Hegemony and Hamburger Migration Narratives and Democratic Unionism

Political Research Quarterly
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Hegemony and Hamburger: Migration Narratives and Democratic Unionism among Mexican
Meatpackers in the U.S. West
Paul Apostolidis
Political Research Quarterly 2005; 58; 647
DOI: 10.1177/106591290505800412
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SYMPOSIUM ESSAY
Hegemony and Hamburger:

Migration Narratives and Democratic Unionism
among Mexican Meatpackers in the U.S. West
PAUL APOSTOLIDIS, WHITMAN COLLEGE
This essay considers how the narrated experiences of immigrant workers in the United States could help promote organized labors participation in a transnational movement to democratize globalization processes. I
draw on interviews with immigrant meatpackers working for the Tyson Corporation, who since the late 1990s
have mounted an impressive and unusual effort to democratize their workplace and union as well as to
improve worker safety and dignity. Although the union has elaborated an effective discourse concerning injustice in the workplace and the need for action to remedy these problems, it has not developed any comparable
interpretation of workers migration experiences. Workers migration narratives often reinforce the liberal
assumptions guiding the unions campaigns as well as the U.S. labor movement in general. They occasionally
intimate, however, how migration processes can aid in the formation of counter-hegemonic subjectivities,
developing these workers practical orientations toward resisting mistreatment both individually and in solidarity with others. Thus, creating more institutionalized spaces for workers to communicate about their migration experiences not only could help unions achieve their organizational goalsit also could help shift the
political orientation of the labor movement toward a more transnational, social-democratic approach to regulating immigration and capitalist production alike.
future of the labor movement depends on organizing and

activating these new workers, rather than trying to revive
antiquated strategies for cooperation with business that
traded organizing and an expansive, confrontational political agenda for regular wage increases, stable benefits, and
closed shops in selected industries (a partnership in which,
in any case, most companies are no longer interested). Yet
despite these promising signals, labor still seems largely
focused on trying to hang on to its dwindling resources as
an interest group rather than genuinely reinvesting itself in
a new, movement-oriented praxis.
This essay considers certain aspects of contemporary factory workers experiences in the United States that may offer
prospects for labors intensified participation in a broader
democratic movement to confront the neoliberal institutions that are currently guiding the process of globalization.
Despite the general conservatism, in practice, of the AFLCIO and most major unions in the United States, there have
been important signs of discontent with the accommodationist approach and interest in a new kind of labor activism
over the past decade among leaders and rank-and-file participants alike. Unions waged an impressive, if unsuccessful,
campaign of opposition to the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), came out in force to protest the World
Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999, and have
more recently taken the highly unusual step of officially
opposing an increasingly popular war promoted by the
president. Will these events turn out to be early glimpses of
a new future for the union movement as an agent for more
democratic regulation of transnational streams of capital
and labor? That depends in part on the extent to which
LABOR AND CHALLENGES TO

CORPORATE-LED GLOBALIZATION
rganized labor in the United States is in the midst of

an epochal transformation. Several decades ago, it
was already apparent that major corporations were
withdrawing from participation in the postwar compact
between labor and capital administrated by the Keynesian
state primarily under the leadership of New Deal and postNew Deal Democrats. The Democratic party itself soon followed suit, leaving the labor movement bereft of progressive
political leadership and mired in a losing battle to staunch
ebbing union membership while accommodating intransigent demands for wage givebacks and benefit cuts. Meanwhile, the decline and off-shore relocation of manufacturing
industries, the movement of more and more women into the
paid labor force, and leaps in immigration rates have literally changed the face of the labor movement. In their rhetoric, at least, national labor leaders such as AFL-CIO President John Sweeney have recently acknowledged that the
NOTE: My sincere thanks go to James Buckwalter-Arias, Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, and Elizabeth Wingrove for their insightful and
extensive comments on earlier versions of this essay. I also want to
thank my research assistant, Paola Vizcano Surez, for her invaluable efforts on this project. Thanks also to Whitman College for
supporting this research through the Perry and Abshire Grant programs. Finally, I would like to thank the other participants in this
forum and in our initial conference panel, for what has been a most
satisfying and dynamic exchange of ideas and political hopes.
Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 4 (December 2005): pp. 647-658
647
648
POLITICAL RESEARCH QUARTERLY
rank-and-file workers and local-level leaders develop programmatic practices for contesting current forms of
employer power, and in turn use these mobilizations of
workers as workers in particular industries as grounds for
launching attacks on a wider range of hegemonic powerrelations that intertwine privileges of class with those of
race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality.
In this essay, I analyze the struggle of Mexican immigrant
activists in a local union of meatpackers to improve the
health, safety, and dignity of their workplace, searching out
pieces of kindling, as it were, for such political projects.
Since the late 1990s, workers at the Tyson Foods, Inc. beef
processing plant in Wallula, Washington, have democratized their union and raised unprecedented challenges to
dangerous and unfair company practices, especially rapid
speeds of production that cause high incidences of injuries
and health problems. I interviewed twenty-four current or
former Tyson workers, including the two principal officers
of the union, from May through December of 2002.1 All but
three of these workers were Mexican immigrants, while the
others were U.S.-born Mexican Americans. As I discuss
below, the interviews offer compelling evidence that the
union has succeeded in leading workers to adopt a densely
woven discourse that enables them to make sense of the
problems they face at work and to take action against the
company both individually and collectively. Through these
shared terms of struggle, the workers understand their multiple hardships and conflicts with management (job-related
injuries, low wages, disrespectful treatment) as causally
interrelated; as placing certain specific values (dignity, justice, human rights) at stake; and as necessitating counteraction on both the individual and cooperative levels.
However, the union has not attempted to cultivate a
similar discursive environment regarding workers immigration experiences, even though roughly 85 percent of the
plants employees are Mexican immigrants and many of the
others are immigrants from Southeast Asia and the former
Soviet bloc. To be sure, to do so would depart from the historical, economistic focus of the U.S. labor movement on
solving plant-specific problems and measuring achievements in terms of wage and benefit levels. Nevertheless,
1
The interviews first prompted workers to relate their personal stories of

growing up in Mexico, deciding to migrate, crossing the border, and
living as immigrants in the United States. We then asked the workers
about their experiences working at Tyson/IBP, the nature of their involvement in the union, and their general reflections on leadership. I conducted all but one of the interviews in Spanish, with the help of a bilingual, Mexican research assistant, Paola Vizcano Surez. The interviews
usually took place either at peoples homes or at the public libraries in
Pasco and Walla Walla, Washington (the cities where most of the workers live, and which are closest to the small town of Wallula where the
plant is located). These conversations generally lasted about one and a
half hours, following previous, half-hour sessions to get acquainted and
discuss the nature of the research project. I identified the informants by
pursuing contacts given to me by the unions leaders, as well as by independently contacting a small group of workers opposed to the current
officers and several other individuals who were not involved in union
politics but whom I met through various local acquaintances.
immigration and the historical conditions with which it is

