At the beginning of World War II, the United States and Mexico launched the bracero program, a series of labor agreements that brought Mexican men to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural fields. ...InBraceros, historian Deborah Cohen asks why these temporary migrants provoked so much concern and anxiety in the United States and what the Mexican government expected to gain in participating in the program. Cohen reveals the fashioning of a U.S.-Mexican transnational world, a world created through the interactions, negotiations, and struggles of the program's principal protagonists including Mexican and U.S. state actors, labor activists, growers, and bracero migrants. Cohen argues that braceros became racialized foreigners, Mexican citizens, workers, and transnational subjects as they moved between U.S. and Mexican national spaces.Drawing on oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, and documentary evidence, Cohen creatively links the often unconnected themes of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, and gendered class and race formation to show why those with connections beyond the nation have historically provoked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory political policies.
In the early 1900s, workers from new U.S. colonies in the Philippines and Puerto Rico held unusual legal status. Denied citizenship, they nonetheless had the right to move freely in and out of U.S. ...jurisdiction. As a result, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans could seek jobs in the United States and its territories despite the anti-immigration policies in place at the time.JoAnna Poblete's Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai'i takes an in-depth look at how the two groups fared in a third new colony, Hawai'i. Using plantation documents, missionary records, government documents, and oral histories, Poblete analyzes how the workers interacted with Hawaiian government structures and businesses, how U.S. policies for colonial workers differed from those for citizens or foreigners, and how policies aided corporate and imperial interests.A rare tandem study of two groups at work on foreign soil, Islanders in the Empire offers a new perspective on American imperialism and labor issues of the era.
The memorial sent by Giovanni Battista Scalabrini to Pius X on a possible Vatican structure dedicated to migrants is an important document not so much for the weight he had at his time, as for the ...way in which it was relaunched in the Scalabrinian reflection from the second half of the last century. In the 1970s, after the Second Vatican Council, it was in fact rediscovered and used to explain and support the choice of the Scalabrinian Congregation to help all migrants and not only those of Italian origin.
Embodied Politics illuminates the influential force of public health promotion in indigenous migrant communities by examining the Indigenous Health Project (IHP), a culturally and linguistically ...competent initiative that uses health workshops, health messages, and social programs to mitigate the structural vulnerability of Oaxacan migrants in California. Embodied Politics reconstructs how this initiative came to exist and describes how it operates. At the same time, it points out the conflicts, resistances, and counter-acts that emerge through the IHP’s attempts to guide the health behaviors and practices of Triqui and Mixteco migrants. Arguing for a structurally competent approach to migrant health, Embodied Politics shows how efforts to promote indigenous health may actually reinforce the same social and political economic forces, namely structural racism and neoliberalism, that are undermining the health of indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico and the United States.
As a thriving port city, nineteenth-century Bombay attracted migrants from across India and beyond. Nile Green's Bombay Islam traces the ties between industrialization, imperialism and the production ...of religion to show how Muslim migration fueled demand for a wide range of religious suppliers, as Christian missionaries competed with Muslim religious entrepreneurs for a stake in the new market. Enabled by a colonial policy of non-intervention in religious affairs, and powered by steam travel and vernacular printing, Bombay's Islamic productions were exported as far as South Africa and Iran. Connecting histories of religion, labour and globalization, the book examines the role of ordinary people - mill hands and merchants - in shaping the demand that drove the market. By drawing on hagiographies, travelogues, doctrinal works, and poems in Persian, Urdu and Arabic, Bombay Islam unravels a vernacular modernity that saw people from across the Indian Ocean drawn into Bombay's industrial economy of enchantment.
If we have to evaluate the migratory phenomena in the modern age as a whole, we discover some long-lasting trends, without denying specific typologies. The basic model of mobility under the old ...regime in the Peninsula is the Braudelian one of geographical origin: the mountain-plain relationship as a basic migratory direction, in which the role of cities as places of particular attraction is relevant. This model is built on centralnorthern Italy, i.e. Alps/Po valley plus part of the Apennines, seen as a starting area, a "man factory" sending migrants to other Italian regions and to a lesser extent to European and Mediterranean destinations.
Review of:
Border Abolitionism: Migrants’ Containment and the Genealogies of Struggles and Rescue
, Martina Tazzioli (2023)
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 200 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-52616-093-5, ...h/bk, £80.00
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