This book challenges conventional perceptions about this particular street-corner community and how day labor functions in the lives of these individuals. The men’s accounts compel readers to regard them as active participants in their social and economic life—as people who work not only for wages but also to institute change, create knowledge, and reshape their social world. I not only examined the men’s work experiences and the structure of operations at the street corner in detail but also explored how the men understood their participation in this labor-market sector in relation to men of other racial, ethnic, and national origins.
Day-labor sites are still an important, and growing, sector of the U.S.
economy, but they are increasingly concentrated as street-corner markets,
where the majority of workers are of Latino ethnicity and do not have official residency status in the United States.13 The day-labor market is growing particularly fast in New York, where Abel Valenzuela and Edwin Meléndez’s
2003 study estimated there were 5,831–8,283 day laborers in the metropolitan region.14 This estimate likely fell short of the true number, because Valenzuela and Meléndez could not account for those who did not seek day
labor on a particular day or for work sites that went undiscovered. Their casual makeup contributes to the likelihood that many day laborers’ work
sites are not widely known.