Journal of Contemporary

Ethnography
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The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men : Boundary Work among Immigrant

Day Laborers
Gretchen Purser
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 2009 38: 117 originally published online
21 December 2007
DOI: 10.1177/0891241607311867

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 Journal of Contemporary
Ethnography
Volume 38 Number 1
February 2009 117-139
The Dignity of © 2009 Sage Publications
10.1177/0891241607311867
Job-Seeking Men http://jce.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Boundary Work among
Immigrant Day Laborers
Gretchen Purser
University of California, Berkeley

Drawing on interviews and comparative ethnographic fieldwork in two day

labor hiring sites (a street corner labor market and a “regulated” day labor
worker center), this article examines the discourses through which Latino
immigrant day laborers make sense of, and find dignity within, their ongoing
quest for work. My findings reveal a clear pattern of “boundary work” along
the center/street divide, wherein each group of day laborers asserts its dignity
and masculinity by repudiating what they construe to be the feminine submis-
sion exemplified by the other group. I argue that gender both shapes and is
shaped through the articulation of these moral boundaries and show how work-
ers’ struggle to attain dignity—in this case, via strategies of social differentia-
tion and distinction—can act against the formation of a collective identity.

Keywords: day labor; immigrants; work; masculinity; symbolic boundaries

I mmigrant day laborers, known as jornaleros or esquineros in Spanish,

have sparked considerable controversy in cities across the country.1 Now
estimated to total well over 100,000 nationwide, these poor, predominantly
undocumented men are a ubiquitous presence on urban street corners, a vis-
ible indicator of labor market casualization, flawed immigration policy, and
the state’s failure to enforce even minimal regulation at the bottom of the
labor market. While residents and merchants express concern over “quality

Author’s Note: I would like to thank the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program and the University
of California Institute for Labor and Employment (ILE) for financial support during the course of
this research. I would also like to acknowledge Michael Burawoy, Hwa-Jen Liu, Greggor Mattson,
Josh Page, Jennifer Sherman, Cinzia Solari, and Loïc Wacquant for their insightful comments and
suggestions throughout this project. Special thanks also go to the editor of this journal and the
anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft. A version of this article was presented
at the 2005 Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association in Philadelphia, PA.

117

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118 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

of life” issues in “besieged” neighborhoods, worker and immigrant rights

advocates raise concerns about the men’s vulnerability to abuse at the hands
of their drive-by employers. An increasingly common, if contentious, local
policy response has been to establish an alternative to curbside hiring in the
form of quasi-regulated—but nonetheless informal—day labor worker cen-
ters, where labor-starved employers are encouraged to hire work-hungry
job seekers (Esbenshade 2000; Fine 2006). More than doubling in number
since the year 2000, there are now 63 such centers throughout the nation
run by community organizations, city government agencies, or church
groups (Valenzuela et al. 2006). Viewed by many scholars as “the most
promising policy intervention to restore the floor under the day labor
market” (Theodore, Valenzuela, and Melendez 2006, 408), these day labor
centers now coexist, in numerous communities, with curbside hiring sites.
While we know a good deal about the ways in which this informal labor
market operates (see Valenzuela 2003), we know very little about the cul-
tural meanings day laborers assign to their work and the role these might
play in shaping where and how they go about the relentless task of search-
ing for it. Taking as its starting point Everett C. Hughes’ (1994, 61) propo-
sition to study “the social and social-psychological arrangements by which
men make their work tolerable, or even glorious,” this article explores the
discourses through which these most marginalized of workers, perched pre-
cariously on the fringes of the labor market, conceive of self-worth.
Drawing on interviews and ethnographic data gathered at two day labor
hiring sites—a street corner labor market (International Avenue) and a “reg-
ulated” day labor program (the Bay Area Worker’s Center [BAWC])—I
find that immigrant day laborers engage in a process of “boundary work”
(Lamont 2000), wherein they draw on gendered imagery to distance them-
selves from each other and reaffirm their masculinity.2 Whereas job seekers
on the street construct the men who go to the center as lazy and dependent
(evoking the specter of the “welfare queen”), the men at the center view
those on the street as engaged in a desperate act of selling their bodies
(evoking the specter of the “prostitute”). By repudiating what they view as
the feminine submission exemplified by the other group, members of each
group constitute themselves as engaged in an appropriately masculine, dig-
nified pursuit of work. These findings reveal how the everyday “struggle to
achieve dignity and attain some measure of meaning at work” (Hodson
2001, 4) can act against the formation of a collective identity, with impor-
tant implications for research on, and organizing efforts among, immigrant
day laborers.

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 Purser / The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men 119

Literature Review

The existing literature on the informal day labor market predominantly

employs survey methods to document the scope of the phenomenon, the
demographic characteristics of the workforce, and the characteristic pay
and working conditions of this market (Theodore, Valenzuela, and
Meléndez 2006; Valenzuela 1999, 2003; Valenzuela et al. 2006). Scholars
using an ethnographic approach have analyzed the social organization
underpinning this informal trade (Malpica 2002) as well as the social needs
men fulfill through their presence on the corner (Turnovsky 2006). Given
the nearly exclusive focus on grasping the basic contours of how this
market is organized, there are no qualitatively detailed studies addressing
day laborers’ subjective experiences. We thus know very little about how
day laborers perceive, make sense of, and cope with the precarious labor
market in which they take part.
A notable exception is the work by Walter, Bourgois, and Loinaz (2004),
which broaches these questions by exploring the “embodied social suffer-
ing” of immigrant day laborers who face injury, illness, or disability. The
authors highlight the central role played by gender in shaping the social and
psychological experience of injury. They argue that “cultural constructions
of patriarchical masculinity among undocumented Latino day laborers
organize their sense of self-worth and define their experience of poverty
and social marginalization” (2004, 1160). Successfully crafting a male,
hardworking identity, the authors suggest, “becomes a bulwark for main-
taining self esteem” in the face of poverty, insecurity, and social marginal-
ization (2004, 1162). Overlooked in this analysis, however, are the specific
practices and discourses through which immigrant day laborers constitute
this masculine, hardworking “self.”
This article investigates these everyday practices and discourses, reveal-
ing a consistent pattern of “boundary work” through which immigrant day
laborers distinguish themselves from other immigrant day laborers. This
article thus not only contributes to the empirical literature on the pertinent
topic of day labor, but also contributes to the literature on symbolic bound-
aries, defined as the “conceptual distinctions made by social actors to cate-
gorize objects, people and practices” (Lamont and Mólnar 2002, 168). In
The Dignity of Working Men, Michèle Lamont (2000) draws on interviews
with working class men in France and the United States to reveal that moral
standards, as opposed to economic status, are the key principles of their
evaluations of worth and perceptions of social hierarchy. Lamont’s influential

