Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs - Quintana (2022)

Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs - Quintana (2022) Introduction: Freedom Struggles and the Labor Contract “U.S. guestworker importation expanded and flourished as an instrument of conceptual freedom during World War II, when the U.S. military inducted over 6 million men for the war. Believing a labor shortage threatened food production, U.S. officials proposed a set of hemispheric programs and organizations to manage labor migration that would, according to all the governments involved, produce enough food to ensure that the United States could “win the war against fascism and racism, saving the world from slavery and oppression.” (1-2) “After the end of World War II, the threat of Communism loomed large, leading U.S. officials to continue to engage a language of “freedom” to protect U.S. capitalism in the world. As President Harry Truman declared in his 1949 inaugural address, the United States should assist “the free peoples of the world, through their own efforts,” to create self-sufficiency through economic production in a “worldwide effort for the achievement of peace, plenty, and freedom.” (2) “Other contract workers pointed out the conflict between rhetoric and reality as they experienced the supposed “freedom” of the labor programs on the ground.” (2) “Nonetheless, the labor programs with Mexico, the British West Indies, and Puerto Rico served as a paradigm for the value of formal labor contracts, bilateral agreements between nation-states, and equal rights at a time of intensifying pressure on Western democracies.” (3) “U.S. policymakers during this period were deeply concerned about the propaganda strategies proGerman forces throughout the Caribbean and Latin America might use to criticize the United States as a racist state, interrupting U.S. economic affairs in the hemisphere.” (3) “They were also anxious about raw materials from Latin America and the strategic importance of the Caribbean as a military site during and after World War II. To ensure the United States remained viable as a hegemonic power, U.S. officials asserted the right to self-determination of all peoples and began to consider institutional labor arrangements, national organizations, policies, laws, and legislation that could promote racial equality and end colonial exploitation, including “guestworker” and “contract labor” initiatives.” (3) “In the Caribbean, British colonialism was likewiseunder siege, as a robust labor movement challenged British colonial officials to ponder how economic and labor crises on the islands might be resolved.” (4) “The idea of state-managed labor mobility appealed to many progressive officials and labor advocates who genuinely saw the Mexican and Caribbean labor importation programs as a means to politically and economically improve the lives of migrant farm laborers and grant them civil rights. Inspired by the ideological promise of liberalism as a political philosophy based on liberty, equality before the law, and the consent of the governed, federal officials and administrators defended the World War II guestworker programs as a solution to the rampant discrimination and racism faced by migrant farmworkers. These officials developed a framework for the labor programs that portrayed “race” as a contradiction to modern civil society, rather than as one of its structuring conditions, a contradiction that could be overcome through proper state intervention.” (4) Introduction: The Co-Constitution of U.S. Guestworker Programs “This book represents the first scholarly attempt to examine the broad geographical dimensions of the World War II U.S. contract farm labor programs together and in sweeping detail. It views these labor programs relationally and in tandem to reveal how they were co-constituted and mutually understood across time and space, producing a liberal consensus during this period that lives on today. By examining debates among government officials, labor leaders, civil rights activists, and agribusiness employers, it explores how the contractual consent and freedom of 1940s guestworker programs legitimated and extended U.S. racial and imperial domination abroad in the post–World War II period. More broadly, Contracting Freedom pursues the argument that liberalism, as a normative political idea and practice in the modern world, cannot be divorced from empire. In comparing the labor programs across geographic regions, it demonstrates that a global shift in the ideology of liberalism nurtured race and empire both before and after World War II, as numerous states sought to expand control over laborers through antiimperial and race-neutral measures. (5) “While the New Deal’s most enduring achievements, including universal social security and housing loans under the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), were allocated along racial lines, there were many contentious moments when state officials more expansively interpreted the goals of the New Deal. And even though there were many segregationist New Deal officials who did not support civil rights, there were also those who attempted to draw the attention of a growing group of U.S. bureaucrats to the issue of racial inequality. These officials, influenced by the rising global anticolonial and civil rights movements, attempted to make racial liberalism central to broader legislative change in the United States from the 1940s to the 1950s.” (5) “The ideas of these New Deal intellectuals and leaders gained credence at this time, as a rising backlash in Latin America against U.S. militarism and Washington’s dollar diplomacy had forced the Roosevelt administration to promote a diplomacy of neighborly good intentions and reciprocal intellectual exchanges through the Good Neighbor Policy … With the United States’ strategic military and economic connections to Latin America and the Caribbean threatened by the global anticolonial and civil rights movements, officials promoted