Analysis of Race/Ethnicity in The Ethnography

Labor and Legal; this book is an ethnography that describes illegal immigrants working as busboys in a cafe in Chicago. Ruth exposes to the readers the Lions, ten Mexican peers committed to improving their fortunes and their family’s lives. The setting is around a restaurant the depicts the various places where immigrants are employed. Labor and Legality show the face of the fight against “illegal aliens” in America. The writer focuses on creating a vast array of social interventions by undocumented employees to foster financial stability, mental welfare, integrity, and self-esteem. She also reviews the sociopolitical context of illegal migration, focusing on financial and political situations in the US and Mexico after 1970. Labor and Legality is one of the publications on globalization issues: case studies in the sequence in postmodern anthropology that explore human societies’ perspectives in the contemporary world. Each volume presents a brief and informative analysis of a specific topic resulting from globalization and its cultural, political, and economic impact on individual peoples or classes. Ideal for comprehensive classes in anthropology and as a resource for many high-level courses, these texts blend perfectly depictions of a culture of interconnection and globalization with stories that highlight the agility of their topics. This paper examines how race and ethnicity are addressed, their effect, and the ethnographic stereotypes.

The novel’s key theme is the day-to-day hardships of refugees and their loss of meaningful agencies or options. Ethnographic research shows their collective status by work, whether they are deemed illegitimate and how they succeed under these conditions. The author tries to provide an appreciation of the experiences of immigrants by telling their tales. In addition to reviewing their supposed social standing, the author reports their undocumented lives and hardships as they attempt to merge with the locals.

• What racial/ethnic system does the ethnography portray?

The immigrants see that the recent rash of exclusionary laws at the state level in the USA has exacerbated and aggravated emotional difficulties in the immigrant community. The state passed legislation that denies access to state and state scholarship tuition for undocumented immigrants, limited access to public services, and prohibited Mexican American studies from public school. The immigrants experience the visible effects of this rash law, including an elevated chance of arrest and expulsion, prolonged family split, increasingly hazardous border crossings, and less access to whole work, education, and healthcare.

• What is the relationship between race and class in the ethnography?

A race is a category of people-centered on common physical and social characteristics, which are usually regarded by culture as separate groups. On the other side, an ethnographic community asserts a distinct identification centered on cultural features and a common ancestry supposed to offer its representatives a distinctive sense of population or heritage. The cultural features employed to identify ethnic groups vary; they involve tongues spoken, religions embraced, distinct fashion styles, diets, rituals, holidays, and other distinctive markings. In certain societies, in specific areas, ethnic groups are geographically clustered. Ethnicity relates to the extent to which a person associates himself with a specific ethnic community and feels a connection. Racial identity may be primarily or solely abstract in the United States. Sociologists and anthropologists use the word symbolic ethnicities to characterize small or sporadic manifestations throughout their everyday social lives of ethnic pride and belonging, which are expressive mainly – for a show in the public domain – rather than instrumental.

• What racial and ethnic stereotypes are shown in the ethnography?

The Lions and other Mexicans without documents encounter American stereotypes every day. They face the challenges of life without the benefits of residency in a foreign nation. The stereotype portrayals of Mexicans, especially those considered illegal in the USA, are harsh and degrading. The men are depicted as offenders of illiteracy. The women are portrayed as hypersexual. Men and women alike are depicted as idle, filthy, visually unattractive threats. Latin American immigrants are thought to be stealing American employment. Another prevalent stereotype is that Latin American women are not employed by the United States and often default to sit and take care of children. This is a misconception since the money immigrants pay on local products and services allows businesses to employ more workers or interns to recruit immigrants.

• How do ideas about race/ethnicity affect the people in the ethnography?

In addition to stereotyping, immigrants who have no documents face a range of particular obstacles from the host, such as hostility at work and school, cultural barriers to physicians, teachers, and other professions, a lack of access to childcare, and a lack of knowledge in the field of mental wellbeing. Mainly they are employed in low-paid occupations and poor working environments and hard work, trauma from the past before immigration, employed in low-paid occupations and poor working environments and hard work, a trauma from the past before immigration. The failure to experience ordinary achievements in life is subject to poverty and division between families. Undocumented immigrants regularly face expulsion and even in everyday ways, such as shopping or work. They feel alone and lose their identity. Undocumented immigrants also have little trust in physicians, therapists, and other providers.