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120 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

work has focused scholarly attention on morality as an “alternative mea-

suring stick” by which individuals of low social and economic status judge
themselves vis-à-vis others (2000, 147). However, her work fails to address
how gender shapes, and is—in turn—shaped through, the repeated articu-
lation of these moral boundaries. Lamont’s consideration of gender appears
to be only indirect, in so far as it is part of a broad “cultural repertoire” that
influences moral standards. As scholars have noted, there was no “serious
attempt at understanding how the term men in her book title and in the lives
of her subjects functions to shape the very identities and social processes
she sets out to explore” (Raissiguier 2002; see also Carr 2001).
Paying critical attention to the gendered dimensions of worker’s dis-
courses, I argue that men’s struggle for self-worth—the positioning of one-
self as privileged on a symbolic hierarchy—cannot be divorced from the
“struggle over masculinity” (Connell 1995). My comparative data reveal
that the cultural construction of moral boundaries goes hand-in-hand with
the cultural construction of gender: both involve the identification and repu-
diation of a contextually dependent “other.” I highlight men’s assertion of
moral boundaries through the invocation of gender, but in so doing reveal
what Leslie Salzinger (2003, 25) has theorized as the “basic emptiness” of
gendered categories, their extraordinary “malleability and variability.”
While soliciting work from the curbside is constructed as “masculine” by
one set of actors, it is viewed as “feminine” by another. What both groups
of day laborers share in common is a compulsion to frame their job-seeking
practices as dignified and appropriately masculine via internecine strategies
of social distinction and differentiation.
I begin by describing the two fieldwork settings, a street-corner-based
labor market and a day labor worker center. I then describe my research
methodology. Next, I turn to my two case studies, highlighting the dis-
courses through which each group of day laborers conceives of self-worth.
Finally, I conclude by drawing out the implications of these findings for
scholarship on both day labor and symbolic boundaries.

Research Methodology

Day Labor Hiring Sites

As a major traffic thoroughfare with on and off ramps to two of the
region’s major freeways, International Avenue cuts through the residential,
commercial, and cultural heart of the city’s Latino immigrant community.

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 Purser / The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men 121

As an epicenter of battles over gentrification, the historically working-class

neighborhood bisected by International Avenue is now a curious mixture of
urban chic and urban blight: homeless sidewalk vendors hawk their wares
outside high fashion boutiques, taquerías and pupuserías hug either side of
trendy upscale restaurants, old run-down apartment buildings and single
room occupancy hotels stand shoulder-to-shoulder with new luxury loft
condominiums.
Yet what is most striking about International Avenue is that it moon-
lights as a modern day, drive-through “shape-up,” an informal day labor hir-
ing site where employers come to handpick and hire immigrant day
laborers.3 From six in the morning until as late as six in the evening, hun-
dreds of men eager for work line the side of the street, occupying every
street corner for more than a half-mile span. The job seekers are dressed
similarly in comfortable clothes: sweatshirts layered over button-down cot-
ton or flannel shirts over white t-shirts, jeans or carpenter paints, tennis
shoes or work boots, and baseball caps. Many of the men wear clothes
splattered with paint, a detail which on this street serves as a mark of dis-
tinction, a status symbol of sorts, signifying jobs completed and a willing-
ness to work (Parker 1994, 65; Valenzuela 2003).
The majority of these job seekers are homeless.4 Some spend their nights
sleeping in alleyways, nearby parks, or under the freeway. Others opt for a
bed in one of several homeless shelters scattered throughout the city. Still
others are lucky enough to find shelter in a car or to team up with a half
dozen other immigrant men and cram into a studio or one-bedroom apart-
ment. These men live in a sea of material deprivation, albeit one with ebbs
and flows depending on the season, the economy and, as one man res-
olutely pointed out to me, “por suerte” [sheer luck].5
Action on the street is frenzied and unpredictable. There seem to be no
rules governing this open-air market, no institutionalized mechanisms for
either distributing work in a “fair” or organized manner or ensuring that
employers respect workers’ rights or pay a minimum wage. As is typical of
all casual labor markets, there is a chronic labor surplus, making the com-
petitive tension on the street quite palpable. Given this stiff competition,
individual workers try to maximize their chances of attaining work by
appearing the cleanest, strongest, and most assertive. “It’s all about how
you look, how you carry yourself,” explained Efraín, a 25-year-old from
Guatemala, as he flexed his youthful muscles in a purposefully exaggerated
display of strength. Like Efraín, several day laborers point to some aspect
of masculine “bodily capital” (Wacquant 1995) —build or appearance—as
key to finding work in this informal casual labor market.6 Dozens of men

