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Joseph R. Smallwood was, for lack of a better term, a Newfoundlander for Newfoundland. Or so, that is how he portrayed himself. Under the first ten years of Confederation, Smallwood pushed a program of rapid industrialization. This program was largely unsuccessful. So, when the IWA [International Woodworkers of America] declared a strike on the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company in January 1959, which posed a significant threat to the province’s most prosperous industry (pulp and paper), Smallwood leapt into action. Rather than support the loggers’ elected union, he banned the IWA in favour of a provincial union that was to be run by Max Lane, President of the Fishermen’s Federation. Utilizing key documents from the Smallwood Collections at Archives and Special Collections, Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University, this thesis examines the factors that led up to this decision, its outcome and ultimately, and why Smallwood chose to do what he did.

The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was one of the most influential political parties in Canadian History. Without doubt, from a social welfare perspective, the CCF helped Canada build and develop an extensive social welfare system across Canada. The CCF’s major contributions to Canadian social welfare policy during the critical years following the Great Depression has been justly credited to the party. This was especially true during the Second World War when the federal Liberal government of Mackenzie King adroitly borrowed CCF policy planks to remove the harsh edges of capitalism and put Canada on the path to a modern welfare state. Despite the party’s success in shifting the role of the state in society, electoral triumphs proved more difficult for the CCF to obtain. On the federal level, there has been a great deal of discussion about the third-party status of the CCF. One of the objectives of this paper is to indicate that such a role was not pre-ordained for Canada’s democratic socialist group. From 1942 to 1944, it appeared that the CCF was a significant electoral threat to the monopoly of the Conservative and Liberal parties. Ultimately, the party fell short of ending the dominance of the traditional governing bodies. The failure of the CCF to break through with the Canadian voting public is often blamed on the underwhelming performance of the party in the two most populous provinces: Ontario and Quebec. This work explores the efforts put forth by the party to expand the CCF beyond its Western base of support and shows how both provinces were inhospitable to the CCF prior to World War II. In addition, evidence is presented that clearly demonstrates that the CCF in Ontario and Quebec often hindered its own efforts to grow the movement. Horrid organization, non-existent leadership, and serious divisions within the party all helped to contribute to the anemic state of the CCF in Canada’s two largest provinces. These problems were compounded by thinly-veiled racism towards members of the French-Canadian community in Quebec. However, by 1942, the Ontario CCF addressed these issues and became a force to be reckoned with in the province. Attempts were made to incorporate this model into the Quebec branch of the party. The Quebec CCF made some in-roads in expanding their small base on the Island of Montreal. Despite these advances, the party failed to break through in the predominately French-speaking province. The 1945 Ontario and federal elections stemmed the tide of CCF momentum. From that point, the party was relegated to a permanent third-party status at the federal level. In Ontario, the party maintained a substantial degree of public support and would play a role in maintaining the three-party political system in that province. The Quebec CCF could make no such boast. The party’s weak support ensured they would remain on the fringes of Quebec politics during the remainder of the party’s days. While numerous factors are often credited with dooming the CCF in Quebec (opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, the centralizing nature of CCF policy, and media disdain), the available evidence indicates the party failed to address persistent concerns over leadership and organization.

This dissertation explores the transformations in tobacco farm labour in Ontario from approximately 1925 to 1990, advancing a significant reinterpretation of the histories of agricultural labour and guestworker programs in Canada. Contrary to portrayals of Canadian agriculture as permanently plagued by labour shortage, this case study demonstrates the heterogeneity of the sector, which included not only labour-starved growers but also farmers like those in tobacco whose high profits enabled them to attract a diverse range of harvest workers each year. Indeed, for much of the 20th century, Ontario’s tobacco sector, located primarily in Norfolk County and the surrounding areas, was the premier destination for seasonal farmworkers in Canada. In the sector’s early decades, tobacco workers enjoyed significant freedom of movement, unusual opportunities for social mobility, and a vibrant culture of worker organization and resistance. However, the opportunities in Ontario tobacco were never equally available to all prospective workers, and incorporation into the sector was always marked by patterns of inclusion and exclusion. For those workers who could gain access to the tobacco labour market, the benefits of working in tobacco steadily declined over the 20th century. By the 1980s, the sector no longer offered opportunities for social mobility and the possibilities of worker organization were greatly constrained. Guestworkers from the Caribbean and Mexico found their labour and geographic mobility much more tightly restricted than any previous or contemporary groups of tobacco workers. These transformations were complex and the result of many contingent factors (in both Canada and migrant-sending countries), including: political economic trends; ideologies of race and gender; the actions of employers, local communities, and workers themselves; and the efforts of multiple levels of the state to exert greater control over tobacco farm labour. The thesis pays particular attention to the transnational dynamics of labour migration systems, guestworker program structures, and worker resistance. By historicizing farm labour in a single crop and single region over approximately seven decades, the dissertation demonstrates that farm labour is not by definition a station of poverty and extreme exploitation, but instead is made so by historical processes.

