Shared Social Space and Strategies to Find Work: An Exploratory Study of Mexican Day Laborers in Freehold, N.J

DAY LABOR HAS BECOME A VISIBLE AND VITAL COMPONENT OF THE ECONOMY overall band a major element of nonstandard employment strategies for disenfranchised prospective workers. For migrant workers, particularly men, day labor serves as an important means to employment, offering them a chance to find work despite barriers such as immigration status or lack of well-paid work in the primary economy (Valenzuela, 2003; Catanzarite, 2003). Informal day labor, in which prospective workers congregate daily in public spaces such as street corners to solicit work, is the focus of this article. We will examine how Mexican day laborers struggle to negotiate two contradictory demands: the need to present themselves visibly in public spaces, such as parking lots and sidewalks, to attract the notice of potential employers, and the need to avoid provoking whites in a town that has an organized opposition to the presence of Latin migrants. Using participant observation data and structured interviews, this article examines the strategies Mexican men use to negotiate survival while presenting themselves in public to find work. We argue that migrant men are conscious of their marginalized role in the shared social space of a particular town, and regularly develop strategies to minimize the potential for being forcibly removed from a social space where they are subordinate, but for which they are dependent to sustain economic survival (Lim 2004; Soja 1989; Lefebvre, 1991). Key in the strategy for negotiating this social space is the presentation of self as clean, quiet, and orderly, qualities that dominant white citizens would presumably embrace. In this analysis, social space is not understood as simply a geographic area. Rather, it consists of conceived spaces, and as such is not inured from the social, political, and economic hierarchies of the wider society (Lefebvre, 1991). The question of who can utilize such spaces, and how, is largely determined by the will of the dominant classes. Marginalized individuals typically develop strategies of survival, including identifying and abiding by norms defined by those in more privileged positions. "Who gets to 'represent' space and formulate what is spatially (un)desirable is contingent on the power of the dominant person/group" (Lim, 2004: 1764). Actors orient themselves according to their perceptions of space and make determinations about how they want to act in those spaces; they also decide if there are certain spaces they should avoid (Lefebvre, 1991). Of particular consequence to the migrant workers in our study is the singular challenge of simultaneously negotiating the social space of Freehold, New Jersey, as visible actors and willing wage earners. In what follows, we explain the efforts of Mexican migrants to mitigate opposition to their public presence by managing how they present themselves in this predominantly white social space. Their efforts include strategies of managing noise, addressing public fears about large groups of men on street corners, and acknowledging long-held stereotypes of Mexicans as dirty. We present findings from a two-year study in Freehold using ethnographic methods and semi-structured interviews with undocumented day laborers. The article explores how these Mexican men managed the need to attract the notice of potential employers as they drove through town by presenting themselves visibly in public spaces, while avoiding anything that would provoke the fear and ire of local residents who had organized opposition to their presence. These divergent demands entail risk for Mexican day laborers whose conspicuity in this social space is essential to finding work. Mexican migrants, most of whom are undocumented immigrants from rural provinces such as Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Puebla, began arriving in Freehold just before the year 2000. They arrived hoping to find work in landscaping and construction, thus benefiting from New Jersey's housing and development boom. …