Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Three very different projects discussed in this issue highlight the political challenge of perceived racial difference for liberal and social democratic forces in the twentieth-century West. In the first article Latin American specialist Heidi Tinsman probes the issue of labor control and lack of rights among Chinese contract laborers in postslavery 1870s Peru from an original angle. Through the activities of special Chinese envoy Yung Wing, sent to survey the conditions of Chinese contract workers on Peruvian plantations, we gather at once the contemporary power and the limitations of an antislavery discourse as applied to a new migrant workforce. Yet even as Qing dynasty officials, whom Yung Wing represented, registered a compelling critique of Western hubris in international relations, that critique, Tinsman indicates, did not fully resonate with the perspective, or aspirations, of the contract laborers themselves.Fifty years on from the debate over whether conditions of immigrant contract laborers were like or unlike slavery, Second International socialists meeting at the World Migration Congress of 1926 in London believed that they had transcended a blinkered and racist past and arrived at a moment of “color-blind solidarity among all peoples of the world.” Their enthusiasm, as historian Lucas Poy documents in an exhumation of discussions among socialist parties and trade unions, was of course premature. While happy to declaim in principle against colonialism and imperialism, Western worker representatives betrayed deep assumptions of racial hierarchy and social Darwinian justifications for national just deserts, as most evident in “White Australia” rhetoric and broader defenses of immigration restrictions. Poy concludes that within the “inter-nationalism” of the period, the delegates’ “common sense of belonging to International Labour . . . never included the coloured/colonial peoples.”Kelly Lytle Hernández's Bad Mexicans, our Bookmark selection for books published in 2022, not only offers a vivid retelling of the roots of the Mexican Revolution through the transborder perspective of the anarchist movement centered on the Flores Magón brothers but also sets up—as our three reviewers attest—a fascinating discussion of the broader public purposes of historical research and writing. As a group the reviewers are at once enthralled by Lytle Hernández's narrative power and divided on her claims as to the significance of Ricardo Flores Magón and the Partido Liberal Mexicano in the larger events that led to revolutionary upheaval in Mexico that began in 1910. Especially given the magonistas’ focus on the machinery of US repression, Elliott Young wonders why “they mostly stayed in the United States after the bullets started flying in Mexico.” An accomplished transborder scholar herself, Sonia Hernández also seems to draw more lessons from the “defeat” of a “potentially transformative democratization” by Magón and company than from any putative victory on their account. Notwithstanding the principled radicalism and derring-do of anarchist leaders like Flores Magón, John Tutino insists that readers must look elsewhere for the roots of popular resistance in a land “steeped in religious traditions” and commitment to Indigenous land claims. In her response, Lytle Hernández does not deny the historical defeat of the magonistas; rather, she questions whether that defeat proves their irrelevance. By bringing the story of cross-border rebellion to a new generation of readers, she identifies as one of the “fire tenders of this rebel history.” “I believe,” she writes, “in the magonistas and the power of their story. For me, the knowledge that a small group of ordinary men and women in the borderlands, my homeland, challenged a tyrant and stirred a revolution that ousted him from power is enough. They did not go on to lead the revolution, but there is no doubt they helped kickstart it.”Following a five-week strike in December 2022, graduate student workers organized into the United Auto Workers across the University of California system rocked the labor world with a pathbreaking collective bargaining contract affecting some thirty-six thousand employees across the ten-campus University of California system. Far less recognized, yet still notable for its precedent-setting inventiveness, was the April 2022 certification—by a vote of 327 to 6—of the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. The UGSDW instantly became “the nation's first campuswide undergraduate union to win legal recognition” and “the nation's largest undergraduate union.” The breakthrough, in fact, dated to the union's initial organizing efforts among the college's dining hall workers—many on work-study grants—beginning in 2016. In a valuable interview with four of the union's founders, John W. McKerley, an oral historian with the University of Iowa Labor Center, documents not only what was distinctive but also what is likely transferable about the Grinnell “self-organizing” experience.If you glanced at the list of reviews for this issue, you could be forgiven if you thought you had wandered into the back pages of the American Historical Review rather than Labor. The point is that Labor has become mighty comprehensive in its topical (as well as geographic) coverage. Start, for example, with the early modern Spanish Caribbean, and then move on to the US Civil War, the Paris Commune, disability in industrial Britain, unruly youth in post-Victorian Britain, and economic development in the Western world since 1970. And how about the United States? Don't worry, still plenty to sink your teeth into. That includes labor museums, Black workers in Harlem, Mexican migrants, Polish steelworkers in West Virginia, Texas farmer-labor radicals, and even a political biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg that focuses on the redrawing of employment law. The most highly touted by reviewers include a collection of essays on racial capitalism edited by Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy; Toni Gilpin's treatment of “ceaseless class warfare” at International Harvester; Erin Woodruff Stone's recasting of Columbus as an early slave trafficker; and Matthew E. Stanley's ambitious reconsideration of the multiple meanings of postslavery realities during the Long Gilded Age.