Capturing Labor

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.

Jessica R. Pliley is a professor of women’s and gender history at Texas State University. She is the author of Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI and the coeditor of Fighting Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking: History and Contemporary Policy and Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890–1950: Fighting Drinks, Drugs, and “Immorality.”

John Mckiernan-González is the director of the Center for the Study of the Southwest and an associate professor of history at Texas State University. He is the author of Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 and coeditor of Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America.