Feedbacks and Fruitsellers

The Cybernetic Reality of Poverty, Labor Types, and Non-Citizenship

Abstract

Capital and citizenship preserves and begets capital and citizenship. Poverty and non-citizenship preserves and begets poverty and non-citizenship. It is as cyclical a feedback system. And labor informs the preservation and begetting deeply.

This paper traces how citizenship, or lack thereof, is constructed and maintained through forms of labor, through the experiences of Fruteros, informal fruit sellers often selling fruit stored in pushcarts on urban street corner who are overwhelming majority latino immigrants often with no citizenship status, in the U.S and especially California. Specifically, I argue that based on Fruteros exclusion from U.S citizenship and forced funneling into informal labor types rather than formal, Fruteros experience a state enforced condition of poverty/inability to accumulate capital, a condition which then leads them to tie themselves to immigrant-kin social networks that create and provide a parallel and “informal” type of citizenship. Both the state enforced condition of poverty, as well as the tying of self to informal social networks that confer parallel citizenship, due to the condition of poverty, work as cybernetic systems. Mechanisms that ossify and preserve the Frutero status as non-citizens within the capitalist operating U.S nation, and thereby ossifies and preserves their inability to labor outside of the informal economic market which itself, in a cyclical feedback loop, disallows them from obtaining U.S citizenship.