Scratching out a living : Latinos, race, and work in the Deep South
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Scratching out a living : Latinos, race, and work in the Deep South
（California series in public anthropology, 38）
University of California Press, c2016
- : pbk
Available at 2 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
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
by "Nielsen BookData"