Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor: Global Latin/o Americas
Autor Wilfredo Alvarezen Limba Engleză Paperback – 31 mar 2022
Winner, 2023 NCA Ethnography Division Best Book Award
Wilfredo Alvarez’s Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor is an exploration into co-cultural communication practices within the workplace. Specifically, Alvarez investigates how Latin American immigrant janitors communicate from their marginalized standpoints in a predominantly White academic organization. He examines how custodial workers perceive, interpret, and thematize routine messages regarding race, ethnicity, social class, immigrant status, and occupation, and how those messages and overall communicative experiences affect both their work and personal lives.
A Latin American immigrant himself, Alvarez relates his own experiences to those of the research participants. His positionality informs and enhances his research as he demonstrates how everyday interpersonal encounters create discursive spaces that welcome or disqualify people based on symbolic and social capital. Alvarez offers valuable insights into the lived experiences of critical––but often undervalued and invisible––organizational members. Through theoretical insights and research data, he provides practical recommendations for organizational leaders to improve how they can relate to and support all stakeholders.
Wilfredo Alvarez’s Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor is an exploration into co-cultural communication practices within the workplace. Specifically, Alvarez investigates how Latin American immigrant janitors communicate from their marginalized standpoints in a predominantly White academic organization. He examines how custodial workers perceive, interpret, and thematize routine messages regarding race, ethnicity, social class, immigrant status, and occupation, and how those messages and overall communicative experiences affect both their work and personal lives.
A Latin American immigrant himself, Alvarez relates his own experiences to those of the research participants. His positionality informs and enhances his research as he demonstrates how everyday interpersonal encounters create discursive spaces that welcome or disqualify people based on symbolic and social capital. Alvarez offers valuable insights into the lived experiences of critical––but often undervalued and invisible––organizational members. Through theoretical insights and research data, he provides practical recommendations for organizational leaders to improve how they can relate to and support all stakeholders.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814258262
ISBN-10: 0814258263
Pagini: 178
Ilustrații: 1 table
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.29 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Global Latin/o Americas
ISBN-10: 0814258263
Pagini: 178
Ilustrații: 1 table
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.29 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Global Latin/o Americas
Recenzii
“A valuable study for leaders in higher education interested in relational processes across hierarchies, as well as scholars and students in the social sciences interested in organizational communication. By emphasizing the work experiences of historically marginalized people in lower-status occupations, Alvarez makes a significant contribution to the literature on social identities, and his focus on Latin American immigrant workers expands our understanding of how occupational identities intersect with immigration status.” —Gustavo H. R. Santos, Society for the Anthropology of Work
“With its focus on Latinx immigrant essential workers, Everyday Dirty Work could not be more timely. Alvarez’s centering of translinguistic communication in his ethnography is unprecedented, and the new perspectives he unearths on the intersections of race, class, occupation, language, and immigration status have clear, actionable implications for positive change.” —Joanne Belknap, author of The Invisible Woman: Gender, Crime, and Justice
“The book appears to be particularly good at engaging with the vast array of interdisciplinary literature to date, adding fresh findings and analysis when relevant. Both academic readers and readers in organizational leadership roles can benefit from the author’s analysis.” —Keumjae Park, Ethnic and Racial Studies
“Alvarez’s monograph serves as an exigent reminder that as the field of communications and its adjacent disciplines start unraveling more complex communicative phenomena that cut across intersectional identities, communication scholars and practitioners need to take a step back to heed those salient communicative sites to explore more what communication could mean in and for our research, teaching, and everyday encounters. Alvarez’s audacious attempt at a less visible institutional site thus accomplishes this exigent need.” —Meng-Hsien Neal Liu, Communication Design Quarterly
“Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor is a crucial work...[Alvarez’s] approach yielded theoretical, empirical, and practical insights into the relationships between white male, English-speaking supervisors and Latina/o, Latina immigrant, Spanish-speaking janitors doing ‘dirty work.’” —Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, Contemporary Sociology
“Alvarez offers an empirically driven, theoretically sophisticated, and touchingly real account of everyday, stigmatizing workplace communication experiences of Latin American immigrant janitors at a U.S. university...Communication researchers will find Alvarez’s account of great interest. The book may also be of value to scholars working in the wider domain of social sciences and humanities, but also to practitioners and leaders in non-profit, academic organizations that aspire to ‘walk the talk’ of inclusivity.” —Anna Milena Galazka, Work and Occupations
“Alvarez expands communication research by avoiding essentializing or universalizing race. Instead, he elaborates on the heterogeneous and interconnected ways in which race, class, immigration status, and occupational stereotypes shape communication in everyday life.” —Neill Esquibel-Kennedy, New Mexico Historical Review
“This book offers a detailed and nuanced account of workplace interactions for one group of marginalised but vital US workers that adds useful insights to a growing debate.” —Frances Myers, Work, Employment, and Society
Notă biografică
Wilfredo Alvarez is Associate Professor of Communication and Media at Utica University.
