Language, Immigration and Labor

Negotiating Work in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

E. DuBord

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137301017
• eBook ISBN: 9781137301024
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores dominant ideologies about citizenship, nation, and language that frame the everyday lives of Spanish-speaking immigrant day laborers in Arizona. It examines the value of speaking English in this context and the dynamics of intercultural communication in fast-paced job negotiations.

1

The Social Context of Language Contact in the Informal Economy

In the predawn hours of the Arizona winter, shivering day laborers, their shoulders hunched forward in their jackets against the sharp desert air, huddled around a wobbling card table that served as the Day Labor Center’s (DLC’s) operational headquarters in the parking lot of Hope Christian Church. At precisely 6 o’clock, workers distributed tickets for that morning’s hiring raffle. The sound of a voice reading off ticket numbers and the response of ticket holders calling out their names intermingled with the hiss and glug of coffee percolating in the industrial pot powered by extension cords snaking across the concrete. As the list grew, the serious hush morphed into murmurs and then conversations. Everyone knew that if your name was more than halfway down the hiring list, there was little chance you would get a job that day. Some of the workers who had not been lucky in that morning’s raffle got out their cell phones and started calling employers or friends who might have a lead on a job. Others would try to negotiate directly with employers who came to the Day Labor Center that day and compete with workers who were further up on the hiring list. A few workers might sign up as volunteers for the morning—monitoring the hiring list, cleaning the bathroom, or directing traffic—which insured their place at the top of the list the next day. Some would just settle in and wait, hoping that it would be a busy day at the DLC, while others would drift off to nearby street corners to find employers who would circumvent the system.

The U.S.-Mexico borderlands are defined by a history of contact between people and nations. This dynamic and globalized region of intense interaction is the product of long-term political, socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic contact, coupled with the regular influx of economic migrants from South to North. The state of Arizona is the broader context of this book’s ethnolinguistic exploration of immigrant day laborers, a place where the intense regulation of immigration, labor, and language policy shapes the reality of their day-to-day lives. Based on research with Mexican and Central American day laborers and their employers in Southern Arizona, this book explores how immigrant workers negotiate identities in their interpersonal interactions. More specifically, Language, Immigration and Labor: Negotiating Work in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands examines how day laborers in the informal labor market perform linguistic identities and assert their desirability as potential employees in ways that may contest or reinforce their socioeconomic marginalization. Through their everyday interactions, day laborers sought out venues for their socioeconomic and linguistic integration in response to dominant discourses and institutional actions that attempted to block their integration.

The literature on language contact between Spanish and English in the United States has typically explored the result of contact in the language practices of established immigrant groups or U.S.-born Latinos/as rather than the process of contact itself. In contrast, the current study focuses on the process and point of contact between new immigrants and people from other cultural and linguistic groups. Grounded in critical discourse analysis, performance theory, and critical race theory, this research intervenes in research on Spanish in the United States by linking the analysis of macro-level language ideologies with the micro-level realities of face-to-face job negotiations in the informal economy. Ethnographic sociolinguistic studies on Spanish in the United States have tended to examine the experiences of women, youth, children, and families, typically in educational or familial settings¹ (Urciuoli, 1996; Zentella, 1997; Bailey, 2000; González, 2001; Schecter & Baily, 2002; Bejarano, 2005; Farr, 2006; Cashman, 2005, 2008; Mendoza-Denton, 2008; Menard-Warwick, 2009). This study is unique in the field because of its focus on Spanish-speaking men, most of whom were very recent immigrants, and their language practices in the informal labor market.