bound up, including the globalization of capital investment
and markets, neoliberal reforms by Third World governments in the face of persistent and rising poverty, and the
intensified regulation and surveillance of trans-border
travel by the United States, have everything to do with the
fact that thousands of Mexicans now find themselves in
dusty cow-towns in the U.S. northwest, processing the
hamburger that winds up as the main course in McDonalds all-American meals. Beyond a certain point, the
workers at Tyson can much more effectively fight their battles at the plant if they are simultaneously engaged in struggles to bring these conditions under which immigration
currently takes place under more popular-democratic,
transnational control. Doing this would mean carrying out
a kind of discursive work regarding immigration that parallels the effort the union has already devoted to health and
safety issues and supervisor treatment problems at the factory. It would mean creating alternatives to the hegemonic
narratives about immigration and work that help compose
a practical basis for counter-hegemonic struggle through
their active circulation in the communicative interactions
among workers. And it thus would mean facilitating the
emergence of new political subjectivities, capable of materializing new configurations of the democratic imagination
spanning the killing floor, the union hall, and the contested
space of the transnational.
While this study does not presume to set out the terms
of such political subjectivation in anything like a comprehensive form, it does suggest that promising elements
might be found within these workers personal accounts of
their immigration histories. In particular, a discourse that
reinterpreted workers activism at Tyson as part of a
broader effort to transform political-economic conditions
would probably gain traction to the extent that it recognized and valorized those aspects of migrant experiences
which, besides involving sometimes excruciating suffering, also enable immigrants to develop certain knowledges
and capacities in new and politically significant ways. The
U.S. Border Patrol does its best to ensure that, for most
low-wage workers traveling north from Mexico, immigration is a physically and emotionally debilitating process.
But it is also possible to see migration to el norte as laying
the groundwork for the constructive formation of counterhegemonic subjects, as involving moments of self-actualization from which organizations like immigrant unions
could eventually draw productive political consequences.
As we shall see, the workers narrations of their own immigration experiences are not necessarily conducive to decisive breaks with the liberal assumptions that tend to guide
the unions discourse of opposition to the company as well
as the U.S. labor movement as a whole. They do, however,
contain intimations of solidaristic values and practices that
progressive leaders could thematize and develop in the
interest of building a more transnational, social-democratic approach to regulating immigration and capitalist
production alike.
HEGEMONY AND HAMBURGER
649
TERMS OF STRUGGLE: THE UNIONS DISCOURSE OF

OPPOSITION TO TYSON
In 1999, about three-fourths of the 1,700 workers at the
Wallula Tyson plant (at that time owned and operated by the
Iowa Beef Processors company, which merged with Tyson in
2001) participated in a wildcat strike that initiated fundamental changes in the leadership and activity of Teamsters
Local 556, which represents those workers. The workers
walked out to protest what they saw as the unfair firing of one
of their coworkers for not working fast enough, but the roots
of the strike went deeper than that. Tensions at the factory
had been accumulating for years, due to a variety of longterm, structural changes in the meatpacking industry. Since
the 1960s, meatpacking companies have spiked new levels of
profits by merging and consolidating firms; replacing a
mostly skilled, white, male work force with workers who are
mainly immigrants and often undocumented, and who
include a much higher proportion of women; moving plants
out of union-friendly, urban areas in the east and midwest to
remote rural locations in the west and southwest, some in
right-to-work states; deskilling jobs and slashing wages and
benefits; and speeding up production. Production line workers have accordingly experienced a dramatic rise in rates of
work-related health and safety problems, which has made
meatpacking the most dangerous job in America. Excessively rapid production, which makes it difficult for workers
to perform their tasks carefully and leads companies to minimize worker training, has boosted work-related injury rates:
every year, over one in four workers in this industry suffer a
job-related injury or illness requiring medical attention
beyond first aid; and meatpacking also has by far the highest
rate of serious injury of any industry, over five times the
national average. In January 2003, for example, a 22-year-old
worker at the Wallula Tyson plant named Lus Madrigal had
his arm nearly severed from his body by a large mechanical
scissors machine in the slaughter area. Meanwhile, the proliferation of work-stations involving repetitive motions, in
combination with high speeds of production, has multiplied
incidences of cumulative trauma health problems, which
happen in meatpacking 33 times more often than the national
average, affecting one out of every ten workers in the industry (Schlosser 2002: 172-73). Workers outrage over the hazards they faced, the bodily pain and damage they endured,
and the inadequate treatment they tended to receive from
company medical personnel contributed profoundly to the
sentiment that resulted in the wildcat strike, along with frustration over persistently low wages, benefit cuts, and disrespectful and even abusive treatment from supervisors.2
My comments here are based in part on information gained from 22 workers who were interviewed in October of 2002 by Whitman College students
in a course I taught in the Fall 2002 semester. These interviews sought
workers opinions regarding the medical treatment they had received for
job-related injuries and their experiences on light duty, tasks to which
injured workers are often reassigned during recovery periods because they
are supposed to be less physically demanding than their normal jobs.
While the strike did not enable the workers to gain the
enhanced control they sought over the speed of production
(chain speed, or the velocity of the chain from which cattle
pieces hang as they move through the factory), it did generate an unprecedented spirit of solidarity among the workers
and galvanized discontent with the existing leadership of
the Local. In the subsequent union elections, a newly mobilized rank and file mostly made up of Mexican immigrants
ejected the incumbents, who were Anglos loyal to the Hoffa
administration of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) and committed to conciliatory dealings with the
company. A large majority of the voting members elected a
reform slate of former strike leaders who were mostly Mexican immigrants or Mexican-Americans. The new officers
proceeded to implement their campaign promises of holding democratic elections for union representatives at all
levels and taking a firmer stand on health and safety issues
and against exploitation by Tyson/IBP. The pro-democracy
slate won reelection by a decisive margin in December,
2002, again under the leadership of Secretary-Treasurer
Maria Martinez who spearheaded the initial organizing
effort inside the plant in the mid-nineties as well as the
strike in 1999.
Teamsters Local 556 is contesting the companys power on
the basis of continual and successful efforts to develop a
sophisticated discourse among workers about what the problems in the plant are and how best to solve them. Those
workers who participate regularly in union activities articulate criticisms of the company with confidence, authority, and
clarity, and they have specific views on how to address those
issues collectively that indicate critical reflection on their
experiences. Rosario Robles, for example, is a 35-year-old
woman and ten-year Tyson/IBP veteran whose job, for the
most part, has been to cut the tails off the cows shortly after
they are killed. Robles describes in a succinct and thorough
manner how the high speed of the chain leads supervisors to
mistreat workers, while both generate health problems for
workers as well as food contamination risks for consumers:
RR: The chain is really fast. . . . When a worker is decontaminating the cows, the cows come in very dirty, but the
supervisors want you to work fast so the government
inspectors dont stop the chain. They keep you going fast
and if a piece gets by you they come back saying: What
are you doing, sleeping? They come right back with the
piece that got by you.
PV [Paola Vizcano, research assistant]: And sometimes
the worker cant clean it [the cow]?
RR: You cant do it, because the area [to be cleaned] is too
big. And these days with there being more workers, there
are times when you take a piece of meat that comes by
hanging from the chaina half-section of the cow comes
byand sometimes youre opening it when another
worker doing another place on the cow turns it over. So
youre not able to look at it, and so it goes by and the
inspectors might stop the chain and come back later to
650
yell at you, see? And so its really hard work. Thats why
people get injured so often. And sometimes its because
your knife doesnt have a sharp edge and youre using
pure strength to cut with itwhen youre on the line and
its impossible to get away to sharpen it. You end up
forced into a job where you have to work too hard,
because you dont have any other options. Simply to
finish all the work and to avoid getting yelled at, you
have to rush.3
Numerous workers echo these concerns about repetitive
stress and other injuries stemming from the speed of the
chain and its more proximate effects of barking supervisors,
dull knives, and workers tripping over each other to get
their jobs done.4 The important point, however, is that as
Robless comments illustrate, workers tend to see these
problems as interrelated. The union has made it a priority to
create opportunities for workers to express their own ideas
about not only the problems at the plant but also the causes
and remedies of those dysfunctions. When the Local
arranged for the students in my course to interview members, for example, the officers saw the partnership as valuable, in part, precisely because it furnished a venue for this
sort of vocal reflection. (They also asked that two workers
be seated at each interview table, so that a worker being
interviewed by students could simultaneously be communicating with a fellow worker.) Robless remarks indicate that
the union has had some success in fostering an environment
where workers can engage in such reflection and then build
on it in conjunction with others, so that particular difficulties become a more general, shared critique. Workers thus
not only voice an array of concerns about their work environment but also do so in a way that is, if not precisely systematic, attentive to the complex relations that link those
problems. The fast- and ever-moving chain fittingly serves
as both the unifying signifier and the literal, material basis
of the multiple miseries these workers endure.
The workers also offer a cultivated rather than ad hoc critique of the company insofar as they frequently frame problems on the job as violations of universal-humanist notions
of justice, dignity, and equality. The unions leaders rely
heavily on this liberal, humanist discourse when they characterize their grievances and objectives. The great extent to
which workers themselves employ this rhetoric in a natural,
common-sense manner suggests another respect, then, in
which the Locals educative and organizing efforts have
accomplished much. Workers often speak in these terms,
for example, when they object to supervisors abusive treatment of workers. Ramn Moreno says this about his super-
Rosario Robles, interview by author, June 20, 2002, Pasco, Washington.

