From Central American Warriors to San Francisco Latino Day Laborers: Suffering and Exhaustion in a Transnational Context

Abstract

Many Central American day laborers seeking work in San Francisco, California are here mainly as a result of past and present political, economic, and military US policies practiced throughout the Central American region. However, this social fact, largely unacknowledged throughout the body politic in the United States, neither explains their current status nor detracts from coercive social and state efforts to demonize and exclude them. Instead, there has been cultivated a popular perception upon which an active political campaign has been built that views Central American day laborers as part of a larger mass of so‐called illegal aliens who fundamentally threaten the integrity of US society. In this essay, Central American discourses of social suffering are juxtaposed to an official Californian measure that employs a counter‐discursive nativist construction of social suffering. Taken as whole, we are witnesses to a particular contest of suffering which obfuscates the common concerns and structural forces that bind Central Americans to the United States.