No Soy Welferero: Undocumented Latino Laborers in the Crosshairs of Legitimation Maneuvers

California urban and agricultural centers rely heavily on Latino migrant laborers, regardless of their legal documented status. In the delivery of social services, and in the mass media, popular consciousness, and formal legal understandings and arrangements, Latino laborers are viewed as either legitimate voluntary low-wage workers or illegitimate undocumented workers not entitled to the same civil rights as US citizens. Their de facto second-class status becomes a central component of their social identity, with the structural conditions of their lives internalized, resulting in limited agency and poor social and health outcomes. The lived experience of structural vulnerability prefigures the actions and efforts of undocumented Latino contingent workers. In this article, the capacity for Latino laborers to maneuver and negotiate the travails of everyday life is explored.