Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South

by Angela Stuesse

How has Latino immigration transformed the South? In what ways is the presence of these newcomers complicating efforts to organize for workplace justice? Scratching Out a Living takes readers deep into Mississippi’s chicken processing plants and communities, where large numbers of Latin American migrants were recruited in the mid-1990s to labor alongside an established African American workforce in some of the most dangerous and lowest-paid jobs in the country. As America’s voracious appetite for chicken has grown, so has the industry’s reliance on immigrant workers, whose structural position makes them particularly vulnerable to exploitation.

Based on the author’s six years of collaboration with a local workers’ center, this book explores how Black, white, and new Latino Mississippians have lived and understood these transformations. Activist anthropologist Angela Stuesse argues that people’s racial identifications and relationships to the poultry industry prove vital to their interpretations of the changes they are experiencing. Illuminating connections between the area’s long history of racial inequality, the industry’s growth and drive to lower labor costs, immigrants’ contested place in contemporary social relations, and workers’ prospects for political mobilization, Scratching Out a Living paints a compelling ethnographic portrait of neoliberal globalization and calls for organizing strategies that bring diverse working communities together in mutual construction of a more just future.

Genres: Anthropology, School, Nonfiction, Food, Social Justice

329 pages, Paperback

First published February 2, 2016

Reviews

[San Diego Book Review]

Reviewed by Kevin Winter for San Diego Book Review

Chicken processing might be one of the most dangerous, degrading, and worst jobs in America today. Many immigrants start working in chicken processing facilities in the deep south of Mississippi and anthropologist Angela Stuesse examines how immigrants have changed the face of the deep south in her new book "Scratching Out A Living". In this book she lives in the communities of rural Mississippi to look at how the workers live, in dilapidated homes that are barely fit to live in, and how they have impacted the communities they live in as well.

You can read this entire review and others like it at San Diego Book Review.

[Jessica]

This book is a great deep dive into Latinx workers in poultry in Mississippi, but also a very helpful survey of the ways race has shaped workers' access to jobs in the South, from reconstruction forward. Highly recommend.

[gnarlyhiker]

Interlibrary loan

[Raquel]

Very eye opening.

[Cabot]

Not giving a rating because it’s another textbook, but out of all the readings I’ve had this semester it’s one of the better ones.