The Persistence of Unfree Labor in the American Southwest

This article explores the continuities of forced labor in the Southwest, where peonage and the partido system lasted for more than a century after the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, and places it within the broader context of modern global slavery. Debt peonage and peasant sharecropping—known locally as the partido—are usually classified as two different forms of unfree labor, but in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Southwest they had much in common and were oftentimes mutually reinforcing. Through the legal and cultural intricacies of the partido system, thousands of landless Hispanos in the northern half of New Mexico and southern reaches of Colorado worked full-time in exchange for a small share of the annual wool harvest. Many of those same men became debt-bound to the tiny percentage of wealthy families who owned the sheep herds and grazing ranges. Through these means, partidarios (sheep renters) lost much if not all of their autonomy and became, to varying degrees depending on the disposition of their creditor and benefactor, debt peons.

COVID-19, Racial Capitalism, and Undocumented Bangladeshi Agricultural Workers in Manolada, Greece

This article uses the example of undocumented Bangladeshi migrants in the strawberry sector of Greece to highlight how racial capitalism heightens the health vulnerabilities of racialized low-class migrant workers and exposes them to a greater risk of COVID-19 transmission. Race-based devaluation of workers intersects with migrant illegality and culturally-specific masculine norms to normalize a discourse of healthcare “undeservingness” for undocumented racialized migrants. Unfree labor is legislated through restrictive migrant labor laws and selective detention and deportation of “illegal” migrants. Structural and systemic discriminations increase health precarities for undocumented agricultural workers.

The Other Indians in Town

This chapter shows that tribal delegates were not the only Indian people to be found in the cites of early America. Indian people included cities in their trade networks and they lived and worked in and around town in various capacities as both free and unfree labor. They went to cities and stayed there for many reasons and cities became centers of cultural mixing as well as economic exchange. Colonial laws designed to regulate Indian people reveal how much they were part of the fabric of urban life. Some Indians sought refuge in cities during times of war; others were taken there as prisoners of war. Increasing racial violence rendered Indian people in and around town vulnerable.