Final Essay

Force and Shadow in the Making of Precarity Boris, Eileen 1 1 Hull Professor of Feminist Studies and a professor of history, Black studies, and global

studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes on the home as a workplace . Kalfou ;

Santa Barbara  Vol. 2, Iss. 2,  (Fall 2015): 304-317.

ProQuest document link

ABSTRACT (ENGLISH) She came on a tourist visa from Ecuador in 2005 with her husband and older daughter-and stayed. Another

daughter was born in New York City, automatically becoming a US citizen because the nation determines

citizenship mostly through birthright rather than blood right (following ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to

the Constitution in 1868, one of the Civil War amendments that ended formal slavery). But Ms. Martinez has had to

live in the shadows. We have learned that systems designed to mitigate the precarity of the capitalist labor market

placed the industrial worker, predominantly white and male, at both the symbolic and policy centers of the welfare

state that emerged out of the struggles of working people during the Great Depression. Protected by collective

bargaining and employment standards, his labor brought social rights to the (heterosexual white) family, including

pensions, health insurance, and other forms of income maintenance. FULL TEXT Headnote

Racialized Bodies and State Power

She came on a tourist visa from Ecuador in 2005 with her husband and older daughter-and stayed. Another

daughter was born in New York City, automatically becoming a US citizen because the nation determines

citizenship mostly through birthright rather than blood right (following ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to

the Constitution in 1868, one of the Civil War amendments that ended formal slavery). But Ms. Martinez has had to

live in the shadows. Learning English at a family support center at night and on the weekends, she cleaned homes,

receiving $200 a week or less while her husband, trained as an accountant, earned meager wages selling costume

jewelry. In 2011, a border patrol agent in upstate New York apprehended them as they boarded a bus and detained

them for a day. The constant stress of living "illegally" in the country put additional pressure on their marriage,

which, she reported, "crumbled." She sent her older daughter to another state for "safety." The Brooklyn, New York,

denizen, who earned a university degree in business administration in her own country, "toils in a clerical job that

does not require her to show work papers, earning so little that she cannot afford to buy new clothes or hire a tutor

for her daughter," the New York Times reported. "I don't have money, I don't have papers, I don't have a family, but I

have my faith and my hope that something is going to change," the fifty-year-old explained, days before President

Obama issued an executive order that proposed temporary work permits for undocumented immigrants and

protection from deportation.1

I begin with this story, ripped from the headlines, to illuminate the ways that citizenship status and race enter into

the making of precarity under social policies beyond the exclusions from labor protections, social security, and

public assistance (the welfare we hear about) that historians commonly discuss to explain the workings of what I

have named the "racialized gendered" state. That is, over the last quarter century, women and gender historians

have reshaped the narrative of social politics to show the differential treatment of women by race and class that

has reinforced and intensified, even while it has reflected, economic and social inequality.

We have learned that systems designed to mitigate the precarity of the capitalist labor market placed the industrial

worker, predominantly white and male, at both the symbolic and policy centers of the welfare state that emerged

out of the struggles of working people during the Great Depression. Protected by collective bargaining and

employment standards, his labor brought social rights to the (heterosexual white) family, including pensions,

health insurance, and other forms of income maintenance. Yet a woman's divorce or widowhood became another

path to precarity because she gained access to social citizenship-what the welfare state theorist T. H. Marshall

referred to as "the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security"-mainly through her man.2 The 1935 Social

Security Act solidified this model of the citizen-worker by creating an unequal system that linked the most

generous benefits to employment, but excluded agricultural and service occupations dominated by men and

women of color and, to a lesser extent, white women. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 similarly limited its

coverage to smokestack America, while collective bargaining, guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act of

1935, required additional measures to bring fair representation to minority workers. The latter act still excludes

domestic and household workers from its protections. The resulting public/private regime, which Jennifer Klein's

2003 book For All These Rights so powerfully illuminates, contained an undeveloped state sector with limited

provisions that provided goods and services mostly to those for whom the market and/or family failed: those

labeled as dependents, not workers.3 Subsequently, even Aid to Families with Dependent Children, commonly

named "welfare," shrunk to a forced-work program that required mothers of even small children to toil for the

privilege of receiving minimum amounts of cash assistance, food stamps, and housing and childcare allowances-

the latter only if they resided in more generous states and had a fair benefits officer or social worker assessing

their case.

