Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists: The Lives of Mexican Immigrants in Silicon Valley by Christian Zlolniski

Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists offers a political economic analysis of the impacts of global restructuring at the local level. Through an ethnographic account of Mexican immigrants in Silicon Valley, Christian Zlolniski demonstrates how the vast movements of capital, labor, and changing technology in the past several decades have radically transformed people’s lives both in the workplace and at home. The author illustrates how Mexican immigrants have become integrated into global sys-tems of production through flexible labor regimes including subcontracting, part-time labor, and informal arrangements outside the formal market. Although these ar-rangements have largely favored Silicon Valley’s high-tech corporations, Zlolniski shows that the exploitative conditions in which Mexicans work also provide contexts through which immigrants have organized both at work and in their communities to challenge these conditions.