All the translations of the interview material in this article are my own,
although I would like to thank James Buckwalter-Arias for his ever-ready
and indispensable help in working through some of the finer points of
the translations.
Magdalena Trevino, interview with author, November 9, 2002, Pasco,
Washington.
visors: They should treat you like a human being, not like
an animal. They always want to keep their shoe planted
firmly on your neck; they always mistreat you as if you were
a . . . a cockroach.5 Speaking about her experiences working for the company prior to the strike, Mara Chvez adds:
For me the work itself wasnt so bad. What bothered me
was the way people were treated. . . . Because, you know,
sometimes what hurts more is . . . the emotional pain,
more than the physical pain. That wounds you more
deeply. And thats what was going on there. But the
people who were there, we were seeing what was happening and everything kept building up. And finally
what happens is, you start to feel really resentful. And
you say, like I said sometimes, My God, wont there ever
be any justice here? Because I saw some things that were
un-just [emphasizing each syllable]. And all that stuff
keeps building up and finally resulted in the srike.6
Chvez specifically described the humiliation she and, she
contends, many other workers have experienced from being
denied bathroom breaks and having to void in their clothing, because supervisors would not tolerate the meat piling
up if no worker came to relieve the worker who needed to
use the toilet. According to Rosario Robles, one supervisor
had actually called workers disposable objects to their
faces: Look, you people here he said, arent worth more
than a bunch of disposable cups. Or disposable plates, he
said, that you use, he said, and toss in the garbage.7 Magdalena Trevino echoed these remarks: So many people are
injured, and when they are injured, then theyre sort of like
tools that are no good anymore, so you just toss them, you
throw them out.8 The comments of Chvez and Moreno,
along with Robless indignation at her supervisors derision
of workers as disposable tableware, invoke classic humanist distinctions between being accorded the dignity due to a
human being and being treated like an animal, an insect, or
an inanimate object. Trevinos objection to being used like a
mere tool, in turn, echoes this sentiment and evokes the
complementary demand to be treated as an end in oneself.
For these workers, then, to be treated justly would
mean to be spoken to by supervisors respectfully and to
have work processes organized in ways that took into
account their bodily needs and limitations. It would involve
being accorded on a day-to-day basis the full dignity of
embodied persons who are fundamentally equal to all other
human beings, and hence deserve to be treated as ends in
themselves. Justice here notably does not imply any judgment that wage labor as such inherently contradicts this
humanist principle, but rather requires fair compensation
for the workers effort and a rejection of the companys
5
7
8
Ramn Moreno, interview with author, June 16, 2002, Pasco, Washington.
Mara Chvez, interview with author, November 2, 2002, Pasco, Washington.
Robles, June 20, 2002.
Trevino, November 9, 2002.
651
attempts to get workers to perform more work for the same

wages. Robles, for example, claims that the company routinely forgets to include pay for recorded overtime hours
on paychecks, and has consistently nullified the effects of
negotiated wage hikes by speeding up the chain.9 For these
workers, working for wages need notindeed, must not
mean their utter objectification or reduction to the status of
inanimate things, but rather must be made consistent with
their rights as human beings. When a supervisor started
yelling at him once, for instance, Jos Chiquito recalled, I
told him, we are workers, we are not slaves, and it doesnt
give you the right to insult us that way.10 Both Chiquito and
Camerino Ramrez, moreover, connect their more abstract
notion of workers human rights with the concrete legal
rights they say the union enables them to have and to exercise, especially rights to speak and to have their voices be
heard in the workplace. In this regard, Ramrez speaks of
the right to tell the company when a machine is not working properly, while Chiquito stresses the workers right to
demand to be provided with protective equipment for labor
at physically dangerous workstations.11
According to these classically liberal terms of discourse,
then, justice remains for the most part a matter of juridically
guaranteed respect for individual rights, especially rights to
fair wages, free expression, and freedom from being unjustly
harmed by others (i.e., suffering injury as a result of their
employers pursuit of profits). Nonetheless, as Chiquito and
Ramrez illustrate, the pursuit of liberal justice requires certain kinds of participatory, political solidarity. Workers can
resist the companys intense pressures to work without
compensation, Ramrez contends, only by developing a
keen sense of their common cause: If we dont all support
each other . . . what were doing is giving away money to the
company.12 The definition of the goal remains liberal and
10
11
12
Robles, June 20, 2002. At Tyson/IBP, it appears that there is perpetual

