| How are low-wage, immigrant workers' interests promoted and suppressed? Drawing on theories of political empowerment and resource mobilization, this dissertation develops a power analysis of the efforts of advocacy organizations to improve conditions for immigrant workers in the lowest paying jobs. Relying on participant observation and extensive interviews, I conducted two field studies---one of New York farmworkers and one of their advocates. I also interviewed employers, government representatives, and legislators. Incorporating scholarly work on social movements, interest groups, immigration, and race and ethnicity, the dissertation argues that the collective mobilization of farmworkers---mostly undocumented Latinos---is inhibited by workers' legal status and transnationalism. Moreover, employers foster quiescence in their workers through encouraging ethnic succession, controlling job access, and influencing the development and implementation of state labor regulations. In response, advocates have coordinated farmworker organizing efforts, legal cases, and a legislative campaign, all with the aid of a number of allies. This resulted in raising public awareness, educating and empowering workers, and successfully promoting pro-farmworker legislation.; I examined relations among these three groups---workers, employers, and advocates---to give a comprehensive account of the barriers and routes to political empowerment of new non-citizen immigrants, the political processes leading to pro-worker legislation, and the hostile response of elites (government and private) to the claims of advocates. My results show that advocates are necessary, but not sufficient, for workers to advance their interests. Advocates produced real, if limited, gains for workers, and succeeded in gaining them some access to the U.S. political system. However, they did not alter the deep structural constraints that inhibit workers' power. The confines of advocacy power and a deficit of participation on the part of the workers themselves prevent more success. Moreover, workers' collective action is inhibited by a robust network of agricultural elites, closely allied with state actors, which circumscribes their working lives and suppresses their political imagination. In light of the increase in the number of undocumented, low-wage workers in the U.S., pending national guestworker legislation, and the growing influence of Latinos in the U.S., my case study has implications for the broader Latino population. |
