‘Catch and kill’: work, hustle, and precarious life in urban Belize

Belizean men in sporadic employment need to hustle to make ends meet. The term ‘catch and kill’ describes this casual engagement in wage labour and the need to undertake wageless activities to make a living in this Caribbean nation in Central America. In the rural context, its use signifies relative autonomy from a wage, while in the urban context it denotes a condition characterized by the scarcity of wage work. Focusing on how Afro‐descendant men in Belize City navigate between casual and flexible employment in the construction industry and street hustling, the article explores the interplay between wage labour and wagelessness in their everyday lives, and the ways in which they understand it. Catch and kill as an idiom of precarity allows them to identify with a life condition defined by occupational multiplicity rather than a single occupation, and to make sense of the multiple moral attributes – including those linked to their gendered reproductive responsibilities – associated with their livelihoods. Taken seriously, such local categories provide a key to contemporary anthropological concerns, deepening understandings of precarity and expanding its analytical purchase.