Flexible labor, inflexible citizenship: Latina immigrants and the politics of welfare reform.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the racial politics of welfare reform and its implications for Latino citizenship in the contemporary United States. Passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) dramatically transformed the nation's welfare system, as it devolved federal authority to state and local government, imposed time limits and work requirements on welfare recipients, and severely restricted the eligibility of noncitizens for public assistance. Not simply an attempt to rework social welfare policy, the PRWORA fundamentally engaged the questions of what is America and who is an American. Its response to these questions signals a profound shift in American ideas of citizenship and a new intertwining of race, gender, and immigration in late twentieth-century U.S. society. This dissertation interweaves multiple disciplinary fields, including history, political economy, sociology of knowledge, cultural studies, and ethnography, into a critical analysis of the material and discursive forces that have shaped the design and evaluation of welfare reform. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant-observation research that I conducted with Mexican immigrant welfare recipients in Long Beach, California, as part of a large nationwide study of welfare reform, I analyze the ways that Latina immigrants navigate and narrate the micro-politics of the new welfare-to-work regime, as well as their reformulations of citizenship, race, and rights in the contemporary moment. Three central themes run throughout this work: the political-economic imperatives of post-Fordism and globalization, particularly the growing demand for flexible, feminized immigrant labor in the U.S. economy, that undergird the work-first approach of the post-1996 welfare state; the critical role played by social science research in shaping public policy and popular understandings of poverty and poor people; and, finally, the post-civil rights paradigm that constructs impoverished African Americans and Latino immigrants as undeserving cultural outsiders at the same time that it underplays the centrality of race and racism in the reproduction of social and economic inequality in post-1960's America.