Extras
Today, in the United States, the (Latin American) immigrant as a social imaginary is filled with tension and disapproval (Villegas, 2019). And, worse, that imaginary maps from the abstract concept of an immigrant to actual immigrant bodies, contributing to the hypermarginalization of Latin American immigrants (Bogel-Burroughs, 2019). Accordingly, public discourse is not just conceptual: It can have serious implications for immigrants in many social contexts, beginning with the link between societal discourses and interpersonal interactions (K. R. Chávez, 2009). Immigrants are “read” as unwanted and potentially dangerous by individuals who draw from negative societal discourses to make sense of and to interact with immigrants (Alvarez, 2018). In other words, the target group of the discourse becomes the embodied representation of those discourses; consequently, this group is the target of those who follow the fundamental ideas that those discourses advance. As a whole, these observations suggest that when a group is demonized consistently in popular culture, it typically is the case that we hear about aggression toward those group members (Alvarez, 2016, 2018).
Media and societal images are deeply ingrained in interpersonal interactions between dominant group members and immigrants, especially in the case of a power differential (e.g., police and immigrant, supervisor and worker). A prime example of this transfer from negative discourse to negative interactions (especially aggression) is the Chandler Roundup, a July 1997 immigration raid in Chandler, Arizona. In her study of how law enforcement agents and presumed migrants interact, K. R. Chávez (2009) discusses the role of history in shaping those interactions, especially in historically conflict-ridden contexts such as the state of Arizona (i.e., conflicts due to Mexican immigration). Law enforcement officers’ perception of brown-skinned people as outsiders who deserved to be removed from the country was, in part, driven by the corresponding societal narrative.
Another, more recent example of this dynamic is one of the many mass shootings in the United States in 2019 (a total of over 300 at the time of writing). A young White male drove nine hours to El Paso, Texas, and opened fire on a group of Walmart shoppers (mostly Mexicans and Mexican Americans). In this instance, the killer was a self-avowed White supremacist who sought to kill Mexicans because he perceived that they were “invading” the country (Bogel-Burroughs, 2019). This rhetorical framing is increasingly common in mass media and encourages some consumers of that media to act accordingly. This shooting has accelerated a national conversation about the relationship between the promotion of hateful discourse in the mass media (social media in particular) and physical violence—specifically, race-based hate against primarily Black and brown people (Alvarez, 2021, 2022; Ott, 2017; Ott & Dickinson, 2019).
Understanding the influence of broad societal messages on interpersonal interactions also requires analyzing common social contexts such as the workplace (Zlolniski, 2003). The struggle for legitimacy and inclusion is especially amplified at work, where communication is central. Still, the communicative experiences of working-class Latin American immigrants in service occupations have not been well documented (for an exception, see Amason et al., 1999). For instance, a search in multiple major academic online databases yields only a few relevant articles from the keywords “Latina/o/x” or “Latin American,” “Organizational” or “Workplace,” “Service Work(ers)” and “Communication.” This outcome suggests that researchers have not seized the opportunity to conduct investigations that illuminate the communication-related service work experiences of Latin American immigrants in the United States. My work is motivated by this opportunity. In the following sections, I will identify the key communication processes that are at the center of understanding this book’s subject in depth.
Media and societal images are deeply ingrained in interpersonal interactions between dominant group members and immigrants, especially in the case of a power differential (e.g., police and immigrant, supervisor and worker). A prime example of this transfer from negative discourse to negative interactions (especially aggression) is the Chandler Roundup, a July 1997 immigration raid in Chandler, Arizona. In her study of how law enforcement agents and presumed migrants interact, K. R. Chávez (2009) discusses the role of history in shaping those interactions, especially in historically conflict-ridden contexts such as the state of Arizona (i.e., conflicts due to Mexican immigration). Law enforcement officers’ perception of brown-skinned people as outsiders who deserved to be removed from the country was, in part, driven by the corresponding societal narrative.
