Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor

by Wilfredo Alvarez

Overview

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.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814214671
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	03/31/2022
Series:	Global Latin/o Americas
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Wilfredo Alvarez is Associate Professor of Communication and Media at Utica University.

Read an Excerpt

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.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

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 and Design Quarterly

From the Publisher