Harleen Kaur Bal

The anthropology of work has considered diasporic labor on the one hand, and work’s permeation into the lives of workers on the other; this research strives to consider the intersection by focusing on intergenerational Punjabi families with members who take on “blue-collar” and “white-collar” work. This study examines how Punjabi intergenerational families within California conceive of and negotiate various forms of work across class in the context of migration and contemporary capitalism. A significant portion of the roughly 500,000 Punjabi-Americans in the U.S. work in California’s food and transportation sectors with a multigenerational history of migration, although they are often grouped solely into the “skilled” Indian immigration wave of post-1965 (Brack 2015). This project explores how Punjabi intergenerational workers offer a nuanced perspective that further complicates conventional framings of the American post-Fordist worker through their everyday practices, social networks, cultural values, and informal economies in the context of contemporary U.S. capitalism.