Caregiver migration programs and policies in Canada have undergone numerous changes since the implementation of the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) in 1992. Although changes made by the Canadian government between 1992 and 2020 claimed to “support” migrant caregivers, many caregivers continue to face precarious conditions. The purpose of this Major Research Paper is to argue that caregiver migration programs and policies need to be reassessed and challenged as they continue to embody problematic labour practices that render migrant caregivers vulnerable. Broadly, this research brings literature on racism, sexism and colonialism into one conversation in order to better understand the root causes of inequality faced by migrant caregivers in Canada. The significance of this work lies in its provision of a contemporary understanding of caregiver migration, especially in light of a global pandemic, in order to advocate for policy amendments that will genuinely support migrant caregivers and lead to the elimination of exploitative care labour practices.

This thesis examined the experiences of contract academic staff (CAS) regarding their use of work-life balance programs (WLBPs). As precarious employees, CAS are subject to work conditions that put them in a bind between surviving as precarious workers and meeting the demands of their work and family lives. As such, a clearer picture of how such highly-skilled professionals utilize WLBPs to achieve WLB is required. Adopting the phenomenology qualitative research approach, I used NVivo to analyze the data obtained from in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted with ten research participants. Four themes emerged: precarious work, support and performance, gendered aspects of academia, and precarious workers’ use of WLBPs. Results showed that male and female CAS adopted similar WLBPs as boundary management strategies to integrate and/or separate their work and family obligations. The limitations and implications of the research for theory and practice were discussed and recommendations were made for future research.

At a meeting of the Farmworkers’ Organizing Committee (FWOC) on 6 April 1980, the FWOC officially became the Canadian Farmworkers’ Union (CFU) with the goal of providing better legal protection, immigration services, and overall improved safety standards for South Asian farm workers in the Lower Mainland. The CFU was unable to reach financial autonomy on their own and with a perpetual shortage of dues and heavy reliance on outside support, the CFU affiliated with the larger Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) in 1981. The CFU’s community unionism was unique and suited for their members’ needs but complicated their relationship with the CLC’s vision of a labour movement dominated by business unionism. This thesis demonstrates the CFU’s importance to Canadian labour historiography and provides valuable lessons for those who want to organize in an increasingly neo-liberal dominant society.

Precarious employment is often experienced as contract work, involuntary part-time work, low wage work, and self-employment. There is a well-developed body of literature pointing to negative health, economic, and social impacts related to precarious employment in urban centres, while little consideration has been given to the particularities that may make a rural precarious employment experience different. The goal of this exploratory research project is to understand the experience of being precariously employed in rural Ontario. Nineteen unstructured individual interviews with rural Ontarians experiencing rural precarious employment were conducted. The phenomenon of rural precarious employment was distinguished by five themes (financial, health, self-view, social, and system) emergent through phenomenology. The phenomenon encompassed experiences of poverty, decreased health, negative self-views, social struggles, and marginalization from support public systems. Unpacking precarious employment in rural Ontario from the experience of workers has significance for both rural scholars and policy makers. Rural scholars benefit from a better understanding of precarious employment as an experience in rural areas, and the addition of lived rural experiences to the precarious employment literature advances the understanding of urban bias in scholarship. This research provides provincial policy makers the opportunity to craft rural focused employment policy and better understand how services can support rural precarious employees.

