This paper explores the manifold ways in which `Mexican' labor functions as a representational resource in three contemporary Hollywood texts: the films Friends with Money (2006) and Transamerica (2005), as well as the television sitcom Arrested Development (2003—2006). While the narratives partake in the racialization of labor in the US, they also visualize types of work and workers that often pass unacknowledged in white bourgeois culture. They rely on similar images of Hispanics as domestic, agricultural, service, and construction workers to a variety of diegetic ends, not all of which align with conservative xenophobic agendas. Although Hispanics are often depicted as self-identical foreigners irrespective of national origin and citizenship status racialized images of labor may be used to politically question mythologies of white bourgeois normativity.
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