Women received benefits more often on the basis of their family connection to men, for being wives or daughters,

than on account of their own wage records. Like minority men, who disproportionately suffered from under- and

unemployment, they went in and out of the labor market, worked part time, and were concentrated in workplaces

uncovered by either law or union contract. They remained constrained by responsibility for household labor even

when insourcing a nanny or cleaner or carer, a history that Klein and I explored in Caring for America and that my

other writings on home labors have underscored. This system doubly disadvantaged the vast majority of African

American, Mexican American, and immigrant women of all sorts (but particularly nonwhite ones), who could

neither rely on their men's access or their own labor histories and found themselves relegated either to low-waged

jobs without pensions or unemployment insurance or to public assistance if they could qualify. There was no

mandate to provide any aid to those not citizens in the first place, and laws both restricted citizenship, especially

among migrants from Asia, and curtailed immigration itself. Thus, immigrants from Asia and the Americas, like

European migrants earlier in the twentieth century, continue to labor in family businesses, sweatshops, or fields,

and often outside the law. Social provision for the poor, stigmatized as welfare, rarely came without arbitrariness

or discrimination, as employable-mother, suitable-home, and man-in-the-house rules curbed the eligibility of poor

solo mothers, especially African American ones. As one New Dealer advised on how "to clean up those Mexican

and Negro case loads": "We force them to go back to work by withholding relief-even though it may be forcing them

back in peonage. . . . Why . . . should they work-chopping cotton and so on-if we make it possible for them to live

without working?"4 That coercion, I argue, is central to the making of precarity, as much as the examples of

"strange fruit" hanging from a tree or the abuse of Black and brown bodies through public murders and rapes that

the police either participated in or allowed to happen.

It is time to recognize the underbelly to this history that we ignore at our peril. As recent events in Ferguson,

Missouri; Baltimore, Maryland; and on the US/Mexico border highlight, state power comes in raw as well as

"cooked" forms, through force as well as laws and courts, through violence in multiple dimensions. To explore how

force generates a shadow, pushing some outside the law to live unnoticed and toil in low-waged and temporary

jobs, I turn to immigration policy, especially the threat of deportation that has generated fear for those classified

as "alien" or "illegal." This fear makes it difficult to protest against exploitation because the boss can call in

Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) officers when workers demand their due. Deportation, as historians

are just recognizing, is a tool of the carceral state.5

These carceral agents are not the only police involved in the making of precarity. The Jim Crow system

marginalized the livelihoods of African Americans through extralegal means-lynching and rape of Black women-

and through criminalization. The incarceration system targeted men and women of color and stole their labor

power through chain gangs and what historian Sarah Haley has named "carceral domestic service"-the placing of

women from prisons into nearby homes to work off their sentences as servants or as a form of parole.6 The shift

to coerced welfare-to-work programs and the change in sentencing policies through "three strikes" laws and

onerous terms for drug possession have generated a new neoslavery. As superfluous workers, not needed in a

declining manufacturing economy and replaceable by immigrant laborers perceived as more docile because they

lack the same formal rights, Black men and women have their labor power stolen again through the prison-

industrial complex. In focusing on the violence of both immigration restriction and segregation, I argue that state

power has particularly targeted racialized gendered bodies for the low wages of precarity. That is, we cannot fully

understand women and precarious labor without accounting for the ways that race, gender, and citizenship status

work together.

The Shadow of Immigration

US immigration policies have consistently reflected assumptions that are racialized and gendered, with burdens

placed particularly on poor people. That is, they were racialized, gendered class acts. These assumptions have

been embedded from the first act in 1790 that restricted potential citizenship to whites only (while who was

considered "white" shifted over time) through the 1875 Page Law that excluded Asian women "imported" for

prostitution, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act extension that allowed only the wives of elites to join husbands here

and barred working-class people, and then through the national quota acts of the 1920s that disproportionately

admitted Northern Europeans to the disadvantage of those designated as racial others.7 In considering

immigration policy, we particularly witness the ways that the classification of people as deserving or undeserving

laid the basis for precarity. Bound up in this process were desires for racial purity and cheap labor; the threat of

nonadmittance as well as deportation served as a disciplining measure. Various grounds not only barred entry but

also hung over the behavior of immigrants for first three and then five years after coming to these shores and

extended back to actions prior to arrival. That is, the "Likely to Become a Public Charge" (LPC) designation could be

invoked years after settlement in the United States if an immigrant became unemployed or lost family or spousal

support. Though initially deployed against women, especially mothers who migrated apart from husbands, by the

1930s this classification-LPC-rationalized the deportation of Mexican men (and Filipinos as well). The lack of a

breadwinner, who would send remittances back, intensified economic instability for families in the country of

origin as well as those left in the United States. The lone migrant must be seen as connected to a household. The

gender of this migrant breadwinner has shifted over time, from the male agricultural and construction worker to

the female domestic and household worker, but the significance of these figures for extended family well-being

has remained.

