Medical Care and Labor Rights in the Post-Bracero Program US–Mexico Borderlands

Scholarship on medicine and immigration has noted the link between medical practices and borders. In particular, the use of medicine to reinforce racialized ideas of exclusion, removal, and the belonging of Others. Relatedly, labor historians have identified the investment of unions in border policing and deportation as deterrents against undocumented labor in the United States. This paper excavates the creation of state sanctioned permits to cross into and remain in the United States by the United Farm Workers (UFW) union. The UFW negotiated an informal medical visa for the rank-and-file of the United Farm Workers and their family members living in Mexico. The union also used agricultural labor arbitration courts to effectively stay deportations. Emerging from the shadow of a growing deportation regime, a hostile bloc of economic powerbrokers in the United States, and limited access to public benefits, the medical visa and labor courts created an opening for and by union members to demand medical and labor justice in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during the 1970s. Through the lens of labor and border studies, this paper demonstrates the fractured dimensions of the racialized labor and mobility, where workers challenged the power of the federal government to determine entry into the United States as a response to their transborder lives. On the Imperial-Mexicali borderlands, the UFW’s clinics responded to a population of farmworkers and their families who lived on both sides of the border, but could not access the medical care funded by union contracts with growers. The establishment of California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board provided a legal venue for farm workers and the UFW to present transborder labor cases. The main impediment to access medical care and labor courts was an increasingly hardening border for commuter workers and their families.