Contracting Freedom

Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs

Maria L. Quintana

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English

University of Pennsylvania Press
10 May 2022

History of the Americas; Industrial relations

Series: Politics and Culture in Modern America

Contracting Freedom is the first relational study of the origins of twentieth-century U.S. guestworker programs from Mexico and the Caribbean, focusing on their shared origins. It investigates these government-sponsored programs as the unexplored consequence of the history of enslaved labor, Japanese American incarceration, the New Deal, the long civil rights movement, and Caribbean decolonization.

In the World War II era, U.S. lawmakers and activists alike celebrated guestworker agreements with Mexico and the Caribbean as hallmarks of anti-imperialism and worker freedom. A New Deal-based conception of racial liberalism inspired many of these government officials and labor advocates to demand a turn toward state-sponsored labor contracts across the hemisphere to protect migrant workers' welfare and treatment in the postwar world. Their view of liberalism emphasized the value of formal labor contracts, bilateral agreements between nation-states, state power, and equal rights, all of which they described as advances beyond older labor arrangements forged under colonialism and slavery. Eighty years later, their conceptions of guestworker programs continue to shape political understandings of the immigration debate, as these programs are often considered a solution to offset the deportation regime, and as a response to increasingly rigid racist measures to close U.S. borders to migrants.

Maria Quintana's compelling history shifts the focus on guestworker programs to the arena of political conflict, revealing how fierce debates over the bracero program and Caribbean contract labor programs extended and legitimated U.S. racial and imperial domination into the present era. It also unearths contract workers' emerging visions of social justice that challenged this reproduction of race and empire, giving freedom new meanings that must be contemplated.

By: Maria L. Quintana
Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780812253887
ISBN 10: 0812253884
Series: Politics and Culture in Modern America
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 10 May 2022
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Maria L. Quintana is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Sacramento.

Reviews for Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs

Contracting Freedom is a meticulously researched effort to push open, and push forward, our discussions of the real rights afforded by guestworker programs in the United States. Quintana connects multiple and overlapping state-managed initiatives involving Mexican braceros, Japanese internees, Puerto Rican citizen-migrants, and Caribbean workers in a refreshingly relational history that shows how little these labor programs--from contract to return--manifest actual consent, freedom, and mobility. As she strongly and smoothly demonstrates, guestworker programs couched in languages of liberalism simply cannot be divorced from continued imperialism, coercion, control, and worker precarity.-- Lori A. Flores, Stony Brook University (SUNY)

Winner of Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title 2023 (United States)
Winner of Winner of the Empowering Latino Futures' International Latino Book Awards, in the Best History Book category 2023 (United States)
Winner of Winner of the Empowering Latino Futures' International Latino Book Awards, in the Hank Lacayo Best Labor Themed Book category 2023 (United States)