During the late nineteenth century, the US Congress sought to regulate the transnational flow of labor that crossed

national borders, workers dispossessed by the globalization of that era. This was a period of rapid industrialization

and the rise of the modern corporation amid financial and monopoly capitalism, years when the system of

segregation and racial apartheid known as Jim Crow and the acquisition of an actual empire took form. As

historian Deirdre Moloney documents, between 1882 and 1921-that is, before the 1924 National Origins Quota Act-

five "major" immigration laws codified a regime of control that justified denial of entry or deportation "on the basis

of poverty, mental and physical health, morality, or political beliefs" and expanded to include "postentry conduct."8

Officials would investigate to verify a woman's employment and her children's school attendance, probing for

reasons to deport with questions like "Have you ever received any charity while in the United States?" There would

be no guaranteed safety nets that would not subject an immigrant to future removal.9 Behind labeling women as

LPC was the assumption that they were dependent on men. There also was the material reality of the labor market

where women's jobs paid less, exposing women to poverty without multiple wage earners in a household to make

up the difference. A typical plea went: "She did not desert her husband, but he deserted her and baby, and left them

to starve. . . . [I]f they are sent back, it means their being thrown into the street, as they have no place to go."10

Indeed, the perils of sexuality were multifold. During the panic over "white slavery," the nineteenth-century term for

trafficking, some immigrant women appeared as innocents who had been coerced into a shameful practice-that is,

sex work. But for Mexican women working as prostitutes on the border or older European immigrants in mining

towns, as historian Moloney argues, "their personal safety was largely ignored by both local police and federal

immigration officials." The number of "prostitutes" deported was small (fewer than two hundred per year on

average between 1892 and 1920, with even fewer denied entry), which suggests that while the law provided a

regulatory device expansive enough to threaten through the possibility of punishment, it stood mostly as a

disciplinary device targeting sexual behaviors as well as labor and as a tool when laborers became superfluous or

unruly.11 Concentrations of single men in extractive industries needed the services of sex workers. LPC became

the default rationale for denying entry or for the subsequent removal of women.

Laws prohibiting "contract labor"-immigrants solicited when abroad for jobs in the United States-generated a

catch-22 for those who migrated without significant resources or a skilled trade: no resources, no entry; but

contract work, no entry. As historian Martha Gardner has concluded in a study of women and immigration, for

women, "work that was in, of, and for the home was valuable, admittable labor, work that was not, was not."12

Domestic service and, beginning with WWI, nursing were exempted from contract labor prohibitions. That is, work

associated with womanhood even when commodified was not a ground for denial, suggesting that these

classifications really operated to shape a low-waged labor market. Agents admitted women with those

occupations despite the fact that the low wages associated with such services could make such women public

charges. Under-age women could migrate with their employers, despite laws that required children to travel with

parents or be en route to meet guardians. Nannies and midwives were classified with cooks and butlers as a

"necessary part of the domestic force." Also allowable was temporary agricultural labor, in which women entered

as wives in family labor units from Mexico, Japan, Canada, and the Philippines, as in the beet fields of Colorado or

Hawaiian plantations.13 These often precarious forms of labor were necessary for social reproduction and thus

had a special place in immigration policy.

By creating the "illegal alien," immigration law in the 1920s facilitated the growth of a low-waged, racialized,

transnational labor force. Quotas cut off the supply of Japanese farmworkers. As colonial subjects, however,

Filipinos had unrestricted entry and, along with Mexicans, provided a new workforce. During the 1920s and 1930s,

their labor militancy on West Coast farms and canneries fed into a more generalized anti-Asian sentiment that

feared their taking jobs away from "white" men and their dating "white" women. A carefully administered process

promising independence for the Philippines entailed transforming foreign nationals into "aliens" through the

Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 with a quota that essentially eliminated immigration. Mexican border crossers also

became "illegal aliens" during this period, not under quotas but instead through a work permit system. The

