Paper short abstract:

This paper explores essential services as experienced through the body among Brazilian immigrants from Minas Gerais (Mineiros) in Massachusetts. It does so in a sociopolitical moment and global pandemic that has revealed and exacerbated the risks of this labor, particularly for migrant workers.

Paper long abstract:

The Metro-West, a suburban region of Massachusetts, has among the highest concentration of Brazilian immigrants in the US. It began as a key site for Mineiros, Brazilians born in Minas Gerais, in the 19th century when Portuguese speaking communities from Azores and Portugal migrated to labor in textile mills and cranberry production. In the 1980s, changes in Brazil’s sociopolitical landscape from an authoritarian to a democratic government, high unemployment, and hyperinflation led to the devaluation (desvalorização) of many white-collar professions. Formerly trained Mineiro professionals traded in their dentist coats and briefcases to work in the Massachusetts service sector. Into the present, Mineiros in the Metro-West remain the dominant ethnic minority and are overrepresented in essential services.

In this paper, I explore the experiences of Mineiros who have aspired for a career that they feel they can no longer pursue and work in the service sector. I ask how this reconfiguration of aspiration broadly, and labor in services specifically, is experienced through the body. Considering the body as phenomenologically experienced, I examine how generational shifts in occupation from professions to services invoke reformulations in gender, race, and class and related changes in occupational mental health. In this way, my paper asks how the service sector, what is often termed “affective” or “immaterial” labor, becomes experienced through and marked onto the body and how it influences embodied experience. It does so in a sociopolitical moment and global pandemic that has revealed and exacerbated the risks of essential services, particularly for migrant workers.