Week 9: Migration, Mobility & Borders: Reading Response

Allison Brown HIST 5400: Migration, Mobility & Borders Dr. Hampton October 20, 2022 Reading Response - Week 9 Quintana’sContracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs (2022) examines the intersecting influences of race, constructs of freedom, and the economy in guestwork or migrant worker programs into the United States. Emerging after World War II, “guestworkers” were created from different labor importation agreements between the US, Mexico, and other Caribbean countries. Quintana argues that these guestworker programs were foils of imperialism and economic expansion from the US into the Caribbean in a changing global order, and one of changing regional security following WWII. German interests in the Caribbean during WWII increased US concerns in the Caribbean, “U.S. policymakers during this period were deeply concerned about the propaganda strategies pro-German forces throughout the Caribbean and Latin America might use to criticize the United States 1 as a racist state, interrupting U.S. economic affairs in the hemisphere.” Additionally, Quintana also builds a US interest in the Caribbean for economic output from raw agricultural exports. Central to US interest in the Caribbean in addition to regional security and the potential for economic output was combatting a changing global transformation which was anti-colonial and antiimperial, “As progressive and radical intellectuals and officials enacted this transformation toward antiimperialism and racial equality through state-managed labor importation programs … this process made illegible the tangible ways the U.S. federal government had historically served as a mechanism to 2 commodify and coerce labor while also inflating capitalist profits for private enterprise.” More broadly, Quintana also compares these labor programs from the Caribbean to that of the New Deal and the use of endured Japanese Americans for economic output. By analyzing what “freedom” means for these contracted or endured laborers, Quintana seeks to ultimately “demonstrate the limitations and 1 Maria L. Quintana, Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) pg. 3 2 pgs. 7-8 3 contradictions of state-centered approaches to social justice and to point to other political possibilities.” By deconstructing labor programs such as the Bracero program among others, Quintana also presents commentary on the promises or assurances made by the US for these migrant works, and how that in itself is a disruption in a way to the standard practices of imperialism’s influence. Chapter 6 examines the role of President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policies and bilateral relations between the US and the British West Indies. Initially, the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (AACC) supported the implementation of a labor program to be a “model of regional cooperation, and was intended to address the problems shared by both colonial governments in agreement with local interests in the Caribbean … [and] to improve the welfare of workers and modernize the 4 economies of the British Caribbean islands on a purported path to freedom and independence.” Understanding the initial notions behind these agreements in the British West Indies is crucial as it depicts these labor programs as being of direct economic benefit and progression for Caribbean nations. As Quintana develops, these forms of guestworker labor were still anti-colonial, but in a new way developing twenty-first century imperialism as “the rhetorical self-determination and happiness promised by the contract labor programs had functioned to secure colonial labor without colonialism, even as the programs helped the British West Indies achieve what many civil rights activists in the Caribbean and the 5 United States had desired all along—postcolonial independence.” Center to the development of these guestworker and migrant worker programs remained race. In the US South, Jamaican guestworkers faced discrimination and difficulties living in Jim Crow society where at times they were forced to live in “ cement-block dormitories surrounded by barbed wire, their movements controlled by local growers, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) housing authorities, and the WFA.” 6 Quintana defines the central problem of the implementation of these guestworker programs to be that of national independence in the Caribbean was that they maintained the fiction of the liberal promise of freedom, thereby serving as the means through which Mexican and Caribbean workers 3 pg. 15 4 pgs. 188, 189 5 pg. 216 6 pg. 201 7 became racialized subjects of an expanding U.S. state, within and beyond national borders.” In addition, these guestworker programs established the common legal and political terms of “illegal” and “alien”, which have lasting impacts on the inclusion of migrant workers and how citizenship, and the borders of 8 belonging, are defined in the US. Discussion Questions Quintana writes: “In the Caribbean, British colonialism was like wise under siege, as a robust labor movement challenged British colonial officials to ponder how economic and labor crises on the islands might be resolved.” (4) “Once the British colonies gained independence in the 1960s, the labor programs continued—in order to improve local economies and to secure votes for nascent political parties— and served to deepen and legitimize the U.S. presence across the Caribbean.” (17) 1.) In what ways does British colonialism and imperialism prior to the establishment of guestworker programs allow for the economic state in which they could be formed? 2.) How does WWII change British engagement in the British West Indies? 3.) Looking to today, with the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, how does this impact bilateral relations between Caribbean countries and the UK as well as between the US and the Caribbean? - With growing sentiments of countries wanting to split from the UK, does this threaten the US relationship with Caribbean countries? - Barbados - Jamaica - Grenada - And does this jeopardize the US’s reliance still on agricultural exports/contract labor from the Caribbean? 7 pg. 218 8 pg. 223