Abstracts Anthropology

Desde abajo How Day Workers and Domestic Workers Re-value Labor Power at Casa Latina

by Raul Garcia

This dissertation examines the rise of jornaleros and jornaleras in the Pacific Northwest at a community center in Seattle Washington called Casa Latina and critiques the contemporary interpretations of the jornalero/a experience, both regionally and nationally. The objective of the study is to understand how day laborers organize to negotiate their own labor value in urban centers and the impact of the current political milieu on the ability of those workers to self-organize. The principal research question of the proposed study addresses issues related to the political nature of the concepts of skill, labor value, and working-class agency. This research project raises the following questions: Are day laborers really the deskilled cheap labor depicted by most popular and scholarly accounts, or have they organized to redefine their value as skilled craft workers? What are the political and organizational dynamics that transform “cheap unskilled labor” into “well-paid highly-skilled craft work”? The analysis of the day laborer experience incorporates a diversity of interpretations including the application of the epistemology of Chicana/o anthropology, critical anthropology, and alterNative epistemologies. Moreover, this dissertation challenges mainstream economic interpretations of capitalism and proposes an autonomist perspective of workers and questions the centrality of the “informal labor market.” Through the application of a collaborative ethnographic and participant observation research with mostly Mexican-origin and Latina/o day laborers at a community center, the study concluded with a critical perspective of the day laborer experience. Based on in depth interviews, the research project unveiled the weaknesses of previous analysis on the jornalero/a experience: it rejected the common assumptions of day laborer studies grounded on theories of “globalization” and the centrality of the “informal labor market.” It explored and expended an ignored aspect of the day labor experience: the important role of women in the jornalero experience, thus placing women as important actors in the history of the working class in the region and the national level. Women set their own rules and participated in their own “asamblea”, exposing the politicization of women activists in decision making, political campaigns and political power. Most significant, the analysis of the day labor experience through the lens of an “autonomista” perspective unveiled how workers in Casa Latina self-governed themselves through the “asamblea.” It examined how workers organized and governed themselves: “los trabajadores en control (the value of worker agency). More specifically, it examined the self-valorization of the day workers in Casa Latina by observing how they set wages and refuse work. In this context, the day laborers demonstrate agency and re-value the labor power with the refusal to work.