Immigration Politics, Service Labor, and the Problem of the Undocumented Worker in Southern California

Abstract

In his 2002 poem These Hands, Jimmy Santiago Baca lucidly captured the essential interconnection between service work, fear of economic stagnation, and immigration, particularly undocumented immigration from Mexico, that became normative in Southern California and the nation in the decade and a half following the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. As Santiago Baca wrote, “We don’t want to see you. Until there is more work to do… polish your luxury cars, weed your gardens… wash and dry your clothes, spoon feed your ailing parents and then you tell us we don’t belong, we are the reason for your faltering bank accounts, we are taking your jobs away.”¹The relationship that Santiago Baca captures between economic dislocation, immigration, and service work would turn undocumented immigration into a major political and cultural issue while simultaneously obscuring the actual work that undocumented immigrants did as well as larger structural changes in the economy of the late twentieth century. As undocumented immigration exploded in the late 1960s and 1970s, Californians of all stripes conceived of the growing numbers of “illegals” and “wetbacks” in their midst specifically as a problem of labor and economics, portending the national immigration debates of the 1980s.²Simply put, many people came to believe that illegal immigrants were taking jobs away from American citizens and were thus the primary cause of the growing economic dislocation felt across the country.