Los Yarderos

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.

“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

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