Los jardineros de Los Angeles: Suburban maintenance gardening as a pathway to first and second generation Mexican immigrant mobility

This dissertation is the first in-depth study of the Mexican immigrant men who work as suburban maintenance gardeners throughout Los Angeles. Specifically, it is an interview-based study of social mobility among first-generation Mexican immigrant gardeners, or jardineros, and among their U.S.-born young adult children. In it, I ask several key questions, including: Is there a false distinction between entrepreneurship and manual labor? And what can account for the remarkable degree of social mobility that some Mexican immigrant gardeners and their young adult children can experience? After reviewing of the history of this immigrant occupational niche in Los Angeles, I find that self-employed jardineros can earn relatively high incomes through their maintenance gardening routes. The profitability of their routes rests upon several key factors, including: (1) self-exploitation; (2) the exploitation of co-ethnic employees; (3) the exploitation of unpaid family labor; (4) the routine practice of taking on "extra" jobs; and (5) the reselling of plants and other garden materials to clients at marked-up prices. Meanwhile, some of the factors that contribute to the social mobility of the children of jardineros include: (1) work ethic lessons; (2) the positive mechanism of keeping kids occupied with gardening work or under close supervision; (3) fathers' social capital and know-how; (4) being able to afford good schools; and (5) homeownership. The findings of this study challenge taken-for-granted notions about the fate of Mexican immigrant workers with low levels of human capital as well as the fate of their U.S.-born young adult children. Moreover, the suburban maintenance gardening niche combines elements of ethnic entrepreneurship and subjugated service work in a way that has not been accounted for in the literature on immigrant entrepreneurship.