn detasseling: R: He [the contractor] said next week? U (Unknown): No he told me (incomprehensible) R: This coming month, in July? U: Yes.
Moving to work
After waiting to leave, workers face challenging periods in transit between the border region and jobs throughout the US. They move across multiple borders and boundaries: Mexico and the US, Border Patrol checkpoints 100 miles north, various states and cultural divides. Workers are not paid, and often must pay, for this time between work and home, traveling by commercial bus or by ‘ride’ in a van owned by the contractor or another worker.
The road holds potential danger. In 2014, two unlicensed vans were traveling north on a Texas highway carrying workers to detassel corn in Indiana. One van’s tire blew out, the van crashed, and two died with another seriously injured. The accident rattled the community and remained a vivid memory. When José’s son had car troubles on his way to work in Ohio, José dwelled in uncertainty: R: Because you see how now that our friends died … I: Yes, I’m so sorry. R: My son left [to go north for work], and his truck broke down … the transmission oil. I: In Texas? R: Yes. On the same [highway] as – the others? Where you show – where you show your papers to get out, to leave [at the 100-mile checkpoint] … I just talked to him and he arrived. [Here José poignantly reveals an awareness of mortality that the accident brought home] R: – it’s like the saying that goes, ‘I know where I was born.’ I: Uh huh R: But I don’t know where I’ll end up.
Transit is an integral and, as the tragedy reveals, often dangerous part of the labor process. Workers are dioquis on these stressful journeys because they cannot work or earn income while traveling – they usually have to spend money – but they must get to work. Many link inconsistent transit conditions to growers’ use of contractors. According to 56-year-old Julio, even though the grower pays the contractor for worker transport, the contractor still charges workers. ‘The grower gives a certain amount so that [the contractor] can rent a bus, so that he can bring people. And the contractor doesn’t do it. He looks for vans, the raiteros [informal drivers], to bring us. And it’s a danger.’ He mentions the tragic accident. Eliseo remarks, ‘the transport is awful when they bring us from here to work. It’s a danger. There’s no insurance … all piled on top of each other.’
In contrast, Juan Luis recalls a smooth van ride to Indiana the previous season, without overcrowding. Tomás believes it’s good ‘as long as the van goes in good condition … the guy that brings us, he’s in charge of checking the van, that it has good tires, that everything’s good.’ On the other hand, ‘The companies that flipped over – bad luck, the tires they had in front were not good.’
Many workers prefer bus travel, considering it safer and more comfortable. As Julio explains, ‘in the van, when a person wants to go to the bathroom, he has to hold it until the driver stops’, while the bus has a bathroom. Ignacio, 73, who has 25 years of experience detasseling corn in the Midwest, paid $100 each way to work in Indiana last year. ‘The company has always paid for the bus, so probably the contractors took that money and contracted other people who have vans and then they look for people like us’, charging them and pocketing the money: ‘They are keeping that money, which the company, from what I know from the many years I’ve gone to work, the company gives them to pay for our ticket for a bus, whether it’s the Greyhound, or the Tornado, to bring us to Indiana.’ Not all employers pay travel costs to start, leaving workers to figure out transport, as when Carlos rode in a colleague’s vehicle to save money getting to an Ohio nursery.
Workers’ problems in transit suggest that the journey between home and work adds economic and existential uncertainty to the labor process. This moving time is liminal, literally the transition in between ‘home’ and ‘work’. Growers often give contractors total control of transportation, along with housing and wages. Under these conditions, travel is frequently unsafe, with contractors or workers themselves making ad hoc arrangements. Here again a liminal space corresponds to increased precarity: in this case, economically constrained workers subject their bodies to danger to reach the source of work.
