Christian Zlolniski

Etnografía de trabajadores informales en un barrio de inmigrantes mexicanos en el Silicon Valley

This article describes a set of informal activities engaged in by Mexican immigrants in a poor district of San Jose, California. Based on ethnographic field research, the study posits that the informal economy in Mexican inmigrant communities does not constitute a labor niche of subsistence activities for workers excluded from the formal sector, or a set of jobs generated by an ethnic economy. On the contrary, it serves as a complement to the income generated by unqualified work in the formal sector, in which most workers are inserted, while in other cases, it represents an advantageous alternative form of work

Neoliberal Agrarian Policies and Its Effects: Labour Flexibility and Regimentation in Mexico’s Export Agricultural Industry

This chapter examines the production of fresh produce in northern Mexico for consumer markets in the United States and its impact on farmworkers in Baja California. While labour flexibility is at the heart of the global fresh-produce industry, work has become increasingly standardized and regimented to enhance workers’ productivity. The result is a labour regime characterized by heightening discipline and labor control. Five elements of this production regime, namely indoor agriculture, piece-rate system, the merging of harvest and packing, the use of good agricultural practices (GAP), and time as a mechanism for labor control are described. Together, the author contends, these components have led to the quantitative and qualitative intensification of the work process for farm laborers, which he terms regimented flexibility.

Confronting the Risks of Undocumented Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border and Beyond

The World of Mexican Migrants: The Rock and the Hard Place. By Judith Adler Hellman. New York: New Press, 2008. Pp. xxiv + 546.

Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists: The Lives of Mexican Immigrants in Silicon Valley

17.95 paper.

Labor Control and Resistance of Mexican Immigrant Janitors in Silicon Valley

28.50 cloth. “I Know It’s Dangerous”: Why Mexicans Risk Their Lives to Cross the Border. By Lynnaire M. Sheridan. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009. Pp. xv + 206.

Water flowing north of the border: export agriculture and water politics in a rural community in Baja California.

24.95 paper.

Working but Poor: Mexican Immigrant Workers in a Low-Income Enclave in San Jose

55.00 cloth. Clandestine Crossings: Migrants and Coyotes on the Texas-Mexico Border. By David Spener. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv + 298.

Political Mobilization and Activism Among Latinos/as in the United States

24.95 paper.

Export agriculture, transnational farmworkers, and labor resistance in the Mexico–US borderlands

65.00 cloth.