Diasporic strategizing: Punjabi Sikh immigrant navigations of labor and citizenship within contemporary U.S. racial capitalism

Abstract

To avoid the snowballing of economic and legal challenges that immigrant and diaspora workers face, Punjabi families continue to use an assemblage of social practices and vernacular legal acumen to maneuver around restrictive labor conditions and economic systems, thereby mitigating what Balibar (2015) describes as “ultra-subjective” and “ultra-objective” violence. This essay draws on ethnographic examples to explore these strategies. In one case, a Punjabi family faced bankruptcy from a new motel business following the events of September 11, 2001. The family deployed the legal instrument of a fictive divorce to prevent the loss of their property and home, thereby formally individualizing the financial loss of bankruptcy while actually maintaining their collectively shared resources. Paradoxically, the formal dissolution of the marriage here served to ensure stability within the intergenerational family by securing the home, school enrollment, and community ties. In another case, I consider the role of the intergenerational family in contesting cultural citizenship for working-class immigrant parents working in meatpacking plants. This article explores the way Punjabi immigrant workers experience the contested web of cultural citizenship, racial capitalism, and violence, while concomitantly leveraging their legal acumen and community ties to traverse a legal and economic system that is often inaccessible or hinders their very stability. In doing so, workers challenge the distinction between class struggle and non-class struggle forms of action to ameliorate the objectification of racialized workers under capitalism (as reported by Riley et al., New Left Review, no. 138 (December), 5–27, 2022).