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I began my examination of the Tyson workers’ narratives at the beginning of chapter 2 by discussing an evocative statement that Maria Martinez, the principal leader of the workers’ movement, had made when we interviewed her toward the end of 2002. We spoke to Martinez shortly after her “Respect and Dignity” slate had triumphed by a landslide in the first round of elections following the rank-and- file takeover of Teamsters Local 556 in 2000. Buoyed by heavy turnout , the Martinez group had soundly beaten the so-called Reform slate organized by Diego Ortega, garnering over 70 percent of the vote. Yet when we talked with Martinez in the aftermath of her victory, she was worried that the vigor of the workers’ movement was abating. In particular, she sensed that there was something about the union’s vision that the younger, U.S.-born, more recently hired workers fundamentally did not and perhaps could not grasp given their life circumstances . “They don’t understand the struggle,” Martinez had remarked apprehensively. These new workers hadn’t grown up in Mexico or seen their family’s hardships multiply as economic conditions slid downward. Nor had they known what it was to bear the humiliations and traumas of crossing the border or the miseries of laboring on the farms while living encerrado and hiding from la migra. Without this experiential basis, she implied, it was hard for them to gain any critical perspective on the enticements Tyson offered in exchange for their refraining from lodging any protests against the manifest abuses of the slaughterhouse. Within a few years, events proved Martinez’s concerns to have been well founded: in early 2005, after a grueling but failed campaign to win a new contract and to repel an effort to bust the union, the members of Local 556 voted to abolish their own organization. In this conclusion , I step back from a detailed consideration of the workers’ narratives and consider the legacy of these stories for immigrant workers’ counterhegemonic struggles in light of the union’s eventual downfall as well as its prior achievements. Since the union’s decline occurred Conclusion: Immigrant Workers and Counterhegemony 211 after the interviews were done, telling this story requires that I shift modes of writing. Thus, in the first part of what follows I move away from a style focused on how the workers expressed to us their commonsense conceptions of self and world in various contexts of power toward an account of events based on my own observations of their denouement as a continuing observer of their efforts and as a supportive community activist. I then confront questions that stand at the intersection of immigrant worker activism and contemporary critical theory. First, I revisit the critique of liberal legalism by Wendy Brown and others that I discussed in chapter 5. What does the inability of Local 556 to survive amid the disciplinary pressures of its legalist entanglements, despite the radicalizing energies of the narrative strain regarding political education , suggest about the very possibility of sustaining this kind of dually invested struggle? Are legalist endeavors such as lawsuits, contract-based grievances, appeals to state regulatory authorities, and collective bargaining processes simply a dead end in this neoliberal age? Or does the experience of the Tyson workers show that stauncher efforts can and must be made to wrangle radical democratic consequences from within engagements of the state and the law by doing something else, simultaneously, to nourish the spirit of political education? Finally, moving beyond the matter of legalist struggle: what exactly qualifies as counterhegemonic politics in the context of contemporary biopolitics and in the midst of the transformations wrought by neoliberalism ? What is the particular role of immigrant workers within broader coalitions that contest these modes of power, given the ambivalent effects of their narratives? If biopolitics administrated by the state and private corporations is also partly the creature of immigrant political narrators, then what do those storytellers and their allies need to do to set alternative flows of power in motion? And if these biopolitical mechanisms, reenvisioned through the prism of immigrant workers’ narratives, serve as key components of the historical project of neoliberalism , then what does this analysis suggest overall about strategies for reversing the neoliberal tide? The Destruction of Local 556 The forces that eventually accomplished the downfall of the Local began to gather in the aftermath of the 2002 union election. When 212 Conclusion [3.21.104.109] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 14...

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