Sharryl SosaDissertation

ProspectusApril 26, 2014

Tentative working title:From Bracero to Chicano: The Biopolitical Implications of

Racializing the Working PoorMexicanos and descendants of Mexicanos have been active

in many sectors of the U.S. workforce since 1848. Today,

many of these self-identifying Chicanos and Mexicanos fulfill

varied roles within the service industry, factory settings,

agricultural settings, professional areas, etc. in the

Southwest and beyond. In other parts of the U.S., Latinos

from other countries also fulfill such roles. However, my

study suggests that the Bracero Program1 is a key labor

moment for understanding subsequent issues of immigration,

wage-labor struggles and the hegemonic practices that

continue to attract Mexican workers even as they deport them

1 The Bracero Program lasted from 1942-1964. This program allowed U.S. agricultural corporations to recruit men from various regions of Mexico. Then they were taken to processing centers in Mexico D.F. and then to various agricultural sites in the U.S. It was first intended to supply farm labor during World War II, but was renewed various times through legislative means even after the war ended.

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and perpetuate poverty among them. Beyond the effects

suffered by the Mexican men who participated in the Bracero

Program, my work will investigate the outcomes of this

program for both genders in various sectors of the workforce

and for Latinos working with and without legal documentation

in both the Eastern and Western regions of the U.S.

I argue that the Bracero Program acted as an

accelerator for the growth of a Chicano and Mexicano

population working in the U.S. Braceros were attracted by

inviting ads; but the benign and even pleasant image of the

program promoted in photography, documentaries and newspaper

articles of the time reminds us of ways in which government

and Capital work together to maintain U.S. hegemony. David

Harvey calls this the “molecular process” of capitalist

imperialism (Harvey, The New Imperialism, 26). Although he

focuses on the distinct logics of the state and Capital, he

does recognize their intersection. I find his insights

useful to the investigation I am embarking upon particularly

due to his treatment of the theme of territorial

constraints:

2

“Imperialist practices, from theperspective of capitalistic logic, aretypically about exploiting the unevengeographical conditions under whichcapital accumulation occurs and alsotaking advantage of what I call the‘asymmetries’ that inevitably arise outof spatial exchange relations. Thelatter get expressed through unfair andunequal exchange, spatially articulatedmonopoly powers, extortionate practicesattached to restricted capital flows,and the extraction of monopoly rents”(31, The New Imperialism).

In both territorial and economic aspects, the Bracero

Program took advantage of the ‘asymmetries’ between the U.S.

and Mexico. State power was able to orchestrate policies

that benefitted economic interests within the U.S. Rather

than benefitting Mexican populations on both sides of the

border, the Bracero Program helped to establish and maintain

a tradition of institutionalized racism and exploitation and

led to the accentuation and perpetuation of an already

existing second-class citizenry.

As an historical event, the Bracero Program was created

during WWII, a key moment for the establishment of the U.S.

as a global super-power. It was a show of force, power and

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national affluence in an economic sense. Tragically, the

economic foundation of today’s global economy is built on

the exploitation of uneven geographical conditions and

simultaneously on domestic capital accumulation based on the

exploitation of a domestic labor force, either native or

immigrant, that allow the U.S. to enter the global mode of

production and thrive within it. The subsequent

restructuring policies of the post-1970s period and the

transfer of U.S. manufacturing towards the global south

added to the labor pools that strengthened the global

economic power of the U.S. Together, the establishment of

factories and plants in the global south and the

establishment of the Bracero Program in the U.S. provided

crucial labor reserves that secured the global economic

status of the U.S. and laid the groundwork for a continuing

tradition of subjugation of peripheral peoples and countries

through hegemonic partnerships that manipulate the most

vulnerable workers in economic, political and material

aspects.

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As I map out my research on the effects of the Bracero

Program and other guest worker programs, I will focus on the

impact of exploitation on the immigrant body by making

connections to biopolitics and theories on the body both in

individual and collective forms. I have chosen to center

the body as the focal point of this dissertation’s economic

analysis due to the unsettling entanglements of interests

that become apparent in my analysis of Chicano/Latino

literature and film, cultural productions that counter the

materialist, structural and technological depictions of the

body in U.S. sponsored photography of agricultural workers

during World War II. This state propaganda reveals

governmental-corporate illicit entanglements of interest or

in other words “hegemonic partnerships” that play out on and

within the body. For example, ad campaigns and photography

taken for government purposes reveal the fictions that are

created when the state together with agribusiness works to

construct a wholesome picture of content Anglo field workers

in order to motivate consumption, trade and consumer

confidence. In reality fieldworkers in the South were

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often Black/African-American and in other places such as

California or the Southwest most field workers were of

Mexican or Latino descent. In contrast to government and

corporate photography, the photographic compilations

included in Steven Street’s book Everyone Had Cameras:

Photography and Cameras in California, 1850-2000 offer another

perspective on the real situation of field workers during

and after World War II.

Although the reality of the field worker’s condition

was not frequently photographed, Street has been able to

compile many rare photographic works of the Post-WWII

agricultural setting that provide an enlightening contrast

to the fictions created by Agri-business and the state

through ad campaigns. Furthermore, this type of realist

photography permits alternative readings of conditions in

the fields and enables new insights for analyzing the body’s

representation in farm settings. Visual analysis offers the

possibility of alternative angles and viewpoints for

exploring these labor sites and generates a richer

discussion of the immediacy of visual interventions in

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political, social and cultural contexts. For example,

Street includes photography of newly recruited2 braceros

undergoing a fumigation process before being allowed to

travel to their U.S. agricultural labor destinations.

The analysis of these particular photographs reveal

the haunting and troubling ways in which agri-business

together with the state works to transform the body into a

commodified form for production purposes. Interestingly,

the otherness of the Mexican body is highlighted more

through the invisibility of the white body than through its

own reduction to irrelevance due to the commodification and

reification process it undergoes. The white worker spraying

the Mexican bodies as if they were land investments to be

plowed or crops to be harvested remains peripheral; his

image is not a producer of “shock value” or as Roland

Barthes would have it, “the punctum” of the photograph due

to his obscureness, his fully clothed body, and due to the 2 Historians that have studied the Bracero recruitment process have cited primary sources (Bracero personal experiences) including reports that many parts of the agreement were frequently violated. Food was not provided, shelter was substandard and wages were severely suppressed to levels that created a modern-day slavery system.

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fact that his health remains protected against the chemical

spray by the protective facial mask he wears.

In Imperialism and Global Political Economy (2009), Alex

Callinicos sheds light on these illicit entanglements of

interest when he talks about the distinctiveness of modern

imperialism: “modern imperialism is capitalist imperialism…the

Marxist theory of imperialism has been defined…by the claim

that the geopolitical struggles among the Great Powers for

global domination were a consequence of changes in the

structure of capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century

in particular, the increasing concentration of economic

power and its interweaving with the state” (Callinicos, 10).

My own reading of this dynamic for the purposes of this

dissertation will be centered on the “concentration of

economic power and its interweaving with the state” during

three specific historical moments. These specific

historical moments capture hegemonic processes at work and

reveal the power of working class resistance. In addition,

they demonstrate how hegemonic partnerships between the

state and corporate entities enable the U.S. domination of

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Chicanos and Mexicanos as a laboring class on both sides of

the border. The first historical moment that I will

reference in order to connect corporate and governmental

interests is that of the Post-WWII bracero program; second,

I will include a discussion of the 1970s period in which the

UFW was formed and Chicano activism was at its height;

lastly I will include a discussion of workers during the

NAFTA free-trade agreement of 1994.

In global terms, the history of agriculture in the U.S.

represents a unique experience in the progression/evolution

of a society through different modes of production.

Principally, the U.S. deviates from the traditional model of

progression from subsistence and feudal modes of production

to more advanced mercantile and capitalist/imperialist modes

of production. This is due to the manner of colonization of

the United States and its advancement as a nation from

British colony to independence to expansionist/imperialist

nation to global superpower. This is the historical process

that I consider to contextualize my reflections on the

immigrant and/or racialized body as the terrain for

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political and economic advancement. While largely

functioning in agricultural spheres in the early part of the

20th century these hegemonic practices and partnerships have

permeated other occupational sectors and allowed for the

continued exploitation of immigrant laborers and the

displacement of undesirable sectors of society.

