Unionization of home care has depended on the state location of the occupation. Government social policies and funding created home care, shaping the structure of the industry and the conditions of work. The welfare nexus, linking old age, disability, health, and welfare policies, however, also transformed care hidden in the home into a public service. Through case studies of California and Oregon, leaders in deinstitutionalizing care of the elderly and disabled, we explore the social struggles that forced the state to recognize its invisible workforce. The home location of personal attendants and other health aides has entailed not only organizing challenges but policy innovation as well. Using the welfare state location of the labor, workers allied with consumers to develop the public authority as a newstructure of representation. The history of home care shows that social welfare and health policy have long been entangled with labor policy.

What is work? Who is a worker? How does law and social policy shape our understandings of these terms? What is at stake when only wage workers are endowed with worker status? That limitation excludes unpaid caregiving and other forms of nonmarket production. Indeed, even within waged work, specific forms of employment take precedence, privileging industrial jobs associated with adult white men and marginalizing much agricultural, household, and other service work. How does this dual structure, both bounding and dividing labor markets, create precarious conditions for people of color, immigrants, women, and others who face exclusion from privileged forms of work, consignment to subordinated forms of work, and denial that their labors constitute work at all?

This paper uses visual and material culture analysis of garments, marketing materials, and exhibitor booths as well as textual analysis of online discourse to unpack the cultural sensibilities of Chicanx streetwear fashion designers. I argue that what I term, paisa aesthetics, are mobilized to visually disrupt how race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship are aesthetically understood in mainstream fashion narratives and challenge normative ideas of Mexicanidad. By reclaiming and queering paisa, these designs center Mexican American nostalgia, working-class lives, and the experience of first-generation migrants while simultaneously poking fun at illegality and racialized sexist tropes in high fashion/culture spaces. In addition, I argue that the cultural work that the fashion industry depends on is within a colonial capitalist logic that renders it as unorganized labor and decontextualized aesthetics. I examine the collections of Equihua and Paisa Boys to identify those cultural legacies and specificities that are lost in the process of consumption. Paisa aesthetics provides a vocabulary from which to understand the bicultural sensibility of Chicanx and Mexican communities in the U.S.