AHA Session 19
Labor and Working-Class History Association 2
Labor and Working-Class History Association 2
Thursday, January 8, 2026: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Salon 7 (Palmer House Hilton, Third Floor)
Chair:
Mireya Loza, Georgetown University
Papers:
Session Abstract
This panel expands upon the established immigration historiography by redirecting the field’s attention away from adult migrant men to focus on Mexican and Central American families and minors in both the United States and Mexico. In reappraising the history of guest worker programs to include Mexican Green Card Commuters in the 1960s, Nahomi Esquivel reveals how restrictions on the entrance of Mexican commuters’ families incentivized the endurance of extralegal circular migration and cemented Mexicans’ status as perpetual foreigners. Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez then recovers the migration, clandestine smuggling, and labor trafficking of Mexican and Central American youth in the U.S. to show how their imprisonment mainly on remote farm fields fueled the growth of child detention in the 1970s and beyond. Finally, Irvin Ibarguen traces the emergence of make-shift refugee centers in Mexico as sites of immigration policing in response to the growing arrivals of Central American individuals and families. As a whole, the panel considers how paying attention to neglected forms of migrant containment and relocation—whether through restrictions on family migration, false imprisonment on farms, or policing in countries rarely acknowledged as important sites of migrant reception—reveals new insights about historical subjects, migrations, and geographies that have been largely ignored by the scholarship on twentieth-century migration across Western North America.
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