Malinowski’s Latinx Gardeners: Domestic Interruptions and the Manicured Resplendence of Zoom University

Abstract

SummaryDuring the pandemic, the separation between our work lives and personal lives has become complicated and sometimes untenable. By exploring an instance where my professional duties—guest lecturing for a colleague’s class—were interrupted by a residential gardener and his leaf blower just outside my window, I demonstrate how the pandemic and the crises it represents to ethnographic research might be thought alongside the Latinx migrant service labor economy of Southern California. By drawing attention to Latinx migrant labor practices, I demonstrate how doing our ethnographic and scholarly work amid a pandemic and from home can depend on a regime of outsourced work that sustains our affective and material needs and desires, forming the invisible conditions to our scholarly productivity.