friction along the margins of legally specified working hours, as the
company attempts to prolong workers effort by minutes and seconds
that individual workers are supposed to disregard but that add up to
labor-cost savings for the firm. Workers are told, for example, that they
should not leave their station at the end of a shift or before a break until
they have dealt with all the product at hand (Chvez, November 2,
2002; Moreno, June 16, 2002; Trevino, November 9, 2002). In its first
two years leading the Local, the new officers counted as their major victory a favorable court decision in a lawsuit filed by workers (including
Robles and Chvez) against the company for refusing to pay workers for
the ten to fifteen minutes it takes to don or remove protective equipment that must be worn inside the plant. Workers in many parts of the
plant wear what are essentially modern-day coats of chain mail over
most of their bodies, along with a variety of other devices, to protect
themselves from being slashed by the knives of the coworkers beside
whom they are working. The company responded to the decision by
appealing the case and by redefining certain kinds of protective gear,
notably a plastic glove apparatus that workers consider vital to their
safety, as optional.
Jos Chiquito, interview by author, November 9, 2002, Pasco, Washington.
Camerino Ramrez, interview by author, November 2, 2002, Pasco,
Washington; Chiquito, November 9, 2002.
Ramrez, November 2, 2002.
individualistic, but the means of achieving it is cooperativist

in a way that modulates the predominant role of rights talk
in the discourse. Chiquito takes a similar approach to conflicts over abusive treatment of workers by supervisors,
explaining why he often intervenes when he sees a fellow
worker being dealt with unfairly: Theyve asked me why I
get involved in other peoples affairs, why I dont just mind
my own business. Mainly because of my past, [I feel that]
we are the same people, and if this other guy doesnt defend
himself because hes afraid theyll fire him, it hurts me that
theyre yelling at a person in front of me who isnt defending himself.13 In mentioning his past, Chiquito is referring
to experiences in his early childhood in Mexico as well as
his youth as a newly arrived immigrant in the United States,
in which he was harassed and insulted by work supervisors
(having started work at an extremely young age). Workers
sense of sharing common struggles apparently does not
depend solely on such particular individual experiences,
however, because it emerges as a major theme in the workers comments as a group.14
Chiquitos comments here also illustrate the sort of individual practices that workers have developed to challenge
power relations within the plant, in accordance with the ideology of workers rights specified above. Magdalena Trevino is
another worker who has engaged in such interpersonal forms
of advocacy, standing up to hostile supervisors and taking it
on herself to encourage a co-worker to do the same. On one
occasion, for example, Trevino boldly contradicted a supervisor who told her that it was her own fault when she injured
herself by falling while crossing a slippery floor, a perennial
source of injuries at Tyson/IBP due to inadequate procedures
for cleaning up the blood and tallow that continually splatter
off the meat.15 Both Ramrez and Chiquito say that after being
yelled at once by supervisors, they let it be known that they
would not stand for such treatment anymore.16 Chvez and
Trevino, along with Chiquito, say they exhort their fellow
workers not to give in to pressures to overwork themselves,
to swallow abusive treatment from supervisors, to work additional time without pay, to do tasks they are supposed to
avoid because of a health condition, or to accept substandard
medical treatment from plant personnel.17
At the same time, workers contestation of the companys
authority clearly has gone beyond such sporadic, personal
acts, taking on more collective, organizationally congealed
forms. All the workers I have discussed here have become
activists in the union, and many not only participated in the
strike but also helped organize workers during that event by
spreading word throughout the plant about the initial walkout (which Chvez did), or regularly assessing the strike
13
14
15
16
17
Chiquito, November 9, 2002.

Moreno, June 16, 2002; Ramrez, November 2, 2002; Trevino, November 9, 2002.
Chiquito, November 9, 2002; Ramrez, November 2, 2002
Chvez, November 2, 2002; Chiquito, November 9, 2002; Trevino,
November 9, 2002.
652
forces support (e.g., by calling roll and gathering signatures,

as Robles did). Ramn Moreno is now an elected shop steward, a leadership role that both Ramrez and Chiquito are
seriously considering. Two other strike activists whom I
interviewed, Lucio Moreno and Arturo Aguilar, recently
won union posts as part of Martinezs 2002 officer slate.
These workers are activists, furthermore, in the sense that
they regularly attend the Locals membership meetings and
health and safety workshops. They have also helped coordinate the Locals efforts to generate a base of support in the
community by organizing marches and rallies, raising community funds for Martinezs slate, and participating in the
partnership with college students.
Just as in the workers analysis of the dangers at the plant
with regard to the chain speed and its various consequences, and as in their conceptualization of the meaning of
these problems as affronts to both individual rights and collective well-being, so likewise the workers practices display
both individual and collective facets. In all of these dimensions of the Locals discourse of resistance, moreover, the
aspects of particularity and generality have been intensively
integrated through a logic of mutual implication. To object
to overwork and bodily injury as a trespass on ones own or
a co-workers rights and dignity tends at the same time, in
practice, to mean joining a collective challenge to workers
shared misery brought on by extremely high speeds of production as the lynchpin of corporate profits. And it is this
comprehensive integration of causal reasoning, universalist
norms, and cooperative practices, on the one hand, with
particularistic experiences of and responses to bodily and
emotional violation, on the other hand, that comprises the
central achievement of the Local and perhaps its greatest
resource in its struggle with the company.
IMMIGRATION DISCOURSES AND IMMIGRANT WORKERS
Given these impressive efforts of Local 556 to build
worker support for transforming the work environment
inside Tyson, how might these workers potentially contribute to a broader political effort to challenge hegemonic
structures of power in which they themselves are involved?
Robless reference to not having any other options and
Chiquitos comment about his childhood in Mexico reflect a
central fact about these workers employment at Tyson: their
participation in a transnational network linking immigrant
labor and U.S.-based capital. What individual workers
immediately experience as a paucity of employment opportunities, and the necessity of taking bodily and psychically
debilitating jobs when they find them, are manifestations of
less directly perceptible but fundamentally consequential
tendencies in the world political economy. These politicaleconomic circumstances act as basic, limiting conditions on
what workers can achieve through activist strategies that
focus only on changing those company actions that directly
create hazardous and unfair situations in the plant.
Macroeconomic conditions in Mexico are one important
reason why Mexican immigrant workers today find them-
selves working in the dangerous jobs at Tyson and the other

