Unsung Heroes or Exploited Workers? Latino Migrant Day Laborers in Post-Harvey Houston and Critical Environmental Justice

Abstract

Unsung Heroes or Exploited Workers? Latino Migrant Day Laborers in Post-Harvey Houston and Critical Environmental Justice Daniel Olmos (bio) In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey devastated the Houston metropolitan area and caused approximately $125 billion in property damage, becoming one of the most costly storms in US history. Media outlets and observers attended to the serious socioeconomic plight of homeowners by highlighting the flooding of 150,000 homes and over 60,000 displaced people living in shelters and hotels, as well as featuring the historic role that social media played in connecting first responders to victims when emergency call systems overloaded.1 The storm acutely devastated lowlying areas of Houston, which is home to many disinvested and disadvantaged communities of color—the flooding and the lackluster state response led many to evoke the dramatic scenes of racialized abandonment during Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in 2005.2 As global warming increasingly intensifies tropical storm systems along coastal regions in the US, climate justice movements insist that the most vulnerable and marginalized communities—also the least responsible for deeply-rooted systemic inequities—are also the most negatively impacted by the effects of global warming.3 While much scholarship has emphasized post-hurricane recovery efforts from the vantage point of Houston residents and businesses, little attention has been paid to the incorporation of Latino migrant day laborers as veritable “second responders” and, even less, as subjects of climate injustice and agents of environmentalism.4 Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm, dumped fifty inches of rainfall and thirty-three trillion gallons of water into major commercial, [End Page 46] industrial, and residential corridors of the Houston region. The spectacles of evacuation and rescue that dominated media representation of the storm during the four-day news cycle obscured the eventual arduous process of recovery, in particular the prevailing mode of disaster recovery based on the exploitation of precarious racialized migrant labor. In the aftermath, unregulated small contractors and individual homeowners recruited mostly Latino day laborers to clear out moldy dry walls, replace rotted flooring, demolish dilapidated structures, and clean hazardous facilities, often with little or sometimes no pay and frequently without proper workplace safety equipment and conditions. “People don’t analyze it. They don’t see the consequences,” Martin Mares, a Mexican immigrant day laborer who has lived in Houston since 1995, noted during the recovery efforts. “They go to work without knowing whether the business will even pay them.”5 The erasure of day labor exploitation was extended by the mass-mediated appeals to resilience and grit in the face of a non-responsive state, namely through hashtag campaigns like #houstonstrong that promoted a neoliberal “rebuild above all else” model of recovery.6 In this context, this essay posits that the devastation wrought on the greater Houston area in the wake of Hurricane Harvey revealed not only the increasing vulnerability of US coastal regions to catastrophic weather patterns as a result of accelerated climate change, but also the socioeconomic relations and structures of racialized exploitation necessary for post-disaster reconstruction. I focus on the role of Latino migrant day laborers in greater Houston’s post-Hurricane Harvey rebuilding efforts and the environmental injustice implications, including the situatedness of day laborers in the face of ecological devastation. In the spirit of what Sarah Wald, David Vazquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette articulate as emerging “Latinx environmentalisms,”7 and drawing on a critical environmental justice framework through a qualitative sociological approach, I examine the conditions under which Latino migrant day laborers experienced racialized, economic, and ecological injustice following Hurricane Harvey, and finally how their subjection and struggle for dignity embodies a critical environmental justice politics in a moment of profound ecological crisis. [End Page 47] From the Anthropocene to Critical Environmental Justice The recruitment and exploitation of Latino day laborers in post-Harvey Houston was structured within the anthropocene era. In 2000, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Strermer introduced the concept of the anthropocene to explain a new stage of geohistorical development characterized by human activity as a “major geological force” and influence on climate patterns.8 While the anthropocene has become a buzzword with many different meanings, the category has fundamentally identified humanity as...