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122 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

stand right on the curb, even several feet into the street, their right arms
extended outward, similar to a gesture made by a hitchhiker. When a car or
truck slows down, even if it is merely to obey traffic lights, workers on the
corner rush over to the vehicle and begin a scene they will repeat dozens,
even hundreds of times that day. Men huddle around the vehicle, each try-
ing to be noticed by raising their hands higher in the air, similar to eager
students who know the answer but can hardly wait to be called on. Usually
this scene lasts but a minute, not unlike a fast-food pick-up at a drive-
through window. Even as the truck pulls away with the chosen few tucked
inside, a few men still scurry along, pleading with the employer through the
side window to add just one more to the day’s work crew.
The presence of these curbside job seekers, on International Avenue as
well as similar street corners throughout the country, has sparked consider-
able controversy. The Bay Area Worker’s Center (BAWC) was established
over a decade ago by city officials as a practical—albeit contentious—
response to ongoing complaints and concerns about day laborers from res-
idents, merchants, and immigrant rights advocates. Located nearly a mile
away from the hiring site along International Avenue, the nonprofit BAWC
was thus founded to serve as an alternative to the street corner labor market.
The BAWC is a hybrid organization, serving as many as five loosely
integrated functions. First, it operates as a labor market intermediary, an
organization that brokers the relationship between job seekers and employ-
ers. The BAWC not only facilitates the meeting of supply and demand,
advertising “energetic and dependable” workers to employers, but also reg-
ulates it by establishing collectively agreed-on rules to monitor and oversee
the hiring of day laborers. These rules aim to curb labor exploitation as well
as allocate jobs in such a way so as to abolish competition. To that end, the
center requires both workers and employers to register, heightening
accountability in an otherwise informal and often anonymous exchange,
and pay the established minimum wage, which was $10 per hour at the time
I conducted this research. Unlike the lottery system that is used in some day
labor worker centers, the BAWC distributes work on a rotational basis
according to a formal list that job seekers sign each time they come to the
center in search of work. They are dropped to the bottom of the list if they
go out on a job for five hours or more, break a rule and are suspended from
the program, or fail to sign the list two days in a row.
The second function of the worker center is service delivery. BAWC
staff members view service delivery as a key component of the center’s
mission to provide day laborers with what they advertise as a “dignified
gathering place” to meet potential employers and provide the necessary

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 Purser / The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men 123

support for laborers to achieve economic independence. Thus, the BAWC

offers restroom facilities, free food, clothing distribution, shelter referrals,
and educational, social, medical, and legal services. Through the BAWC,
job seekers have access to ESL classes, job training workshops, a physical
and mental health clinic, and legal representation to recover unpaid wages.
Worker organizing constitutes the third function of the BAWC. To this
end, staff work doggedly to promote a sense of collective empowerment
among day laborers, encouraging them to take a leadership role in setting
the policies and priorities of the center. The BAWC thus provides the space
and resources for day laborers to meet on a weekly basis to collectively
grapple with the challenges they face. They also do “outreach” to the day
laborers on International Avenue: informing them of their rights and dis-
tributing booklets to encourage them to write down the days and hours they
work, along with information on the employer, so as to make it easier to
recover unpaid wages, if need be.7 The fourth function served by BAWC is
advocacy. The staff and leadership of the BAWC play an active role in both
educating the wider public about day labor and advocating on behalf of the
poor and immigrant communities, particularly at the local level, but also at
the state and federal levels.
Finally, the BAWC functions as a day shelter of sorts, offering a relatively
quiet and safe space where people can pass the time. When describing this
function of the BAWC, a staff member described it as a “community drop-
in center or homeless campsite.”
Housed in a run-down trailer, the BAWC attracts anywhere between 50
to 100 men daily, only a handful of whom will succeed in finding work.
With a few exceptions, all are Latino immigrant men, roughly identical to
the men on the street in terms of demographic, living arrangement, and eco-
nomic status.8 They arrive as early as six in the morning, sign up on the list,
and wait for an indeterminate length of time, sitting on the cement or on a
few scattered folding chairs that are strewn throughout the parking lot. On
a typical day, several people can be seen sleeping below the trailer, curled
up in tattered blankets, venturing out now and again for a trip to the port-a-
potty or in search of food. Others chat and tell jokes with friends, pick up
stones and toss them into the metal waste can, or discretely sell cigarettes
for 25 cents apiece. Next to the trailer, enclosed by a chain-link fence, is a
soccer field owned and operated by the city’s park district. Lacking the
extraneous funds needed to pay the fee to use it, many of the day laborers
peer longingly at the empty field, mere spectators of an image which con-
fronts them as a symbol of exclusion.

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124 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

Data Collection and Analysis

The data for this study were gathered over a period of five months in
2001. The data collection involved ethnographic fieldwork and interviews
with individual day laborers. I spent 2 to 3 days per week in each field site
throughout the period of research, sometimes combining visits to both sites
in the course of a single day. My role in each site, however, varied.
I began my fieldwork on the street as an observant pedestrian. After
gaining some familiarity with the faces and features of the street, I
approached the men on the corner, explained that I was a student studying
day labor, and asked if I could hang around and watch as they sought work.
Most field notes were drawn from the vantage point of one of two street
corners on opposite ends of the more than half-mile span where men seek
work. To integrate myself into the life of the BAWC, I combined my role
as researcher with that of volunteer. This was advantageous in that it
enabled me to participate in a wide variety of the center’s activities, includ-
ing, but not limited to, canvassing city neighborhoods with flyers promot-
ing the center, answering phone calls, attending meetings and public
hearings on day labor, filling out job-intake forms, accompanying partici-
pants to homeless shelters and other social service establishments, and
gathering food from the food bank. Despite these various activities, I spent
the majority of my time at the center hanging around, casually talking with
the job seekers and jotting down notes, which I used to jumpstart the more
elaborate field notes that I typed in the evenings. Although all were aware
of my status as researcher from the university, it is nonetheless probable
that many workers in this site associated me with the center’s staff.
I conducted a total of 22 in-depth, loosely structured interviews with day
laborers, 10 of whom regularly sought work out of the center and 12 of
whom regularly sought work on the street. I asked a series of open-ended
questions that focused on the objective and subjective dimensions of the
men’s work experiences and job-searching strategies. Substantial attention
was devoted to understanding how the men made sense of their precarious
position on the margins of the labor market. Respondents ranged in age
from 18 to 52. All were male immigrants from Latin America, with roughly
two-thirds (n = 15) from Mexico and the remaining third (n = 7) from
Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua). At
the time of the interviews, respondents had been living in the United States
for as long as 16 years to as little as 2 months, with an average length of 3
years. Since most respondents spoke little or no English, all but two of the
interviews were conducted in Spanish. Four of the 22 interviews were tape

