Hanging Out Together, Surviving on Your Own: The Precarious Communities of Day Laborers

Abstract

How does one make sense of a group of migrant men who spend much of their time together over several years, share a space as well as a social position, and behave in some respects like close friends, yet do not develop stable relationships of solidarity and collective forms of self-perception? What are the micro-foundations of these precarious communities? Drawing upon eight months of ethnographic fieldwork at three day labor sites in Los Angeles, this article explores three interlocking processes that sustain one of the most radical forms of marginality in contemporary the United States. It analyzes the economic, political, and cultural dispossession of day laborers through (1) market competition, (2) the embodiment of an undocumented status, and (3) the internalization of cultural exclusion. These individualizing mechanisms are argued to truncate basic forms of mutual solidarity, producing and reproducing the precarious communities of day laborers.