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- All Subjects: Labor Relations
- Creators: Quan, H.L.T.
- Creators: Avalos, Diego
- Creators: Fish, Jennifer N.
Description
This dissertation examines the embodied experiences of domestic workers and their children as they emerged in organizing campaigns aimed at achieving a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in California. I analyze the ways domestic worker organizers have historically conceptualized their movements around demands for dignified labor and immigration reform. I argue that their demands for protections and rights force them into a contradictory space that perpetuates vulnerability and recasts illegality—a space where domestic workers’ bodies get continuously figured as exploited and in pain in order to validate demands for rights. I trace this pattern in organizational survey material across generations, where worker’s voices resisted prefigured mappings of their bodies in pain, and where they laid out their own demands for a movement that challenged normative frameworks of fair labor and United States citizenship that continue to center race and gender in the transnational mobility of migrant women from Mexico and Central America. Furthermore, I explore the embodied experiences of domestic workers’ children, and the embedded power relations uncovered in their memories as they narrate their childhood accompanying their mothers to work. Their memories provided an affective landscape of memory where the repetitive, and demeaning aspects of domestic work are pried apart from western, colonial arrangements of power. I argue that their collective embodied knowledge marks a reframing of pain where transfiguration is possible and transformative patterns of becoming are prioritized. I propose interpreting these collective, embodied memories as a constellation of shimmers—luminous points that align to expose the relationships between workers, their children, employers, and their families, and the specific context in which they were produced. Altogether, they create what I call a brown luminosity—forces activated by their mothers’ labor that created multiple worlds of possibilities for their children, resulting in nomadic memories which move beyond victimizing their mother’s bodies to enable an ever-changing perspective of the ways their labor has radically transformed homes, livelihoods, and transnational spaces.
ContributorsPerez, Nancy (Author) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Romero, Mary (Committee member) / Fish, Jennifer N. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This dissertation examines the San Diego border region to understand migrant construction worker’s mobility, autonomy, and labor power. San Diego County is enclosed by a network of internal immigration checkpoints and roving patrol operations that constrain migrant worker’s labor power to the territorial boundaries of the county. The project uses ‘differential mobility’ as a strategic concept to highlight the ways in which borders differentiate, sort, and rank among noncitizen migrant construction workers to meet local labor demands. The project reveals worker’s collective struggle to evade and cross border enforcement operations to maintain consistent employment across a border region that is marked by internal immigration checkpoints, roving patrol stops, and state surveillance measures. In addition, the project examines migrant men’s emerging workplace narratives about the body and penetration that symbolize workers’ understanding of social domination in a global economy. These expressions open up a critical space from which migrant men begin to critique a global economy that drives men northbound for employment and southbound for retirement—inhibiting a future that is neither entirely in the United States or Mexico.
ContributorsAvalos, Diego (Author) / Gomez, Alan (Thesis advisor) / Quan, H.L.T. (Committee member) / Yellow Horse, Aggie (Committee member) / Téllez, Michelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
This dissertation is a collection of three essays that take seriously the knowledge generated through and by communities in struggle in Pakistan. This project reveals how communities in struggle are systematically excluded and power is monopolized in the hands of a few, engages the means through which communities find ways to survive and thrive under harsh conditions. The first essay, “Beyond Bondage: Hari Women’s Communities of Struggle” centers the testimonies of peasant Hari women, or bonded sharecroppers, in Sindh, Pakistan, describing the carceral conditions of labor to which they are subjected. The essay historicizes the ability of wealthy, politically empowered landlords to retain their monopoly over land resources and attempts to make explicit the tacit state support that allows this system of bonded labor to continue unregulated. These testimonies also document the Hari women’s tools for escape and their movement to free others. The second essay, “Khawaja Sira Life Struggles: Is Womanness Really a Loss?” traces the stories of Khawaja Sira Gurus from Lahore, Pakistan, who are engaged in organizing their community to advocate for rights and human dignity, and how they make inroads into the imposed gender regime. It argues that Khawaja Siras create a third space inside a heavily enforced gender binary. It also shows how the Khawaja Sira community provides its members home to exist in their womanness that eases their alienation from their family and society. The final essay, “The Movement for Transgender Rights in Pakistan” traces the history of criminalization of the Hijra/Khawaja Sira community and argues that colonial legal formations set in motion marginalization of trans* lives, which the post-colonial Pakistani state folded easily into its binary understanding of gender. Trans* activists have been engaging the state on its own terrain to make trans* life legible to the state, with the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2018 being the most recent gain.
ContributorsSuhail, Sarah (Author) / Quan, H.L.T. (Thesis advisor) / Leong, Karen J (Committee member) / Toor, Saadia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021