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 Purser / The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men 125

recorded and later transcribed and translated. For those men who expressed
discomfort with the recorder, I took detailed notes during and again after
each interview. I used an inductive approach to data analysis, coding my
field notes and interviews by theme (Glaser and Strauss 1967).
The fact that day laborers spend much—often all—of their day waiting
facilitated my ability to attain in-depth interviews in two ways. First, many
of the men I approached with a request for a one-on-one interview were
eager to find ways of passing the time and were, thus, quite willing to talk
with me. Second, although the majority of interviews lasted about an hour,
many others carried on informally for several hours. While most of the
interviews were conducted at the sites where my respondents waited for
work, providing me with ample opportunity to watch their expectations ebb
and flow each time a job prospect arose, eight of the interviews took place
during walks around the neighborhood or over coffee or lunch at a nearby
corner store or cafe.
There are two identifiable methodological limitations of this study, both
of which stem from the particularities of this informal, casual labor market.
First, my sample undoubtedly reflects a selection bias, given that the day
laborers I interviewed and most often observed were those who, on that par-
ticular day, had been unsuccessful in their attempt to find work. Valenzuela
(2003, 329) also makes note of this methodological challenge and suggests
the need for rigorous sampling frameworks that account for “fluid or
impossible to identify universe populations.” Second, given the unpre-
dictable nature of this labor market and the fact that it is what one of my
respondents referred to as a “rolling” (rolando) population—meaning that
you do not necessarily see the same people everyday—my relations with
several of the men were fleeting, one-time encounters, as opposed to the
durable relations in the field that ethnographic research uniquely makes
possible. For a discussion of similar dynamics in the study of panhandlers,
see Lankenau (1999, 293).

Research Findings
For both groups of intermittently employed men, how they search for
work is seen to be a measure of their character, a mark of their masculinity,
and an indicator of their moral worth. Both groups see their own pursuit of
work as dignified and, to varying degrees, state that they would feel “shame”
to find themselves in the other’s shoes, using gendered language and imagery
to distinguish and distance themselves from the other. On the one hand, the
day laborers on the street corner emphasize their perceived autonomy, skill,

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126 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

assertiveness, and work ethic, and differentiate themselves from those at the
center whom they view as dependent, deferential, incompetent, and lazy. The
day laborers at the center, on the other hand, differentiate themselves from
those on the corner whom they see as desperate and self-compromising.

View from the Corner

Toward the end of our conversation, as we sipped down the last few
drops of our coffee, Margarito handed me his business card. Simple and to-
the-point, the card listed his name, cellular phone number, and the occupa-
tional title “handyman.” When I asked him to describe how he felt about
searching for work on the street, he explained:

The work is hard and you never know what you’re going to get, but I can
come and go when I want and I can negotiate the pay. The truth is that I have
autonomy. If a guy comes by here looking for someone to work for $6 an
hour, I can say “never.” I’m a hard worker and know I can earn more than
that. So, if you’re ambitious, a little creative, and you work hard, it’s really
good on the corner because you can start building up clients who come back
for you regularly. I have five clients now.

Although Margarito, who is originally from Guatemala and has been in

the United States for 8 years, was the only day laborer who used the term
“client” to refer to his drive-by employers, his emphasis on autonomy and
negotiation was something that I heard over and over again throughout the
course of my research.9 While nearly all of the day laborers said that they
were looking for a steady job that pays well, they nonetheless perceived
International Avenue to be paved with economic opportunity. The street
corner labor market offers to those with “ambition,” “creativity,” and
undoubtedly patience, the prospect—however illusory and improbable—of
steady employment.
This perceived autonomy—exemplified by Margarito’s stylized self-
presentation as a freelance entrepreneur (Valenzuela 2001)—is one basis on
which the men on the street assess their self-worth and construct a sense of
dignity (Duneier 1999; Gowan 2000; Hodson 2001). However, both auton-
omy and the ability to negotiate the pay and responsibilities of the job are
constrained by material necessity. Thus, this portrayal of themselves as free
and autonomous individuals engaged in an entrepreneurial activity is
repeatedly contradicted by their actions. Because of the stiff competition on
the street as well as the paucity and unpredictability of jobs, several of the

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 Purser / The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men 127

men stated that, rather than coming and going as they please, they fre-
quently stand out on the street for more than 12 hours at a time, hesitating
to go to the nearest public bathroom out of fear that they may miss their one
and only opportunity to get work that day, not to mention their one and only
chance to achieve the illusive goal of a stable job. As much as they high-
lighted their ability to negotiate wages, the men I interviewed also noted
that they are frequently bargained down from the wage that they had
desired by one of their aggressive curbside competitors.
Other men drew on the “fleeting” nature of day labor work and the
incessant, unpredictable rotation of jobs to highlight the breadth and supe-
riority of their skills (Davis 1959). In this respect, they renounced wide-
spread depictions of themselves as unskilled laborers, scavenging for
crumbs at the bottom of the labor market. They asserted a sense of dignity
in their ability to “hacer todo” (do everything), regardless of their lack of
formal training and credentials. As Eduardo, a 31-year-old from Veracruz,
Mexico, explained:

Sometimes the employers pull up here and ask me if I know how to, for
example, drywall. I say, “Look, patron, I’m a dry waller, a construction
worker, a carpenter, a window installer, a landscaper, a mover, a roofer, a
plumber, a painter. I can do everything.” On the corner, I’ve had jobs of all
types. Each day is something different. I know people look at me standing out
here and think I’m a miserable guy, but I know . . . and God knows . . . I have
more skills than them. I can do everything. [In a resolute tone] I tell the boss
“hire me” and if he is not happy with my work, he does not have to pay me.

