The dignity of job-seeking men: Boundary work among immigrant day laborers

Drawing on interviews and comparative ethnographic fieldwork in two day labor hiring sites (a street corner labor market and a "regulated" day labor worker center), this article examines the discourses through which Latino immigrant day laborers make sense of, and find dignity within, their ongoing quest for work. My findings reveal a clear pattern of "boundary work" along the center/street divide, wherein each group of day laborers asserts its dignity and masculinity by repudiating what they construe to be the feminine submission exemplified by the other group. I argue that gender both shapes and is shaped through the articulation of these moral boundaries and show how workers' struggle to attain dignity-in this case, via strategies of social differentiation and distinction-can act against the formation of a collective identity.