Capturing Labor

Reviews / Votes

"Remarkable in its scope, analysis, and ambition, Capturing Labor sheds new light on systems of coerced labor and how central they have been to the histories of race, politics, and capitalism in the American Southwest. Not a specialist in the history of the American Southwest? You will still want to read the essays contained in this volume, as each, in its own way, challenges us to think about the history of coerced labor in new, fascinating, and important ways." - Stephen C. Beda, University of Oregon, author of Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country

"Capturing a persistent history of unfree labor, this outstanding collection questions triumphalist interpretations of freedom by documenting slavery, peonage, indentured, contract, unpaid, and carceral arrangements well into the twentieth century. The Southwest emerges as central to capital accumulation through the bodies of Black, Mexican, Indigenous, and poor white workers. The brothel, "Native" boarding school, "feebleminded" asylum, and the prison join fields, restaurants, and factories as sites of coercion and exploitation, reinforced by law but subject to the struggles of working people themselves. In the process, Pliley and Mckiernan-Gonzalez powerfully demonstrate the ways that reproductive labor feeds into racial capitalism." - Eileen Boris, UC Santa Barbara, author of Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019