Skilling race: Affective labor and “white” pedagogies in the Chilean service economy

Abstract

This article examines the effects of racialization practices in quotidian encounters between migrant Haitian women looking for work and Chilean recruiters in job interviews and skills-training programs in Santiago. Drawing on ethnographic research, I show how racialized differences are made material and emotional based on a particular history of white supremacy and mestizaje. I argue that to become appropriate and hirable workers in the service economy, Haitian women transform their appearance, movements, feelings, and attitudes according to white pedagogies of affective labor. I show how the skilling of labor performed through these pedagogies is deeply affective, shaping Haitian women's sense of worth and their self-constitution as migrants beyond labor encounters. The analysis of how anti-Black racism toward migrant women perpetuates local manifestations of white-mestizo privilege reveals how affective labor and racialization practices articulate intimate experiences of transnational mobility with intersectional scripts of power.