"We're all Mexicans here"--Connie Bracewell

The thing that struck me in this week's readings was the manner in which power structures in society often create situations in which our individual and communal everyday situations are often played out as conscious enactments of ordinary life in defiance of or despite those who would seem to limit or delineate what our various "ordinary lives" consist of. In other words, a large part of "ordinary life" or "everyday life" is reflective of the various class and racial barriers within a society. In this sense, the formation of everyday life--at least in the sense of a particular place, such as in the workplace--is itself a reflection of power inequalities in a society and our efforts to create referential spaces for ourselves within those systems of inequality.

Striffler's piece reminded me of the 1991 Hamlet chicken factory tragedy in North Carolina, my home state. Plagued with years of absent or indifferent safety inspections, the plant had problems that rendered it a ticking time bomb. In particular, the management of the plant insisted on locking virtually all fire doors within the building, effectively sealing the work-force (primarily consisting, as with the Arkansas Tyson plant, of immigrant and non-anglo workers) within the plant. When fire broke out in the plant on September 3, 1991, workers found themselves trapped in an inferno fueled by the very products they worked with. Ultimately, 25 people died in the fire and over 50 were injured, many of them critically. In subsequent investigations, it was said that the plant operators defended their actions in locking the fire doors, citing the need to prevent worker theft and unauthorized exits from the work areas. For those of us in the wider North Carolina community, what this essentially shook down to was--"Let's not let the Mexicans and blacks have an opportunity to squeeze out an undeserved bonus" and "all black people steal." It was an ugly reminder that the lingering effects of racism and the equal rights movement of the South were still alive and well in the stubborn holdouts of my father's and father's father's generations.

What the situation above also demonstrated was the manner in which racism itself is often woven into the fabric of everyday life, meticulously repaired and maintained by those who would defend the need to create ordinary, everyday social barriers based on nothing more than visual and economic human difference. It also demonstrated to many younger North Carolinians that it could no longer be acceptable for our newer generations to simply continue this system of maintaining a status quo that could leave people to burn to death like the chickens they were processing, valued little higher than the chicken patties on a McDonald's sandwich combo. In the years following this incident, I personally saw a change in how many people in my home state viewed the everyday status of non-white citizens. As a state, we became more socially conscious, disinclined to simply turn our heads and ignore the injustices leveled at the weaker in society. It's not a perfect process. Like most places, North Carolina still deals to a certain extent with changing perceptions of what is acceptable everyday life to the community at large. We see similar processes taking place in areas such as California, where debates on same-sex relationships play out, or here in Arizona, where the omnipresence of the Border Patrol reminds us that who is "in" and who is "out" is in a state of change and often debated.

So, my point this week is: This thing we term "everyday life" or the "ordinary" is itself a dynamic construct. Some parts of it we consciously construct for ourselves, while other parts are delineated by others and placed around us as a set of social expectations. The workers in Striffler's piece are illustrative of this process--although they find their social spaces at work limited and constrained by the demands of people such as Michael, they also find room within this framework to form a sense of the everyday that is self-constructed and reflective of one's groups of class, race, and cultural inclusion. In this sense, the "everyday" is a constant process of creation, rather than a static end result.

Connie Bracewell