This thesis examines three Ontario strikes during the 1970s: the Dare Foods, Ltd. strike in Kitchener, Ontario, 1972-1973; the Puretex Knitting Company strike in Toronto, 1978-1979; and the Inco strike in Sudbury, 1978-1979. These strikes highlight gender issues in the Canadian food production, textile, and mining industries in the 1970s, industries that were all markedly different in size and purpose, yet equally oppressive towards working women for different reasons, largely based on the regional character of each city the strikes took place in. In Kitchener, the women's movement worked closely with the Dare union local and the left to mobilize against the company and grappled with the difficulties of framing women's inequality within the labour movement. At Puretex, immigrant women workers were subject to electronic surveillance as a form of worker control, and a left-wing nationalist union needed to look outside of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) for allies in strike action. At Inco, an autonomous women's group formed separate from the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) but struggled to overcome a negative perception of women's labour activism in Sudbury. Ultimately, these strikes garnered a wide variety of support from working women and feminist groups, who often built or had pre-existing relationships with Canadian and American trade unions as well as the left-wing milieu of the 1970s. This thesis uses these strikes as case studies to argue that despite the complicated and at times uneven relationship between feminism, labour, and the left in the 1970s, feminist and left-wing strike support was crucial in sustaining rank-and-file militancy throughout the decade and stimulating activist careers for women in the feminist movement, in unions, and on the left.

This dissertation examines the history of working-class environmentalism. It investigates the relationship between work and the environment and between workers and environmentalists. It presents five case studies that focus on the relationship between workers and the environment in British Columbia from the 1930s to the present, with particular emphasis on the forestry industry. Each case study examines how the interests of workers both intersect and conflict with the interests of environmentalists and how this intersection of interests presented itself throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Additionally, this dissertation examines how the working class has historically been constructed as the adversary of nature or wilderness and aims to explore how the working class, resource workers in particular, have come to symbolize that adversarial relationship. As well, it hopes to answer more epistemological questions about why working class environmentalism has not entered our lexicon and how lacking a sense of the working-class environmentalist serves to shape a discourse in which the history of worker environmentalism has been largely passed over. This study also explores how the collective memory of environmentalism has been constructed to exclude notions of class, and thus how environmentalism and the working class have been constructed as mutually exclusive categories. While this dissertation explores the exclusion of working class environmentalism it also attempts to write the worker-environmentalist back into history and show how teaching working class and labour history can help remedy this exclusion.

his thesis examines a selection of print materials from the radical and Communist-affiliated Left in the 1930s, a group and time period that are often passed over in assessments of Canadian literature. While similar texts have been studied in the context of legal evidence or political propaganda, they have rarely been considered as print objects in themselves, operating within a network of production, circulation, and response alongside other literary and non-literary media. In looking at the 1930s, a moment when the project of Canada was acutely challenged by the political and economic forces of the Great Depression, I see an equal challenge to scholars and critics by writers and readers struggling to organize from below. By considering examples of Canadian proletarian print from different points along the communication cycle, this project seeks to connect the imaginary aspirations and rhetorical strategies of these texts to the material contexts of their producers and readers. Chapter One addresses the existing gap in Canadian literary history, which maintains a liberal orientation throughout its associated institutions, approaches and subjects; this orientation has been upheld through political and legal structures hostile to proletarian movements. This chapter discusses Ronald Liversedge’s Recollections of the On-to-Ottawa Trek as a text that highlights and crosses such institutional boundaries. Chapter Two takes up the methods of book history, using the example of the “Worker’s Pamphlet Series” to discuss expanding this approach to include material such as pamphlets, periodicals, and manifestos as part of an explicit class analysis. Chapter Three analyzes the self-reflexive circulation of proletarian print in the restrictive legal environment created by Section 98 of the Criminal Code through materials produced by the Canadian Labour Defense League. Chapter Four examines surveillant readings and misreadings as they intercept proletarian print, using the Edmonton Hunger March and the subsequent pamphlet “The Alberta Hunger-March.” By mapping locations associated with this event and with the print economy in 1932 Edmonton, Chapter Five considers the formation of proletarian publics as highly localized interpretive communities, and how the application of tools such as GIS mapping might further re-center readers’ material lives in the analysis of print culture. As a whole, this dissertation demonstrates how the methods of analysis and historicization offered by book history can and should be applied to bring proletarian print and readers into conversation with the wider patterns of Canadian writing through the twentieth century. This is a necessary confrontation: as the study of Canadian literature begins to acknowledge the construction and contestation of our national myths, it must also avow the lasting political consequences for those who have been excluded.

