"Aguantamos porque no nos Queda De Otra" (we holdup because we have no other option): Everyday resistance in the lives of Latina immigrant U.S. hospitality industry workers

Latina immigrant workers in the United States are often rendered invisible by mainstream society. These women, especially when fulfilling service occupations, such as hotel housekeeping jobs, are expected to work in silence and in deference to those in "higher" positions of power (e.g. supervisors and customers) (Romero 1992; Villenas 2006). What many fail to recognize is that Latina immigrant hospitality workers are a resilient population, enduring mundane, repetitive and dangerous labor that has been deemed "low-skill" by the capitalist industrial complex and a patriarchal society (Romero 1992; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007). In this study I present the testimonio of Sofia, a Latina immigrant worker who has worked for some time as a housekeeper in the hotel industry. My analysis explores some of the ways in which Sofia resists and survives social oppression in the United States hospitality industry. In her testimonio, Sofia speaks to the creation of spaces of oppositional culture (Mitchell & Feagin 1995) in what Erving Goffman (1959) theorized as the "backstage" of social establishments. Utilizing a Chicana/Latina feminist theoretical lens and analytical tools, particularly humor casero mujerista (womanist humor of the home) (Carrillo 2006) and pedagogies of the home (Delgado Bernal 2006) I examine how some Latina immigrant workers, like Sofia, create spaces of oppositional culture in the U.S. hospitality industry to resist and survive oppression. Sofia pays significant attention to her mother's informal teachings and pedagogies of the home, and it is these "seeds of resistance" that Sofia will transplant to the United States to fashion her own forms of everyday resistance within the U.S. hospitality industry.