Labor History’s Transnational Turn

Beginning in the late 1980s, the anthropologist Michael Kearney explored the lives of indigenous immigrants living on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. Examining their cultural, emotional, and social ties in multiple locations, he opened the way for the study of what he called, in an article published along with Carole Nagengast in 1989, “transnational indigenous communities” (Rivera-Salgado, 2014: 27). Three years later, the anthropologists Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton (1992) called for a new approach to migration and settlement in an article titled “Transnationalism: A New Analytical Framework for Understanding Migration.” Building on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory, which looked at the unequal functions performed in a global division of labor by different world geographic regions, scholars interested in transnationalism criticized Wallerstein’s approach for its lack of attention to migrants’ historical experiences, their structural conditions, and their relation to hegemonic ideologies in home and host societies. Although it was not a novelty for historians to look at movements of people around the globe, they actively embraced this new approach because it offered a (re)interpretation of history through a transnational lens. Informed by the theoretical underpinnings of the cultural turn in the humanities and the social sciences, historians crossed disciplinary borders to question and challenge one of the key ideological pillars of the field of history since its professionalization: the nation-state.

The LaPietra Report, drafted by Thomas Bender (2000), established that “both the nation and the other historical phenomena we examine must be resituated in larger contexts because the movements of people, money, knowledges, and things are not contained by single political units.” According to Bender and other scholars, “transnationalism” was needed as an analytical category. As the Latin American historian Heidi Tinsman and the U.S. anthropologist Sandhya Shukla (2004: 1) suggest, “In a moment of intensified U.S. imperial projects and the globalization of capital, we should strive to formulate an object of study that would stress internationalism, cooperation, and alternatives beyond the overwhelming power of the nation-state.” Informed by contemporary struggles such as the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, workers’ factory occupations across the globe, and the antiglobalization movement along with the development of global capital in the past three decades, historians are challenging conventional categories of knowledge through an analysis that pays attention to the flow and circulation of goods and peoples beyond the nation.

Despite these developments, until recently labor history was, according to Carolyn Brown (2009: 189), “locked into a fragmented historiography dominated by studies of individual nations and regions.” Leon Fink problematizes this notion in the introduction to Workers Across the Americas: “We U.S. labor historians have long been practicing transnational history. The only problem is that we’ve been doing it rather haphazardly” (xii). The books under review demonstrate that labor historians are not only taking part in the (inter)disciplinary conversation on transnationalism but redefining it.

Peter Winn (2012: 86) writes: “As a historian of Latin America, I am aware of the hold of national histories over both established historians and young students of history, and how difficult it is to get them to look even beyond their borders.” While labor history has traditionally been studied from a national perspective, working-class institutions and movements have been transnational because of their contacts, aspirations, and heavy immigrant membership. Using the concept of transnationalism in Latin American labor history opens up new possibilities for understanding connections across borders (e.g., the flow of migrants, transnational family structures, and international political organizing) and constructing an analysis of the capitalist system, which is itself transnational, from a labor and working-class perspective.

Transnationalism is but one of a series of methodological approaches, among them attention to symbolic representations and gender studies, adopted by historians of the region. Books such as Paulo Drinot’s The Allure of Labor (2011) and Natalia Milanesio’s Workers Go Shopping (2013), which aspire to understand the social, economic, and cultural politics of workers in a specific nation-state context (here Peru and Argentina, respectively), contrast with recent publications that use a transnational analysis. Besides the books under review we find, for example, Lara Putnam’s Radical Moves (2013), Frederick Douglass Opie’s Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala (2009), and Micol Siegel’s Uneven Encounters (2009). Although not all of these books easily fit the field of labor studies, since they focus on different social groups and broader aspects of culture, nation, and market forces, all of them stress the role of workers in collective identity formation across national boundaries.

Thus the field of Latin American labor studies has seen a bourgeoning of contributions in which transnationalism has added new layers to the conversation. As the books under review show, looking at workers and migrants with a transnational lens sheds light on the networks forged by these historical actors and the complexities of concepts such as the nation, race, and identity. The works under review are part of wider debates that are emerging in different academic areas throughout the globe. Although this essay analyzes works from U.S. academia only, it recognizes that the books under review are part of the broader cartography of knowledges and debates from the Caribbean and Latin America (see, e.g., Bohórquez-Montoya, 2009; Coelho, 2011–2012; LeGrand, 2006; Weinstein, 2013).

