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.

Urban Neoliberal Debt Peonage: Prisoner Reentry, Work, and the New Jim Crow

In this study, I analyze the experiences of people leaving prison and jail, using the concept of urban neoliberal debt peonage. I define urban neoliberal debt peonage as the push of race-class subjugated (RCS) formerly incarcerated people into the low-wage labor market. I argue that urban neoliberal debt peonage is a social process of economic extraction from and racial control of RCS groups structured by state bureaucracies and corporate employers. I provide evidence for this argument using participant observation and interview methods in a large northeastern U.S. city at an employment-oriented prisoner reentry organization that I call “Afterward.” People came to Afterward seeking employment, but were forwarded to work that was often unstable and unable to support subsistence living. Unstable low-wage work did not alter people’s social and economic situations enough to preclude them from engaging in income-producing criminal activity that comes with the risk of reincarceration. Meanwhile, the criminal justice system extracted money from the formerly incarcerated via debt collection, and corporate employers benefited from neoliberal policies that give them tax breaks for hiring Afterward clients. While not identical, the social process of urban neoliberal debt peonage echoes that of post–Civil War debt peonage and convict leasing.

Labor in the Spanish and Early US–Mexican Borderlands (1540–1848)

The forced, coerced, and voluntary labor systems of the Spanish and early US–Mexico borderlands were as diverse as the territories where they predominated, and they evolved substantially over the course of three centuries. Spanish borderlands refers to an immense region that encompassed New Spain’s northern “interior provinces.” They were mostly inhabited and controlled by Indigenous peoples. In the 19th century, these provinces would become the modern border states and territories of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Texas to the north; and Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas to the south. Thousands of Indigenous, Black, mulatto, and mestizo people worked in coerced and unfree labor systems that ranged from outright slavery to encomienda, repartimiento, and debt peonage. New labor forms emerged with expanding global trade, economic reform, and industrialization in Europe and the United States. Compensated labor coexisted alongside forced labor in the colonial period, until it came to rival and, in some cases, replace involuntary labor by the early 19th century. Yet debt peonage and chattel slavery grew in importance during the same period. Workers themselves struggled to maintain autonomy and resisted through means that ranged from flight, malingering, and migration to outright rebellion.

Hard War in Jolo

This chapter analyzes the murderous war between American troops and the Tausug Moros on Jolo Island, 1903–1906. It begins by discussing Panglima Hassan’s failed efforts to nurture a working relationship with Sulu governor Hugh Lenox Scott. It goes on to list specific do’s and don’ts in fighting small wars. Governor Scott and Gen. Wood committed many of the “don’ts.” They initially failed to consider the centrality of arbitration to the Tausug datu system, how the abolition of debt peonage threatened datus, and how imposition of the cedula tax offended Tausug religious sensibilities. Despite numerous American victories against Hassan and other Tausug Moros, the insurgency grew and spread into a reign of terror. Its horrifying climax came in March 1906 with the massacre of 700–900 Moro men, women, and children on a volcanic peak called Bud (Mt.) Dajo.

The Peruvian Amazon Co.: Credit and Debt in the Putumayo “Wild Rubber” Business

In this article, I trace the credit and debt practices of a company incorporated in the UK to extract “wild rubber” in the Amazon. Based on reports by Sir Roger Casement, an officer of the British diplomatic service, I present a general description of the organization of the Peruvian Amazon Co., whose operation did not depend on investment in technology or infrastructure but, rather, on the flow of credit in the form of merchandise. I will discuss debt-peonage as the form of labor privileged by the wild rubber industry in the Amazon and show how it works when indigenous peoples and their territories are involved, as was the case in Putumayo. I argue that the concept of debt-peonage is misleading in this situation, as it obscures both the conditions and the relations into which the Indians, as a society, were forced. I will highlight the role of debt in this relation, commonly referred to as the “conquest” of the Indians, as constitutive of both physical and symbolic violence. I conclude showing how credit and debt, usually considered to be instrumental for the development of capitalism, are here at the core of a system that not only was opposed to the logic of the market, but also strangled local production and exchange networks. The “credit engine” became here an instrument of genocide.

Borderlands of Bondage

This essay explores the historiography of Indian slavery in various borderlands of the hemisphere and argues that even though the Spanish Crown prohibited Indian slavery after 1542, several coercive labor arrangements akin to enslavement allowed owners to retain mastery over indigenous workers while formally complying with the law. These labor arrangements, including encomiendas in certain circumstances, repartimientos, convict leasing, debt peonage, and other forms of coercion, continued to function until the end of the colonial period and beyond. This chapter employs comparative methods and a wide range of empirical data to make a preliminary attempt to quantify the number of Indians held in bondage in different regions of the New World from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

Scarce Labor and Unrealized Reform

This chapter uses the history of a large finca called San Juan las Chicharras to demonstrate how laborers extracted incentives from their employers as the export economy of the Soconusco expanded. While labeled debt peonage, the labor system of the growing coffee economy is better understood through the idea of incentivized contracts. Because of demographics and planters’ lack of coercive capabilities, planters’ continual attempts to circumvent or reform contracts that came with advances, access to credit, good wages, and subsistence plots continually failed. Finqueros tried to ease their bottom lines through legislation and attempts to reach beyond the regional labor source. Yet so long as need for workers outpaced the supply of interested laborers, these attempts failed. The informal institutions of incentivized contracts won out over attempts to reform formalized labor relations.