Capturing Labor

Jessica R. Pliley is a professor of women's and gender history at Texas State University. She is the author of Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI and the coeditor of Fighting Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking: History and Contemporary Policy and Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890–1950: Fighting Drinks, Drugs, and "Immorality."John Mckiernan-González is the director of the Center for the Study of the Southwest and an associate professor of history at Texas State University. He is the author of Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 and coeditor of Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America.

"Remarkable in its scope, analysis, and ambition, Capturing Labor sheds new light on systems of coerced labor and how central they have been to the histories of race, politics, and capitalism in the American Southwest. Not a specialist in the history of the American Southwest? You will still want to read the essays contained in this volume, as each, in its own way, challenges us to think about the history of coerced labor in new, fascinating, and important ways." - Stephen C. Beda, University of Oregon, author of Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country"Capturing a persistent history of unfree labor, this outstanding collection questions triumphalist interpretations of freedom by documenting slavery, peonage, indentured, contract, unpaid, and carceral arrangements well into the twentieth century. The Southwest emerges as central to capital accumulation through the bodies of Black, Mexican, Indigenous, and poor white workers. The brothel, "Native" boarding school, "feebleminded" asylum, and the prison join fields, restaurants, and factories as sites of coercion and exploitation, reinforced by law but subject to the struggles of working people themselves. In the process, Pliley and Mckiernan-González powerfully demonstrate the ways that reproductive labor feeds into racial capitalism." - Eileen Boris, UC Santa Barbara, author of Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019

• Introduction (Jessica R. Pliley and John Mckiernan-GonzÁlez) I. Troubling Contracts: Limiting Worker Mobility in the Labor Market 1. Constructing Coercion: Labor Regimes and Sex Workers at the US-Mexico Borderlands (Erik Bernardino) 2. Cotton’s Paradise: Coerced Labor and the Right to Live During the Great Depression in El Paso, Texas, 1931–1933 (Yolanda ChÁvez Leyva) 3. “We Never Had No Payday Here”: Folk Song, Forced Labor and the Carceral State in Texas (Jason Mellard) 4. Mario CantÚ and the Struggle Against Unfree Labor in San Antonio, Tejas, and Mexico, 1969–1984 (Jerry GonzÁlez) II. Imprisoning Housework: (Re)producing Unfreedom 5. The Curse of Cane: Sugar, Race, and the Bittersweet Legacy of Prison Segregation in Texas, 1871–1926 (Jermaine Thibodeaux) 6. The Carceral Rescue Industry: World War I-Era Anti-Prostitution Campaigns in Texas (Ánh Adams and Jessica R. Pliley) 7. Native Women and Unfree Labor: The Haskell Indian Boarding School Experience (Bethany Eby) 8. “Nobody Paid Me Anything”: Forced Labor in California Institutions for the Feebleminded (Natalie Lira) Epilogue: Chasing (and Being Chased by) Slavery—A Borderlands Journey (Luis C. de Baca) Acknowledgments Index