Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor (Global Latin/o Americas)

Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor (Global Latin/o Americas)

Wilfredo Alvarez
$32.95
Publication Date: March 31st, 2022
Publisher:
Ohio State University Press
ISBN:
9780814258262
Pages:
194

Description

Winner, 2023 NCA Ethnography Division Best Book Award

Wilfredo Alvarez’s Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor is an exploration into co-cultural communication practices within the workplace. Specifically, Alvarez investigates how Latin American immigrant janitors communicate from their marginalized standpoints in a predominantly White academic organization. He examines how custodial workers perceive, interpret, and thematize routine messages regarding race, ethnicity, social class, immigrant status, and occupation, and how those messages and overall communicative experiences affect both their work and personal lives.

A Latin American immigrant himself, Alvarez relates his own experiences to those of the research participants. His positionality informs and enhances his research as he demonstrates how everyday interpersonal encounters create discursive spaces that welcome or disqualify people based on symbolic and social capital. Alvarez offers valuable insights into the lived experiences of critical––but often undervalued and invisible––organizational members. Through theoretical insights and research data, he provides practical recommendations for organizational leaders to improve how they can relate to and support all stakeholders.

 

About the Author

Wilfredo Alvarez is Associate Professor of Communication and Media at Utica University.

Praise for Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor (Global Latin/o Americas)

“A valuable study for leaders in higher education interested in relational processes across hierarchies, as well as scholars and students in the social sciences interested in organizational communication. By emphasizing the work experiences of historically marginalized people in lower-status occupations, Alvarez makes a significant contribution to the literature on social identities, and his focus on Latin American immigrant workers expands our understanding of how occupational identities intersect with immigration status.” —Gustavo H. R. Santos, Society for the Anthropology of Work

“With its focus on Latinx immigrant essential workers, Everyday Dirty Work could not be more timely. Alvarez’s centering of translinguistic communication in his ethnography is unprecedented, and the new perspectives he unearths on the intersections of race, class, occupation, language, and immigration status have clear, actionable implications for positive change.” —Joanne Belknap, author of The Invisible Woman: Gender, Crime, and Justice

“The book appears to be particularly good at engaging with the vast array of interdisciplinary literature to date, adding fresh findings and analysis when relevant. Both academic readers and readers in organizational leadership roles can benefit from the author’s analysis.” —Keumjae Park, Ethnic and Racial Studies 

“Alvarez’s monograph serves as an exigent reminder that as the field of communications and its adjacent disciplines start unraveling more complex communicative phenomena that cut across intersectional identities, communication scholars and practitioners need to take a step back to heed those salient communicative sites to explore more what communication could mean in and for our research, teaching, and everyday encounters. Alvarez’s audacious attempt at a less visible institutional site thus accomplishes this exigent need.” —Meng-Hsien Neal Liu, Communication and Design Quarterly

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