Waiting to work while at work
Workers face uncertain schedules and pay that make each departure a risk. Each season offers the possibility of relatively large earnings but also the threat of significant periods of dioquis. Tomás and his compañeros often find themselves ‘a day or two dioquis’ before the work begins: ‘It’s happened to me myself that I couldn’t work for as much as four days.’ Danilo notes that ‘they ask for us now more or less two, three days early …we arrive and we go to clean the house … we go shopping and then – by Monday – to work.’ Danilo roots this stretch of dioquis in unpredictable crops and weather: ‘for example we’d arrive … to [work in] cucumber, the cucumber would be very little’.
Eliseo places blame squarely onto growers for start-of-the-season dioquis. Growers request workers early to guarantee a ready pool: ‘the farmer, instead of going to the contractors, if they are going to start the 20th [of the month] they want people on the 10th to ensure them’. Here, the employer – working through the contractor – displaces some crop uncertainty onto workers by having them arrive early. The waiting period before the crop is ready ‘is dioquis, they don’t give us even $5 … we don’t get anything, we’re dioquis’, Eliseo remarks. Two years earlier, I caught up with Eliseo and Anselmo during this very period before corn detasseling began in Indiana. They were hanging out in their motel room, waiting to work. A hot plate was propped up on an end table, one of various adaptations to get by while dioquis in the liminal dwelling space between work.
In explaining the term dioquis, Julio mentions some workers who had just left to pack corn: ‘the corn packing begins on the 5th [of the following month.] And already people are asking for them right now [on the 16th of the current month] … they are going to be dioquis.’ In these waiting intervals before starting a season, ‘We’re losing, we’re losing time.’ Companies should pay workers something for this spell of dioquis up north, Julio believes: ‘we’re not going to say they should pay us for all the time that we’re dioquis … but at least half salary!’ since ‘we’re there waiting for the work.’ At the very least, he feels entitled to an accurate start date.
Relatedly, Elise has seen workers receive ‘substantially less work than they’ve been promised’ since the 1990s: in the detasseling area, part of the reason why I think that occurs is that – when seed corn is being grown, the growers aren’t – able to always predict accurately when the detasseling will have to take place and how quickly, and so in an abundance of caution, and in disregard for workers’ rights [wry laugh], they’ll just figure ‘Well, better safe than sorry, have ‘em come up early and bring many of them.’
Once the work begins, workers continue confronting dioquis. ‘Because we work in the field, it depends on the weather’, Tomás explains. When weather interferes they wait in the motel or living barracks. Unpredictable weather can jeopardize a whole season of earnings, even leading to ending a season ‘at zero’. For Antonio, ‘of the seasons that I've gone and returned from, three times I’ve failed. I mean I’ve returned with nothing.’ Epifanio had a fruitless season in sweet potato in Louisiana in 2005, where ‘it didn’t go very well because it rained a lot over there … sometimes we would work two days, sometimes one, sometimes three, four [a week].’
Onion is a particularly risky crop. Antonio, his voice laced with emotion, recounts idle time during an onion harvest in Georgia in a dilapidated trailer: R: … the job was slow, we would work three hours, four hours, and they’d send us home. Well I got very sad because I was shut up in the house there – I couldn’t even go to the store because it was like a half hour to the town to go buy food … and we were shut in there without work. I: Shut in the trailer? R: Shut in the trailer. I: How awful R: Waiting – waiting for the next day … And again four hours of work … [emotional tone] For me it’s like – being in prison being at home.
Dioquis punctuates seasons of uncertain durations. As Danilo explains, it all depends on ‘the weather, the harvest that you have’. In Carlos’ experience, ‘If the weather, the season is good, and it doesn’t rain, [corn detasseling and corn packing seasons are] from four to six weeks.’ Celestino works most of the same harvests year to year, but ‘some seasons are good and others are bad. Like just now when I went to Minnesota – the corn packing season was bad.’ Here he echoes Antonio on the risk of coming back ‘at zero’: when there’s no work then a person comes back because you pay more than what you make … the seasons go badly. There are times that it goes badly for us, we go in with the hope of making a buck and … have to come back …
During spells of dioquis within a given season, workers are being – staying in temporary living quarters and having to reproduce themselves – but not doing: working and earning money. Given the consistent risk of dioquis, Danilo approaches each season with a mixture of apprehension and hopefulness; ‘It’s an adventure in other words.’ ‘What do you mean by “adventure”?’ I ask him. ‘Well sometimes you lose, and sometimes you win. You don’t know. But now on the regular, it’s all right.’
