مردسالاری و مهاجرت نیروی کار مستند نشده" کارگران روزمزد لاتین مصدوم در سان فرانسیسکو

Drawing on data collected through clinical practice and ethnographic fieldwork, this study examines the experience of injury, illness and disability among undocumented Latino day laborers in San Francisco. We demonstrate how constructions of masculine identity organize the experience of embodied social suffering among workers who are rendered vulnerable by the structural conditions of undocumented immigrant status. Theoretical concepts from critical medical anthropology and gender studies extend the scholarly analysis of structural violence beyond the primarily economic to uncover how it is embodied at the intimate level as a gendered experience of personal and familial crisis, involving love, respect, betrayal and patriarchal failure. A clinical ethnographic focus on socially structured patriarchal suffering elucidates the causal relationship between macro-forces and individual action with a fuller appreciation of the impact of culture and everyday lived experience.

Fieldnotes Estefan, a young Mayan Mexican farmer crossed the US border without papers in 1999 to support his wife and two children as a day laborer in San Francisco. While working for an uninsured roofing contractor he overturned a bucket of hot tar, scalding his face and upper body. Several weeks later, still recuperating in a homeless shelter and disfigured by scars from burns to 60% of his face, he reflects on his responsibility to provide for his family: I am sad but I give thanks to God. Because blind—then we are not complete. I would not be fit to serve my family. Left with one hand, I would not be fit for anything. With one foot I would not be fit before God. Better that I go all at once; that I am not here suffering…I would kill myself. I really think that I would. Early each morning, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the sidewalks along the central boulevard leading to the freeway in San Francisco's predominantly Latino immigrant neighborhood known as the Mission District filled with Latino men seeking employment from passing motorists. As untrained temporary day laborers in many of the United States’ most hazardous industries, these undocumented day laborers are at disproportionately high risk for work injury (Walter, Bourgois, Loinaz, & Schillinger, 2002). The clinical and statistical literature identifies immigrant Latino workers as having almost double the occupational injury rate of the US labor force (12.2/100 versus 7.1/100) (del Pinal, 1996; Pransky et al., 2002). In many European countries immigrants suffer more than twice the rate of injury of native-born workers (Bollini & Siem, 1995, Table 4). There have been repeated calls for health care providers to address the special cultural needs of immigrant workers and their families. Public health needs to address the inequalities that expose immigrants and ethnic minorities in industrialized countries to dangerous working conditions and impede their access to services and legal protection (Bollini & Siem, 1995; Felton, 2000; Siem, 1997). Drawing on participant observation fieldwork and community-based clinical care among injured day laborers in San Francisco, we examine the cultural experience of occupational injury through the lens of gender. Specifically, we argue that cultural constructions of patriarchal masculinity among undocumented Latino day laborers organize their sense of self-worth and define their experience of poverty and social marginalization. This dynamic emerges especially clearly when immigrant workers become disabled and are unable to fulfill their masculine obligations of maintaining their families economically in their home communities.