Language and Globalization

Responding to Blommaert’s (2010) call for analysis of the role of the state in influencing underprivileged populations’ lived experiences in the sociolinguistic study of globalization, this book explores labor migrants’ everyday responses to policies and discourses of state control that monitor their transnational movement and social and linguistic integration. By performing transnational identities, the economic migrants in this study legitimize their unauthorized status, social integration, and participation in the local labor market. Through these “performances” they 1) express their cultural citizenship as responsible and productive members of society, 2) assert their right to linguistic inclusion by seeking out venues for English-language acquisition, and 3) project individual iden-tities as reliable and hard-working laborers. These performances allow day laborers to negotiate identities “from below.” Guarnizo and Smith (1998) explain that

Identities forged “from below” are not inherently subversive or counter-hegemonic. Yet they are different from hegemonic identities imposed from above. The process of subaltern identity formation is a process of constant struggle—a struggle in which discursive communities produce narratives of belong, resistance, or escape. (p. 23)

This is the middle ground I seek with Language, Immigration and Labor: Negotiating Work in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. By taking both a macro- and micro-approach of analysis as a research strategy, I foreground the ongoing tension between agency and institutional structures (Guarnizo & Smith, 1998, p. 24).

This book ultimately examines the ways in which popular discourses and official policies about language, immigration, and labor reverberate down to the interpersonal level and are enacted and contested in everyday encounters at the DLC. Following Sorrells’s (2010) push for a critical intercultural communication perspective in the context of globalization, I understand relationships of power and inequality to be in dialogue with acts of agency. Individuals have agency to perform and contest identities, but it is also crucial that we situate intercultural encounters in the broader social, historical, and political context that informs contact.

Haugen’s (1972) concept of “ecology of language” describes this kind of interaction between language and its social environment. The linguistic ecology is comprised of speakers’ understanding of the relationship between their own and other languages as observed in social interactions. I understand the linguistic ecology as both a site and a framework for interpreting language ideologies and language practices. Newly arrived immigrants, like the participants in the present research, negotiate their own place in the linguistic ecology through a process that seeks to reconcile the sometimes contradictory nature of competing ecosystems found in sending and receiving communities. Immigrants’ understanding of their own positionality—for example, documented versus undocumented or permanent versus temporary—informs their adaptation to this change in environment. Language behaviors are not static, but rather are the result of linguistic perceptions that are constantly redefined through interactions and institutions contained within this linguistic ecology (Haugen, 1972).

In the case of Spanish-English contact in the Southwest, it is pertinent to examine the wider social context of social hierarchies and interactions that influence speakers and their use of both languages. The ideologies and institutions that make up the linguistic ecosystem are both the backdrop and stage directions that influence the scripting of face-to-face interactions. Martínez (2003) has noted that linguistic ecosystems are mutually determined by infrastructure and superstructure. He defines infrastructure as the socioeconomic institutions that determine and govern language contact and interaction (such as schools, government, and business) and superstructure as the ideologies that simultaneously explicate social and institutional imbalances of languages and their speakers (such as attitudes, stereotypes, and definitions of ethnolinguistic boundaries). Infrastructure motivates the superstructure, which in turn ratifies the infrastructure. Infrastructure and superstructures cyclically inform linguistic praxes that reflect and/or contest these structures. Linguistic ecosystems, then, act as an ideological filter through which language passes in the construction of social order.

Language and Borders

I situate my research as looking beyond traditionally drawn borders of ethnolinguistic contact as Pratt (1987) and Urciuoli (1995) have done when they question the imagining of languages as bounded entities that are representative of a people or nation (Anderson, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990). Urciuoli asserts that “Borders are places where commonality ends abruptly; border-making language elements stand for and performatively bring into being such places” (1995, p. 539). I seek to examine the places where language is not bound, but rather reaches across social categories in the context of contact.

Arizona provides a productive site for the study of languages in contact because of the multilayered coexistence of U.S. Latinos/as and Anglos, new and established Latino/a immigrants, all in interaction with each other and other social groups. Alvarez (1995) stresses the dynamic nature of migrant communities that define themselves through practice rather than through place. Analyzing the negotiation of employment at the DLC allows us to explore the ways in which individuals (re)construct identities through discursive exchanges.

Scholars of border regions and contact zones have often focused on the cultural and linguistic production of minority groups as a result of their contact with dominant groups without examining actual intercultural encounters as a part of the process of contact. Saldívar (1997) notes the heterogeneous nature of cultural constructions in the U.S.-Mexico border region, resulting in a kind of cultural hybridity. But rather than focus on a hybrid culture in the border region, which implies a fixed—albeit new—social construction, I emphasize the dynamic nature of the process of ethnolinguistic contact. Vila (2003) calls on border theory and ethnography to emphasize the crossing of borders—both geographic and social—rather than the demarcation of limits and boundaries. This is what I propose to do by focusing on the discursive practices of contact.

