“Rightful and Moral Work: Rethinking Free Labor and Sex Work at the California-Baja California Borderlands, 1877-1937” explores Mexican working-class identities from a transnational perspective. I argue that Mexican workers, specifically agricultural workers and sex workers, leveraged their crossings between the United States and Mexico to assert rights favorable to themselves and their families. Migrants’ proximity to the US-Mexico border was a critical factor in defying the most exploitative elements of free and semi-free labor systems in which agricultural and sex workers toiled. At the California-Baja California borderlands, mobility disrupted some of the most visible forms of labor exploitation, including contract labor and poverty wages. Mobility also altered how growers and immigration officials understood laborers who struggled against state control of their movement and labor power. Three overarching questions underscore this study: 1) in post-1877 borderlands society, why did Mexican agricultural workers and sex workers resist constraints against their mobility by Mexican and American state-makers; 2) why did Mexican working people living on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands contest state-based definitions of labor and morality by developing and asserting their own ideas about work and honor; and 3) given that scholars have understood the border asvi fluid for Mexicans before 1917, what do these early border crossings tell us about the nascent regimes of federal immigration regulation at the Baja California-California borderlands? “Rightful and Moral Work” shifts our understanding of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through a focus on morality that considers freedom and unfreedom in everyday identity formation. In connecting morality to labor, this study redirects our attention to early policing mechanisms that created and favored certain laborers over others. Chapter One engages key debates and questions in the historiography of labor, migration, and policing by scholars in Mexico and the United States. Besides identifying the historiographical commitments of the study, Chapter One explores why American society sought to criminalize certain workers, while in Mexico, the same laborers were free from such punishments. In the same vein, Mexican contract labor workers, when they crossed into the United States, entered as free laborers. The difference lay in what each nation considered rightful and moral labor to be. Chapter Two examines the colonization projects of the 1880s in northern Baja California. It lays out a new understanding of labor based on a blended system of both wage labor and debt peonage. Ultimately, Mexicans rejected this combined free labor system and developed strategies to retain political rights like migrating to other places in Mexico or crossing north into the United States. Chapter Three examines the early years of Mexicali’s prostitution industry and the construction of morality from two contested views of labor and morality: the commerce in sex as a threat to decency and an vii affront to respectability controllable through strong regulatory measures, and the commerce in sex as a part of the local economy and as a temporary measure used by women to support their families. Chapter Four explores the 1926 Pass-book Plan in California’s Imperial Valley, also known as the Gentlemen’s Agreement. The Plan, developed by U.S. immigration inspectors, local entrepreneurs, the Calexico Chamber of Commerce, the American Consulate in Mexicali, and Mexican labor contractors, allowed 6500 Mexican men, women, and children to enter the U.S. The Pass-book Plan recognized these efforts and afforded pass-book Mexicans a pathway to American citizenship. Chapter Five examines the labor strikes of the 1920s and 1930s at the California-Baja California borderlands. Municipal police and federal immigration agents policed strike activity and impeded cross-border movement. The Chapter shows that agricultural and sexual commerce workers defined labor as based on one’s ability to provide subsistence for family survival, not morality tied to middle-class religiosity or female chastity. The Epilogue discusses the 1990s and the growing militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border alongside the trope of immigrants as criminals and undeserving welfare users. “Rightful and Moral Work” recasts Mexicans as circulating in a complicated political and cultural landscape between freedom and unfreedom through which they strived toward a better life.

This dissertation explores the emergence and significance of Indigenous waterway sovereignty in the Mexican Pacific borderlands from 1750 to 1934. By breaking away from traditional perspectives, this study evaluates how Indigenous groups leveraged waterways and maritime spaces to oppose European, Mexican, and American forces. It illuminates the potency of waterways as reservoirs of power, casting light on the crucial role of Indigenous water sovereignty in rebuffing external domination. By resisting the enforcement of terrestrial borders, Indigenous-controlled waterways emphasized power disparities in the borderlands, illustrating the malleability and adaptability of racial categories in the late-colonial and early national phases in the Sonora and Baja California-US borderlands.

“By Land and By Sea” scrutinizes the legislative and political infrastructures guiding Indigenous actions and explores the aftermath of Indigenous maritime jurisdiction on the formation of Indigenous-Mexican mestizaje and racial undertakings of American and Mexican societies gleaned from historical narratives, archival sources, and oral histories, unveiling patterns of racial formation, power dynamics, and struggles for autonomy in the borderlands. The dissertation emphasizes the resilience and agency of Indigenous, Mexican mestizo, and Chinese Mexican communities in the Mexican Pacific borderlands, emphasizing their resistance against national politics.