a purportedly “new” anti-imperialism that provided an opening for those officials and progressives seeking social change in the United States.” (7) “As progressive and radical intellectuals and officials enacted this transformation toward anti-imperialism and racial equality through state-managed labor importation programs, they likewise folded migrant labor into the narrative of freedom and made the state the primary vehicle of social change. This process made illegible the tangible ways the U.S. federal government had historically served as a mechanism to commodify and coerce labor while also inflating capitalist profits for private enterprise.” (7-8) “As with the Mexican and Caribbean labor programs, New Deal officials defended and framed the project of Japanese internment as a race-neutral government project designed to protect and ensure the welfare and “freedom” of Japanese Americans.” (9) “As much as New Deal state officials as well as civil and labor rights advocates tried to convince themselves and the public of the bilateral, reciprocal, and voluntary or “free” nature of the labor programs, placing the entangled histories of the Japanese American, Mexican Puerto Rican, and British West Indian labor programs together reveals how central the history of colonialism and racial coercion was to their formation.” (9) “The history of slavery and agriculture structured the economies of the Caribbean and led to new forms of labor extraction and coercion throughout the twentieth century. Contextualizing the labor programs within these regional histories contemporaneously illustrates that the labor programs emerged out of a long history of European and U.S. colonialism in the Caribbean, upending the bilateral and anti-imperial framework upon which they were designed.” (10) “Many contemporary scholars have referred to the bracero program in par- ticular as “colonial-like” or as a form of “imported colonialism,” but the poli- cies and practices surrounding imported contract labor are deeply rooted in the history of colonialism and slavery in the United States and not necessarily “imported” at all … The liberalism that emerged in the 1940s thus ushered in new practices of labor control through state power— even as it simultaneously conjured and elided colonial subjecthood.” (10) Introduction: Liberalism and Empire “The concept of state power discussed in this book is neither monolithic nor static; it is not only a set of bureaucratic agencies, informed by political advocates, but also a particular process of negotiation, force, consent, and contestation through which governance is accomplished.” (11) “With the contract and worker legality so central to the historic expansion of state power and violence against migrant workers, Contracting Freedom begins by tracing the history of the labor contract, focusing on the postemancipation period, when U.S. policymakers expanded federal immigration laws to increase distinctions between legal and illegal labor, between foreign and domestic laborers, between contratados and U.S. citizens, and between white and nonwhite labor. These distinctions rationalized racial segregation and controlled mobility, normalized the surveillance and deportation of noncitizen workers, and allowed for the exploitation of workers at the hands of a powerful agricultural elite class— all forms of violence.” (13) “In highlighting the liberal entanglements of the guestworker labor programs and the processes by which contract workers became subject to state violence, Contracting Freedom demonstrates that the labor programs were not merely a product of U.S. state power, but of multiple overlapping state projects. The Mexican and Puerto Rican governments, actively involved in their own liberal New Deal projects not unlike those in the United States, framed new hierarchies and divisions of labor through the labor programs.34 Mexico had long sought to expand state power over agricultural labor, in attempts to either include peripheral indigenous populations within the centralized claims of the nation-state through landownership, or exclude them through indigenous land expropriation.” (13) “By constructing migrant workers as individual liberal subjects capable of signing a contract of their own free will, the contract became a capitulation to narratives of liberal individualism. In the process, government officials also turned migratory workers into heroic subjects making a sacrificial effort to feed their families and patriotically improve their national economies through monetary remittances. Each state government involved thus elided the shared histories of contract workers as peasants, landless people, and the working poor, who had been made vulnerable by government policies, making it nearly impossible to see the larger political and economic forces at work shaping their lives.” (14) “In placing the labor programs within the framework of ethnic studies, labor studies, civil rights history, immigration history, and U.S. and Latin American comparative colonialism, this book aims ultimately to demonstrate the limitations and contradictions of state-centered approaches to social justice and to point to other political possibilities.” (15) Introduction: The Long Arc of Guestworker Labor and Empire “To expose the shared historical and ideological links driving the programs, each chapter of Contracting Freedom places the contemporaneous Mexican and Caribbean U.S. labor importation programs within the context of their formative moments: slavery and indentured servitude in the British Carib- bean colonies, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the U.S. labor and civil rights movements.” (15) “By insisting on guestworkers’ contributions to the United States, the writers of the memorial recreated a notion of the United States as a land of opportunity based on democratic ideals and personal liberty, one that features the inclusion of guestworkers in its unique national history. This vision of “freedom” imagines the bracero