Carceral Arcadia: Working Patients and Organizing Work in Texas Through the Texas State Lunatic Asylum in Austin, 1854–1954

In 1925, the TSLA Superintendent J.G. Springer declared that “work or exercise is universally recognized as one of our most useful therapeutic measures.” Springer made this public statement at the height of the Eugenics movement and Jim Crow in Texas, sharing the taken-for-granted assumption that people judicially considered incapable of work were also expected to provide labor to keep asylums going. The 1920s emphasis on the therapeutic dimensions of unfree work done by patients evoked earlier therapeutic fantasies, where in the 1870s “the more moderate and pleasurable out-door exercise of gardening is indispensable for preserving and fortifying their bodily health,” justifying a multipurpose farm and factory for Austin’s state institutions. This paper uses labor - the organization of work and patients - in Austin and Texas asylums to understand the racialization of regions in Texas, a surprising challenge to full racial segregation in Texas asylums, the persistence of patient work alongside the transformation of mental illness diagnoses, and the expulsion of ethnic Mexican patients from official Texas records. Recent work by Natalie Lira, Kylie Smith, Mab Segrest and Antonia Hylton emphasize the centrality of work to patient experiences. Regina Kunzel and Martin Summers track the mutual construction of medical authority and the expulsion of Black and queer people from a shared humanity. The partial, fragmented official records of the TSLA point to direct links between when freedom colonies emerged during reconstruction to when farm labor came to mean Mexican work in the 1940s. This paper pushes statewide frameworks to understand the racializing, de-medicalizing, deporting and “southernizing” of patient labor in Austin.