Waiting to retire
Workers continue to labor into their 70s and even 80s. Old age here is doubly liminal: workers are becoming elderly, a transitional ‘limbo’ place (Hazan, 1980) frequently corresponding to leaving work. Yet these older workers are also trapped in another kind of limbo: they cannot afford to retire. They are stuck working due to missing time in their work histories: without enough social security credits accrued, those over age 66 cannot stop working. Paradoxically, the periods of being without doing (dioquis) throughout years of seasonal labor prevent them from being without doing (from ceasing to work) at retirement age.
Workers fail to accrue adequate social security credits for various reasons. First, contractors and employers frequently pay cash and do not report earnings properly (or at all). Incomplete employment histories also relate to agricultural work’s short-term and unpredictable nature. Pedro, an advocate for over 40 years, lists other common causes of earnings gaps: workers taking jobs off the books; growers or contractors deducting money purportedly for taxes but never paying the treasury; growers misclassifying workers as independent contractors (though 1990s lawsuits made this practice rarer). Contractors sometimes pay workers ‘on a piece-meal basis … how many rows did they do today? They may even get paid in cash every day … and even when they get paid on a weekly basis it may be strictly a cash offer.’ Growers frequently fail to ensure contractors pay workers properly despite joint legal liability.
Knowing they need to pay into the system to shore up retirement funds, workers rue failures to do so. 47-year-old Manuel worked in Kentucky tobacco for 10 years. He would get picked up on the corner, taking the best offer. He’d receive his pay ‘in cash and it wasn’t good for me. But I didn’t … have that – that experience to say, “I need to do my taxes”.’ Reflecting back, he dwells on the earnings gap from being paid under the table: Well I’ve worked a lot in the fields. [rueful laughter] … I feel bad that – I can’t recoup those years. I don’t know how to make it so it doesn’t affect me, but … … I’ll tell you now, I have to forget about this. Forget it, get it out of me, fix it or get it out of my mind, and, and all those years that I worked are gone.
Work (and waiting) not captured in social security records jeopardizes workers’ futures. Uncertainty piles up beyond single periods of dioquis, as gaps in earnings prevent stability even after long careers of toil. Short- and long-term insecurity coexist, and low earnings push many into the informal economy. When I met Manuel on Adams Street, he was washing cars with a bucket and rag, striving to earn enough to tide his family over until the next season.
Workers under 65 focus on putting into the system. Miguel Ángel is proud of the challenging work he’s done around the country and aware that each job must count. ‘I just have six, seven years until they give me something to live … I’ll have enough in my social security number. Because every year, every year, every year, every year I put into social security.’ Recently, he went to the Social Security Administration and obtained a printout of the numerous jobs on his record. ‘It’s a paper like this, enormous … the girl went and got it. She said, “You went around working in all these places?” “Yes”, I told her. “Oh my goodness!” she said.’
Of nine workers over 65, all receive $700 monthly or less in Social Security. All continue working. José, 66, only receives $150 a month. He is focused on increasing it: ‘however it goes … I continue putting in to make it grow … it’s $150 … from these weeks [of work], probably it’s already $160.’ José expresses a purposive work ethic – ‘The more you put in, the more you get out’ – but no vision of when he can quit.
Older workers take for granted that la jubilación includes work. One afternoon, I ask 67-year-old Ubalde if he is retired. He affirms that he is, then reveals what ‘retired’ means to him: ‘They [social security] give me a little bit of money, every month … since I turned 65. It’s not a lot, but it’s something.’ Pressed on whether he can live off it, Ubalde remarks, ‘Yes, because – if I do yards, I have three machines to work.’ With an injury and advanced age, he cannot find permanent work, so yardwork supplements his monthly check. He is retired, and he continues working.