“By Land and By Sea” argues that Indigenous communities’ control of waterways was pivotal in linking disparate environments, populations, and economies, countering the imposition of terrestrial political boundaries in the Mexican Pacific region. By documenting the experiences of Indigenous communities in these regions over almost two centuries of societal shift, the dissertation provides a nuanced interpretation of borderlands history within a settler colonial context. The dissertation demarcates strategic geographical movements, fluid intra-tribal boundaries, and instances of Indigenous-Spanish cooperation, highlighting the co-existence of multiple sovereignties.

“By Land and By Sea” broadens our understanding of the region by emphasizing the significance of Indigenous waterway sovereignty. It underlines the essential role of waterways in linking communities, contesting political borders, and shaping resistance strategies. The dissertation also enriches our understanding of the Mexican Pacific borderlands, casting light on the complexity of power dynamics and the agency of diverse communities in their struggle for autonomy.

Living Openly and Notoriously explores the intersection of federal immigration control and state efforts to control women’s sexuality in the United States. To interrogate, surveil, detain, and deport immigrant women for prostitution, officials at New York’s Ellis Island, San Francisco, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands developed new sexual policing techniques. Yet, this new federal apparatus proved ineffective to deport Asian, Mexican, and European immigrant women. Living Openly and Notoriously examines this disruption of sexual policing. I argue that immigrant women successfully evaded the federal apparatus by migrating covertly across municipal, state, and international borders, thus outpacing state and national officials’ efforts to detain and deport them. Although collaborations between local police authorities, the courts, and citizen activists expanded the federal government’s reach through what I call a coalitional state, these partnerships did not serve to control or protect immigrant women. By 1924, a comprehensive carceral system against certain sexual practices severely affected immigrant women’s lives, but it did not reduce incidence of prostitution. The Bureau of Immigration’s failed initiative to contain prostitution from 1852 to 1924 calls into question claims made today that international, national, and non-profit organizations can reduce sex commerce (or what others have conflated as “human trafficking”) to protect immigrant women.

My dissertation, titled “Tracking Contagious Cases: Venereal Disease, Sex Work, and the Making of the Male Homosexual at the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1926-1964,” focuses on three critical areas: public health, sexual identity, and the control of national borders. In my dissertation, I investigate how public health initiatives aimed at combatting venereal diseases have played a significant role in shaping social attitudes toward homosexual men. This investigation is conducted within a multidisciplinary framework that accounts for the geopolitical and cultural landscape of the United States, Mexico, and their shared border.

I argue that Mexican and American health authorities directing these transnational initiatives confined the discourse on venereal disease to heterosexual interactions involving vaginal penetration. Such medical and legal reductionism rendered female sex workers as especially susceptible vectors of infection while minimizing homosexual disease transmission in public health discourse. Instead, the homosexual body was largely negated as a site of venereal infection, reinforcing the idea that male homosexuals and male sex workers were biological and societal anomalies. Constant but covert sexual surveillance and incarceration targeted both groups. My study outlines how these groups were characterized as sexually threatening: psychiatric diagnoses established sexual deviance in male homosexuals, while ongoing venereal disease infections stigmatized female sex workers. Sexual containment policies cemented distinct narratives about the perceived sexual threats posed by each group, further entwining their social and legal standing as social scourges.

My research is innovative in three ways. It is the first study to examine the construction of the homosexual body through the lens of heterosexual prostitution. I argue that prostitution regulation and venereal disease prevention initiatives, while primarily focused on female sex workers and their male clients, were critical to the formation of homosexual identities. Second, the dissertation challenges the traditional chronology of twentieth-century gay identity formation by demonstrating that homosexual men formed transnational communities and confronted widespread persecution well before the 1940s. Finally, my study charts the historical feminization of sex work and the associated erasure of male homosexual venereal disease transmission before the HIV/AIDS crisis. By tracing how homosexual men were rendered invisible and neglected in states’ efforts to regulate sexual health, I provide critical historical context that helps us better understand the HIV/AIDS crisis, when homosexual men became hyper-visible in sexual health projects. This study thus offers a critical intervention into the ongoing conversations surrounding sexual health and identity at the U.S.-Mexico border.