program as one more step on the path to equality and inclusion for migrant workers. In contrast, in this book we see that guestworkers imagined alternatives to the type of freedom imposed upon them by the labor contract, since many saw themselves less as “builders of an exceptional nation” and more as dissidents against it, dreaming of a more expansive freedom beyond the contract and beyond borders.” (18) “ Chapter 1 elaborates on the ambiguous contradictions of freedom and coercion, focusing on the interconnected histories of slavery and the labor contract. This chapter provides a genealogy of the labor contract, to show how the U.S. government has historically policed the racialized boundaries of “foreign” and “domestic” through the slave/free dialectic that figures the labor contract. Whether imagined as a form of “slavery” or “freedom,” the contract became, in different historical moments, a means to exclude foreign contract laborers from U.S. citizenship, while transforming them into resources or commodities to be transferred from one nation-state (or colony) to another. Instead of turning to the slave/free dialectic to frame and critique the labor programs, this chapter stresses how the logics of that paradigm have sustained the capitalist commodification of racialized labor.” (16) “ Chapter 2 examines the formation of the bracero program from the perspective of the labor and civil rights activist Dr. Ernesto Galarza. In initially proposing a Mexican labor program in 1940 and 1941 as an official of the Pan-American Union, Galarza took part in forging a particular kind of liberal politics that celebrated a U.S. labor importation program as marking a new hemispheric age of freedom. This chapter demonstrates how an ideology of racial liberalism gained momentum during the formation of the bracero program in the context of the Good Neighbor Policy, the New Deal, and World War II, divulging how Galarza’s defense of a labor importation program was not an anomaly but rather part of a broader continuum in state attempts to control labor migrations.” (16) “ Chapter 3 shifts the focus to the U.S. West, to explore the intimate links between the incarceration of Japanese Americans and the importation of Mexican laborers in 1942. Through different congressional committee hearings headed by Representative John H. Tolan (California), this chapter explores how the U.S. entry into World War II shifted New Deal officials’ strategies and priorities to finding new sources of labor. As agricultural employers clamored for new workers to fill the wartime labor shortage, Tolan and his colleagues turned their attention to Mexican workers and Japanese Americans, whose incarceration in concentration camps ironically had contributed to the perceived labor shortage in the first place.” (17) “ Chapter 4 investigates braceros’ reactions to the moral language used by government officials and labor advocates, to show how they invented their own terms for understanding the labor programs and the labor contract. Placing the bracero program within the history of the civil rights movement, it then focuses on how Galarza’s transnational farm labor unionization efforts and appeals to the state to enforce the rights of the labor contract, along with federal immigration laws, served to fortify and justify divides between citizens and undocumented migrants.” (17) “ Chapter 5 details how Puerto Rican officials, trained in the United States and steeped in New Deal liberalism, configured a U.S. labor importation program in the late 1940s and into the 1950s. Here, the United States and Puerto Rican governments became just as invested in choices as with the Mexican labor program; in the choice of the Puerto Rican government to serve the greater good however it saw fit, and in the choice of the individual worker to serve the Puerto Rican and U.S. nations as an expression of democracy and good will. The new conceptually “postcolonial” model of governance that transpired on the island in the 1950s promised the right to self-determination of all peoples, a legitimizing rhetoric that became necessary for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the island.” (17) “Last, Chapter 6 addresses the struggles of British West Indian contract workers within the context of the anticolonial national independence movements in the Caribbean and the Black freedom movement in the United States. This chapter illustrates how the promises of liberal protections and rights through the labor programs expanded the U.S. government’s influence over the Caribbean, which some anticolonial activists welcomed as a means to gain national independence for the islands. 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) Chapter 6: Empire and Nation: Caribbean Independence and the Labor Programs in the British West Indies “Taussig recommended to Roosevelt that the United States take a reformist stance toward the region and form a “Joint Commission” to relieve poverty on the islands. Roosevelt eventually took Taussig’s advice, and it led to the formation of the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (AACC) between the United States and Great Britain on March 9, 1942.1 The AACC became 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.” (188) “Aiming at the agrarian reform Tugwell and others had studied in Mexico, the AACC proposed a U.SBritish West Indies labor importation program to improve the welfare of workers and modernize the economies of the British Caribbean islands on a purported path to freedom and independence.” (188-189) “With the Good Neighbor policy, Roosevelt had renounced the U.S. government’s right to unilaterally intervene in the Caribbean and the Americas, and condemned its former militarism, but then began to expand the number of troops in the Caribbean soon after World War II began. The formation of new bases in the Caribbean functioned to “strengthen Caribbean security and contribution to the war effort,” during World War II, as part of the U.S.-Great Britain Destroyers-for-Bases agreement” (189) “The Bases Agree- ment provided land grants to the U.S. military to build bases in Trinidad, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, and British Guiana. As a purported extension of the Good Neighbor Policy to the Caribbean, the bases offered employment and a higher wage scale than Afro-Caribbeans were accustomed to, effectively calming and subduing the burgeoning anticolonial labor movement that had mushroomed there in 1935–38.3 The bases provided work to the unemployed but upon completion, proved insufficient to quell unemployment and unrest, such that the AACC instituted the labor programs a few years later.” (189) “Within the context of World War II and the Good Neighbor policy, offi- cials structured the British West Indies labor contract as a statement of Allied friendship and benevolence. As the Bahamian Agreement stated, the pro- gram existed “for the purpose of making agricultural workers from the Baha- mas available for work in the United States of America for the production of food for the winning of the war.” (189) “When officials argued that the Caribbean labor programs made “a vital contribution to the effort of the United Nations,” the contract again became an innovation to advance the cause of worker “freedom,” even as it legiti- mized the expanding structure of colonial labor. It was no contradiction that state governments labeled contract work “free labor,” even though contract workers were, quite literally, a colonial labor supply. Rather, it was part and parcel of the realities created in this historic moment of liberalism, when state discourses of equality, anti-imperialism, national security, agrarian reform, and modernization erased and facilitated the very real continuities between colonial rule and expansive liberal state governance over labor migrations. The farm labor importation program thus became a means by which the U.S. government was able to further its hegemony over the Caribbean, while pur- portedly working against the “colonial order of things” … The World War II state-regulated contract labor importation programs with the British West Indies were not new, but were rather a continuance of former “free labor” innovations in recruitment practices that had long been established in the region.” (190) “It seems odd that any New Deal progressive or labor advocate would have wished to continue this historic cycle of exploitation through a Caribbean guestworker program, but the effort by state officials and liberals to create the labor programs was no anomaly. To New Deal leaders, the expansion of state power over labor from the Caribbean colonies through the labor con- tract seemed a natural and salutary response to the global inequalities that had arisen as a result of the abuses in plantation agriculture, especially in the tropical fruit business. They perceived the labor programs as essential to their agrarian reform efforts on the islands, designed to undo the historical inequalities created by enslavement, in conversation with Black civil rights organizations in the United States. The British West Indies labor programs thus point to the complex process through which colonial governance and imperial geopolitics were refashioned in the post–World War II period.” (191) The Anglo-American Caribbean Commission and the Struggle over Farmworker Freedom “1942, Eric Williams, scholar, activist, and future first prime minister of an independent Trinidad and Tobago (1962), set out a path for Caribbean independence through economic development, calling out sugar as both “king” and curse while arguing for U.S. expert intervention.” (193) “In his 1942 book, The Negro in the Caribbean, he concluded that “no permanent solution can be found for the future welfare of the Caribbean which does not have as its aim and purpose the raising of the standard of living of the area, and so raise the productive capacity of the islands. . . . This is the contribution the United States can make.” He argued that such a contribution would carry out the U.S. government’s ideological mission to liquidate colonialism in Latin America and the Caribbean under the Good Neighbor Policy. For, as Williams argued, much as Governor Muñoz Marín would argue in Puerto Rico, that economic independence would lead the British West Indies on the path to political independence. In response to poverty on the islands, Williams stated, “some [economic] scheme, if the Good Neighbor Policy is to survive, will have to be devised.” (193) “...Williams’s goal was to free global Black society from all vestiges of colonial rule. He believed that U.S. economic and expert assistance, if done under the aegis of the Good Neighbor Policy, would be better than British colonialism for the islands, and that the Carib- bean should look to the United States to end archaic British colonial rule and ensure that “surpluses that normally went to Europe will be consumed in the Western Hemisphere.” (193) “When Afro-Caribbean contract workers tried to attain U.S. citizenship, they fought within the bounds of liberalism to gain access through the state to rights and benefits that they hoped might prevent the violence and exploita- tion they experienced. Other Afro-Caribbean contract workers refused to turn to the state for protection entirely, preferring instead to respond to vio- lence with violence” (200) “Contract workers also protested the difference between their treatment in the U.S. North versus their treatment in the U.S. South. When many Jamaicans employed in the North were asked to shift to canecutting in Flor- ida (where Bahamians were already employed), a riot effectively ensued. Whereas in the North, Jamaicans had sometimes received a welcome recep- tion in local towns, they arrived in Florida to find cement-block dormitories surrounded by barbed wire, their movements controlled by local growers, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) housing authorities, and the WFA” (201) Caribbean Independence and the Perpetuation