Latino Labor and Working Class History

GOALS AND APPROACH

This course will examine the presence and experience of working class people of Latin American descent in the history of the United States and its colonial dependencies. By looking at different aspects of working class history in both rural and urban contexts including different forms of labor organizing, work sites, and regional and ethnic contexts, we will examine the rich and diverse experiences that connected Latin American and Caribbean immigrants and long-established hispanic ethnic/racialized communities to a larger, multi-ethnic US labor history since the 1850s. The course will focus on aspects of working class history that have long been part of working class studies, as well as some newer more interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches: the immigration process, the labor process, organizing, land tenure, ethnic conflict, the tensions between culture and class-based approaches, the formation of working class communities, dual labor markets and discrimination, left politics and worker struggles, the dissapearance of work and ghetto-formation, the racialization of Latino workers, and the decisive power-yielding and gatekeeping functions of the dominant anglo institutions and the state.

 

REQUIREMENTS

This course has very straightforward requirements:

• This course is a seminar. As a seminar you will need to be prepared every week to actively participate in discussion and analyze the course materials.
• It is especially important that you spend at least six hours a week completing the readings and other requirements for this course.
• Because this course meets only once a week attendance and participation will form 30% of your grade. This means that no unexcused absences and no lateness will be accepted. I also expect students to arrive on time and allow sufficient time for unexpected bus delays. Every absence will count against your grade. For every time you are late more than once or have any unexcused absence your class participation points will be reduced by 5 (of 25).
• Another 40% of your grade will be determined by your work on a semester-long research project and paper that will be described in more detail after the term begins.
• Besides the research project you will have to write near-weekly discussion papers based on the in-class readings (1-2 pages). These count as another 30% of your grade. Every student in the class will have to present a longer written and oral presentation once in the semester on the week’s readings.

 

BOOKS REQUIRED FOR THIS COURSE

The following books are should be ordered from Amazon or another discount retailer of books. Other readings not ordered by the bookstore are available on electronic reserves at Kilmer Library.

• Juan Gomez-Quiñones. Mexican American Labor, 1790-1990. University of New Mexico Press. 1994.
• Zaragosa Vargas. Proletarians of the North: Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917-1933. Univ California Press. 1999.
• Cesar Andreu Iglesias (Editor). Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York. Monthly Review Press.
• Camille Guerin-Gonzales. Mexican Workers and the American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900-1939. Rutgers UP. 1994.

 

COURSE ORGANIZATION AND SCHEDULE

9/6 Week 1: Latinos and US Labor and Working Class History: An Introduction

• Jacqueline Jones. American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor. Chaps 10-12.
• González. Harvest of Empire. Chaps. 4-8.
• Brody. In Labor’s Cause. Chaps. 2,3,5,6. [Will be discussed next week]

9/13 Week 2: Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest, 1800-1900

• Gomez-Quiñones. Mexican American Labor. Chaps. 1-3.
• Gunther Peck. Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930. Chaps.

9/20 Week 3 Industry, Service, Farming and Mining in the Southwest, 1900-1930

• Gomez-Quiñones. Mexican American Labor. Chap. 5.
• Guerin-Gonzales. Mexican Workers and the American Dreams. Chaps. 1-3.
• George Sanchez. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945, Chap.9.
• Select one of these:
  • David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986, Chaps. 8-10.
  • González, Gilbert. Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950. Chaps. TBA
  • Jose Alamillo. Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town 1880-1960. Chaps. 2,6.
  • Nancy Hewitt, Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s. Chaps. 4, 7.

9/27 Week 4: 1900-1930 Industry, Railroads and New Communities West and Midwest

• Vargas. Proletarians of the North. Chaps. 1-4.
• Gomez-Quiñones. Mexican American Labor. Chap. 4

10/4 Week 5: Early Twentieth Century Caribbean Workers and Artisans in New York City

• Memoirs of Bernardo Vega. Entire.
• Virginia E. Sanchez Korrol. From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City. Chap. 2.
• Gerald Meyer, Vito Marcantonio: radical politician, 1902-1954. Chap.7.

10/11 Week 6:The Depression

• Guerin-Gonzales. Mexican Workers and the American Dreams. Chaps.4-6.
• Vargas. Proletarians of the North.Chap. 5.

10/18 Week 7: War, Braceros, and Great Migrations, 1940-1960s

• Center for Puerto Rican Studies. Labor Migration Under Capitalism. Chap. 5.
• Carmen Teresa Whalen. From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies. Chaps. 3.
• Gomez-Quiñones. Mexican American Labor. Chaps. 6-7.
• Optional:
  • Joon K. Kim. “The Political Economy of the Mexican Farm Labor Program, 1942-64” Aztlán 29:2 Fall 2004: 13-53.