The practice of design has become obscured by global networks of production, circulation, and consumption. Traditional design studies tend to focus on high-profile products, presenting heroic designers as the primary authors of works of design. This approach is inadequate for understanding design in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Contemporary design is better understood as an iterative and distributed process of give-and-take among actors, human and non-human, including people, tools, places, and ideas. It is a process that is influenced by conditions along the commodity chain that fall outside of the designers traditionally recognized sphere. This research demonstrates that commonly held conceptions of designers as sole authors and of design work as a largely intellectual, creative activity distanced from manufacturing, misrepresent the real practices and relations of design labour in the current global economy. Two object ethnographies follow the production, circulation, and consumption of everyday, mass-produced goods: the Vanessa steel-toe boot by Mellow Walk and the Non Stop flatware by Gourmet Settings. These case studies map networks of design labour across continents, countries, cities, and generations. Primary research includes 18 interviews, observations of environments and practices, and the analysis of material evidence. This process reveals actors whose contributions have typically been omitted from design history, and describes practices of design that contest traditional depictions of designers, design work, and evidence thereof. This research contributes a fuller and more accurate understanding of the range of creative labour and labourers involved in the design and development of goods for global markets while challenging the view of these goods as placeless and culture-free. I respond to the call by design historians to extend the scope of designs histories beyond the West, and I build on the work of design and creativity scholars who identify design thinking outside of recognized design roles. My work challenges established hierarchies of design, including who is permitted to design, which countries are perceived as superior sources of design and manufacturing expertise, and the hand-head dichotomy that underwrites how we think about design and that has been entrenched in traditional conceptions of manufacturing and the global division of labour. Understanding how the work of design is distributed and how it has changed in response to globalization gives insight into the politics of production and consumption.

This dissertation is a study of working-class identity and subjectivity among a sample of male nickel miners in Sudbury, Ontario. Recent foreign takeovers of mining firms and a protracted strike at Vale-Inco in 2009-2010 motivate this dissertation's new look at class relations and subjectivity in one of Canadas most historically significant regions of working-class organization. This study understands these recent events as part of a set of decades long economic processes that have transformed workers lives in and outside work. It explores how the form that trade unionism took in the post-WWII period has shaped class relations and class identity among male nickel miners in Sudbury. The dissertation asks: how have class subjectivity and socioeconomic change interacted over this history? After first analyzing the political economy of mining in the Sudbury Basin, the dissertation traces the formation of historically situated class subjectivities. In it, I examine how the postwar compromise between capital and labour influenced unionization and class identity among male workers at the mines. I then inquire into how industrial restructuring and job loss, the rise of new managerial strategies and neoliberal governance, and the growth of precarious, contract labour have transformed both the material contexts of workers lives and their practices of reproducing their identities as members of a working class. To form the central arguments of the dissertation, I draw on 26 oral history interviews with current and retired workers, and organize their narratives into three thematic areas of class identity: first, issues of work and the labour process; second, themes of place, space, and belonging in the formation of class identities; and third, how historical memory and generational conflict influence class. Within and across these thematic areas I show how material conditions and workers own practices of identity formation interact, adjust, and at times, contradict. I argue that the postwar class compromise between labour and capital contributed to a resilient form of working-class subjectivity among workers that is reproduced by local processes of social remembering and class reproduction. Yet, industrial restructuring, the growth of precarious employment, and the internationalization of ownership and management at the mines challenge the efficacy of this historical subjectivity. By studying unionized workers who are confronting profound industrial change, this dissertation raises questions about how the making of male working-class identity limited broader processes of class formation, as well as how we understand class and class formation in the global economy at a time when labour movements face growing structural challenges.

