Overview

This highly accessible, engagingly written book exposes the underbelly of California's Silicon Valley, the most successful high-technology region in the world, in a vivid ethnographic study of Mexican immigrants employed in Silicon Valley's low-wage jobs. Christian Zlolniski's on-the-ground investigation demonstrates how global forces have incorporated these workers as an integral part of the economy through subcontracting and other flexible labor practices and explores how these labor practices have in turn affected working conditions and workers' daily lives. In Zlolniski's analysis, these immigrants do not emerge merely as victims of a harsh economy; despite the obstacles they face, they are transforming labor and community politics, infusing new blood into labor unions, and challenging exclusionary notions of civic and political membership. This richly textured and complex portrait of one community opens a window onto the future of Mexican and other Latino immigrants in the new U.S. economy.

Full Product Details

9780520246430

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Reviews

Zlolniski makes a critical contribution to our understanding of the underside of advanced capitalism. He shows us its complexities: It is not only about misery, it is also about shaping subjective and political possibilities. If there is one concept that comes to mind it is the complexity of powerlessness. - Saskia Sassen, author of Guests and Aliens In a time when we have great need to understand Mexican immigrants and their place in U.S. society, Zlolniski offers a superior analysis of why and how advanced capitalist economies employ undocumented workers. After reading his book, we will never think again of immigration as something that exclusively comes from outside. The immigrants, too, have agency in his account, as he narrates and analyzes an important case of unionization, pointing to significant new possibilities in American life. - Josiah Heyman, Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas at El Paso

Author Information

Christian Zlolniski is Assistant Professor in Anthropology and in the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington.

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