Another, more recent example of this dynamic is one of the many mass shootings in the United States in 2019 (a total of over 300 at the time of writing). A young White male drove nine hours to El Paso, Texas, and opened fire on a group of Walmart shoppers (mostly Mexicans and Mexican Americans). In this instance, the killer was a self-avowed White supremacist who sought to kill Mexicans because he perceived that they were “invading” the country (Bogel-Burroughs, 2019). This rhetorical framing is increasingly common in mass media and encourages some consumers of that media to act accordingly. This shooting has accelerated a national conversation about the relationship between the promotion of hateful discourse in the mass media (social media in particular) and physical violence—specifically, race-based hate against primarily Black and brown people (Alvarez, 2021, 2022; Ott, 2017; Ott & Dickinson, 2019).
Understanding the influence of broad societal messages on interpersonal interactions also requires analyzing common social contexts such as the workplace (Zlolniski, 2003). The struggle for legitimacy and inclusion is especially amplified at work, where communication is central. Still, the communicative experiences of working-class Latin American immigrants in service occupations have not been well documented (for an exception, see Amason et al., 1999). For instance, a search in multiple major academic online databases yields only a few relevant articles from the keywords “Latina/o/x” or “Latin American,” “Organizational” or “Workplace,” “Service Work(ers)” and “Communication.” This outcome suggests that researchers have not seized the opportunity to conduct investigations that illuminate the communication-related service work experiences of Latin American immigrants in the United States. My work is motivated by this opportunity. In the following sections, I will identify the key communication processes that are at the center of understanding this book’s subject in depth.
Cuprins
Introduction Communication in Everyday Life
Arriving in Nuebayol
Language, Communication, and the Immigrant Experience
The Significance of Culture for Communicating (Identity)
Key Communication Processes at Work
Research Framework: Converging/Diverging Immigrant Realities
Target Audiences, Objectives, and Organization of the Book
Chapter 1 Research Methods
The Research Site: A Public Ivy in the Southwest
Race Relations at RMU
Mitigating Racism on Campus
Access to the Site and Interest in the Study
Positioning Myself as a Researcher
Situating Work Experiences Within an Interpretive Framework
Researcher’s Assumptions: My Story, Their Story, Our Story?
Chapter 2 Communicating at Work
Workplace Communication
Case Study Findings and Research Implications
Summary
Chapter 3 Communicating Co-Culturally
Co-Cultural Communication Theory
Co-Cultural Communication Orientation
Co-Cultural Communication Research
Case Study and Research Implications
Pushing Back on Co-Cultural Communication
Summary
Chapter 4 Communicating Social Identity
Communication and Social Identity Research
Case Study and Research Implications
Summary
Chapter 5 Encounters With Strangers
The (English) Language Dilemma
Achieving Communicative Integration
Summary
Chapter 6 Research Implications, Advocacy, and Future Directions
Theoretical Implications
Practical Implications: Institutional Advocacy
Practical Recommendations
Shifting My Positionality: From Watching to Doing
Limitations
Directions for Future Research
Closing Thoughts
Appendix A Interview Guide
Appendix B Guía de Entrevista
References
Indez
Arriving in Nuebayol
Language, Communication, and the Immigrant Experience
The Significance of Culture for Communicating (Identity)
Key Communication Processes at Work
Research Framework: Converging/Diverging Immigrant Realities
Target Audiences, Objectives, and Organization of the Book
Chapter 1 Research Methods
The Research Site: A Public Ivy in the Southwest
Race Relations at RMU
Mitigating Racism on Campus
Access to the Site and Interest in the Study
Positioning Myself as a Researcher
Situating Work Experiences Within an Interpretive Framework
Researcher’s Assumptions: My Story, Their Story, Our Story?
Chapter 2 Communicating at Work
Workplace Communication
Case Study Findings and Research Implications
Summary
Chapter 3 Communicating Co-Culturally
Co-Cultural Communication Theory
Co-Cultural Communication Orientation
Co-Cultural Communication Research
Case Study and Research Implications
Pushing Back on Co-Cultural Communication
Summary
Chapter 4 Communicating Social Identity
Communication and Social Identity Research
Case Study and Research Implications
Summary
Chapter 5 Encounters With Strangers
The (English) Language Dilemma
Achieving Communicative Integration
Summary
Chapter 6 Research Implications, Advocacy, and Future Directions
Theoretical Implications
Practical Implications: Institutional Advocacy
Practical Recommendations
Shifting My Positionality: From Watching to Doing
Limitations
Directions for Future Research
Closing Thoughts
Appendix A Interview Guide
Appendix B Guía de Entrevista
References
Indez
Descriere
Centers Latin American immigrant janitors’ lived experiences to analyze their workplace communication in the face of linguistic, cultural, and perceptual barriers.