In The Positionality of the Latino– America’s Migrant Worker, Dr. Isabella Alexander dissects the various components that go into classifying how positively or negatively certain individual is viewed. The reader learns an interesting way to view status, where instead of being hierarchical it is composed of a scale with two axes, “one marking inferiority or superiority, and the other marking insider or foreign status (Ancheta 1998 in Kim 1999,106)” (Alexander, 7). One axis measures superiority while the other measures “insiderness”, each having a significant role in defining a person’s social “worth”.

This concept can be seen playing out in Dr. Alexander’s research in the food service industry, as Latino Americans are both low on the superiority scale, as well as generalized to all be foreign born, and therefore not “insiders”. This association has led to the common practice of employing Latino Americans, as well as others low on the scales, to work in the “back of the house” where they are essentially hidden. This reminds me in particular of my experience working at a restaurant over the summer, and that my role as a hostess was given to me for a certain reason: I am neither a minority, nor foreign born. The clear divide at my restaurant was apparent, where most of the cooks and dishwashers were either Latino or foreign born, and the staff in the front of the house was mostly white and American born. Dr. Alexander discusses how in order to “move up”, many migrant and Latino American workers try to change the way they speak and act in order to move inward on the spectrum of “insiderness”. Evidence of this concept was clear at my place of work, as the only two Latino servers (my good friends) acted and sounded completely different when they were serving in the front compared to how they did when they were in the kitchen or off duty.

The socially constructed ideal of the white American is incredibly pervasive and powerful. The Positionality of the Latino-America’s Migrant Worker illustrates the dimensioned construction of social status and its place in the food service industry. It seems that the only way to de-segregate this sector is to deconstruct this underlying scale, which is certainly no easy task.