"wetback" was the bracero, a name given to the guest worker in a program that was initiated during WWII and

lasted until 1964. Without contracts, these workers were vulnerable to deportation for speaking up, striking, or

malingering on the job. When skipping out of a contract, braceros themselves lost the protection of Mexican

consuls. These officials served as their bargaining agents until 1954 amendments to the Migrant Labor Agreement

undercut any Mexican control over labor supply and, hence, working conditions. The ins and outs of immigration

rules have closely corresponded to the labor needs of US employers. The preferred gender for farm workers was

male.14

The US Border Patrol (created in 1924) gave agricultural employers a new mechanism of control over Mexican

immigrants. California, Texas, Ohio, Arizona, and other states engaged in mass deportations in the 1930s.15

Immigrants who had spent fewer than five years in the country, including Mexicans, could be forced home for

seeking relief or any state-sponsored service, since hospitals and private charities were required to provide their

names to public authorities. If they engaged in criminal activity, were deemed physically or mentally defective, or

were illiterate, they could be deported as well. In Chicago and Detroit, relief bureaus instigated repatriation

campaigns that pushed Chicano steel and automobile workers across the border. In Los Angeles, as historical

sociologist Cybelle Fox discovered, "the welfare office became an extra legal arm of the Immigration service,

expelling those immigration laws could not touch [legal children]."16 Around five hundred thousand migrants

returned to Mexico during this period, mostly before 1933, taking their US-born citizen children with them. In these

circumstances, immigrant workers and their families were reluctant to ask for assistance from private, let alone

public, welfare agencies. In such conditions, their lives sunk into deeper precarity.

Wives were encouraged to "voluntarily" depart with deported spouses.17 The assumption was that married

couples and their children, whether or not they were US citizens, would leave together. In subsequent years, family

reunification became the official policy, allowing the admittance of wives, parents, children under eighteen, and

other relatives of citizens and those eligible for citizenship-a preference ensconced in 1965 reforms. President

Obama's executive order, with its call to throw out felons, not families, is hardly a break with prior administrative

actions. Before the 1965 law, however, it took additional acts of Congress, including the lifting of Asian restrictions,

for Japanese women married to GIs to come to the United States, despite the 1945 War Brides Act. Wives whose

previous practice of prostitution disqualified them for entry required special waivers.18

Despite legalization provisions in the 1986 immigration reform measures, tighter border enforcement has

disrupted family formation among Mexican immigrants and has made it difficult for the mothers of citizen children

to become documented. In going after those who would use alleged kinship to cheat quotas, the Immigration

Marriage Fraud Amendment (also 1986) functioned like earlier administrative attempts to ferret out paper sons

among Chinese immigrants who had relied upon false family histories and identities to gain admittance. As with

the double sexualization of Filipino men who migrated alone to the United States-charged with lusting after white

women despite being labeled as an unmanly "third sex"-immigration and naturalization policy continued to classify

by racialized gender. It reinforced the significance of marriage for a racialized and gendered construction of

citizenship.19 Thus, when women's right to stay in the United States depended on their relationship to husbands,

they could be vulnerable if that relationship faltered. Throughout the century, they faced a double retaliatory threat:

not merely from employers who sought to curb protest but also from disgruntled male partners. Indeed, the charge

of immorality, including any sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage, or prostitution was enough to

instigate proceedings against a woman; procurers were less often prosecuted.

Post-WWII immigration policy revised quotas and instituted a work visa policy that privileged skilled labor.

Women's work, however, was generally classified as unskilled and thus women outside the Western Hemisphere

found it difficult to obtain work visas if they had labored in factories or offices. Domestic workers were unskilled,

but women from Mexico and the Caribbean gained maid-like positions and lower-level nursing jobs in private

homes and hospitals. Only with the 1965 Immigration Act were the Americas folded into the revised preference

system that privileged family members of citizens and skilled workers. These family members had to assure

officials that they could become selfsufficient-without displacing US-born workers or lowering their wages-in order

to obtain a work certificate.