This emphasis on skills was echoed in the statements made by a small

group of a half-dozen day laborers who attended a meeting organized by
the staff of the Bay Area Worker’s Center to combat the increasing preva-
lence of police harassment on International Avenue. After discussing the
possibility of creating (unofficial) photo identification cards for the day
laborers on the street in an attempt to curb police harassment, one of the
staff members proposed that each worker’s occupational specialty or pro-
fession be printed on the IDs. Muffled sounds of frustration instantly filled
the small, stuffy room in the basement of the Catholic church, and a man
who had been perched on a table in the corner stood up and announced that
he did not support such a proposal since he considered himself to have
“diverse specialties” and took pride in the fact that he was “not only a
painter.” Several other workers reiterated this assertion; one shouted
emphatically that he had “hands of magic.” In the end, they agreed to the

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128 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

catch-all title of “trabajadores de la Avenida Internacional” (workers of

International Avenue) over more limiting occupational affiliations.
Other men prided themselves on their assertiveness, emphasizing a set
of skills more typical of a hustler (Duneier 1999; Venkatesh 2002;
Wacquant 1998). Thirty-eight year old Milo, from Mexico City, drew an
analogy between his job-searching strategy on the corner and the skills
required by a salesman:

Here on the street you have to be aggressive, very aggressive . . . and I am a

good talker. I see a truck pulled over on the corner and a lot of guys standing
around it and I go up to the employer and ask him directly: “How much are
you paying? Ten? Well, I’ll take nine.” [He motions with his finger, hand up
in the air, as if making a bid at an auction.] When the employer sees that he
often picks me because he can see that I am very sharp. I take pride in the
work I do. After five years of this, I am like a specialist in salesmanship (soy
cómo especialista del arte de vender). And that has helped me in all differ-
ent areas of my life. [Laughing] See, I am a really good salesman.

Still other men pointed to their daily and highly visible quest for work as
evidence of their unparalleled work ethic, entailing perseverance, discipline,
and moral fortitude. Jorge, a 51-year-old man from Michoacán, Mexico, who
had recently quit a $5 per-hour dishwashing job at a bakery and now finds
himself working on the corner, exclaimed in a tone of righteous indignation:

We are the most hardworking people in this country. Each and every day, we
are standing here on the corner, from early in the morning until late at night,
looking for work. Who else has so much patience, so much dedication? We
are not here to amuse ourselves, but to work, to take care of our families. I
don’t understand the White people who yell at us from the windows of their
cars. They should reward us for our hard work, our sacrifices. We don’t want
to bother anyone, we just want to work.

While the day laborers who line the street fashion themselves as
autonomous, skilled, assertive, and hard-working, they tend to evaluate
those who search for work through the center as dependent, incompetent,
deferential, and lazy, a set of attributes that collectively evoke the specter of
the “welfare queen.” By casting those at the center in this pejorative female-
identified role, the day laborers on the street constitute themselves as
engaged in an appropriately masculine, and dignified, pursuit of work.
With its rotational distribution of jobs, the BAWC takes away individual
day laborers’ competitive advantage with respect to securing employment.

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 Purser / The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men 129

Thus, for the men on the street, those who use the center provide a foil
against which they cast themselves as assertive, competent, and hard-working.
As Milo, the self-proclaimed “specialist in salesmanship,” stated with
regard to the people who seek work through the BAWC:

Some of them may be there physically, standing around, but they’re not there
[pointing to his head] mentally, understand? They are not ready to work.
They are just there to sit around and maybe make a little money for their beer
or their drugs so they can go home, get high, and watch soccer, understand?
They are not there to work. They are not there to take care of their families.

Milo draws a clear-cut distinction between those who merely work for sur-
vival or to feed addictions and those who, like himself, are both physically
and mentally “ready to work” to fulfill their masculine role as breadwinners.
Pointing out that “they’re not there mentally” and that “they are not there to
work,” Milo constructs the center’s participants as lazy and incompetent.
Carlos, a spunky 22-year-old from El Salvador who sports a shiny silver
tooth and a black and white bandana tied tightly around his head, had sim-
ilarly depreciatory things to say about the program and its participants:

I first came down here [to International Avenue] with a Salvadoran guy I met
my first day in the city over on Main Street [location of one of the most fre-
quently used homeless shelters in the city]. We have been coming here now
for six months . . . One time, I went to the center, just to check it out, noth-
ing more, but it’s much better to work in the street because the process at the
program is slow, very slow. I don’t need help, I just need a job. The people
there [at the center] go to get food, coffee, and tickets for clothes; they don’t
really want to work. I’d prefer one thousand times more to work than to
receive a damn ticket for clothes! . . . I’m a man and I have to work!

With its provision of services—albeit extremely meager ones—the

worker center is construed by men like Carlos to be a form of welfare, a
place one goes for “help” as opposed to a place one goes for a job. By
explicitly distinguishing and distancing himself from the center’s partici-
pants, whom he deems dependent, deferential, and emasculated, Carlos
reaffirms his own sense of autonomy, self-sufficiency and manhood: “I’m a
man and I have to work!” These statements echo the dominant American
discourse on “dependency”—that the poor who receive “hand-outs” are
morally and psychologically degraded—a discourse that has, over the
years, become increasingly pejorative, individualized, and feminized
(Fraser and Gordon 1994; Gans 1995; Katz 1990).

