Notes taken for the class ANTHRCUL101 at the University of Michigan summarizing some of the required readings and viewings for the class, including Holmes, de Leon, Talking Black in America, and Race: Power of an Illusion
Holmes – Introduction
●Participant observation → classic anthro research method
○Long-term immersion in everyday lives of people, occasional recorded conversations/interviews
■Media accounts, clinical charts
●“Systems of migrant labor are characterized by physical and temporal separation of the processes of reproduction of the labor force and the production from that labor force” (12)
○Migrant laborer can survive on low wages bc family/state provides schooling/healthcare/etc to promote reproduction
■Host state externalized costs of labor force renewal → benefits further from labor migration
○Things that are necessary for reproduction and healthcare are provided in Mexico; US only provides what is necessary while migrants work
●Separation of processes in US/Mexico is enforced through “contradictory political and economic forces” (13).
○Economic systems → require cheap labor of migrants
○Political systems → ban migrants from entering country
●Contradictory systems like this one need political/legal mechanisms that assume migrant
does not have citizenship rights, limited power
○Reproduction of system of migrant labor depends on lack of power of migrants to
change the system
○CA/AZ/CO Prop 187 → “... make it legal for U.S. companies to pay workers only enough for daily survival and illegal for government money to go toward their health care, education, or other social services” (13)
●Push Factors: motivations for migration that are located in the origin country that force a migrant out of that country
○Ex: Poverty/racism
●Pull Factors: motivations for migration that are located in the target country that invite migrants to that country
○Ex: Social networks, economic opportunities
●“Push and pull factor” idea in migration studies assumes labor migration is voluntary and
economic
○Author’s friends experienced involuntary labor migration
■Forced to migrate to survive + help families
●“In much public health and global health discourse… the focus remains on individual risk
behaviors… migrant workers are seen as deserving their fates, even untimely deaths, because they are understood to have chosen voluntarily to cross the border for their own
economic gain.” (25)
○Line b/n economic and political migration is blurred
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