Julie Greene, Deborah Cohen, Kathleen López, and the contributors to Workers Across the Americas provocatively analyze the global and transnational connection between production and labor through the lenses of race, gender, empire, and citizenship. Their books pay attention to the way these processes informed and shaped the subjectivities of historical actors that crossed porous national borders and sometimes inhabited a social space that defied physical and geographical barriers. They offer new interpretations and develop critiques of the field of labor history in a broad historical and geopolitical framework.

Leon Fink’s edited volume Workers Across the Americas aspires to present a coherent though complex response of labor and working-class historians to the transnational turn in the field. The contributors adopt different approaches to and interpretations of the ways the transnational rubric should be applied to labor history. Intersecting analyses on gender, race, and imperialism are intertwined with labor history and transnationalism. A product of the 2008 conference “Workers, the Nation-State, and Beyond: The Newberry Conference on Labor History Across the Americas,” the book’s 20 chapters question, critique, and challenge the ways historians study the lives and experiences of workers at the national level. These scholars show how, for example, coffee workers defied handed-down ideas of nationality by constantly crossing the Guatemalan-Mexican border and how Mexican workers in Chicago created binational identities that challenged assimilation in their working-class neighborhoods. The five chapters that directly deal with Latin America and the Caribbean demonstrate that this approach can enhance our understanding of labor as part of a global system of capital and the way it resonates in the individual subjective experience of workers embedded in it. They show that workers’ subjectivities are shaped by their interactions in both their home and host countries simultaneously.

The thrust of Deborah Cohen’s narrative in her book Braceros is precisely the construction of the individual subjectivity of migrant workers crossing the Mexican-U.S. border and how living between two nation-states helped shape their identities. The braceros’ migration was the product of bilateral accords between the governments of Mexico and the United States between 1942 and 1964. These massive movements of migrant workers and their personal experiences have been very well documented by historians from within the United States, but Cohen focuses on the way the two nation-states created a separate social space in which these migrants dwelled. She considers transnationalism “a constitutive process, not a relationship that merely extends its roots or ties beyond the nation” (3) and explains that by “transnational subject” she means “a particular kind of political and social person with ties to, claims on, or self-understanding beyond the nation” (5). This conception of transnationalism as a process of becoming allows her to analyze how both nations and people aspired to achieve modernization. The way these workers defined and became “modern” is a key theoretical element that guides her narrative.

Braceros shows how migrant workers and planters created their own conceptions of modernization in a transnational context. For braceros this meant “achieving manhood [which] brought full citizenship, a status previously undercut by class” (84), acquiring economic mobility, and fulfilling national expectations of both Mexico and the United States. Planters saw modernization in terms of economic expansion and industrialization while constructing a hard-worker identity that gave them symbolic power when appealing to the broader national consumer public in moments of strikes or labor tensions. Although stressing the importance of a transnational approach, Cohen frames her analysis in concrete geographical and historical contexts, following workers into their barracks and the fields and onto the picket lines of the 1947 strike against the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation and the 1961 lettuce workers’ strike.

Recognizing the way transnational movement informed these workers’ subjectivities, Cohen navigates the racialized and gendered hierarchies that were created in the border space occupied by the braceros between the United States and Mexico. This approach allows her to create dialogues among former braceros’ histories and to cross disciplinary boundaries to interpret those intersecting narratives. Merging oral testimonies and traditional historical sources, she constructs a nuanced picture of the processes in which these workers were immersed. With regard to the question whether we should view the bracero program as exploitation or opportunity, she argues that framing the argument this way precludes an exploration of the complexities of these workers’ actions and experiences.

