In this session, each paper explores the experiences of people of color who fought enslavement, imperial oppression, and economic instability through migration and political activism in the Americas and Caribbean between 1793 and 1980. The goal of this panel is to highlight the struggles and efforts of marginalized populations to free themselves from the social, political, and economic forces that controlled them. The paper, “Engineering Liberation: Black Women on the US-Mexico Borderlands before 1865,” explores how Black women like Matilda Hicks, Sylvia Hector and Sylvia Routh not only resisted enslavement in the United States through their abolition efforts, but also actively fought against it by creating channels of liberation that led South to Mexico. The paper, “The Dawn of Disenchantment: Puerto Rican Autonomist Movements and the Fight for Self-Determination 1868-1917,” investigates how in Puerto Rico Non-White criollo elites collaborated with the rural working-class to create and proliferate a unifying national identity which repudiated colonial rule and embraced Puerto Rican indigeneity following the United States’ invasion of the island in 1898. Lastly, the paper, “One-Way Trip, U.S.A.: Black West Indian Immigrant Women to America, 1930-1980,” examines the immigrant experience of undocumented working-class, black West Indian women searching for the American Dream to invigorate a new wave of study on Caribbean migrants that is presently dominated by monographs about black intellectuals, the upper class, or working-class male laborers.