Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs

Contracting Freedom is the first relational study of the origins of twentieth-century U.S. guestworker programs from Mexico and the Caribbean. It investigates these government-sponsored programs as the unexplored consequence of enslaved labor, Japanese American incarceration, the New Deal, the long civil rights movement, and Caribbean decolonization.

In the World War II era, U.S. lawmakers and activists alike celebrated guestworker agreements with Mexico and the Caribbean as hallmarks of ant...