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130 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

Carlos’s derision of the program and its participants was echoed by

Felipe, a witty and bespectacled 50-year-old man from Mexico City. Felipe
has been working on International Avenue as a day laborer for 14 years. He
is the self-proclaimed “founder” of the corner where we first met, the first
to have broken off from the original corner in front of the construction sup-
ply store, setting into motion the rapid outward expansion of the informal
day labor hiring zone such that today it spans more than a half mile in
length. As for the center, Felipe exclaimed in English: “Oh, I don’t trust
them! Too much corruption. They give out cookies and coffee and say
‘we’re gonna help you’ [in an effeminate voice and mocking tone]. Besides,
they’re too slow.” A little later in the conversation, Felipe asserted, still in
reference as to why it is better to look for work on the street than at the
center: “A man has to be willing to take risks.”
Hector, a 31-year-old man from Aguascalientes, Mexico, also drew an
explicit comparison between the men on the street and the men at the
center, echoing the assessments made by others on the corner:

[The center] is full of lazy people with problems. Here on the street are all of
the healthy, strong, and hard-working men. I would be ashamed or embar-
rassed to be picked up by an employer at the program because it is filthy and
the guys are all just sitting around, looking tired and hopeless . . . They are
fucking weaklings.

Milo, Carlos, Felipe, and Hector share a similar assessment of the men
who go to the program: they “do not really want to work.” They draw on
particular characteristics of the center’s operations and use gendered
imagery to make moral judgments of those who use it as their job-searching
strategy. Despite the program’s stated mission to provide day laborers with
a dignified gathering place to meet potential employers, many men on the
street interpret the passive waiting that occurs at the center (because of its
bureaucratic, rotational distribution of jobs) as well as the provision of
services (English classes, clothing, food, legal aid, medical clinic) to be
indicators of participants’ dependency, deference, incompetence, and fal-
tering work ethic. “Real workers” and “real men,” they assert simultane-
ously through these acts of repudiation, look for work in the street.
What is particularly revealing in these discourses of self worth is the
degree to which they are premised on the logic of making a “virtue of
necessity” (Bourdieu 1977, 46). The men on the street corner turn the
uncertainty that is endemic to this casual labor market into the masculine
virtue of risk-taking. They interpret the lack of stable and enduring relations

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 Purser / The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men 131

to employers as a virtue of autonomy. They turn the competitive tension on

the street into the basis for assertiveness. And they interpret their public
quest for work (the street corner as open-air labor market) as a stage on
which to enact and display their work ethic. As De Genova (2006, 250)
argued in his ethnographic study of Latino migrant laborers, these findings
reveal the complicity between the men’s “compulsions of masculinity” and
their “own exploitation.”

View from the Center

“I don’t want to beg for work,” Hugo tells me, as we sit on the concrete
in the parking lot of the Bay Area Worker’s Center. Hugo is number 27 on
the list today (out of 62) and as he waits, he is weighing his options, con-
sidering whether he should “throw in the towel,” as they say, and try his
chances out on the street. He has been coming to the center for a little over
two months and tells me that he has been out on six jobs in that time, only
one of which lasted for longer than a day. “There are not many options,”
Hugo readily admits, looking down at his worn and calloused hands. [Being
on the street] “makes me feel sick and dirty. Here at the center we are all
treated the same, with dignity. There is no begging, no desperate chase.”
Clemente, a short Oaxacan man with a fondness for boxing who sits near
us in a folding metal chair, chimes in: “In this place, we get work in a dig-
nified manner. We sign the list and wait until our turn.”
Compared with the men on the corner, the men at the BAWC spent con-
siderably less time talking about their self-conception as workers. I did not
hear the type of boastful claims of superiority pertaining to skill, autonomy,
and work ethic that were so common on the street. Unlike the men on the
corner, who were battling their vilified status in the eyes of residents, busi-
ness owners, and politicians alike, the men at the BAWC seemed to feel less
of a need to prove their status on the symbolically profitable side of the
working/nonworking divide. As Rachel Sherman (2005, 133) argued in her
comparative study of interactive service workers in luxury hotels, organi-
zational factors “both enable and limit workers’ interpretations of them-
selves and others.” In this case, the practices and rhetoric provided by the
BAWC played a key role in shaping the day laborers’ evaluations of self and
other. As a worker center, staff members legitimated participants’ claims to
a worker status. Each job seeker at the center was given a photo identifica-
tion card and invited to be an active participant in weekly meetings of the
“workers’ committee.” Staff consistently made reference to them as not only
hard-working men, but as bearers of rights, worthy of respect. Not surprisingly,

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132 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

then, much of the day laborers’ discourse of self-worth focused on being a

member of this community. Again and again, men at the center told me that
they came there because of the camaraderie and companionship it offered.
Gustavo told me that he comes to the center each and every day, even when
he already has a job and even during the two-week period when he was sus-
pended from the center for having yelled at another worker: “It is like my
family,” he explained. “I have become accustomed to coming here and
when I don’t come, I feel sad.”
Nonetheless, the men did engage in the same kind of “boundary work”
vis-à-vis the day laborers along International Avenue. And here, too, they
drew on gendered imagery to distinguish themselves from the day laborers on
the street corner and to reaffirm the notion that searching for work through
the center is not only more dignified, but more appropriately masculine.
At the time of our interview, Marco had been a regular participant in the
BAWC for a little over two years. At 20, he is one of the youngest men at
the center. He lives with his uncle and four other men, all from his home-
town of Tijuana, Mexico, in a one-bedroom apartment located less than a
mile from the center. He rides a lowrider bike and can often be found “pop-
ping wheelies” and performing other tricks in the BAWC parking lot, much
to the amusement, and sometimes annoyance, of the other men waiting for
work. During a walk around a nearby park one afternoon, Marco launched
into an analysis of what distinguished the men at the program from those
on the street:

The street is not a place for a man to look for honest work. It took me one
week to figure that out before I said “that’s enough.” I saw guys being picked
up for all kinds of things . . . sexual favors [laughing nervously]. I will not
stand on the street corner to be bought by other men.