My research contributes to the study of language contact by exploring how the confluence of languages in intercultural communication results in the production of discourse. Drawing on Pratt’s (1987) definition of “contact zones,” I understand borders as places of colonial encounter where historically separated people establish relationships based on socioeconomic inequalities. Not only do geopolitical boundaries divide social groups but so do socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. The borderlands are a place where people continually negotiate perceived social divisions.

The Day Labor Center

Hope Christian Church and its small progressive congregation—in collaboration with several affiliated nonprofit and religious organizations—sponsored the development of the DLC in a place I call Saguaro City, Arizona.² This program that served immigrant day laborers from Mexico and Central America officially began in 2006, and aligned with Hope Christian Church’s mission to advocate for social and economic justice in both the local and the global community. The creation of the DLC was part of a larger social movement of immigrant rights activism in Saguaro City and Arizona in general. The individuals and organizations that contributed to the establishment of the DLC followed the two tenets of what Van Ham (2006) has termed “civic religion” in Arizona activism, which includes 1) a belief in the worth of all people and 2) citizens’ obligation to correct the wrongs of the state when the state has failed to meet the needs of its subjects (p. 162). Following this tradition, the establishment of the DLC at Hope Christian Church stemmed from the idea that all people have inalienable human and workers’ rights regardless of their place of origin or legal status. The organizers of the DLC intentionally did not inquire about workers’ legal status, yet by collaborating with immigrant day laborers, the church members, activists, and affiliated organizations involved in the DLC took a stand on governmental policies that have limited immigrants’ participation in the official economy.

In Fine’s (2006) exhaustive study of worker centers across the United States, she defines these organizations as “community-based mediating institutions that provide support to low-wage workers” (p. 2). Fine uses this umbrella term to describe several different types of ­organizations—including day labor centers—that do advocacy work and often provide additional services such as legal counseling, leadership training, or English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. Their efforts are focused on employment sectors where labor abuses are common, such as among restaurant workers, janitors, farm laborers, domestic workers, and factory workers. Many worker centers emerged specifically to promote the integration and economic security of immigrants, which was the case with 122 of the 137 centers that Fine surveyed.³ Fine notes that it is often difficult for transnational migrants to invest in the development and establishment of worker centers because of their transitory status. This is especially true for undocumented migrants, as I observed with members of the DLC in Saguaro City.

Addressing a Local Issue

In Saguaro City, day laborers had historically gathered in the Cactus Ridge neighborhood surrounding Hope Christian Church as early as the 1960s, when the Arizona State Employment Office operated one of many Casual Employment Offices nearby. In these early years, employers and their contractors transported workers by bus to nearby rural areas to do agricultural work and for other kinds of temporary labor in Saguaro City. After the Casual Employment Office closed in the mid-1980s, day laborers and their employers continued to gather on street corners in the early morning hours in the surrounding neighborhood.

In the years leading up to the creation of the DLC, workers waited for potential employers on nearby street corners and in front of the church, competing with each other in a system that could best be described as survival of the fittest. There were several issues that affected the surrounding neighborhood as a result of this informal hiring system. As workers waited for work, they left trash in front of private homes, fences broke when workers leaned against them, and men were relieving themselves wherever they could because there were no sanitary facilities. There was also a preschool located on the church’s property, and workers often waited for employers near the fenced-in playground, which made parents, teachers, and students uncomfortable. In a conversation with Saúl, a middle-aged Latino who had grown up in Cactus Ridge, he related how the presence of day laborers in the neighborhood had affected him person...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Social Context of Language Contact in the Informal Economy
• 2 The Regulation of Immigration and Language
• 3 “If I knew the language, don’t think I would be here”: Shifting Understandings of the Linguistic Capital of English
• 4 Solidarity, Rapport, and Co-membership: Employers’ Hiring Practices
• 5 Performing the Good Worker
• 6 Conceptualizing Intercultural Communication
• Notes
• References
• Index