Epifanio receives around $300 a month from Social Security. I ask him if he expects to retire soon. He, too, collapses the distinction between work and retirement: ‘I’m already retired and they already give me the (social) security.’ Still, ‘Better I keep working while I can, right?’ For Leonardo, $600 a month ‘helps me to live.’ Can he retire anytime soon? R: Well it’s [the social security check] to retire already. I: You’re already retired, you already retired. Yes, I know, but will you keep working or … R: Yes! I: Yes? R: Yes, but – more infrequently. Not much, like now [laughs].
Workers link turning 65 to ‘retirement’
6
but de-couple it from the notion of ceasing to work. In some cases, it means taking on less taxing or more sporadic jobs. Elsewhere it marks the beginning of a small monthly sum to build on through more work. Oscar, 59, emphasizes the prevalence of working in the fields into old age. Unable to find permanent work five years earlier, he started doing more farm work after seeing elderly workers toil: ‘Well, man, they weren’t giving me any work anymore, right? And then I got disgusted with myself …over there [in the fields], [they work] until they die … I’ve seen a lot of people that are very advanced in age, and continue on working in la labor.’ Oscar is – at least on the surface – unperturbed about retirement. I ask him if he expects to be able to retire in his 60s or 70s. ‘I haven’t gone [to social security] to ask or anything,’ he laughs. No, because I’ve heard that there are some that, that complete the 62 years and later [laugh] they grab a check or two and they’re gone. They die! [laughs] And they say, ‘Almost ready, almost ready’…they die!
Unlike periods of dioquis – the frustration of waiting for work – the liminality workers encounter in older age comes from the inability to exit work. Here, rather than waiting to work, they are waiting to retire. They do not confront these challenges as passive victims, but maintain agency and pride in their work. One day in June, I call Osvaldo, who I have kept in touch with. I’m hoping to meet up with him while I’m in town. We reschedule for late July, because at the cusp of his 80th birthday, Osvaldo is proudly the oldest and one of the strongest men building grain silos in Washington state. As in any other industry, some do not want to stop working. Yet when workers are constrained from retiring, continuing to work – and wait for work – is not a meaningful choice. Later, after Osvaldo has returned from Washington and we’ve sat down to talk, he highlights this quandary: ‘That’s what I don’t understand. I’m receiving the check right? From social security. But … they give me $400, very little … how am I going to be able to retire?’
Conclusion: Power, inequality, and being without doing
This article has illuminated the importance of not just work time but wait time for migrant agricultural workers’ short- and long-term economic stability. Surplus value is extracted not just by intensifying work rhythms and trying to make two days out of one, as Marx famously observed, but also through capital’s capacity to impose slowdowns and waiting periods, during which workers are ‘being without doing’: dioquis. While dioquis, workers cannot control how long they will have to wait. Unpacking how they wait to leave, move to work, wait to work while at work, and wait to retire, this analysis shows how waiting leads to economic precarity.
Liminality – encapsulated in the spaces and times of dioquis and in unrealized retirement – expresses action forestalled indefinitely. Liminality inheres in the labor process through dioquis. Workers occupy liminal spaces when they wait in the borderlands; in the unregulated spaces of transit between ‘home’ and work’; and while idling in motels and trailers within seasons. In these spaces of dioquis workers are in a suspended state waiting for action to happen (Lahad, 2012), waiting for the next productive event (van der Berg and O’Neill, 2017). They are seeking work, but not yet able to earn productively, as opposed to those who have dropped out of the workforce or devoted themselves to leisure. The long-term consequences of these liminal periods come to light when workers reach retirement age, but cannot stop working – stuck, now in reverse, between work and non-work. Thus dioquis corresponds to both short- and long-term precarity.