Departing from this notion of a transnational subjectivity that is the product of migration, Julie Greene analyzes the lives of the millions of working people who made their way to the Canal Zone from different parts of the globe. Her book The Canal Builders is a fine work of labor history from the perspective of the American empire. The migrant workers who arrived in the Canal Zone from Asia, Europe, the United States, and the West Indies found themselves in a space that was closely monitored and controlled by a range of U.S. officials and employers and dedicated to sustaining gendered and racialized hierarchies that dictated not only their remuneration but also their spatial mobility. By constantly shifting focus from Panama to the United States or from worker interactions to institutional policies, Greene is able to show how workers’ interactions in the Canal Zone were informed not only by migration but also by the transnational ideas of white supremacy and U.S. exceptionalism that permeated local institutions.

While she examines the difficulties and the complexities of everyday life for the workers from different parts of the world, those workers become part of Greene’s story only when they enter the Panama Canal Zone. This approach obscures the vast transnational networks that informed these workers’ subjectivities through social interactions between their host and sending countries. Nonetheless, through her command of sources and narrative, she is able to present the voices of these individuals by contextualizing, for example, the local actions and reactions to the Cocoa Grove Riots of 1912, when local workers fought against drunk U.S. soldiers, the racial tensions between Iberian anarchists and non-European workers, the interactions between radicals and the broader working class, and the protests of black English-Caribbean workers against the racialized wage system imposed in the Canal Zone.

Kathleen López turns her attention to the migration of Chinese laborers, either indentured or free, to Cuba and the way it shaped their multiple identities. In Chinese Cubans she traces the migration of Chinese to Cuba to the infamous “coolie” trade and goes on to explore the less well-documented process of Chinese integration into national narratives in the twentieth century as Cuba became a republic, China faced various political upheavals, and the Cuban Revolution shook the island in 1959. She makes a compelling case that even though Chinese migrants remained on the periphery throughout Cuba’s history they were active participants in shaping the center. Through a series of cultural, economic, and social groups and associations, they challenged Cuba’s racist national narratives. During the 1800s Chinese had been above black workers in the plantation economy’s division of labor, but their position was subverted in 1898, after the United States occupied Cuba. Chinese migrant workers were banned from entering the country from 1907 until 1917, and when the ban was lifted tens of thousands came to Cuba. These new migrants became part of networks created by local Chinese communities while also creating new ties that relied on a more transnational framework facilitated by publications and associations that connected people in Cuba to their hometowns in China.

López does not fully explore the way transnational relations informed Chinese workers’ subjectivity until the sixth chapter, and this limits our understanding of Chinese Cuban labor as part of a global system of capital. Her greatest contribution is in expanding the historical analysis of the Chinese’s role in the construction of the Cuban Republic all the way to the Cuban Revolution. Because the Chinese community was excluded from national racial narratives in the first years of the twentieth century but integrated in the subsequent decades, Chinese people’s support of or opposition to Cuba’s revolutionary government stemmed from their historical experiences and class positions. While some left-leaning Chinese groups had supported Fidel Castro since the events of the Cuartel Moncada and maintained their militancy well after 1959, a group of elite Chinese merchants fled the country after Fidel Castro’s First Declaration of Havana on September 2, 1960. Although the analysis stops in the first years of the revolution, the book leaves avenues of inquiry open for further studies on the importance of the Chinese in the construction of the Cuban national discourse after 1959.

The books under review show us how using transnationalism as a category of analysis can create new avenues of inquiry in the field of labor history. By acknowledging at the same time that the nation is still an important element in processes of racialization and assignment of positions in the social space, they offer labor scholars new ways of understanding imperialism, subjectivity, race, citizenship, gender roles, and migration. Nonetheless, they seem to play down the way transnational identities shape the political identities and actions of migrant workers in the receiving country. Cuba, for example, has a rich history of working-class organizing and mobilization that is absent from López’s book. Cohen and Greene pay attention to class dynamics but do not address the way the transnational lives of these workers informed local working-class institutions and vice versa. Although labor history has paid attention to global interactions and international migrations for decades, focusing on how these processes shaped the historical subjects that took part in them opens up countless possibilities. An optic of transnationalism that pays attention to local social and political interactions as well as international processes might allow labor historians to cross physical, disciplinary, and social borders.