Marco reaffirms his own masculinity and dignified pursuit of “honest

work,” by distinguishing and distancing himself from what he considers to
be the sexual depravity of the day laborers on the street. Marco explicitly
contrasts the mediated search for work through the BAWC to the unmedi-
ated search for work on the street corner, where men are “bought by other
men.” The gendered imagery of prostitution is central to how Marco
describes the differences and symbolic hierarchy between the men at the
BAWC and the men on the street corners.10
Clemente used a similarly gendered discourse to distinguish between the
two job-searching practices and, hence, the two day labor populations:

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 Purser / The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men 133

On the corner, when a truck pulls up, the driver looks you up and down.
He measures how strong you look from the outside. It’s like [in English]
“Miss America.” He only sees your body. And those guys seem to love the
attention. I think it’s better here [the BAWC]. Here, everyone is serious and
hardworking.

Clemente uses the metaphor of a beauty contest to make sense of the

practice of searching for work on the corner, reproducing the folk theory
that employers’ selection process is based on the physical appearance and
stature of job seekers. In doing so, he attributes highly gendered meanings
to each job-searching strategy: if standing on the corner is constituted as
feminine submission to, and homoerotic tension under, the objectifying
gaze of other men, then waiting at the center is constituted as appropriately
masculine, a place for “serious and hardworking” men. For both Marco and
Clemente, dignity is asserted and masculinity is affirmed through the repu-
diation of the act of displaying or selling one’s body on the street corner.
Although presented here as the interpretations of individual day labor-
ers in the context of one-on-one interviews, these cultural meanings do
appear to circulate among the group as a whole and in the midst of
dynamic group activity. For instance, on my first day in the field, I
attended a meeting of the “worker’s committee” at the BAWC, which all
of the center’s participants were encouraged to attend. In the midst of
reporting on some of the recent outreach work being done along Interna-
tional Avenue to advertise the program and its services, one of the BAWC
staff members, aware of the lack of affiliation and identification between
the two groups of day laborers, stated that “the street and the center are the
same thing, the same cause.” The comment elicited a handful of muffled
snickers, followed by one brazen man’s whistling and catcalling, followed
by an eruption of group laughter. At the time, I did not know what to make
of the occurrence, chalking it up to some kind of inside joke. But, as I
began to recognize a clear pattern of “boundary work,” the significance of
this event became all the more apparent, revealing the widespread recog-
nition of the gendered meanings BAWC participants ascribe to the curb-
side quest for employment.
Even when they do not refer to explicitly gendered imagery, the men at
the BAWC evaluate searching for work on the corner as somehow “less
than human.” Luís came to the United States 3 years ago from Honduras.
After spending some time working as a day laborer in both Phoenix and
Seattle, Luís now lives in a homeless shelter and regularly seeks work
through the BAWC.

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134 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

The program doesn’t really serve its purpose because there is not sufficient
work. I have not had a job in, like, eight days. It’s hard. It’s very hard. In the
street, there are more options, but it’s degrading to go around chasing after
cars like a dog like that. Here it is more peaceful and I feel like a man treated
with respect.

Like Hugo, presented at the beginning of this section, who sees the men
on the corner as “begging” for work, Luís contrasts his job searching strat-
egy to the desperate act of “chasing after cars like a dog.”
Byron, a 36-year-old man from Guatemala, told me that he had spent ten
years working the corner before joining the worker center. Over lunch at a
nearby Mexican restaurant, he carefully drew a picture of a deformed-looking
rabbit in my field notebook and explained that the guys on the street are like
“crazy rabbits” [conejos locos] when it comes to trying to find work. By
contrasting their job searching strategy through the BAWC to the desperate,
animalistic chase on the street, all three of these men place control at the
core of their construction of self worth.

Discussion

Studies of the burgeoning informal day labor market have overwhelm-

ingly focused on the demographic characteristics of the workforce and the
basic organization and working conditions of this distinctive trade, over-
looking the question of how day laborers make sense of their daily pursuit
of work while asserting and defending their dignity. Drawing on interview
and comparative ethnographic fieldwork in a worker center and a street cor-
ner hiring site, this article reveals a clear pattern of “boundary work,”
wherein participants in each site construct a set of moral boundaries via
identification and repudiation of what they interpret to be the feminine sub-
mission exemplified by the day laborers in the other site. The day laborers
on the street tended to contrast themselves to the purported dependency,
deference, incompetence, and faltering work ethic of the men at the
program. The day laborers at the program tended to contrast themselves to
the purported sexual depravity and desperation of the men on the street. The
same activity that is construed as appropriately masculine and dignified by
one group is invoked as emblematic of feminine submission by the other,
thus revealing the tremendous “malleability and variability of gendered cat-
egories” (Salzinger 2003, 25). These findings suggest the need for further
attention to the mutually constitutive process whereby gender and moral
boundaries are constituted.

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 Purser / The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men 135

I do not mean to suggest in this article that the cultural meanings day
laborers ascribe to the street and the center determine which of the two sites
they go to in search of work. Given the profound dearth of work opportuni-
ties in either site, I would argue that the men go wherever they believe they
will have the best chance of securing work. This calculation of chance, how-
ever, may very well relate to the cultural meanings I have discussed through-
out this article (e.g., If day laborers view the center as a place one goes to
get handouts, they will likely calculate the chances of obtaining work
through the center as quite marginal). What I am suggesting is that these cul-
tural meanings are the vehicle through which the men constitute their daily
quest for work as dignified. The repeated identification and repudiation of
the alternative job-seeking strategy (soliciting work from a street corner or
participating in a worker center) reveals just how limited their choices for
obtaining work are and yet, how important it is to their senses of self-worth
to feel that they are making a choice, constrained as it might be.
These contextually specific moral boundaries illustrate the way in which
the quest for dignity can lead workers to be complicit with their own
exploitation and thwart the emergence of the sense of commonality and
feelings of solidarity that are needed to collectively organize day laborers.
The findings present a challenge to the successful operation of nonprofit
day labor centers established by community organizations and city govern-
ments in metropolitan areas throughout the nation, for they reveal how the
creation of a regulated and service-providing day labor worker center can
have the perverse effect of serving as the perfect foil against which the
curbside day laborers define themselves. I would thus echo Valenzuela’s
(2003, 326) claim that we do not know enough about the real and, particu-
larly, perceived benefits of regulated informal hiring sites to the workers
themselves. Developing effective organizing strategies among day laborers
requires that we further examine the cultural meanings day laborers attach
to their work as part of their creative pursuit of dignity.
Two important questions about symbolic boundaries are raised, but not
answered, by this article. The first concerns the durability and malleability
of these symbolic boundaries, particularly in light of fluid social bound-
aries. All of the men I interviewed at the BAWC had at one time or another
sought work along International Avenue. Some of them still do, either on
occasion or as a routine strategy for maximizing their chances of obtaining
work. These are thus not rigidly separate and easily distinguishable groups.
But the fluidity between the hiring sites does raise the question of how
these men rationalize their participation in an activity that they have
deemed to be both morally faltering and “feminine.” To what extent do the