Tracing these liminal spaces and times of dioquis reveals how contingent labor processes structure unequal experiences of time. While agricultural labor tempos have long been shaped by unpredictable weather and crop cycles, newer kinds of contingent work are similarly structured with uncompensated waiting. Platform-based workers, from Uber and Lyft drivers to restaurant delivery workers to MTurkers, wait in between rides, orders, and tasks. This time is unpaid, unpredictable, and required for them to obtain work. It is dioquis. Like farmworkers, Uber drivers do not know how much work they will get, in a given day or for a given ride: the app does not tell them where they are going until they pick up the customer, and the payment algorithm is constantly shifting.
A number of other workers endure unpaid waiting periods. Agricultural processing workers for DOLE fruits are not paid for time spent ‘donning and doffing’ their work gear (Rubin, 2013). The 5th Circuit determined that oil refinery workers building scaffolds in Port Arthur, Texas, were not entitled to pay for up to 90 minutes of wait time between getting dropped off in buses and starting work (Brecher and Barnes, 2017). Legal battles over dioquis illuminate the state’s capacity to set limits to or to facilitate capital’s increased efficiency in exploiting workers, in this case through requiring them to wait on demand.
Besides uncompensated off-the-clock time, workers confront temporal uncertainty through new technology. Most major retail and restaurant chains rely on scheduling software that predicts exactly when and how many workers to schedule, maximizing profit and cutting workforce costs. Consequently, workers at companies like McDonalds and Starbucks might receive short notice on shift times; endure erratically spaced shifts; be off the clock but ‘on call’ and required to come in on short notice; and face early dismissal when sales are slow (Kantor, 2014). These technologies can wreak particular havoc on workers with intense time pressures like single mothers.
Dioquis illuminates the power dynamics of making the poor wait for unknown durations for what they need. While those with less power have long been made to wait (Schwartz, 1975), technology and structural transformations – from algorithmic platforms structuring gig work to corporate scheduling software – have created new configurations of temporal domination (Reid, 2013). Neoliberal policies push the poor to wait for basic state services (Auyero, 2012, Ozolina-Fitzgerald, 2016). In the urban US emergency room, race and gender intersect to determine how staff apply criminal stigma to subject certain individuals to longer periods of waiting unrelated to medical indicators (Lara-Millán, 2014). These individuals exist in a liminal state parallel to dioquis in that they are made by those with more power to wait for what they need. Waiting, then, becomes a means of further marginalizing the poor.
Describing how Latvian state employment officials keep job seekers in long-term limbo through making them wait while blaming them for not embracing the active lives neoliberalism demands of them, Ozolina-Fitzgerald concludes that ‘Movement in the contemporary world is a privilege disguised as the norm’ (2016: 469). There is a pattern to who is made to wait – who is subject to being without doing – and who can be mobile and active in the fast-paced global economy. Yet as this analysis of dioquis shows, individuals displaced from economic opportunity can experience immobility whether they remain stuck in one particular location or whether they travel across multiple geographies in pursuit of work. Such movement, as in the case of migrant agricultural workers navigating work and waiting across seasons, is a limited privilege when it offers no security. It can be a burden itself when it increases risk. Research should attend to the experiences and consequences of these liminal spaces and times of suspended action, how individuals experience them across and within particular settings, and how they enact agency within them. 7
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Gil Eyal, Jess Gilbert, Mae Ngai, Adam Reich, Van C. Tran, and Alyssa Pelish for their invaluable feedback, comments, and support, P & D for so generously lending me their wonderful home, UWSCC for sharing their lovely space, and the dedicated and brilliant advocates I had the privilege of working with and learning from. Any mistakes are solely my own.
Dedication
Este artículo se dedica al recuerdo del Sr. H. Alaniz, quien me dio la inspiración para dedicarme a esta investigación, y a todos los trabajadores agrícolas que he tenido el privilegio de conocer. Gracias por tenerme la confianza y compartir sus historias conmigo, las cuales espero honrar.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received financial support from Columbia University and the Columbia University Department of Sociology.