10/25 Week 8: Earning a Living in the Big Cities: Los Angeles

• Valle and Torres, “Latinos in a ‘Post-Industrial’ Disorder.” in Darder and Torres, Eds. The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy, and Society. 257-271.
• Nora Hamilton and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla. Seeking Community in a Global City. Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles. Chap. 4.
• Zaragoza Vargas. Labor Rights are Civil Rights. Mexican American Workers in Twentieth Century America. Chap. 6.
• Optional:
  • Fernandez-Kelly and Anna M. Garcia. “Power Surrendered, Power Restored: The Politics of Work and Family Among Hispanic Garment Workers in California and Florida” Challenging Fronteras. Chap. 12.

11/1 Week 9: Earning a Living in the Big Cities: East Coast

• Whalen. From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia. Chaps. 5.
• Andres Torres. Between Melting Pot and Mosaic: African Americans and Puerto Ricans in the New York Political Economy. Chap 3.
• Select one of these two:
  • Richard Wright and Mark Ellis, Immigrants, “The Native Born and the Changing Division of Labor in New York City,” in New Immigrants in New York. ed. by Nancy Foner.
  • Margaret Chin. “When Coethnic Assets Become Liabilities: Mexican, Ecuadorian, and Chinese Garment Workers in New York City. in Migration, Transnationalization, and Race in a Changing New York. Ed. by Hector Cordero Guzman, Robert Smith and Ramon Grosfoguel
• Optional:
  • Gerald Poyo. “The Cuban Experience in the United States, 1865-1940: Migration, Community and Identity.” Cuban Studies 21 (1991).

11/8 Week 10: No Readings! We meet at the Library

11/15 Week 11: Local Experiences of Migration and Work

• Sarah Mahler. “Suburban Transnational Migrants: Long Island’s Salvadorans” in Migration, Transnationalization, and Race in a Changing New York. Ed. by Hector Cordero Guzman, Robert Smith and Ramon Grosfoguel.
• Juan Vicente Palerm. “Immigrant and Migrant Farmworkers in the Santa Maria Valley.” in Transnational Latina/o Communities, Politics, Processes, and Culture. Ed. by Carlos Velez-Iban~ez and Anna Samapaio.
• Carmen Teresa Whalen. From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies. Chap. 6.

11/29 Week 12: No Class

12/6 Week 13: Poverty and the absence of work

• Select one reading from each group of two readings:
  • Dennis Conway, Adrian Bailey and Mark Ellis. “Gendered and Racialized Circulation-Migration: Implications for the Poverty and Work Experience of New York’s Puerto Rican Women.” in Migration, Transnationalization, and Race in a Changing New York. Ed. by Hector Cordero Guzman, Robert Smith and Ramon Grosfoguel.
  • Santiago-Valles and Jiménez-Muñoz. “Social Polarization and Colonized Labor: Puerto Ricans in the United States, 1945-2000,” in The Columbia History of Latinos in the United States since 1960, 87-145.
  • Bonilla, Frank and Ricardo Campos. 1981. “A Wealth of Poor: Puerto Ricans in the New Economic Order.” Daedalus, 110:2,133-176.
  • Bonilla, Frank. “Manos que Sobran: Work, Migration and the Puerto Ricans in the 1990s”. In The Commuter Nation: Perspectives on Puerto Rican Migration, eds. Carlos Antonio Torre, Hugo Rodríguez Vecchini and William Burgos, 115–49.
  • Carmen Teresa Whalen. From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies. Chap. 7.
  • Susan Baker. Understanding Mainland Puerto Rican Poverty. Chaps. 7-11.

12/13 Week 14: New Work Regimes, Labor Organizing since the 1980s

• María Angelina Soldatenko, “Made in the USA: Latinas/os?, Garment Work and Ethnic Conflict in Los Angeles’ Sweat Shops,” Cultural Studies 13, 2 (1999): 319-34.
• Jose E. Cruz, “The Changing Socioeconomic and political fortunes of Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1960-1990” in Boricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the Making of Modern New York City, Haslip-Viera, Falcon and Matos Rodriguez, eds.
• Margaret Zamudio, “Segmentation, Conflict, Community and Coalitions: Lessons from the New Laor Movement,” in [ ]
• Optional
  • Terry Repak. Waiting on Washington. Chaps. 4-5.
  • Wayne Cornelius. “The Structural Embeddedness of Demand for mexican Immigrant Labor: New Evidence from California” in Crossing: Mexican Immigration in Interdsiciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco