Dynamics and politics of invisibility. Act, surveillance and radicalization in agriculture.

Abstract

Research on the effects of foreign workers in the labour market has often assumed ethnicity as «adding» a new system of stratification to that of class. This work illustrates, on the contrary, the mutual constitution of class and ethnicity as the ofltcome of historical relations and processes Which are in no sense purely economic, but also politically and culturally conditioned. Based on a diachronic and ethnographic research focused on the relations between African foreign workers and Spanish peasants, I explore the significant ethnic and class transformations taking place in the Andalusia countryside. I argue that the process of legitimation of control of «illegal» immigrants, constructed as outside and criminalized labour, enables the state’s intervention over local issues, thus transforming consuetudinary labour practices, informal economic strategies, and local notions of autonomy and justice. Consequently, the presence of immigrants in the labour market enables the state to further modernization, not just at the economic but most fundamentally at the political and cultural levels, in the process of construction of an ordered citizenship.