Abstract: This article highlights the invisibility of farmworkers in Michigan, a state dependent on migrant labor for more than one hundred years. The study describes migrant housing camps using data from fieldwork, visits to housing camps, and the shadowing of outreach staff from service organizations. Although regulated, accommodations are minimal, substandard, and overcrowded, affecting the health and well-being of workers. The study describes what farmworkers do in their scant evening hours, the vulnerability of H-2A guest workers, the meticulousness accompanying outreach, and how farmworkers are visible to outreach staff. The study concludes by highlighting how farmworkers are just as invisible as are their housing camps, their contributions to the food movement, and their erasure from historic tales and promotional materials in local tourist towns, which stress the contributions of only some groups. The article underscores the value of outreach, the outstanding work performed by outreach staff, and avenues for increasing the visibility and advocacy on behalf of farmworkers.Este artículo resalta la invisibilidad de los trabajadores agrícolas en Michigan, un estado que hace más de cien años depende de la mano de obra migrante. El estudio describe los campamentos de vivienda para inmigrantes usando los datos obtenidos del trabajo de campo, las visitas a los campamentos y el acompañamiento al personal de alcance comunitario de organizaciones que ofrecen servicios. Aunque regulada, la vivienda consta de unidades mínimas, de calidad inferior y propensas al hacinamiento, lo que afecta la salud y el bienestar de los trabajadores. El estudio describe lo que suelen hacer los trabajadores agrícolas durante sus pocas horas libres de la tarde, la vulnerabilidad de los trabajadores invitados con visas H-2A, la minuciosidad que caracteriza el alcance comunitario y cómo los trabajadores agrícolas son visibles para el personal de alcance. El estudio concluye resaltando que los trabajadores agrícolas son tan visibles como lo son sus campamentos de vivienda, sus aportaciones al movimiento alimentario y su exclusión de los relatos históricos y de los materiales publicitarios en los pueblos turísticos locales, que solo acentúan las aportaciones de ciertos grupos. El artículo subraya el valor del alcance comunitario, el trabajo excepcional que desempeña el personal de alcance y las vías para aumentar la visibilidad y la defensa de los trabajadores agrícolas.

Abstract: Based on data from 103 surveys of Puerto Rican migrants living in Florida and 54 in-depth interviews with a subgroup of them, we examine how Puerto Ricans who left the archipelago after Hurricane Maria have navigated settlement in their new homes. In this article, we observed and classified our participants’ descriptions of how they managed opportunities and challenges regarding education, employment, and social relations, the traditional benchmarks for the assessment of societal integration. We also observed how our participants described Covid-19’s interaction with these benchmarks. We found that our participants have experienced a series of cascading disasters since 2017—namely, Hurricane Maria, the earthquakes that affected Puerto Rico starting in late 2019, the humanitarian crises that followed both disasters, and now the global pandemic. These disasters, compounded with migration, have resulted in a process of adaptation to Florida in which social and labor-market integration and the ability to nurture social ties have been significantly diminished.

Abstract: Since the 1930s, street vending in Los Angeles has been classified as a misdemeanor, punishable by jail time and fines. The Los Angeles Street Vendor Campaign (LASVC)—a coalition of Brown and Black street vendors and social justice organizations—succeeded in decriminalizing street vending. Drawing on data collected from 2013 to 2020 and utilizing ethnographic and digital humanities methods, this paper spotlights fifteen Black and Brown street-vendor leaders of the LASVC. Combined street-vendor leader narratives reveal how laws and enforcement practices undermined their ability to stay free, remain housed, and keep families and vending communities together. This paper differentiates between state-sanctioned legal violence, which led to dispossession and family separation, and community-sanctioned legal violence to demonstrate how laws that criminalize street vendors make them targets for other forms of violence, namely surveillance by co-ethnics. Legal violence often occurs simultaneously and cumulatively adds extra levels of precarity for street vendors.

Abstract: Critical ethnographers have long challenged positivist notions of research objectivity and the presumed unbiased observer, arguing that one’s theoretical lens and positionality influence research design, access, and experiences in the field. Scholars of color have further pointed out the need to examine people’s lived experiences through an intersectional framework, acknowledging the ways in which people’s lives are situated within larger structures of power and forms of oppression. In this paper, I use critical ethnography as an intersectional methodological approach to examine the lived experiences of mixed-status families and situate them within a larger political-economic context of restrictive immigration policies and neoliberal globalization. Critical ethnography is a useful methodology when interrogating larger questions of structure and agency, positionality, and social justice scholarship. I use critical ethnography to challenge the rigidity of ethnographic borders by proposing a concept of “ethnographic crossings” as moments in time and space when the roles of researchers and participants become blurred and intertwined. I draw on ethnographic examples to show the evolution of my project—from gaining access to immigrant families and following them across two countries to the close relationships developed during fieldwork that crossed emotional boundaries.