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.
