Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Age ed. by Nilda Flores-González et al. (review)

This book brings together a collection of interdisciplinary scholarship focused on low-wage immigrant women workers in the contemporary United States. Its contributors investigate the varied experiences of immigrant women working as domestic workers, health care workers, street vendors, or sales or production workers within ethnic enclaves. The book’s stated aim is to explore how the forces of neoliberal globalization have impacted the lives of immigrant women and the ways in which these women are responding to such forces. The fourteen empirical chapters that make up this volume draw upon an array of qualitative methods – including ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and oral histories – to highlight the subjective experiences of immigrant women and to promote their far-too-often excluded voices.

The volume is divided into four parts. The first part, “Critique of the Neoliberal State,” includes a couple of the volume’s most compelling chapters. M. Victoria Quiroz-Becerra focuses on the grassroots organizing of street vendors in New York City, many of whom experience routine harassment from both police officers and Department of Health inspectors. In their efforts to remove the city’s caps on licenses and permits, vendors and their advocates have adopted a frame resonant with policy makers and politicians, promoting neoliberal notions of self-sufficiency and limited state intervention. While this framing has enabled vendors to achieve some of their objectives, it has nevertheless caused considerable tension within the coalition of activists. Quiroz-Becerra’s chapter raises the critical question of how the struggle for justice for immigrant street vendors might contest, as opposed to reproduce, the neoliberal logics of the state. Grace Chang also focuses on discourse and policy, critically analyzing the construction of “sex trafficking” in the US. Chang argues that the framing of trafficking as an issue of violence against women – and not as a more general labour issue – obscures both the real roots of the problem and its heterogeneous lived reality. The federal anti-trafficking regime’s mono-maniacal focus on sex trafficking means that most victims of trafficking, who work in sectors like domestic labour, agricultural labour and restaurants, remain unrecognized and unprotected. Chang provocatively argues that this creates a false dichotomy between trafficked and non-trafficked victims, “good” and “bad” immigrants, and enables the government to both criminalize sex workers and rationalize forms of state-sponsored human trafficking.

The second and third parts of the volume are comprised of case studies of female immigrants working in the informal economy and ethnic enclaves. The chapter by Shobha Hamal Gurung and Bandana Purkayashta is particularly notable for its illumination of interethnic and class relations in immigrant communities. The authors find that Nepali women in Boston and New York are often hired as domestics by wealthier Indian immigrant families. Pallavi Banerjee’s chapter also focuses on South Asian women, documenting their experiences working in ethnic markets. While these women benefit from the close proximity between work and home, the lack of a clear division between the public and private spheres renders them vulnerable to extreme overwork and reduced wages. Margaret Chin’s chapter analyzes recent transformations in New York City’s Chinese ethnic enclave, specifically the collapse of the garment industry. Chin argues that Chinatown no longer operates as a primary location from which immigrants find work and documents the struggles Chinese immigrant women face in obtaining employment outside the enclave.

The chapters by Lorena Muñoz and by Emir Estrada and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo focus on Latina street vendors in Los Angeles. Muñoz argues that street vending is a “viable alternative” to employment in the service sector, because it facilitates the performance of “street child care,” enabling women to both earn money and take care of their children at one and the same time. Estrada and Hondagneu-Sotelo focus on adolescent female street vendors and the gendered ideologies that undergird and sustain their disproportionate engagement in this income-generating...