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

Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Age is a wide-ranging essay collection that puts low-wage women workers at the front and center of its project. The collection came out of a series of meetings between scholars and activists over a half decade to discuss the havoc neoliberalism has wreaked on women’s and families’ lives. The collection reflects these meetings’ breadth of focus. It examines the numerous troublesome day-to-day realities workers face and the occupational hazards of being women and immigrants in the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Immigrant women continue to struggle—as generations of women have—to earn a living in both formal and informal economies. What is new about their experiences, the book reveals, are the additional forms of economic and sexual exploitation on which the globalized market system thrives. As a whole, Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Age shows how people have attempted to resist the spatial, temporal, and personal manipulations that are part of this postindustrial capitalist moment and the struggles women have waged as part of it.

In fourteen single and coauthored chapters, we hear the voices of twenty-one individuals who are both empowered by and empowering of their subjects. (The authors are both academics and activists.) The book is divided into four sections that reveal what the editors call “labor disruptions”—a term that is both descriptive and analytic (2). Globalization disrupts the lives of women from the global South, for example. But women workers also disrupt—through labor organizing, grassroots mobilization, and daily acts of resistance—the very mayhem caused by the systematic disruptions to their lives.

The first section, “The Critique of the Neoliberal State,” interrogates the policy and legal frameworks that have regulated and defined those deemed insiders and outsiders, legal and illegal, victims and perpetrators, and, as Grace Chang reflects, “‘good’ and ‘bad’ immigrants in public sentiment” (68). Victoria Quiroz-Becerra’s chapter on street vending analyzes the work as a way of negotiating new political identities out of economic activities. She argues that once vendors in New York City began to think of “entrepreneurship as the basis of citizenship,” they were able to wage collective—and successful—action against police, who targeted them for their presence, as well as to change ordinance laws about their work (28). The chapters by Maura Toro-Morn and Chang deal with how immigrants maneuver around the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and in a system that criminalizes, regulates, and redefines their every move. Toro-Morn’s revisiting of the 1990s sanctuary movement pre-and post-9/11 is important because she shows the ease with which the rhetoric around undocumented workers elided with the label terrorist when the INS moved from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security. “Now, not only were immigrants undesirable because of their ‘illegality,’ which made them an affront to the nation-state, but working without documentation became one of the new tropes of the fight against terrorism” (48). Chang’s chapter is brilliant in every aspect. Not only does it include sophisticated analysis and theorizing that tie together issues of gender and voyeuristic victimization of women immigrants and their families, it shows how discussion of sex trafficking in isolation from labor issues is the “smoke and mirrors” of liberalism (73).

The second section, “Ethnic Enclaves,” “examines the ways that neoliberalism depends on traditional notions of family and community. Each author looks at the way that the internationalization of care work intersects with the maintenance of family life. Shobha Hamal Gurang and Bandana Purkayastha’s chapter reveals the complicated way that race, ethnicity, and class intersect to create a niche market for Nepali nannies working for middle-class Indian immigrants in the United States. Nepali women are often provided opportunities because of their ethnic connections...