At the same time, the Department of Labor (DOL) reclassified domestic servants as belonging to a workforce "in

short supply," which allowed the entry of live-in workers. Within two years, these low-waged women workers made

up nearly 40 percent of work visas issued, with the vast majority from the Americas. Vilified by DOL officials for

taking "immigration opportunities from highly skilled individuals whose contribution to our society and economy

would be greater," they actually were replacing African American domestic workers, many of whom had fled the

occupation when better-paying jobs or social welfare became available through the successes of the Civil Rights

movement. Women certainly used the "live-in maid" designation to gain entry to then seek betterpaying and more

independent factory jobs; this had been true earlier of Puerto Ricans, colonial citizens, in the late 1940s and 1950s

when their social welfare and migration bureaus channeled them into such placement, as historian Emma Amador

has found.20 The DOL issued new rules for household labor visas, including the indication of previous service work

and employer-provided written contracts containing labor standards. If employers reneged on the job once the

worker was admitted, a woman was subject to persecution for fraud if she took a position other than domestic

service. Much like in Canada's care worker program, leaving an abusive employer could lead to deportation-or the

lower wages and insecurities of the shadow economy.21

Employer sanctions for hiring undocumented workers came into the law only with the 1986 Immigration Reform

and Control Act, which offered a legalization program as well. Two years before, the Supreme Court had ruled

against employers who retaliated against immigrant union organizers. But the plaintiffs left the country because,

no longer invisible, they became subject to deportation even if they were awarded back pay and their old jobs. In

2002, the Court essentially reversed this decision by privileging immigration policy over collective bargaining. In

theory, even undocumented workers were covered by minimum wages and other labor standards. But the Court

vitiated such rights because it reinforced the precarity of those who would step out of the shadows to seek redress

against labor violations by exposing them to deportation.22

The designation of LPC has persisted in the most recent immigration and welfare policies. California, for example,

passed a proposition in 1994 that barred noncitizens from receiving social welfare and required teachers, doctors,

and others to report undocumented people to the authorities in a throwback to Depression-era actions. The courts,

however, declared the measure unconstitutional for interfering with federal jurisdiction over immigration, and its

major provisions never went into effect. In 1996, welfare reform known as the Personal Responsibility and Work

Opportunity Act especially undermined the economic well-being of poor immigrant women and their families by

eliminating or undercutting access to benefit programs for those in need. For example, many mandated welfare-to-

work programs failed to address issues of Englishlanguage proficiency, access to training, childcare, and

transportation that are necessary for many women to move into the workforce.23

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of that same year increased the number

of women held in dehumanizing detention facilities. Immigrant women are more vulnerable to workplace abuse

and exploitation by laws such as employer sanctions that have effectively criminalized those without a legal

immigration status. The March 2007 raid at the Michael Bianco factory, a military contractor near Boston, typifies

these incidents. About 360 undocumented workers, mostly women, were sent to detention in Texas, leaving breast-

fed babies without their mothers. One eyewitness recalled:

I saw that a girl had fainted. . . . She was on the floor and everyone ignored her. Then she sat up and they put a box

in between her legs and she vomited and vomited into the box. After all this, they took her to Boston, but people

say they took her to Houston. They handcuffed her hands and feet and put her on the plane and they tied her waist.

They treat us like as if we were murderers.24

These recent laws closed pathways for legalization and added to the confusion and fears of battered immigrant

women, who became more reluctant to report abuses or access avenues for legalization because that process

required the sponsorship of the abusive spouse. Subsequently, administrative agencies (INS, Health and Human

Services) issued new interpretations that allowed noncitizens to receive some federal benefits related to children's

health and basic living, like food stamps. They would only seek to prosecute recent arrivals without work permits.

Nonetheless, stigmatization and fear have kept many eligible members of immigrant families from accessing

social assistance for the mixed (legal and undocumented) families whose increasing prevalence offered the

rationale for Obama's presidential order. Confusion and shame have reinforced impoverishment and increased

suffering and want among immigrant women and their families.

The Force of Segregation, Racism, and Neoslavery

Violence toward African Americans is a better-known story, but usually framed apart from analysis of women and

precarious labor. Force and coercion were at the heart of slavery and subsequent systems of racial oppression.

During slavery, necropolitics, the politics of death, found a deterrent in the financial loss from maiming, murdering,

or executing human property-though there are enough accounts showing that individual slave owners did not

always act as rational economic men and women. After all, the peculiar institution commodified people but never

could escape the human labor power infusing it. Emancipation generated a campaign of terror in response, which

continued under Jim Crow segregation that legally separated the races, leaving African Americans with inferior

schooling, housing, hospitals, and jobs. Policing and punishment were enacted by terrorist volunteer organizations

like the Ku Klux Klan and local law enforcement, sometimes the same men, and abetted by courts that reinforced

white supremacy. Freedom, former owners charged, "utterly destroyed" "their efficiency as plantation laborers" and

it challenged the prerogative of white mistresses over Black women's domestic labor.25 Necessity and coercion

brought women and their children back to white women's kitchens.

