Although tenant evictions are routine in impoverished urban communities throughout the USA, scholars of housing and urban poverty have consistently overlooked this social problem. Drawing predominantly upon participant observation on eviction crews in Baltimore, this study examines the social drama of eviction, focusing upon the orchestration and execution of the court-ordered physical removal of tenants and their property. I find that property managers delegate the 'dirty work' of dispossession to a dispossessed population and that laborers on eviction crews tend to differentiate and distance themselves from the people they are evicting, adopting the dominant belief that eviction is rooted in the individual, moral deficiencies of the tenant. These findings reveal that those who are excluded from the American 'paradigm of propertied citizenship' -the homeless -are used to enforce, and serve to legitimate, that very paradigm. I argue that evictions entail a circle of dispossession, reproduced both materially and ideologically. Articleby robert silverman on May 27, 2014 crs.sagepub.com Downloaded from Critical Sociology 'the paycheck looks good to [his] P.O. [parole officer] ', and Joseph, a homeless, who is hoping to scrape together enough money to start renting a room of his own. 1 By the time the Sheriff arrives, there is palpable excitement in the air. Mr. Frank, a stern, 50-something 'maintenance man' who serves as our supervisor for the day, shouts out the apartment number to which we are headed, pointing up a steep, trash-strewn hill to one of more than a dozen two-story, eight-unit, brick buildings. When Mr. Frank knocks on the door of the second floor unit, Calvin, a light-skinned, 42-year-old standing on the staircase behind me, mimics the sound of gunfire -'pow-pow-pow' -referencing the tales he shared earlier that morning about his previous experiences 'putting people out '. 'Most folks don't want to leave,' he had said, to which I had nodded in agreement. 'No, you don't get what I'm sayin'. They ain't gon' leave. They'll be sitting there with their chrome [gun] in their lap. ' The group of laborers huddled in the stairwell laugh, thrilled by the imaginary violence of this conflict-laden encounter. When no one answers, Mr. Frank -who oversees between five and 18 evictions per month in this apartment complex alone -opens the door and sets about changing the locks. We excitedly shuffle inside. The Sheriff watches as the first table is carelessly thrown onto the curb and then follows Mr. Frank and a handful of crew members to the next unit, which reeks of cat urine, forcing those inside to burrow their noses in their shirt sleeves. Eight of us are left alone to finish clearing out the unit; we are entirely unprotected, in the unlikely event that the tenant -about whom we draw numerous assumptions -returns to the property. As we throw out the bright-pink eviction notices that are scattered on the living room floor, Joseph exclaims, 'Maybe she be illiterate or shit. Or just high out of her fuckin' mind...
An extensive body of research has documented the barriers faced by ex-offenders in the labor market. This article presents an ethnographic case study of an industry that actively recruits and makes profitable use of this stigmatized, yet abundantly pliable and easily exploitable, source of labor. In so doing, this article focuses on the qualitative character, as opposed to the quantitative (in)accessibility, of jobs available to the more than half of a million convicts streaming out of prison each year. Drawing upon extensive interviews and participant observation in the day labor agencies of Oakland and Baltimore-where poor, predominantly African-American and formerly incarcerated men clamor for a day's work-the article documents day laborers' experience of this precarious employment relationship as a kind of extended incarceration and enduring form of punishment, one that traps them in a forever liminal status. This study highlights the extraordinary vulnerability of formerly incarcerated workers and deepens our understanding of the interface between hyperincarceration and the restructuring of urban labor markets.
Drawing on interviews and comparative ethnographic fieldwork in two day labor hiring sites (a street corner labor market and a "regulated" day labor worker center), this article examines the discourses through which Latino immigrant day laborers make sense of, and find dignity within, their ongoing quest for work. My findings reveal a clear pattern of "boundary work" along the center/street divide, wherein each group of day laborers asserts its dignity and masculinity by repudiating what they construe to be the feminine submission exemplified by the other group. I argue that gender both shapes and is shaped through the articulation of these moral boundaries and show how workers' struggle to attain dignity-in this case, via strategies of social differentiation and distinction-can act against the formation of a collective identity.
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