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136 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

cultural meanings the men have elaborated about the street as participants
of the BAWC shape their behavior when they clamor for work on the street
corner? To what extent are these cultural meanings durable, if simply in
their effect?
Second, this article raises the question of whether the moral boundaries
drawn by and between groups or individuals in contexts of social and eco-
nomic marginalization are more apt to explicitly invoke gender than are
those drawn by groups or individuals vis-à-vis those above or below them
on the socioeconomic hierarchy. Along these lines, we might ask whether
gender is invoked in the strategies of differentiation and distinction between
the panhandlers and the magazine vendors on Sixth Avenue studied by
Duneier (1999, 83), both of whom assert that they have “too much pride to
engage in each other’s activity.” The point here is not to diminish the over-
all centrality of gender to understanding how individuals construct moral
boundaries, but rather to question whether the prominence of gendered
imagery in the assertion of moral boundaries stems from the fact that the
men in this case have few other recourses for establishing self-worth, other
than through explicit repudiation of that which they construe as feminine.

Notes
1. Jornalero, or “day laborer,” denotes the occupation’s peculiar dimension of time,
whereas esquinero, or “street corner man,” denotes its peculiar dimension of space.
2. All proper names of individuals, places, and organizations are pseudonyms to ensure
anonymity.
3. The term shape-up refers to the traditional hiring system along the waterfront. As
depicted in the 1954 award-winning film, On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando and
directed by Elia Kazan, longshoremen seeking jobs “shaped-up” each morning at the docks
and waited for a hiring foreman to blow his whistle and pick out the men for that day’s work.
Variously described as inefficient, archaic, brutal, degrading, a spawning place for crime, and
a system that promotes chronic unemployment among longshoremen, the “shape-up” hiring
system persisted on the New York docks until 1953 (Larrowe 1976). Shape-up is now some-
times used to refer to informal day labor hiring sites.
4. This is in glaring contrast to Valenzuela’s findings on the population of immigrant day
laborers in Los Angeles, only 6 percent of whom are believed to be homeless (Valenzuela
1999). While Valenzuela’s report compared the situation of day laborers in southern California
to that of day laborers in “other industrialized countries,” my research indicates that the situa-
tion in southern California cannot be taken as indicative of the United States as a whole. These
divergent findings beg further analysis of the way in which the lived experience of homeless-
ness shapes the day labor market and day laborers’ subjective understandings of their work.
5. Just like the Algerian subproletariat studied by Bourdieu (2000, 221), immigrant day
laborers, who “liv[e] at the mercy of what each day brings,” highlight what happens when life
is turned into what they perceive to be a “game of chance.”

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 Purser / The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men 137

6. During the Great Depression, in what became known as the Bronx Slave Market,
African American women from Harlem would line up on street corners and wait for White,
primarily Jewish, women to pick them up for a day’s work as domestic helpers. Similar to the
purported importance of masculine bodily capital among contemporary immigrant day labor-
ers, “Black women [in the Bronx Slave Market] with the most calloused knees would be hired
first,” seeing as that “worn knees indicated that the women were accustomed to scrubbing
floors” (Sullivan 2001).
7. National survey data suggests that immigrant day laborers are regularly denied payment
for their work. Almost half of all day laborers in the sample experienced at least one instance
of wage theft in the 2 months prior to being surveyed (Valenzuela et al. 2006).
8. Given that it is a publicly supported center, the homogeneity of the job seekers is
remarkable. During the course of my research, I saw five non-Latinos come through the center:
two women (one White, one Black) and three men (two White, one Black).
9. In his analysis of the structure and informal organization of the street corner labor
market, Malpica (2002) argues that two different hiring practices take place on the corner.
Esquineros can either be hired by “regular” employers, with whom they have made previous
arrangements, or “unclaimed” employers. Malpica argues that “deference at the corner is
granted to those employed by ‘regular’ employers.”
10
Let me point out that although this discourse of prostitution was a key means through
which the day laborers at the center differentiated and distanced themselves from the day
laborers on the street, I did not over the course of this study gather any evidence that men on
International Avenue were being hired for prostitution. For further discussion on this topic,
however, see Gonzalez-Lopez (2005).

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 Purser / The Dignity of Job-Seeking Men 139

———. 1998. Inside the zone: The social art of the hustler in the Black American ghetto.
Theory, Culture and Society 15:1-36.
Walter, Nicholas, Philippe Bourgois, and H. Margarita Loinaz. 2004. Masculinity and undoc-
umented labor migration: Injured day laborers in San Francisco. Social Science &
Medicine 59:1159-68.

Gretchen Purser is completing her doctorate in sociology at the University of California,

Berkeley. Her research interests lie at the intersection of changing employment relations,
urban poverty, and the labor market experiences of the formerly incarcerated. Her dissertation
is a workplace ethnography of the formal day labor industry in Oakland and Baltimore.

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