In the years following the Civil War, violence maintained the racial order that sought to keep Blacks working for

whites at a pittance. Men were lynched (a recent estimate for the period between 1882 and 1950 puts the number

at 3,959 Black people in twelve southern states), women were raped (sometimes also lynched), night riders

dragged both from their beds and homes.26 It is no coincidence that in the 1866 Memphis Riot, white men raped

Black women and stole money and clothes, dispossessing them doubly. It is no coincidence that whitecappers

targeted landowning Black families, forcing them to flee town or face lynching. "Economic competition . . . was the

cause of mob violence," concludes historian Crystal Feimster, although whites justified their actions through

accusations that Black men raped white women.27

The South's "carceral regime" produced greater precarity; it enhanced southern economic development first by

"leasing" the incarcerated to private industries including railroad, mining, and lumber, then by working them on

chain gangs run by the state itself.28 These systems exempted white women but included all African Americans,

denying the womanhood of the Black women who appeared on chain gangs "beautifying" public roads and doing

the heavy outdoor labor of men during jail terms. The unpaid labor of unfree people became "integral to the state's

[Georgia's] modernizing project," Sarah Haley argues, for building the roads necessary for conducting commerce.

Additionally, women had their reproductive or caring labor coerced through a parole system that put them out to

white households. These were years that Black women tried to escape domestic service, though the number doing

such work dropped only from 92 to 75 percent of Black women in Georgia between 1900 and 1920.29 White

families asserted their right to the labor of women parolees, to whom they did not have to pay wages. Such Black

women became dependent on good reports from their white "caretakers" to end their imprisonment. The violence

of mistress toward maid, so pervasive during slavery, reinforced power differentials. The lives of such Black

women remained precarious as they were shuttled from work prison to households and back when white warders

complained.

Poor women more likely would be on the streets, subject to sexual terror intended to keep them in their place. In

September 1944, outside Abbeville, Alabama, seven men abducted Recy Taylor, the wife of an army veteran and

sharecropper, as she walked home from church one night. The NAACP investigation undertaken by Rosa Parks and

the Committee for Equal Justice formed to gain redress were the prelude to the Montgomery bus boycott and

much Civil Rights organizing in the South. After testifying before a grand jury, Taylor found her life in danger, her

home firebombed. "I haven't gone up into the town since it happened. . . . I'm afraid they'll kill me. They said they'd

kill me if I told on them," she said. The entire family had to circumscribe their movements: "Nobody would walk at

night. . . . Everybody tried to make sure that they done what they had to do in the daytime."30 Though unions and

left-wing and liberal organizations created a coalition of support, her assailants never were tried; there was no

justice for poor Black women in the Jim Crow South.

Domestic workers discovered that male employers expected more than cleaning. Mary Poole, a sixteen-year-old

from Fayetteville, North Carolina, left her home "promis[ed] a job 'as a nurse girl'" for the wife of a man who "drove

her to some woods" and raped her instead. North Carolina migrant Bessie Creech was looking for work in

Washington DC, but when she went to the address for a maid's job, she was gang-raped. She was not alone.

Montgomery activist E. D. Nixon, a mastermind of the later bus boycott, reported, "We have numerous reports from

our women . . . of assaults by white taxicab drivers. . . . The cabbies take them into their cars at the railroad depot,

but before taking them home, drive them outside the town, and subject them to attacks."31 Police too partook of

such practices. Black newspapers in the 1940s regularly reported white on Black assaults, with headlines like

"Dixie Cop, Ousted in Rape Scandal, Arrested Again." Demanding payment of a debt, two armed white farmers

raped Mamie Patterson after beating up her husband. Economic precariousness enhanced personal vulnerability,

which racialized gendered logics enflamed.32

Slavery had ended, but it continued to cast a shadow over Black workers. In the 1950s, the NAACP investigated

New York employment agencies that lured southern women to household positions where employers confined

them as "servant[s] in their home[s] against [their] own will." More recently, cases have surfaced of employers who

essentially imprison immigrant laborers. At least a dozen cases a year are now being tried under the Trafficking

Victims Protection Act of 2000, as immigrant workers'-rights groups attempt to expand the meaning of labor

trafficking to include domestic workers.33

Could these workers seize the spaces of their precariousness? At the notorious Bronx Slave Market, unemployed

women stood on street corners waiting to be picked up for a day's work, often only to discover that they barely

made carfare home.34 Some were (mis)recognized as prostitutes, with men following them on the streets asking

for sex as well as cleaning. According to historian Ariana E. Alexander, these men "offered stories of a sick wife at

home" and spoke in coded language as they bargained for services.35 Puerto Rican women came to the United

States on labor contracts as domestic workers in the 1940s, and those who left their jobs were picked up as

prostitutes for defying the poor terms that facilitated their migration to the mainland.36 The day labor corner for

women as well as men remains another manifestation of precarious-nonstandard, noncontinuous, intermittent,

and low-waged-labor. The fact that standing in public led to accusations of being a public woman underscores the

gender difference in how sexual slander was deployed to discipline the seizing of space as an environment of

one's own. It curtailed the free movement of free people within the cityscape, policing the Black or immigrant

woman's body and her desires and actions.

For the undocumented woman, standing in public risked apprehension by la migra, or the immigration patrol.

Indeed, profits and imprisonment mutually constitute each other. According to the International Worker Center

Network, at the same time as Obama's November 2014 executive order, "Immigration and Customs Enforcement

announced the complete outsourcing of family detention camps for mothers and children to for-profit prison

companies, Corrections Corp of America and GEO Group." Immigrants compose a quarter of the prison population,

and that population has grown to over 2.3 million people, making the United States the global leader in this

business.37 Furthermore, the executive order offers relief from deportation but does not undermine the precarity of

low-waged labor. Nonetheless, the Obama order provided a tool that others could deploy for immigrant justice.

"Many workers, who have been subjected to wage theft, forced labor, and extortion, will now be able to seek justice,

pay their taxes, and continue their contribution to the community and economy without fear of deportation,"

concluded a spokesperson from California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc.38 As of this publication, it was

questionable if the executive order would ever come into effect, given challenges in the courts by anti-immigrant

forces.

That certain forms of violence might be mitigated does not guarantee that the violence of insecure, poorly paid

labor will dissipate. Global capitalism, after all, depends on mobile workers, who uproot themselves for better lives

but end up with merely survival wages. As nannies and elder carers, cleaners and cooks, immigrant women do the

work that makes other work possible. Caught between racism and economic need, the United States wants its low-

waged workers, but not as citizens. It might prefer keeping them in the shadows, adjusting the form that force

takes for today's world order. Meanwhile, violence against African Americans suggests the disposability of young

Black men-and women-who are no longer needed for manual labor and appear too uppity for being citizens

demanding their rights and a living wage. But what was in the shadows now is subject to the glare of exposure in

this era of new media that both exposes violence and spreads the message that Black lives indeed matter.

Footnote

NOTES

Acknowledgment: This paper was originally presented at the Hans Sigrist Symposium "Women and Precarity:

Historical Perspectives," University of Bern, December 5, 2014.

1. Winnie Hu, "Families Can Crumble under Deportation Threat," New York Times, November 16, 2014,

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/nyregion/families-can-crumble-underdeportation-threat.html?_r=0.

2. T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950),

72.

3. Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's PublicPrivate Welfare State

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

4. Cybelle Fox, Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era

to the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 194.

5. Torrie Hester, "Deportability and the Carceral State," Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (2015): 141-151.

Hester emphasizes the jailing of those subject to deportation as a factor of the growth of "mass incarceration,"

151.

6. Sarah Haley, "'Like I Was a Man': Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia,"

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39, no. 1 (2013): 53-77.

7. For a good summary, see Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota, 2002). See also Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

8. Deirdre Moloney, National Insecurities: Immigrants and U.S. Deportation Policy since 1882 (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 13.

9. Martha Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870-1965 (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2005), 104.

10. Quoted in Moloney, National Insecurities, 47.

11. Moloney, National Insecurities, 56-57, 274n1. See also Jessica R. Pliley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and

the Making of the FBI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), especially 9-59; Grace Peña Delgado,

"Border Control and Sexual Policing: White Slavery and Prostitution along the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1903-

1910," Western Historical Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2012): 157-178.

12. Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen, 111.

13. Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen, 106-107.

14. Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and

Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

15. Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Control (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2010).

16. Fox, Three Worlds of Relief, 124.

17. Ibid., 156-159; Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen, 187-192.

18. Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen, 225-226; Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and

American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

19. Luibhéid, Entry Denied; Nancy F. Cott, "Marriage and Women's Citizenship in the United States, 1830-1934,"

American Historical Review 103 (1998): 1440-1474; Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the

Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2003); Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects:

Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), especially 109-

116 on Filipinos, 202-224 on Chinese, quote at 113.

