Immigrant Worker Centers,Technologies of Citizenship,and the Duty to Be Well

Abstract

Although worker centers have reenergized immigrant labor movements in the U.S., recent research points to their potential deradicalization as they expand and institutionalize. This article builds on emerging critiques of the nonprofit worker center model by interrogating this organizational form through the analytic lens of governmentality, particularly efforts to shape immigrant workers’ subjectivities, proclivities, and comportment to capacitate them for the exigencies of responsible citizenship. How do worker centers set out to make ethical subjects out of “illegal” immigrant workers? What technologies do centers rely on to redeem populations marked as criminal, deviant, and deficient? I explore these questions through a case study of a worker center in San Francisco, California, which serves immigrant day laborers and domestic workers. I focus on its “feminist wing” to highlight the technologies of empowerment and self-esteem aimed at reforming Latina immigrant women, a group historically deemed “neither ideal laborers nor ideal women.”