UC Santa Cruz

“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.