20. Emma Amador, "Organizing Puerto Rican Domestics: Resistance and Household Labor Reform in the Puerto

Rican Diaspora after 1930," ILWCH 88 (Fall 2015), in press.

21. Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen, 216-219.

22. Shannon Gleeson, Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose

and Houston (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 64-72.

23. Lynn Fujiwara, Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare

Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

24. Ashley Bendiksen, "Remembering the Michael Bianco Inc. Raid," New Bedford Guide, March 8, 2013,

http://www.newbedfordguide.com/michael-bianco-raid/2013/03/08.

25. An Arkansas newspaper in 1867, quoted in Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual

Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

2009), 122.

26. Mark Berman, "Even More Black People Were Lynched in the U.S. than Previously Thought, Study Finds,"

Washington Post, February 10, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/post-nation/wp/2015/02/10/even-

more-black-people-were-lynched-in-the-u-s-than-previously-thought-study-finds/.

27. Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2009), 90.

28. Talitha L. Leflouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

29. Haley, "'Like I Was a Man,'" 54-58.

30. Quoted in Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance-A New

History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Knopf, 2010), 14.

31. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 58-59; Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of

Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 266-267.

32. Freedman, Redefining Rape, 266-267; headline quoted at 266.

33. Memorandum to Mr. Walter White from Herbert Hill, Monthly Report for September 1953, "Investigation of

Forced Labor of Florida Negro in New York," October 8, 1953, 1, NAACP papers on microfilm, part 13, series A, reel

2, file-Herbert Hill, Monthly Annual Reports, 1949-1955; Asjylyn Loder, "Domestic Worker Reaches Settlement with

Employer," Womensenews, April 4, 2004, http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/1784/context/

archive; Paul Vitello, "From the Stand, Tales of 'Modern-Day Slavery' in a Long Island Case," New York Times,

December 5, 2007. Social justice groups have developed a critique of the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act in

terms of how its focus on sex workers maintains conditions of global inequality.

34. See Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, "The Bronx Slave Market," Crisis 42 (November 1935): 330-331, 340.

35. Ariana E. Alexander, "'. . . Something So Scandalous': Suspicions of Prostitution and the Bronx Slave Markets,

1935-1942," unpublished paper at the 2014 Berkshire Conference in Women's History, Toronto, in author's

possession.

36. Emma Amador, "Training Migrant Domestics: Migrant Household Workers, Labor Reformers, and the Puerto

Rican Government after 1930," unpublished paper at the 2014 Berkshire Conference in Women's History, Toronto,

in author's possession.

37. International Worker Center Network, "International Worker Center Network Calls for Legalization of All

Immigrants and Freedom for All Incarcerated Immigrants," press release, November 24, 2014.

38. Quoted in Brandon Fastman, "S.B. Responds to President's Executive Order on Immigration," Santa Barbara

Independent, November 21, 2014, http://independent.com/news/2014/ nov/21/sb-responds-presidents-executive-

order-immigration/.

DETAILS

Subject: Men; Daughters; Wagner Act 1935-US; Annual reports; Labor market; Slavery;

Workers; Rape; Citizenship; Raids; Welfare; Mothers; Employment; Immigration;

African Americans; Collective bargaining; Executive orders; Women; Border patrol;

Aliens

Location: Asia United States--US New York

People: Hill, Herbert

Company / organization: Name: New York Times Co; NAICS: 511110, 511120, 515112, 515120; Name: Harvard

University Press; NAICS: 511120, 611310; Name: University of North Carolina Press;

NAICS: 511130

Publication title: Kalfou; Santa Barbara

Volume: 2

Issue: 2

Pages: 304-317

Publication year: 2015

Publication date: Fall 2015

Publisher: Temple University - of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education On behalf of

Temple University Press

Place of publication: Santa Barbara

Country of publication: United States, Santa Barbara

Publication subject: Sociology

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ISSN: 21514712

Source type: Scholarly Journals

Language of publication: English

Document type: Feature

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15367/kf.v2i2.68

ProQuest document ID: 2017975723

Document URL: https://search.proquest.com/docview/2017975723?accountid=14214

Copyright: Copyright Temple University - of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education On

behalf of Temple University Press Fall 2015

Last updated: 2018-03-26

Database: Ethnic NewsWatch,ProQuest Central