Colloquium Series: Vanesa Ribas, UNC-CH

Vanesa Ribas, Graduate Student, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Prismatic Engagement: Latino and African American Workers’ Encounters in a Southern Meatpacking Plant

Abstract: Based on her dissertation research, which included 16 months of participant observation working production jobs at a North Carolina meatpacking plant, Vanesa Ribas studies intergroup relations between Latino migrants and African Americans. She shows how the social organization of labor conditions both the symbolic boundaries that Latinos draw, and the social boundaries they perceive, vis a vis their African American counterparts. Ribas finds that Latinos draw sharp, substantially negative symbolic boundaries with African American workers, and argues that this is rooted in Latinos’ perceptions that they are the most oppressively exploited workers, and that African Americans are a privileged group within the social organization of labor.