Los Yarderos: Mexican Yard Workers in Transborder Chicago

Amid the relentless immigration raids in greater Los Angeles in June 2025, the story of Narciso Barranco, a landscaper, stood out. While working, immigration agents beat the landscaper as they arrested him. The case of this undocumented father of three Marines caught the public's attention, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security felt compelled to post online, “If you swing a WEED WACKER at federal agents, run through traffic, and refuse to comply—there WILL be consequences.” Barranco worked seven days a week to support his family. He is a familiar type of worker to homeowners, golfers, and anyone driving through metropolitan areas from southern California to Long Island. Sergio Lemus provides a deep look into this ubiquitous but enigmatic class of mostly Latino, mostly immigrant men who mow lawns, trim bushes, manicure gardens on their knees, maneuver leaf blowers, and shovel snow. This ethnography explores masculinity, race, social class, and immigration.Lemus, an anthropologist, conducted field work as he worked with Mexican yarderos, as the crews call themselves, in South Chicago and nearby middle-class, mostly Black suburbs. Thick descriptions of the workday and excerpts from intimate interviews form the book's backbone and its strength. Lemus labored as a chalan, an assistant, without a contract or clear wages for small company owners who are also Mexican. Chalanes are usually newly arrived immigrants, often without documented status, who hire on via kin networks as ayuda, or help: the phrase redolent of the quiet understandings of work, pay, honor, and mutual obligations between assistants and boss. Readers gain familiarity with raking lawns clean in spring, the tedious artistry of clipping bushes just so, handling the stand-on mowers with their intense vibrations, as well as the routines of getting lunch and attending to bodily functions without available bathrooms. A chalan must have a consistent work ethic. But to be a yardero boss requires some degree of capital and entrepreneurship: “You are smart enough to understand how to make money, provide for your family, and be a man” (p. 44). Lemus is attentive to the yarderos’ playful linguistics and what their banter expresses about race, class, and masculinity. This study reveals a great deal about the business, economics, and calendars of the garden crews and landscapers.The book unpacks the talk and the lived realities of manhood and color among this sub-set of Mexicans. Lemus posits a framework of “dispossessed masculinity” in which yarderos aspire to acquire goods like upmarket pick-up trucks and powerful mowers. He hopes “that yarderos eventually see that possessing the latest vehicle is indeed dispossessing them, even if possession allows them to feel happy and to be seen as men in the short term” (p. 73). Colorism, among Mexicans and in relationship to Black America, is constantly observed and deconstructed. Lemus draws attention to his own brown hands as he works. He reviews the changing notions of race and identity in Mexico (i.e., sistema de castas to José Vasconcelos) where mestizaje has long been accepted. As people emigrate, they carry color notions north. But in the new geography things shift: in Chicago “mestizaje is strategically refused” (p. 98). Anti-Blackness becomes common. Yarderos negatively judge Black men during their workdays.Epigraphs from Gloria Anzaldúa, Foucault, Marx, Toni Morrison, Nicholas De Genova, Matthew Gutmann, and José Limón signpost Lemus's intellectual grounding. His discussions of theory and reviews of scholarly literature often overtake ethnographic sections in a way that this reader found unnecessary and disruptive. This book's focus is closest to Juan Thomas Ordóñez's Jornalero, a study of day laborers in the Bay Area, and Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz's Labor and Legality on restaurant workers in Chicago. Lemus convinces me that the yarderos’ experiences are distinct from other service sector jobs. Throughout the book the reader glimpses the author's conflicts as a person with immigrant and working-class roots who now works in the halls of academia.What if this book was better grounded in history? On matters of colorism, Lemus just touches on Lilia Fernández's seminal Brown in the Windy City. Macro-level questions arise about deindustrialization. In South Chicago, dubbed the “steel barrio” by Michael Innis-Jiménez, ethnic Mexicans worked in the steel mills for generations. When that work disappeared, how did people move into the service economy? How long have Mexican gardeners dominated the industry in Chicago? The yarderos, like hundreds of thousands of Latinos in the service sector, carry, without complaint, “the city of Chicago on their shoulders” (p. 12).Sub-standard copy-editing mars this book's passion and eloquence. Pervasive typos and variable spelling in Spanish distracted my reading.Overall, Los Yarderos is a heartfelt exploration of the world of urban, Mexican male workers. It convinces me that workplace matters. Farm workers, day laborers, restaurant workers, and yarderos all face different constraints, if a shared vulnerability in relation to immigration enforcement. While his yardero subjects manage to create lives, far from home, today their well-being—like Narciso Barranco's—seems increasingly at risk. Lemus invites readers to recognize yarderos and “the humanity of those who migrate to seek a better life for their families” (p. xii). This book would be a good addition to advanced courses on Latino ethnography, masculinity, and labor studies.