The historically materialist outcomes of the Bracero

Program include a cultural climate of heightened

commodification of agricultural products and agricultural

labor, the racialization of laboring bodies and their

invisibility, created by visual descriptions of “white” farm

settings mass-produced for commercial purposes. The

prominence of U.S. agricultural production during and after

WWII owed much to the role that the Bracero Program played

in establishing the U.S. prominent role as an economically

imperialist nation as defined by Callinicos3. As stated 3 “The thought is, then, that capitalist imperialism is constituted by the intersection of two forms of competition,namely economic and geopolitical…The historical moment of capitalist imperialism is when the interstate rivalries become integrated into the larger processes of capital accumulation – something that happens as the selective advantage of having a capitalist economic base imposes itself on states, but which takes several centuries –

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earlier, this national positioning of power emerged from and

has been shaped by various forms of U.S. aggression that

were central to the rise of the U.S. as a global superpower.

In fact, I would argue that each phase of U.S. agricultural

history corresponds to and responds to each phase in the

capitalist mode of production as it evolved in the U.S. The

respective political and social climates of each period of

U.S. advancement were accompanied by aggressive measures

like the slave trade, Manifest Destiny and subsequent

military operations in Latin America and other parts of the

world that caused acts of genocide against indigenous and

other marginalized groups. These policies of aggression go

hand in hand with the agricultural policies and practices

that define each period of U.S. economic and political

growth.

The unsettling connections that exist between the state

and the corporations that support the state work to further

marginalize and dispossess the laboring poor. These

connections are noted not only in literature but also in

starting with the Dutch Revolt, but becoming inescapable in the late nineteenth century.” (Callinicos, 15)

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fantastical and science fiction texts and films that provide

a marked contrast with the commercial photography promoted

by the U.S. government and its corporate consorts. These

laboring poor are very often agricultural workers that

remain outside the scope of labor rules, laws and

regulations. They are further exploited if they are

undocumented and must sell their labor for little

remuneration and in fact many times no remuneration at all.

The disposability of bodies through deportation demonstrates

the conflicting interests of corporate and governmental

hegemonic partnerships and reveals the primacy that material

and economic interests have over the welfare of workers,

particularly among the lowest working classes that find

themselves in powerless positions for the benefit of

agribusiness and, in turn, for cheaper goods.

Although the Bracero Program has not been in operation

for securing farm labor since 1964, the U.S. has continued

to obtain “cheap” labor literally from the “arms” and bodies

of Mexican workers without disruption. Whether through

documented or undocumented means, openly or quietly, the

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work of building a strong nation through the exploitation of

the labor of the invisible bodies of agri-labor and other

unskilled laboring classes has not been derailed. In fact,

the U.S. has invented ever more efficient ways of

technologically policing, tracking, counting, pathologizing

and controlling the bodies that make up the most

exploitable, malleable and manipulable sections of the U.S.

work force.

The post-modern, profit-centered desire to manage and

intrude upon working class biological spaces (bodies) has

grown along with the technological advancements that have

facilitated such abuses of governmental and corporate power.

One of the effects of these types of entanglements of

interests is evident in the biopolitics that govern the

issuance (or denial) of legal documentation to reside and

work in the U.S. Obtaining citizenship status, resident

status or a temporary status requires the biologic medical

data of the immigrant in question.

Today, there is no other class of workers that

undergoes such a stringent or intrusive level of

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surveillance in order to become wage laborers. U.S.

citizens born in this country are legally permitted to sell

their labor upon the satisfactory presentation of two

official documents establishing identity or by simply

presenting a U.S. passport as stated on the I-9 form. These

documents do not require any form of bio-data such as

fingerprints but may include personal descriptive

information such as gender, height and eye color (form I-9,

page 9). However, immigrants from other countries must

first engage in a type of biologic and medical

mapping/coding before receiving governmental permission to

sell their labor.

Although the usage of fingerprinting technologies to

control and manage populations for purposes outside of labor

and immigration has been gaining strength in sectors such as

business and medicine in recent years I am more concerned

with tracing a longer term genealogy of this technology that

locates it as the nexus for governmental control over the

laboring “other”.

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The documents required by the I-9 form of immigrants

undergoing the legalization process require medical

testing4, photographing, biometrics, fingerprinting, testing

on rudimentary U.S. historical facts and the promise of

allegiance. Once this part of the legalization process is

complete, an immigrant’s biologic identity is completely and

irrevocably affixed to government owned tools of

surveillance, thereby allowing for the commencement of

sanctioned extraction of labor from the pathologized bodies

of a malleable and exploitable work force.