This study explores how teacher unions in British Columbia and Ontario attempted to influence public opinion during periods of labour conflict between 2001 and 2016. A comparative case analysis was conducted based on eight interviews with members of the British Columbia Teachers Federation, six interviews with members of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, as well as documents from each union. In addition, newspaper items published in each province during the conflict period were collected. The unions’ efforts were analyzed through the framework of Habermas’ concepts of the public sphere and validity claims. Findings indicate that both unions had active public relations strategies designed to influence media coverage and discourse in the public sphere. However, most of their efforts were focused on influencing the public sphere indirectly, by using tactics that are not traditionally considered part of public relations strategies. While the unions’ efforts were similar in nature, the impact that these efforts had on influencing public opinion and producing policy change varied substantially. I argue that a combination of historical and political differences, mediated through a validity claims framework, helps explain this variation.

This dissertation turns to recent feminist history of the 1980s to consider feminism’s relationship to class, economics, and labour. Challenging the idea that feminism is an inclusive project, I look at how feminist ideology produces commonsense forms of racism, classism, and sexual normativity. To demonstrate this argument, I evaluate two important moments in 1980s Canadian feminism: the development of feminist political economy and the debates of the feminist sex wars. In tracing the ways in which these histories unfold to value some feminist subjects more than others, I show how feminist narratives appear cohesive through quotidian practices of exclusion. I claim that the resistance of marginalized subjects is integral to these narratives, particularly when this resistance has been made to appear invisible or absent. I first turn to feminist political economy to show how a white feminist discourse about gendered domestic labour emerged while simultaneously omitting analyses of the experiences of women of colour and migrant domestic labourers. This white feminist discourse is imbued with commonsense racism, and imagines migrant domestic workers as located elsewhere to feminism. Subsequently, I examine how the feminist sex wars pursued a line of inquiry into sexuality that privileged a framework of danger. Feminist theorizing of violence against women as intrinsic to prostitution and pornography had dire consequences for understanding sex work and the diverse women employed in the industry. In promoting a white, middle-class perspective on sexuality, feminists appropriated sex workers’ experiences of violence and sought state support for abolishing commercial sexuality, in turn contributing to the heightened state surveillance of sexual minorities. In looking to and for marginalized women’s experiences within an archive of women’s publishing, this project insists on the integral place of sex workers and migrant domestic workers within Canadian feminist labour histories.

This paper examines precarious work, its historical origins and certain social consequences. I use the 2015 Canadian Election Study to analyze the relationship between work-related insecurity and economic anxiety with voting, non-voting political behaviour and attitudes toward equity-seeking groups. I propose a theory of "harmonizing down", in which workers who were once able to access the benefits and status of the standard employment relationship have generally seen their opportunities for stable and secure work decline. This has resulted in economic anxiety for most workers. Results were mixed, suggesting that broad generalizations around economic anxiety are problematic. Insecurity and anxiety may reduce the likelihood of voting but may increase non-voting participation. Some aspects of insecurity and anxiety were related to negative attitudes toward equity-seeking groups, but the relationship is not clear. Gender and political party identity influence these attitudes.

This thesis discusses the Canadian outing system, a direct feature of industrial schools in the prairie west prominent in the late nineteenth century. Seen as an extension of the school’s vocational training, the outing system became an outlet with which the Canadian federal government’s Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) could integrate into the lower ranks of Euro-Canadian society young Indigenous girls in a hierarchical system of labour. By examining the roles and education of Indigenous female youth in the industrial school system in the Canadian prairies, this study illuminates how, in the name of assimilation, the DIA implemented the outing system. This thesis highlights how young Indigenous women were compelled to work in homes that exemplified settler values, taking on strenuous labour in environments where attitudes of race and class dimensions were prominent. By drawing from 1901 census data and looking at the settler homes, farms, and establishments in which they worked, this thesis provides an important glimpse into the early history of domestic work for Indigenous women and girls in western Canada and offers insights into the very nature of settler colonialism in early Canadian national history.

Previous research has indicated the prevalence of customer violence towards workers in the service sector, but few studies have looked at the impacts of this violence for LGBTQ2S+ workers. Drawing from survey results (n=208) and interviews (n=11) with LGBTQ2S+ service sector workers in Windsor and Sudbury, Ontario, this thesis explores the rates and experiences of customer violence for these workers, using chi-square analyses to identify relationships between customer violence and independent variables related to workers’ identity and workplace. Further analysis was conducted on qualitative interview data to understand how this violence was experienced, as well as how workers resisted and perceived management’s response. Customer violence was found to be widespread among survey and interview participants, with participants who were racialized as non-white, union members, and in precarious work situations reporting higher levels of violence. Interviews also showed how participants often resisted customer violence through individual means, and perceived support from management to be lacking and contingent upon economic motivations.

