This article aimed to apprehend waiters’s discursive-identity strategies in order to build or maintain a positive professional identity. For this, we carried out a qualitative research study in which 12 subjects were interviewed. For the analysis of data it was adopted Discourse Analysis, as a methodology, and as an epistemological perspective. The results reveal three discursive-identity strategies: a professional valuation of the definition of their specific attributes, and the differentiation between waiters ‘tray’s loaders’, and the importance of the profession for a personal life, business as well as the city itself. It is argued that such strategies seek to minimize the conflict of identity experienced by these subjects due to lack of social recognition, but, at the same time, those strategies confront and reinforce the discourse of devaluation of manual labor.
identity; discourses; strategies; waiters