Chicano literature and film have, in some instances,

sought to expose and critically view governmental and

technological control over laboring bodies; in fact, as

suggested earlier, the formation of a Chicano canon

coincided and grew alongside the struggle for rights for

farm workers and the subsequent generations of working

Mexicanos born in the U.S. Therefore, this literature speaks

directly to historical injustices and the perpetuation of

inequity in the fields and other places of employment for 4 See USCIS form I-693 and section 212(a)(1) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

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working class Mexicanos and Chicanos before, during and after

the implementation of the Bracero Program. What is revealed

through literature and film is an incrimination of power

that places direct responsibility on structures of uneven

distribution, exploitative working conditions and

manipulative governmental decisions that criminalize

immigrant laboring bodies. This brings to the fore the

effects of the state’s criminalization of immigrant labor.

When convenient this labor is utilized, valued and welcomed

but when no longer useful for the purposes and interests of

the state and capital it becomes criminalized and subject to

deportation.

In academic discourse, the task of reading the body has

become one fraught with difficulty due to the

contradictions, contestation and multiple definitions

inherent in such an object of analysis. The body as a

subject of inquiry has been defined and contoured around a

variety of ways of viewing and understanding society. In

addition, there is a significant body of work in literary

theory that deconstructs and views the body through various

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analytical lenses; Judith Butler famously outlined the

importance of taking the body into account in scholarship

that deals with sexuality; Michel Foucault’s work includes

pioneering scholarly visions into the importance of a

critical understanding of biopolitics and the workings of

hegemony, and prior to this Lacan elaborated in depth and in

linguistic terms his view on the fragmented body in contrast

to wholeness.

Jameson’s work on literature as a socially symbolic act

is equally useful for critical discourses related to the

role of the body due to his insistence on the centrality of

a social critique in every interpretation of literature5.

For Jameson, this is accomplished only through the

application of a Marxist analysis in literary and cultural

studies. The analysis of literature as a socially symbolic

act, for Jameson, constitutes an analysis of the relations

of economic domination surrounding the production of

literary and cultural objects. Although Jameson does not

specifically focus his attention on deciphering and 5 Jameson, Frederic. On Interpretation: Literature as a SociallySymbolic Act. 2000.

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contextualizing bodies, the laboring body nonetheless should

figure as a prominent and necessary component to any

analysis that involves capital, material and/or cultural

products. Labor is extracted from bodies; it is the

producing force or “motor” that allows for all economically

based relations of domination to be carried out,

particularly when laborers are racially segregated, racially

categorized, devalued and/or disavowed. Racialization is

partly based on the body´s outward physical appearance but

mainly on the perceptions that those in power have of those

racialized bodies.

My intention here is not to mine the topic of

racialized laboring bodies for its indisputable value in

multiple areas of study. Undoubtedly, there has been

insightful work done already on the importance of the body

in its various functions including sexuality, adornment, the

religious ground it facilitates for patriarchal control,

etc. Rather, I intend to focus on the body as it has been

configured in the field of Chicano studies both in cultural

and historical production, and analyzed in relation to

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exploitative labor practices, particularly the social

aspects of labor that cause economic and material

inequities. I intend to use both Marxist and feminist

theoretical viewpoints to carry out my analysis of the

racialization of bodies of the working poor, such as the

work of Fredric Jameson and Donna Haraway.

These exploitative labor practices are rooted not only

in capitalist relations of production but in U.S.

governmental repressive political traditions dating from the

bracero program and post WWII strategies to increase reserve

labor pools and integrate the nation into the burgeoning

globalized world economy that today is at its height and

gaining strength around the globe.

In my first chapter I will be conducting an analysis of

Y no se lo tragó la tierra (1970) by Tomas Rivera and Under the Feet of

Jesus by Helena Maria Viramontes (1996) in order to delve

further into topics involving the body’s role in determining

(in)visibility, economic exploitations that occur through

the body and implications for the continuing oppressive

practices occurring in the U.S. today. In addition, the

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counter-hegemonic viewpoint these works offer on the plight

of agricultural workers through their geographic, physical

and economic displacement is particularly relevant. Both of

these novels deal with similar topics in very different

ways, but both offer the counter-hegemonic narrative

viewpoints of Chicano children. Pairing them in this

particular chapter allows for a more critical engagement

with the workings of governmental control and the power this

has over Chicano subjectivity in both rural and urban

spaces.