mega-meatpacking firms, or settling for lower wages and
fewer or no benefits (while still facing work-related health
and safety hazards) in the service and farm industries. Since
the 1980s, neo-liberal reforms, the termination of import
substitution industrialization, and increased direct foreign
investment have led to steep declines in Mexicos Gross
Domestic Product (GDP), wage levels, and employment
opportunities. Large and growing wage and employment
gaps between the United States and Mexico are likely to
stimulate high rates of cross-border migration for many
years to come (Dussel Peters 1998). At the same time, the
demand for Mexican immigrant labor is becoming more
structurally embedded in the U.S. economy, as the efficiency of recruiting employees through immigrant social
networks and the segmentation of the job market (into
immigrant jobs, which native-born workers consider
undesirable, and other jobs) lead employers to depend on
Mexican immigrant workers in systematic rather than irregular ways (Cornelius 1998). These trends within the United
States and Mexico are both elements of a broader process of
capitals globalization and the continuing development of a
world-economy. The Mexican government has thus been
responding to the heightened mobility of finance capital
and the increasing importance of finance-capital movement
for profits, in deregulating Mexicos economy and encouraging direct foreign investment through such means as the
maquiladora initiatives and joining NAFTA, precisely those
steps that have kept wages and employment opportunities
depressed for workers in Mexico (Sassen 1998).18 Meanwhile, these same global economic conditions have driven
employers in the United States to optimize profits and management flexibility by building a low-cost immigrant workforce. In short, when workers like those I interviewed from
Tyson make individual decisions to move north to work and
live, their choices are shaped to a significant degree by the
characteristics of the global economy.
At the same time that globalization is rendering Mexican
immigration an increasingly institutionalized feature of the
political economy of the labor market within the United
States, a new nativism has emerged, making the conditions of migration and life inside this country as an immigrant highly dangerous, stressful, and disciplined in a variety of ways. The common labeling of undocumented
border-crossers as illegal immigrants is the most obvious
way that Mexican immigrants are abjected from the domain
of the lawful, even as corporations acknowledge that their
18
Although the maquiladoras created substantial new employment

opportunities, their main effect on employment at the time when most
of these workers immigrated had been to draw new workers into the
system of wage labor who previously had not participated in the labor
marketespecially women and, in particular, young unmarried
women. They thus had a negligible effect on Mexican unemployment
overall, did not improve employment for wage-earning Mexican men,
and even exacerbated unemployment in the northern region of Mexico
in the 1980s by encouraging migration to that area by more job-seekers
than the maquiladoras could accommodate (Fernndez-Kelly 1983).
653
labor needs far exceed the limits on legal migration and

despite the INSs now little-discussed history of facilitating
northward, cross-border migration to benefit U.S. agribusiness (Calavita 1992). The most vehement denouncers of
illegal immigration, such as former California Governor
Pete Wilson and U.S. Representative Elton Gallegly (also
from California) have consistently used rhetoric that blurs
the line between failing to possess proper immigration documentation and committing violent crimes. Police brutality
and racial/ethnic profiling criminalize Mexican immigrant
identity as a matter of social practice (Chavez 1996). The
stigmatization of Mexican immigrants through law-andorder discourse, in turn, merges with jeremiads about the
supposed threat to U.S. national security posed by the
flood of illegal aliens (fears that have been further stoked
by the new war on terrorism). English-only activists and
the far-right Republican factions to whom Patrick Buchanan
appealed during the 1990s have raised the specter of a Mexican reconquest of the southwest prepared through the
spread of bilingualism and culminating in the outlawing of
English usage and military annexation by Mexico (Chavez
1996; Feagin 1996; Tatalovich 1996). But the anxiety over
securing our borders extends well beyond conspiracy theorists on the hard right, through the center of the U.S. political spectrum. It has yielded a series of initiatives by Republican and Democratic administrations alike to enhance
border policing and security operations, often through augmenting the role of military technologies, weapons systems,
and personnel in border control. Yet such determined militarization of the border has neither stopped undocumented
migration nor reduced U.S. employers dependence on
immigrant labor. Instead, as Peter Andreas (2000) argues,
its main effects have been to raise the physical, legal, and
financial risks of such crossings by making migrants more
dependent on well-organized smuggling and documentforging operations, drawing undocumented crossers into a
wider web of illegality and intensifying their overall vulnerability to mistreatment and exploitation in U.S. society.
What would it take, then, for the activists with Local 556
to begin taking part in organized, democratic projects challenging these political and economic tendencies outside,
but still intimately shaping life inside, the plant? Where is
the basis within workers practical, everyday experiences on
which appeals to become involved in such projects could
rest? Here I am assuming, with Gramsci, that critical analyses of the work environment alone are not sufficient for the
collective mobilization of workers to contest the way
transnational flows of labor and capital are currently structured and legitimated. Rather, workers conformity with the
interlocking exigencies of global capitalism and the national
security state depends on their implication within hegemonic narratives that make sense of a multitude of practical
experiences, including experiences of immigration. A successful counter-hegemonic politics thus hinges on the relocation of these experiences within critical re-formulations
of these narratives, or within new, alternative narratives. Put
differently: in the case of these workers, class relations
simultaneously take shape as both the private appropriation

of socially produced surplus value (reflected in the specific
conflicts within the plant) and the negotiation by workers of
multiple, netted disciplinary mechanisms regulating bordercrossing and life for immigrants in the U.S. nation-state.
Thus, if the workers are both to address their immediate
problems at Tyson and to move toward collaboration with
allies to change practices and priorities in the industry as a
whole and in hemispheric class relations, they will need to
reconstruct the discursive matrices furnished by the political-cultural mainstream that make sense of their identities
as immigrants.
These discursive contexts are indeed multiple, and they
sometimes intersect in contradictory ways. Bonnie Honig
has shown persuasively how xenophobic and xenophilic
representations of immigrants tend to feed and (re)produce each other, while both work to legitimate core values
of the U.S. nation-state, including the ideology of nationalism as the focal point of democratic politics. The same vigorous bonds of tradition and language that make immigrant
communities seem so suspicious from the perspective of the
Buchananites, so stubbornly resistant to assimilation and
hence potentially criminal or subversive, for example, have
also been constructed in other areas of public discourse as
positive characteristics that promise to reinvigorate communitarian sympathies in the nation as a whole, counteracting
the latters corrosion by liberal individualism and capitalism.
At the same time, portrayals of immigrants as selfishly
acquisitive and bent on stealing precious jobs away from
native-born Americans are the flip-side of the classic discourse that lauds immigrants for their self-motivation,
entrepreneurialism, and hard work, looking to immigrants
to revalidate the ideal of upward class mobility popularly
known as the American dream (Honig 1998).
During the course of their migrations to the United States
and their periods of residence in this country as immigrants,
with and without documents, immigrant workers like those
who work at Tyson become familiar with these established
discourses and may gradually learn to make sense of their
life-circumstances in the terms they supply. This process of
political learning might in some important and obvious
ways assist the workers struggle for plant-specific goals
defined by through the unions prevailing rights talk. Consider, for instance, how the celebration of immigrant community life could reinforce the kinds of solidarity invoked
by Ramrez and Chiquito, or how embracing an ethic of selfreliance could bolster workers confidence in standing up to
supervisors who verbally abuse them. At the same time, the
dominant U.S. discourses regarding Mexican immigrants
and immigrants in general firmly reinscribe nationalist
assumptions that discourage thinking about transnational
democratic action. They also maintain a resolute support for
the prerogatives of U.S. employers to control production
processes unilaterally so long as they pay fair wages (which,
for struggling immigrants, can still be quite low without
inciting public disapproval). And they seem likely to stimulate defensive, self-protective attitudes and behaviors among
654
immigrants, rather than any activism that involves public

