Servants of the Seasons: Glimpses of Labor Mobility across the Early Americas

This paper offers a glimpse of the variety of itinerant and seasonally-shaped labor that existed on the continuum between free and enslaved work that I have encountered thus far while researching my ongoing book project, “Servants of the Seasons: Itinerant Labor in the Global Early Americas.” At the heart of my research are the relationships between politics and climate, between labor and autonomy, and between boundaries and freedom. The evidence that I will discuss in this paper ranges from the Caribbean to the Pacific coast of North America and from sailors to soldiers, to female laborers working in many capacities— including wet nurses and bakers, laundresses and prostitutes— who provided services in cyclical, often seasonally-influenced and impermanent fashion. The project further encompasses the work of enslaved peoples who were moved around the Caribbean to build fortifications and the indigenous laborers known as yanaconas who surface in Spanish American settlements. Throughout the Americas, seasonal, impermanent work of various types, conducted in cities, on mule trains moving through the countryside, at sea and in private homes, shaped peoples’ engagement with borders and states. The organization behind these distinct migrations and experiences of seasonality is a critical part of my study. Some of these labor arrangements reflected shifting opportunities or forced labor for individuals of certain ethnic, religious, or economic profiles while some occurred in family units or as part of historically mobile ethnic groupings. These types of labor—impermanent, sometimes negotiated by contract, sometimes informally arranged—were employed in projects of varying scale, over distances small and large.