This study concerns the social and emotional dimensions of Mexican migrant workers’ temporary labour migration experience as they relate to precarity and unfreedom within the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). My principle inquiry centers around understanding migrant workers’ subjective and emotional experiences of being away from home and family. This study makes the case that migration and family separation, as requirements of SAWP employment, are precarious labour conditions that result overwhelmingly in distressing emotional experiences that go unseen in workers’ daily lives. I draw on a deeply qualitative methodological approach and theories of precarity, emotion and practice to explore the ways that SAWP workers navigate their labour migration experience through a series of practices in their daily lives. I conclude by sharing my participants’ recommendations for a more dignified and humanized labour experience and with their insistence that they are not maquinas (machines).

International teaching assistants (ITAs) in North American English-medium universities often work with an accent. In one sense, to work with an accent entails doing one’s work while having an aural stigma. This is due to the increased likelihood that students and other university stakeholders perceive ITAs’ foreign-accented English as difficult to understand. The purported problem of their foreign accents can thus create additional facets in working with an accent such as working with the idea of how to change an accent and performing (around) it in order to be viewed as effective workers. All of this work can be considered a type of aesthetic labour in that ITAs need to develop the right sound for their professional duties. Based on a narrative inquiry of the experiences of 14 ITAs working in various universities in Ontario, Canada, this thesis explores how they conceptualize and execute aesthetic labour. Specifically, it details their perceptions of a satisfactory aural aesthetic for work as well as the extent to which they incorporate this aesthetic in discussions about their professional practices. Regarding the first research objective, the ITAs understood a satisfactory accent in linguistic, racial, and professional terms. Indeed, an accent could sound “native” or “nonnative,” become “whitened” or remain racialized, and match or not match one’s work (environment). In terms of taking up these perceptions in their professional practices, which took the general form of working on or around an accent, the ITAs’ prior views on aural aesthetics were upheld and/or tempered by contextual factors in their universities. On the immediate level, the above findings provide suggestions for changes to existing forms of ITA training, which tend to ignore the knowledge of ITAs and fail to prepare them to effectively communicate according to the specificities of their work environments. More broadly, the findings are useful in highlighting how accents are not stable individual traits, but rather, malleable tools that help workers negotiate intercultural encounters in a range of professional settings. Therefore, this study counters research that frames the ITA accent as an inherent problem needing to be rectified for a homogeneous audience.

This dissertation explores the political economy of the physical and mental illnesses that the migrant workers experience while living and working under conditions of illegality in Canada's late capitalism. The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part locates four social determinants of health underpinning the structural vulnerability to which the Latin American undocumented workers are subjected in this particular context. The second part describes the mental and physical health illnesses that the undocumented workers develop while living and working in Canada without authorization, according to the type of industry they work in (1.—Multinational Corporations, 2.—Medium-size local industries and 3.—Underground workers' cooperatives) and to the type of work they do. The empirical evidence illustrates that the undocumented immigrants who work for medium-size local enterprises, those who have been affected by deportability and deportation, as well as those who lost their legal status after being engaged in refugee claimant applications, are more likely to develop the most dramatic forms of physical and mental health diseases, all linked to what is called here "short- term historical trauma." In contrast, undocumented workers who work for underground workers' cooperatives are more likely to report better physical and mental health outcomes. Cooperative labour, free time and social solidarity make this possible. Overall, this thesis indicates that --as explored in part three-- under the social conditions organized by late capitalism, social solidarity and engagement in non-waged cooperative labour constitute social mechanisms by which undocumented migrants can access to forms of refuge, care, solidarity and social recognition that partially emancipate them from illnesses, suffering and social death. This thesis is based on an ethnographic work that I carried out over 24 months in Montreal. During that period of time, I worked side by side with Latin American undocumented workers in slaughterhouses and meatpacking factories, construction and home renovation companies, employment agencies, and as industrial cleaner for multinational corporations, spaces where I carried out direct empirical observation in the points of production and conducted 47 in-depth interviews on illegality, labor and health. I also conducted ethnographic work in hospitals and deportation centers.