My second chapter will be a Chicana feminist counter-

reading of the patriarchal capitalist foundations upon which

criminalization, exploitative labor practices and

nationalist photographic propaganda are built. For this

chapter I will expand my photographic research in order to

come to a visual critique of the topics that permeate the

previous chapter. The theoretical framework for this will

be the work of Roland Barthes, Chambre Claire (1980). I will

utilize the counter-readings offered in this theoretical

framework to examine photography of racialized bodies

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including Chicana laborers and Chicana subversive figures

such as activists and rebellious and/or violent women. As

both a complement and contrast to Chambre Claire, I will

include the Photoshop compilations of Alma Lopez and

feminist theoretical critiques of her work6. Alma Lopez’s

artistic work with photography is important to the topics in

this dissertation due to the images in her work that

foreground historical and current photography of Chicanas in

work capacities and center on the exploitive labor practices

of the global mode of production7. Rather than continuing

a discussion centered on the laboring body in the field,

this chapter will examine feminized work spaces such as the

cannery, domestic work and the garment industry as portrayed

not only in Lopez’s artistic work but also in the cultural

production of Cherie Moraga, Helena María Viramontes and

Margarita Tavera-Rivera.

My third chapter will be a Latino comparative analysis

in which I will reflect on Chicano-Latino connections across6 Including the critical work of Laura E. Pérez, María Herrera-Sobek and Luz Calvo.7 One example of this is California Fashion Slaves, 20x24 in. Digital print on canvas. 1997.

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the U.S. in order to expand my main critical and analytical

points set forth in the previous two chapters. For this

chapter, I will take into account points of convergence such

as immigration, labor and the intersectionalities and

multiplicities within race, class and gender as they relate

to the Latino condition in other parts of the U.S. I plan

to include an analysis of Ernesto Quiñónez novel Bodega

Dreams (2000) for this part of my dissertation. To more

clearly define the connections that exist across the U.S.

between Chicano and Latino laborers, I will center this

chapter´s analyses on the Puerto Rican political condition.

By this, I am referring both to the Puerto Rican nation’s

post 1917 condition (the year in which the Jones Act was

signed conferring U.S. citizenship upon Puerto Ricans) and

the condition of the Puerto Rican displaced classes that

reside in the U.S. today but continue to maintain a strong

Puerto Rican subject positioning. These displaced groups

that are the working class in both the U.S. and Puerto Rico

represent the laboring body that became an essential part of

the functioning of the U.S. in the emerging globalized

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world. In addition to facilitating the migration of much

needed wage labor for the U.S., the Jones Act came at a

strategic time for U.S. military interests. Once U.S.

citizenship was granted to Puerto Ricans they became

conveniently eligible for military service just as World War

I was intensifying.

Therefore, the focus of chapter three will be the

political history surrounding the initial formation of the

Puerto Rican commonwealth and the subsequent naturalization

of its population. Because these events arose out of

strategic political investments by the U.S. for the

securement and procurement of its own empirical strength in

the emerging globalized world, this chapter will provide a

Latino comparative complement to the Chicano field of work

prevalent throughout the other chapters. Although Bodega

Dreams deals with different spatial and political contexts

it provides a necessary complement to the novels in my

previous chapters. With this chapter, I will be able to

focus more precisely on the urban depictions of struggle and

oppression of the laboring poor whose plight is produced

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through U.S. hegemonic partnerships with corporate sectors

of society.

Although this chapter deviates slightly from the

Chicano/Mexicano focus of the dissertation as a whole it

does allow for a view of Latino laboring bodies on the East

Coast and serves to summarize and concretize the connections

I have made thus far on the hegemonic globalized practices

that view vulnerable bodies as exploitable and disposable

resources. This chapter will enable me to contrast Chicano

and Caribeño subjectivities, practices and cultural products

that denounce, challenge and counteract the hegemonic

partnerships that operate both today and that operated

during historical times of military and economic demand for

human resources. As stated and repeated earlier, Chicano

production is particularly important for its development

alongside social struggles of the exploited, racialized and

marginalized workers that form an essential part of the

“molecular process” of capitalist imperialism. Within these

molecular processes there are many factors at work that at

once recognize and resist hegemonic manipulation. Cultural

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production about Chicanos by Chicanos is in itself what

Frederic Jameson calls a “socially symbolic act”. In other

words it is an action of symbolic denouncement of economic

and material inequality. Futuristic cultural production is

a particularly salient example this. Jameson’s method of

development of the idea of the “socially symbolic act”

includes various ideas surrounding mode of production, the

frameworks for each mode and the “cultural revolution” that

will inevitably emerge. He states:

“…every social formation or historicallyexisting society has in fact consistedin the overlay and structuralcoexistence of several modes of productionall at once, including vestiges andsurvivals of older modes of production,now relegated to structurally dependentpositions within the new, as well asanticipatory tendencies which arepotentially inconsistent with theexisting system but have not yetgenerated an autonomous space of theirown.” (50, Jameson)

Chicano futuristic cultural production is a prime

example of this notion in action. Therefore, I propose to

analyze the futuristic model of biopolitical themes in Alex

Rivera´s film Sleep Dealer (2008) in the fourth chapter.

