Migrants from the Mexican states of Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán have become an important presence in Chicago and the Midwest. Many hold jobs as yarderos gardening, caring for lawns, and doing other landscaping work.
Sergio Lemus explores the lives of these migrants and looks at the struggles they face as they work to make the city their home. Drawing on fieldwork in South Chicago, Lemus tells the stories of first and second-generation yarderos and discusses the historical, economic, cultural, and political ramifications they face as they acquire their working-class identity. Lemus’s compassionate portrait places them within America’s ongoing tradition as a nation of immigrants while analyzing their place within today’s transborder cultural moment.
Perceptive and humane, Los Yarderos reveals how a group of Mexican immigrants navigates the crossings of the borders that divide class, color hierarchies, gender, and belonging.
By:
Sergio Lemus
Imprint: University of Illinois Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780252046551
ISBN 10: 0252046552
Series: Latinos in Chicago and Midwest
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 20 May 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Preface: Inspecting Borders Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. Becoming Yarderos: Migration, Capitalism, and Culture Chapter 2. Dispossessed Masculinity: The Market and the Cultural Production of Migrant Mexican Men Chapter 3. Performing Power: The Body, Capitalist Discipline, and Laughing Hard Chapter 4. Color Inspections: Alternative Imaginings of Racial Landscapes among Yarderos/as Chapter 5. Los Morenos y Los Mejicanos: On Colorism, Mugging, and Lateral Race-Making in South Chicago Chapter 6. On Mexican Sacer: Anti-Immigrant Discourse, Deportability, and Working-Class Criminalization Conclusion: Yardero Lives Matter Notes Bibliography Index
Sergio Lemus is an assistant professor at Texas A&M University.
Reviews for Los Yarderos: Mexican Yard Workers in Transborder Chicago
“Los Yarderos is an exceptional ethnography of a ubiquitous but distinct and largely invisibilized type of migrant labor that connects the precarious working lives of Mexican men in the informal service economy to the domestic comforts and conceits of a vast cross-section of ordinary U.S. citizens: lawn mowing and related sorts of landscaping work. This book is extraordinary because anthropologist Sergio Lemus unpacks this world of hard work, honor, and aspiration from the inside, having himself worked as a yardero in the same Chicago neighborhood where he grew up after his family migrated from Mexico when he was a child. His intimate knowledge of this labor and the cultural world of the men who earn their living doing it lend this study remarkable insight and sensitivity.--Nicholas De Genova, author of Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago
