Capturing Labor
A History of Unfree Work in the Southwest
John Mckiernan-González editor Jessica R Pliley editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Texas Press
Publishing:30th Apr '26
£36.00
This title is due to be published on 30th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A collection of essays grappling with the many, often overlooked, forms of unfree labor in the West.
When Americans think of unfree labor—coerced, extracted from workers unable to freely enter and exit contracts—what comes to mind is Black slavery and peonage in the South. But other forms of unfree labor also built the United States. Collecting a diverse range of sharply argued historical essays, Capturing Labor shares the story of unfree labor in the Southwest, affecting mainly Indigenous people, Mexican Americans, and people of color.
In Texas and elsewhere, state agents developed various methods for directing the movement of workers, seizing their time, and controlling the products of their efforts. Case studies highlight the detention during World War I of Indigenous children and unaccompanied women, who were placed in boarding schools, fined, and obligated to work off the resulting debt. Other essays expose authorities forcing workers to break strikes and jailing Americans who supported labor uprisings in rural Mexico and the United States. Prisons and asylums supplied coerced agricultural workers and musicians who were never compensated for their labor or by the labels that took their recordings.
Editors Jessica Pliley and John Mckiernan-GonzÁlez contend that unfree labor continues to shape American life, and is all around us today. Understanding its history aids us in recognizing and bringing attention to the grim realities of the present.
"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
ISBN: 9781477333457
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 30mm
Weight: 567g
280 pages