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Jameson’s work will make up the theoretical framework for my

analysis of the futuristic representation of the commodified

body that becomes transformed into a means of production.

Due to the futuristic moment this film presents, there are

many important connections within it that are particularly

relevant to this dissertation for its commentaries on the

body as a vehicle utilized by the entangled interests of

corporate and governmental powers, particularly those

produced through the NAFTA agreement of 1994. However, in

addition to a discussion of biopolitics and the futuristic

model that Rivera presents that is unsettlingly similar to

reality, Sleep Dealer also centers on a particular historical

experience that is unique to Chicanos.

I will take advantage of the themes in this film to

flesh out the dichotomous historical experience unique to

Chicanos that Rivera locates at the center of the plot of

the narrative and the final resolution towards the end of

the film. This depiction centers around a type of double

consciousness similar to what has been discussed in the work

of its precursor W.E.B. Dubois, and the subsequent work of

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Gloria Anzaldúa, Chela Sandoval, Angela Davis, and most

recently Cherrie Moraga´s book A Xicana Codex of Changing

Consciousness (2000-2010).

Sleep Dealer demonstrates the two sides of Chicano

historical experience. The first, which is rooted in the

displacement of a Mexican peasant class is interpreted and

personified in Memo’s character. The second, which is

rooted in a U.S.-based double consciousness that includes

allegiance on the one hand to the country of birth and/or

residence and on the other hand a desire to mend (redress)

the wrongs committed by the U.S. against non-hegemonic

Mexican classes on both sides of the border is interpreted

and personified in Rudy Ramírez’s character. Chicanos

inhabit a precarious identity positioning because as a class

they are at the center of competing traditions, cultures,

economies and politics. In Sleep Dealer, the characters that

represent these two sides of the Chicano historical

experience cross paths in a cultural and historical type of

mirroring. The futuristic portrayal of U.S.-Mexico

immigration that this film provides will give chronological

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coherence to the history this dissertation traces of

immigration, displacement and the agricultural coefficients

they align with.

I have begun this dissertation prospectus with an

introduction that explores the importance and historical

role of agri-culture in contrast to agri-business.

Therefore, I will be exploring the post-WWII agricultural

setting as an intensified production-based enterprise rooted

in the United States political strategies that promoted a

wholesome façade of white laborers toiling contently while

disavowing immigrant and disenfranchised non-white and non-

propertied labor. I will include a discussion of the post-

WWII visual culture that first brought attention to the

conditions that braceros were subjected to in order to earn

their sparse living. Additionally, I will cover

perspectives of power that place the body on an equal level

with other tools of agri-business and negate the needs of

the laborers providing the necessary labor to maintain and

expand the U.S. economic growth. The United States’

conflicting position on the acceptance and disavowal of

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immigrant labor will be central to this part of my

dissertation.

This will bring my dissertation to a circular close.

Having begun with a chapter on migrant agricultural work and

closing with a chapter that engages with similar topics in a

futuristic scenario will provide clarity and substance to

the connections between the immigrant/migrant cycle of labor

and the hegemonic control that surrounds the immigrant

laboring body. In other words, the generational progression

from contract bracero workers to established U.S. citizenry

that self-identify either as Chicano/a, Mexicano/a,

Latino/a, or caribeño/a reveals not only the preoccupation

with loss of memory but also the conscious need to maintain

strong ties to both sides of the symbolic borderlands:

Latino/a, Chicano/a and/or Mexicano/a culture and the Anglo

environment we are unavoidably immersed in as immigrants and

descendants of immigrants. Examining the power structures

that cause this competition to be a prominent preoccupation

will be my main project throughout each chapter and

therefore I deviate from agriculture into other areas of

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labor so as not to ignore that differences of gender, race

and class permeate society and carry severe consequences for

real lives and working conditions.

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