UCLA Library

Literature on day labor has predominantly focused on the objective characteristics (e.g. labor market, day labor practices, spatial/organizational configurations, hiring sites, etc.) than on the subjective processes of engaging with day labor work (e.g. how they perceive, feel). For this thesis, I have focused on the precarious nature and condition of being a day laborer and the effects on day laborers’ subjective and intersubjective life. That is, how structurally vulnerable day laborers become subjected to precarious work that consequently and negatively influences their psychological well-being, but also how family, dreams, and hopes become entangled with the everyday life of a day laborer. More specifically, as analytics I use constructs as structural vulnerability, precarity, and liminality to understand what it means to be a day laborer and how day laborers are coping with their current condition. In a period of 12 weeks, I conducted participant-observation and contributed as an intern at a day labor center in Southern California. I have found that day laborers are channeled to day labor and consequently find themselves in a heightened condition of precariousness. In trying to overcome obstacles to continue the struggle for being, and finding the day labor center as a source of opportunity to deploy themselves, day laborers paradoxically enter a liminal space that both strengthens them but at times intensify their precariousness.