exposure, to the extent that they demonize these people as
criminals and subversives. Thus, some kind of discursive
innovation and counter-hegemonic reeducation regarding
immigrant experiences and identities seems essential for the
expansion of these workers activism beyond the factory
gates, in the ways I have suggested above.
In the remainder of this essay, I interrogate the interview
material to locate some initial ideas for what the characteristics of such a revised, alternative discourse about immigration might be. The work of evolving such a discourse
would require the sustained efforts of leaders to draw
together elements of existing discourses in novel ways and
foster their circulation among at least a critical mass of the
rank and file, along with their supporters in the community
and even conceivably in far-flung places such as other meatpacking plants elsewhere in North America. The discursive
currents informing this endeavor would include not just the
ones I have already mentioned but also some stemming
from the immigrants countries of origin (e.g., working-class
or indigenous movements in Mexico) as well as those associated with explicitly transnational struggles (e.g., the Chicano movement and cross-border labor and womens organizing projects). Of course, such ideological innovation is
likely to have the best chance of gaining practical force if the
activists who attempt it do so with an ear open to the selfrepresentations of individual workers, making it possible to
see how generally articulated causal arguments, values, and
action programs can most clearly speak to specific experiences. The political practice of formulating new, immigrant
worker subjectivities, that is, must maintain an inclusively
democratic and even, in certain phases, deliberative quality,
in the sense of offering institutionalized opportunities for
sustained rational discussion and argument where members
debate how the union should respond to immigrationrelated issues and decide these questions based on the most
compelling, generally admissible reasons.19 Yet the notion of
deliberative democracy in no sense can stand in for the
more complex political process that counter-hegemonic
subjectivation presupposes, for it fails to capture the imperative of leadership, of the un-self-conscious acculturation
into an affectively tuned discourse of struggle that leaders
must modulate and upon which successful movements
depend.20 In short, this is a matter of enacting once again,
in the case of immigration, something closely akin to the
integration of the universal and the particular that Local 556
has accomplished with respect to the job-related conflicts at
Tysondemocratically and through initiatives of leadership.
19
20
For an insightful discussion reviewing the core premises and goals of

deliberative democratic theory and interrogating its limitations as an
account of both politics as such and democracy, see the introductory
essay to this symposium by Samuel Chambers.
On this conception of leadership in a hegemonic project, emphasizing
the moment in which the political subject-in-formation gains experiences unawares, without a continual self-consciousness, see Gramscis
(1971b) essay on education in the Prison Notebooks.
WORKERS IMMIGRATION NARRATIVES, UNION POWER, AND

COUNTER-HEGEMONIC POLITICS
Hegemony, in its classic, Gramscian sense, implies that
the individuals conformity to social norms depends not only
on coercion but also, and in a more constant and everyday
sense, on practices of persuasion. Such persuasion happens
when the dominant political forces lead individuals to propose social norms to themselves (for instance, ideals of citizenship associated with immigration) in an at least apparently autonomous fashion rather than merely imposing
them externally.21 Conceivably, the rigors and degradations
of the migrant trail take such a toll on individuals that their
obedience to the established order has little if anything to do
with consent, and everything to do with force. Mara Chvez,
for example, recalled how during one of her two illegal crossings she and her husband had walked for hours in the dark
through muddy ocean water that reached up to her chest.
She remembered hiding in a garbage dump and throwing
bottles and cans at skunks to keep them away. She had been
crushed and burned in the bottom of a van careening down
a California highway at what felt like a dangerously high
speed. Perhaps worst of all, Chvez had suffered great anxiety from being separated for three days from her children,
whom she was unable to take with her and had to give to a
friend to get them across the border. She and other workers
told me about their fears or actual misfortunes of being
robbed by gangs or by coyotes (the business agents who
smuggle people across for a fee), being insulted and mocked
by the coyotes, being deliberately kept uninformed about
where they were at any given point during a crossing, having
to go without food and water for several days, and spending
hours on end packed into cramped and dirty spaces with a
mass of strangers.22 After experiences such as these, it would
be understandable if these workers simply wanted to do
their jobs peacefully and avoid making any further trouble
for themselves by engaging in activism. One might especially
sympathize with such a decision when one considers that in
tangible ways employment at Tyson, with its regular, yearround hours, guaranteed vacations, indoor work environment, relatively higher wages (eight to eleven dollars per
hour for line workers), and health benefits, constitutes a real
step up for workers used to seasonal work at sub-minimum
wages in the cherry orchards.
Chvez, however, represents herself as someone who has
succeeded in accomplishing her goals and gaining personal
strength as a result of migrating northward, rather than as
someone pummeled into submission by the hardships she
has endured. Chvez has been working at the meatpacking
plant since 1983, since even before IBP owned it, and today
she makes about ten dollars per hour. Her children, however, have graduated from high school, have finished college,
21
22
See, for example, Gramscis (1971a) analysis of the interplay between

coercion and persuasion, or between force and consent, in the essay
Americanism and Fordism.
Chvez, November 2, 2002.
655
and are building successful careers. She was nearly bursting

with pride when she told us how one son is a loan officer in
a bank. Another son manages three offices for an insurance
company, although he is starting to pursue his dream of
working for the FBI (which makes his mother nervous
because she is worried this might put him in dangerous situations as he pursues hardened criminals).23 Says Chvez:
To me, the way they are living now is the reward for all
that I suffered before. And I say: its worth the effort. . . .
In our country we wouldnt have been able to achieve
this, because one knows that this sort of thing costs a lot
of money. . . . They say you have to suffer a lot to deserve
a lot. And I would really say that, with Gods help, I have
achieved in my life what I wantedthat what happened
to me didnt happen to my children.24
Maybe not individually, but certainly through the experience
of her family as a whole, Mara Chvez is living the American
dream. The high value she places on class mobility, individual achievement, and middle class occupations is exceptionally well-suited to the legitimation processes that Honig discusses. A similar sense that future generations material
improvements will redeem ones own deprivations crops up
in the comments of Rosario Robles and Jos Chiquito. The
latter, for instance, says that because he sorely feels the lifelong consequences of having never gone to school, remaining
illiterate to the present day, and finding his job opportunities
to be sharply limited as a result, he has made it his personal
mission to counsel his children and other youths that finishing school is imperative to avoid these difficulties.25
For both Chiquito and Chvez, the sense that the good
of future generations will result from their self-sacrifices
seems to impart a keen sense of self-worth, of having a vital
task to accomplish in their livesin short, of dignity. And I
would suggest that this sense of personal dignity drawn
from their immigration experiences probably has a profound connection to their shared willingness to struggle for
their dignity as workers at Tyson rather than to accept compliantly the treatment the company dishes out. Moreover,
these immigration experiences impart a sense of dignity not
only through the suffering-as-self-sacrifice that they involve
but also because they sometimes furnish contexts apart
from this specific workplace where the individual exercises
and develops capacities to advocate for herself. Chvez, for
instance, remembered how she had finally scolded the coyotes who mistreated her and her husband for, as she put it,
not treating them like human beings and dealing with
them unjustly.26 She uses the same language now when
she criticizes Tyson; here again, it would seem artificial to
pretend that her sense of dignity as a worker were not
related to the notion of human dignity that she had already
23
24
25
26

