SAM DINGMAN: A new collection of essays looks at the tortured relationship between the United States and its workers. It's called "Capturing Labor," and it's co edited by Texas State University professors Jessica Pliley and John McKiernan-González.
I spoke with McKiernan-González yesterday. The book presents a series of case studies that explore America's long history of exploiting people as workers long after the abolition of slavery, with a particular focus on the Southwest.
JOHN MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ: Three of the cases have to do with the ways in which women in Texas were identified as potential sex workers, were then tested for syphilis. If the test came back positive, they're placed in the treatment center for about three months, if not six months. And while they were there, they were expected to work and make goods and provide services that would help the treatment center keep itself going.
None of this was with consent. There wasn't any judicial determination in this. But that's like a really classic example of this.
DINGMAN: It strikes me, John, that one of the things that this book is exploring is the identity of the worker — and in particular the itinerant worker. Which is sort of hardwired into American culture as this valorous thing to be the sort of salt-of-the-earth idea. But this notion of the ideal worker has long been quite racialized, right?
MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ: If a teenager managed to walk all the way from the Guatemalan border all the way up to Austin, jumping up and off trains, they would be valorized as someone incredibly brave and resourceful and impressive. We don't do that right now. ... We arrest them and treat them as criminals in particular ways because they're not U.S. citizens or they don't come off as U.S. citizens. They come off as Mexicans or Guatemalans or Haitians.
In a sense, the same kind of sort of response by authorities to people walking the streets. I think women literally walking the streets of Tucson, of Calexico, of El Paso and being picked up is a really good example of people who are denied the ability to freely move around the city in search for work.
The idea that we can go anywhere and get a job is deeply ingrained in the United States. But the idea that others can also do the same thing, look for jobs and try to do their best once they get the jobs is not necessarily allowed.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, I mean, at the risk of asking an obvious question ... you've alluded to some of this already in your previous answers. But do you see the Southwest as particularly fertile territory for, or perhaps an ideal laboratory for, exploring these issues?
MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ: What I find particularly interesting is sort of, like, abolition happened earlier in this side of the Americas. But at the same time, you had ways in which people were still rendered unfree, whether it was being captured in the sort of, like, Indian wars that happened. Being placed into adoption. Finding ways to draft people. The rapid expansion that happens with railroads, that gives local authorities a great deal of control over people they decide are itinerant or not.
And I think this comes crystal clear in the case of the 1933 Fabin's cotton strike in El Paso, where that's sort of like, seen as a quintessentially rural situation, a cotton strike. Except that the picket line was actually the bridge in downtown El Paso, the illegal saloons that were in sort of, like Barrios Segundo, there were fundraisers done out of dance halls and to sort of, like, support the strike.
So it's a classic sense that the city residents understood the strike as an urban labor issue. But the people who ran the city of El Paso, the social workers, the relief authorities, the landowners, and the head of the Chamber of Commerce, thought that if people were working in cotton, kind of the act of working in cotton, you give up your labor rights. You give up your sense of workplace equality, give up your sense of dignity.
And if you rebel against that, you should at the very least be driven across the border to Ciudad Juárez , where you're no longer a threat. So to me, the Southwest is actually sort of like more thinking of it as the borderlands.
And having that physical border that's there also gives people the authority to draw national distinctions between people who live in incredibly multiethnic Tucson, incredibly multiethnic Albuquerque, incredibly multiethnic California. The ease of symbolism, of defining who belongs and who doesn't belong.
DINGMAN: Yes, yes. And one of the most active conversations in labor in America right now is this idea of the "gig economy "and all of the various problems that come up around that and the way that more and more companies are relying on it. Do you see a connection between that conversation and what you're covering here in "Capturing labor"?
MCKIERNAN-GONZÁLEZ: I had the joy of running through the peonage cases in Texas when I was sort of, like, doing some of the research, the background that did this. And one of the issues that came up is that labor contractors in South Texas were charging other labor contractors in South Texas with peonage. Because they would recruit workers from outside of the high schools during sports events, load them on cars, drive them all the way from Westlaco to Saginaw, Michigan, to work in the strawberry fields. And they wouldn't get paid in the strawberry fields.
To me, the larger issue, of course, was the rise of transportation, the willingness of people in South Texas to take on this risk. Because sticking around in South Texas might mean that your adult kid might get drafted and sent off to war, and you'd lose their ability to have them be able to contribute to the house.
And in the process, engaged in a kind of very porous exploitation of family labor that allowed sort of like farmers to thrive in Michigan, thrive in Indiana. I think the question of itinerancy, the reason people can do this and the possibility of it changing brings us back to the New Deal to sort of like the Fair Labor Standards Act, included workers, not citizens, included workers who worked for factories, for employers, who employed more than 10 people, who weren't farm laborers and who weren't working as domestics.
And that sense of giving people the opportunity to have an identity as a worker that was enforced by the state transformed workplaces across everywhere. And I think here, it's the same kind of question of itinerancy. If there is a way to provide a as close to universal a floor for if you're working for someone else's domestic, this is the expectation for how much you should be paid.
If you're working at a warehouse, this is what should be expected in return. And it would be nice where our wages wouldn't have to generate our health insurance. And what this book illustrates is how hard it is — whether you're a restaurant worker in San Antonio in the 1960s, a woman, a Mexicana in Mexicali in the 1920s, a person who's had deep neurodivergence, or perhaps not so deep neurodivergence, who happens to be Mexican in rural California.
How hard it is to get your rights as a worker recognized.
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