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103 Yale L.J. 2305 (1993-1994)
The Informal Economy in an Advanced Industrialized Society: Mexican Immigrant Labor in Silicon Valley

handle is hein.journals/ylr103 and id is 2319 raw text is: The Informal Economy in an Advanced Industrialized Society: Mexican Immigrant Labor in Silicon Valley Christian Zlolniskit INTRODUCTION This Essay uses an ethnographic study of Mexican immigrants living in a low-income neighborhood in San Jose, California to demonstrate the relationship between urban poverty and two types of labor in the informal sector: subcontracting of unskilled labor and small-scale vending.' During the 1980's, many of Silicon Valley's manufacturing and service industries restructured their operations, moving toward greater decentralization and labor flexibility. Part of this restructuring was accomplished by subcontracting work that had previously been performed in-house. Widespread subcontracting has led to the expansion of the informal labor market-which employs largely immigrant workers under poor working conditions-and, in turn, to deteriorated working conditions in the formal labor market. Because many workers now earn lower pay and suffer more frequent periods of unemployment, the class labelled the new working poor has expanded. Immigrant workers have adapted to the lower incomes their regular jobs now pay by engaging in another type of informal economic activity-small-scale vending within their home neighborhoods. Vending has received even less t Research Fellow, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California at San Diego; Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of California at Santa Barbara. This research was supported by a grant from the California Policy Seminar. The writing was made possible by a Visiting Researcher Grant from the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California at San Diego. I sincerely wish to thank Leslie Salzinger, a researcher at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, for invaluable comments on my work and her editorial help. My thanks also to the editorial team of the Yale Law Journal, particularly to Stephen F. Diamond, for helpful editorial suggestions. 1. The bulk of the data on which this Essay is based was collected through intensive fieldwork conducted in San Jose from November 1991 to June 1993. Information on the informal economy was part of a broader ethnographic study of the working and living conditions of Mexican immigrants in a low- income neighborhood in San Jose. For the study, I selected twenty-two families who live in the barrio to study in detail, collecting information on the immigration and labor histories of their members, formal and informal economic activities, household organizational strategies, family and social networks, and other topics related to their economic and social organizational strategies. Intensive and intimate interaction with these families allowed me to observe directly a number of informal economic activities which form the basis for this essay. 2305

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