Masculinity in the Workplace: The Case of Mexican Immigrant Gardeners

Abstract

In many parts of the United States, jardinería, or suburban maintenance gardening, has become a gendered occupational niche for Mexican immigrant men. Based on participant observation research with a group of Mexican immigrant gardeners in Los Angeles, this article examines the construction of masculinity in a workplace occupied by Mexican immigrant men. These jardineros construct, affirm, challenge, and negotiate their masculinity through their routine work activities and through their daily on-the-job interactions with their fellow workers. Moving beyond a sort of reiteration of a flat, cultural concept of machismo, jardinero masculinity stresses a more nuanced structural understanding of Mexican immigrant men’s masculinity and how it is intertwined with their performance of masculinized ‘‘dirty work’’ in private households. It is a distinctly working-class form of masculinity, which results from the interplay between very specific, localized cultural constructions, and deployment in the context of racialized nativism and citizenship hierarchy in the United States.