Chiquito, November 9, 2002.
put into practice out of self-defense when she crossed the

border. In a different way, immigration also served as a kind
of training-ground for self-advocacy for Ramn Moreno.
Somehow, even though he had no prior knowledge of English and has great difficulty reading and writing in Spanish,
Moreno managed to study the citizenship manual carefully
enough to pass the citizenship examination on his first try.
Pressed to explain how this was possible, Moreno
responded: Well, I believe that its all a matter of, if you
want to do something, you can do it.27 Echoes of Morenos
remarkable pluck and quiet but determined self-confidence,
in turn, are audible in his recollections of a conflict with a
Tyson supervisor who tried first to sweet-talk him, then to
bully him, into increasing his work-load without a corresponding pay hike:
I remember that one time they took me to the office to
tell me that I sharpened my knife really well, and that I
could easily make one additional cut to help the next
worker on the line. I said to the supervisor: If Im doing
my job well, why do I have to do more work, if youre
not paying me to do more work? He tells me, OK, if
you dont want to do it, I can fire you. That aint gonna
happen, I said. If you think you can fire me over this,
go ahead and try to fire me. And I kept on doing the
same job.28
In both cases, Moreno has taken a situation in which he
finds himself facing a significant and potentially very intimidating power disadvantage, and has been able to accomplish his own goals and compel the respect of institutional
authorities through resolute self-assertion.
To put it more strongly, the interviews provide some initial evidence that the workers identities as immigrants,
accreted over the long course of their experiences crossing
the border and living as immigrants in the United States, has
helped prepare them to embrace the discourse of opposition
to the company that the union is promoting. The comments
of Chvez, Chiquito, and Moreno here illustrate how workers can interpret personal immigration histories in terms
that resonate clearly with the unions liberal discourse,
emphasizing self-reliance and defining justice with reference to the preservation of human dignity, the protection of
contractually secured rights, and fair opportunities for economic advancement, albeit enjoyed vicariously through the
next generation. At the same time, workers experiences as
immigrants also seem to have contributed to fostering the
kind of solidarity that the union relies on to advance this
liberal agenda in practical terms. Magdalena Trevino, for
example, described how she had formed fast friendships
with the people with whom she crossed, and how she felt
ashamed to leave the others when a relative arrived to pick
her family up in Los Angeles.29 Chvez told a moving story
27
28
29
Moreno, June 16, 2002.

Moreno, June 16, 2002.
656
about sharing two six-packs of sodas, which she and her

husband bought with precious U.S. dollars at airport prices,
with about twenty or thirty other crossers while hiding out
in an abandoned hotel.30 Her vision of redemptive sacrifice
for the next generation, moreover, which she shares with
Chiquito, includes an aspect of communitarian commitment that supplements the liberal discourse, an element
reflected in Chiquitos comment, regarding his relationship
with his fellow workers, that we are the same people.
Perhaps the most striking account of how life as a
migrant could help generate the sort of ethic of mutuality
required in the workers struggles with the company came
from Camerino Ramrez. In his initial years living in the
United States, Ramrez said repeatedly, he suffered a great
deal. He was constantly worried about evading the INS, and
on one occasion was actually caught, deported, and
dumped in Nogales very far from his home territory in
Oaxaca. Ramrez also had a hard time finding work because
of his youth (he was in his mid-teens), and when he did
pick up farm jobs he earned very low wages (three dollars
per hour) for the same reason. He remembers living for
months in a farm labor camp with five other single men,
stuffed into small rooms like chickens.31 Ramrez draws
this lesson from his experiences: What I see in the people
who are coming from Mexico right now [is that] they have
nowhere to stay, nowhere to eat, nowhere to take a shower.
. . . I remember how I suffered . . . and Im going to keep
on helping these people. As long as I have a place to live,
these people will also have a place to live if they come with
me, because we know what it means to suffer while youre
on the road.32 Ramrez has made it his custom to invite
undocumented immigrants he meets to come stay with him
and his family in their home, which is a small, prefabricated
house in a trailer park on the edges of the city of Pasco, near
the Tyson plant. Beyond such acts of interpersonal good
will, these experiences have also motivated Ramrez to
engage in union activism and public policy advocacy.
Although he had only worked at Tyson for about a year at
the time I interviewed him, he had become one of the most
avid attendees of union functions. He was also one of the
initial organizers in central and eastern Washington in a
recent campaign to gather signatures on postcards to Congress and the President petitioning for a new amnesty for
undocumented immigrants, the One Million Voices for
Legalization campaign. In this capacity, Ramrez was
involved in regional coordination between Teamsters Local
556, the United Farm Workers, churches, and immigrants
rights groups.33
By now it should be clear how many points of fruitful
contact there are between workers interpretations of their
immigration experiences and the unions discourse of opposition against Tyson. In light of these apparent connections,
30
31
32
33

it would seem that were the union to devote serious effort

to cultivating a discourse of immigrant rights among its
members, the likely result would be mutually invigorating
commitments of the workers both to challenging management at the plant and to advocating for immigrants politically. We can already see an example of this sort of combined political activity in the case of Ramrez. Recently, the
Local as an organization has taken some initial steps along
these lines by participating in the 2002 One Million Voices
for Legalization campaign and the 2003 Immigrant Workers Freedom Rides. Yet principal officer Maria Martinez has
deliberately shied away from speaking with the workers,
even the activists who come to all the meetings, about their
personal stories of immigration. The reason, she said, is that
she wants people to feel that they are all equal, that they all
belong in the United States and in the union, and that they
all have rights they can legitimately claim as workers.34 It is
not hard to understand why Martinez would take this view,
since getting people talking about their immigration stories
would undoubtedly heighten awareness among the workers
of the differences in their experiences, at a time when there
is a pressing need to keep everyone focused on achieving
common goals. Indeed, the company arguably does enough
to try to divide workers against one another, without the
union itself exacerbating the problem by deliberately
encouraging workers, for example, to think about how
people might have come from different class or racial or
regional backgrounds, or by creating an opening for some
people to invoke a hierarchy privileging the voices of people
who have lived in the United States longer than others.
Nevertheless, directly tapping the learning experiences
associated with immigration could be of no small value to
the union as it struggles simultaneously to generate community commitment to the workers cause and to regain
momentum and the offensive, in the wake of a brutal 20042005 contract struggle with the company and simultaneous
battles to ward off a company-fueled union decertification
drive along with renewed efforts to trustee the local by the
opponents of rank-and-file democracy heading the IBT.
Under these perilous circumstances, the risk of fomenting
additional tensions might be well worth taking, since publicizing and discussing peoples particular stories of immigration could also stoke enthusiasm for the unions efforts. As I
have discussed, the union has helped enable members to
realize that they have rights and that they can defend them;
it has facilitated a series of dense, practical-ideological linkages between particular experiences in the plant, on the one
hand, and general causal analyses, universal norms, and collective practices of resistance, on the other hand. It seems
quite possible that encouraging workers to talk about prior
experiences of immigration where the abstract categories of
justice, right, dignity, and solidarity took on additional
kinds of concrete meaning, and to reflect together on these
34
Maria Martinez, Secretary-Treasurer, Teamsters Local 556, interview by