of Guestworker Programs “Through his experience and research at the AACC, Williams gained considerable insight into Operation Bootstrap in Puerto Rico. In the 1950s, he began to uphold Operation Bootstrap as a model of success for encouraging the economic growth of all Caribbean islands. Williams did not find U.S. investments or aid in the Caribbean to be a problem, as long as the islands had self-representation in government. By this time, Puerto Rico, as a Commonwealth, had become a colony “liberated” through democratic revolution and industrial capitalism, with the United States government deemed a patron in a universal struggle against colonialism through “hemispheric cooperation.” (211-212) “By 1955, Williams began to see the Caribbean Commission as a colo- nial agency and quit, after which he gave several influential speeches on anticolonialism.” (212) “When U.S. officials adopted the anticolonial agendas of civil rights and labor activists, it became increasingly difficult for them to discern the difference between “economic aid,” “social welfare,” and “security” interests in the Caribbean” (214) “When U.S officials took on the mission of anticolonial advocacy and sanctified the nation-state through, for example, popular governance and the access to the “rights” and remittances of the contract labor programs, they obscured former colonial practices on the islands, advancing U.S. expansion and empire. The labor programs promised health, education, sustenance, security, freedom from discrimination, and greater access to political rights, even as they resulted in racialized violence, exclusion, and deportation.” (215) “National independence in the Carib- bean therefore did not negate the possibility of imperial coercion via liberal devices, such as the labor contract. Instead, local nationalized state officials used liberal devices like the labor contract to describe what was once colonial labor exploitation as anticolonial, cleansing the contract of its colonial origins and perpetuating imperialism into the twenty-first century. The rhetorical self-determination and happiness promised by the contract labor programs had functioned to secure colonial labor without colonialism, even as the pro- grams helped the British West Indies achieve what many civil rights activists in the Caribbean and the United States had desired all along— postcolonial independence.” (216) Epilogue: Civil Rights for Whom? “The World War II bracero program had initially been, in part, a strategy of New Deal labor advocates to achieve the civil rights of all farmworkers in the United States—an inclusionary effort. Yet in the struggles for civil rights and social justice for farmworkers in the 1950s and 1960s, the exclusion of noncitizen workers became the necessary condition required to make the argument that U.S. farmworkers should have civil rights and that those rights should be protected. Envisioning racial equality only for workers who were citizens of the United States pushed braceros and other guestworkers out of the picture and reinforced the need for state power to deport and expunge laborers as a protective measure for U.S. labor.” (218) “The crux of the problem of guestworker importation programs and 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 became racialized subjects of an expanding U.S. state, within and beyond national borders.” (218) “The Mexican and Caribbean labor programs formalized the construction of the categories of “alien” or “illegal,” as the labor contracts forced those who contested their circumstances or refused to work into a state of criminality or illegality and thus deportability. The migrant workers’ exclusion from the nation because of their “illegality” or lack of a contract set the framework for them to be exploited, allowing agribusiness to further profit from their labor and their vulnerability.”(219) “Today, the H-2A visa is gov- erned by both the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor, “to provide agricultural employers with an orderly and timely flow of legal workers, thereby decreasing their reliance on unauthorized workers, while protecting the rights of laborers.” (220) “This book makes visible some of the intertwined logics, forces, and struc- tures that bind the historical trajectories of guestworkers in the United States under a legal system of labor coercion. Honing in on the historical formation of the labor contract in each of these guestworker scenarios shows that U.S. guestworker programs are imperial formations, with each of the participating places and people entangled in an adaptive yet systematizing web of U.S. fed- eral law, policymaking, and capitalist accumulation. With the turn in domes- tic and foreign policy in the 1940s toward addressing the long-term impacts of racial discrimination, hemispheric policymakers and labor advocates thought they could promote social change through guestworker programs. Instead, they turned Latin American and Caribbean migrant workers into subjects of state power, reinforced the logic of deportability, and racialized them as outsiders, incapable of social integration in the United States, and suitable primarily for agricultural employment.” (223) “The promoters and facilitators of the labor programs during and after World War II modified U.S. imperialism and made it conform with the mod- ernizing ethos of racial and New Deal liberalism in the mid-twentieth cen- tury. While they did not have the goal of making overseas colonialism more efficient and effective, their commitment to anti-imperialism, racial equality, and New Deal government planning fit within a rubric of reformed liberal- ism; it led them to test and refine systems of labor management that were more in line with global anti-colonial and antiracist projects, thereby prop- agating, innovating, and authorizing empire. The framework of legal rights and inclusive nationalism through the labor programs also helped the United States to retain a moral legitimacy in global leadership.” (223)