LACLxS Work-in-Progress Seminar: Political Strategies of Survival in Latin America

Description

The Program in Latin America, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (LACLxS) is excited to present works-in-progress by:

• Mateus Mendonça, doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology
• Sophie D'Anieri, doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology

Mateus Mendonça (Sociology): "Entangled Platforms: Brazilian Migration and Food Delivery Struggles in the U.K."

This paper discusses how Brazilian delivery food workers in the U.K. showcase migrants' potential to strengthen local labor power, even under such adverse industry and conditions. While research acknowledges that migrants dominate the labor force in this industry, especially in the Global North, the implications of this workforce composition for labor processes and collective action remain underexplored. Using the concept of "platform migration" (Collins, 2020) and Marxist class composition theory, the study explores the integration of migration and delivery platforms. While platforms have benefited from migration by getting access to a larger pool of potential workers with little or no social protection, this dynamic has also produced the conditions for workers to respond and react. The migrant condition brings them together and creates common ground, cutting across all aspects of this industry, from the labor process and life experiences to collective forms of resistance and organization. It is no accident that most organic strikes in this industry have been led by migrant workers. These struggles reflect the weaknesses, strengths, and transnational potentialities of these migrant communities.

Sophie D'Anieri (Anthropology): "Political Lives in the Mexican Household"

This project studies how residents of El Salto, Mexico, are reimagining politics and activism amid industrial toxicity, death and disease, and persistent state failures. Located just outside metropolitan Guadalajara, El Salto is home to a weakly regulated industrial corridor of over 700 industries on the banks of one of Mexico's most polluted rivers. Residents have spent decades articulating the explicit connection between toxicity and the region's soaring rates of chronic illness and premature death. For over 20 years, their efforts have intermittently reached national and international audiences, including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which in 2020 called on the Mexican government to take action. Despite these calls for action, little has been done. In this context, where the state has ignored appeals to address chronic violence and industrial toxicity, residents are unsettling any taken-for-granted attachment to life. I consider emergent political practices amid state failure by way of household decision-making, health care pursuits, and stories of death and disease. As this crisis regains national attention through President Claudia Sheinbaum's 2024 campaign promise to clean the river, I consider how, in El Salto, the continuation of life itself becomes a political question.

The LACLxS Work-in-Progress Seminar series is run by graduate students Bruno Franco (Modern Languages and Literatures) and Matheus Mendoça (Sociology), where students and Johns Hopkins faculty will present their current projects.