author, December 19, 2002, Walla Walla, Washington.
657
experiences, would further enrich their sense of what they

are fighting for and their abilities to fight for it.
In point of fact, immigration experiences already are
conditioning workers receptions of the unions exhortations
to defend their rights, so this is simply (or not so simply) a
matter of making that relationship between universal and
particular explicit, self-conscious, and reflective in a new
way. As Mara Chvez eloquently put it, workers bring
everything with them to work, including their trials as
immigrants:
To work in a clean, healthy environment, both the place
itself and the people around youthats a thing Id like to
see all workers striving for. That they feel OK, because. . .
you bring everything with you to work: you bring your
sorrows, your pains, you bring . . . everything life gives
you. And its not easy, mainly for the women whom I
admire so much, and also for the men who are all ready to
go to work at four oclock in the morning. The women
who leave their country like so many, and leave everything
that they haveto come here to work, to do better, to see
their children do betterto give them an education. OK,
and many times so that they eat well too. . . . How beautiful it would be to work in a nice place where one didnt
have to say: I have to stay on here because I need to keep
bringing home a paycheck. Noto feel satisfied. To feel
like you were in a decent, comfortable place. And I would
really like to see this happen some day.35
Creating more institutionalized spaces for workers to articulate these experiences of leaving and arriving, of loss and of
hope, of pain and of comfort that belong to their life-histories
as immigrants would generate a living basis for the unions
further efforts on behalf of immigrant rights. Fortifying the
sinews of such a discourse about immigration, in turn, would
very likely bolster workers commitment to the unions
agenda vis--vis making changes at Tyson, even as the joining
of political struggle regarding immigration could strengthen
the workers position at the plant by addressing structural factors supporting the companys current practices.
Having said this, however, I want to consider in conclusion my earlier proposition that a heightened focus by the
union on both immigration-related organizing and the immigration narratives of its members could help fuel a broader
movement challenging hegemonic discourses regarding the
work of immigrants. There is an undeniably conventional
quality to the Locals discourse of opposition to the company,
the elements of workers immigration narratives that reinforce this discourse, and the rhetoric regarding immigrant
rights that has been deployed in the national campaigns with
which the union has gotten involved. The postcards for the
2002 amnesty campaign, for example, urged Congress and
the president to Reward Work! by legalizing undocumented immigrants who work hard and pay taxes, serve as
soldiers who defend our freedom around the world, and
35
make vital contributions to our economy, our communities,

and our nation. Such rhetoric arguably further entrenches
the nationalist assumptions that foster widespread skepticism, indeed prejudicial suspicion, of discourses envisioning
more popular-democratic, transnational control over working conditions and capital investments. It also conjures up
yet again the nation-redeeming myth of the hard-working
immigrant who could someday achieve the American
dream, if only our government would allow it. The postcards appeal furthermore invites a good immigrant/bad
immigrant dichotomy between hard-working and lazy
immigrants, perpetuating the mutual interplay of xenophobia and xenophilia that Honig discerns while doing nothing
to challenge the gendered facet of this dualism that demonizes immigrant women as leeches on U.S. social services
and maternity wards.
In addition, the unions stress on legally and contractually
secured individual rights to free expression, freedom from
being harmed by others, and fair wages, and the refraction of
autonomy and self-reliance through this depoliticizing liberal-legalist prism by both the union and immigration rights
activists, could conceivably thwart rather than promote the
development of a more creative, active, political ethos among
immigrant workers, as Wendy Browns (1995) critique of liberalism suggests. Local 556s activism on health and safety
issues implicitly poses radical demands for workers control
over processes of production and capital investment decisions by the firm, since calls to reduce the chain speed and
to purchase safer machinery strike at the heart of managements presumed prerogatives over determining volumes of
production and the allocation of investment resources. Such
activism represents a potentially dramatic departure from the
historical norm of subsuming class conflicts within wage and
benefit negotiations (Noble 1986). But these frankly socialdemocratic possibilities have yet to surface explicitly or
emphatically in the unions discourse, especially in the form
in which that discourse circulates among the rank and file.
And it is quite possible that the privatism and posture of
ressentiment inculcated by the liberal-juridical model of justice, not to mention its core assumptions regarding private
property, in tandem with the logic of self-denial carried by
the ethic of self-sacrifice for ones children and grandchildren, may pose genuine obstacles to the realization of these
social-democratic prospects.
To further the prospects of bringing about more socialdemocratic and transnationally organized production and
investment, and of eventually generating an alternative discourse regarding immigrant identity that is not so suffocatingly wrapped up in nation-legitimating mythology, we are
left to sift through the interview material for moments that
push against the self-satisfaction and apparent coherence of
the liberal discourse. Such moments are not too hard to
find. The affects of family, community, ethnicity, even
blood and race as some workers occasionally put it, are
not easily rendered continually auxiliary and subordinate to
the privatist logic of liberalism. Arduous ideological work
must be done to keep them in their place. In turn, this sort
658
of work is also quite capable of redrawing discursive matrices, countering liberalisms inertial abstraction of the rightsbearing individual from social and cultural contexts with
what might be called a strategy of relentless empiricism. The
same person who has to fight for a bathroom break at Tyson
today once had to struggle for a glass of water from the coyotes. Once a man refused to be cowed by naturalization
rules that withhold the benefits of citizenship from workers
who are illiterate because they have always had to work;
today he will not let himself be intimidated by company
officials who attempt to enjoy the fruits of his labor without
paying for it. Further, these people advocate for themselves
not only as self-reliant, juridically interpellated individuals,
but also as socially situated subjects who transgress the
norm of privatism by inviting strangers to live in their
homes because they know what it means to suffer while
youre on the road, who stand up for other workers dignity
because they belong to the same people, and who would
like to see all workers striving for a work environment that
would welcome the worker as a whole person rather than
forcing the worker to exchange recognition as a person for
a paycheck. Faced with the terrible costs the current system
of capital accumulation and national legitimation is exacting
from immigrant workers along the migrant trail and in the
slaughterhouses, leaders have the chance to attend carefully
to these self-representations of rank and file workers. Building a counter-hegemonic alternative could then mean elaborating these intimations of solidarity and elevating them
above a merely instrumental status, such that collective
democratic action takes on greater value in its own right,
both inside and outside the factory, while rights talk
becomes more capacious by incorporating a new emphasis
on social, participatory, collective, and transnationally
secured rights.
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Received: December 23, 2004

Accepted for Publication: December 23, 2004
apostopc@whitman.edu

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