Texas State History Blog – Page 4 – Research and News from the Texas State University Department of History

“Chasing Slavery” Participant Spotlight: Dr. Christian Zlolniski

In preparation for the upcoming symposium, Chasing Slavery: The Persistence of Forced Labor in the Southwest, to be held at Texas State University from 24-26 October, in Flowers Hall 230, we will be running a series of posts focused on the conference participants and organizers. The conference will bring together dozens of scholars, with a keynote from Ambassador Luis C.deBaca (ret.). See the conference website for more details.

Today, conference participant Dr. Christian Zlolninski, Associate Professor, Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Arlington, shares with us a bit about his research.

Tell me in four sentences why I should read your book.

Dr. Christian Zlolniski:

To learn about where much of our the fresh tomatoes, strawberries, and other fresh-produce are grown, you consume come from, especially during the winter.

To find out how people in living in northern Mexico have been affected — positively or negatively — by the production of fresh-produce for consumers markets in the United States, including positive and negative results.

To learn about the environmental effects caused by growing water-intense fresh crops in arid Baja California.

Read from farmworkers’ own voices what they say about the opportunities and costs that export agriculture has brought to their lives and their families.

What was the most surprising thing you encountered when researching your book?

Dr. Zlolniski: The social lives of farmworkers beyond the workplace.

Indigenous workers not only grow the fresh produce we eat, but they also play a key role in settling and developing the arid lands of the San Quintin Valley that until was regarded as recently were seen as inhospitable and impossible to make a living. In the process, farmworkers have also developed a sense of belonging and community, adopting this land as their own with pride. Reducing them to the one unidimensional category of farmworkers prevents us from doing justice to the multiple ways in which they have enriched the region culturally, socially, and politically.

What do you hope people will take away from our conference on trafficking, forced labor and labor exploitation?

Dr. Zlolniski: To see the connections, continuities and discontinuities between different labor regimes across time and space. Capitalist agriculture keeps reinventing old labor configurations while creating new ones with the introduction of new production technologies. My critical and historically informed analysis allows us to understand how forms of labor exploitation change and evolve over time, often sparking novel forms of labor resistance and class struggle.

What challenge(s) raised by your research are you still trying to reconcile?

Dr. Zlolniski: Combining my scholarly work with a more public approach that disseminate its findings beyond the walls of academia. As an anthropologists whose research and scholarship depends on the collaboration with the peoples and workers I study, I realize that we need to reciprocate and make our studies meaningful to a larger audience to bring change. This means balancing our intellectual labor with the moral imperative to make our research relevant to the people who contributed to our studies and academic careers. It also means to use our voice to shape public policies to improve the conditions of the people we study as they themselves define them.

Also check out:

Made in Baja The Lives of Farmworkers and Growers behind Mexico’s Transnational Agricultural Boom
By Christian Zlolniski (University of California Press, 2019)

Categories: Events, News, Research

“Chasing Slavery” Participant Spotlight: Dr. William S. Kiser

Today, conference participant Dr. William S. Kiser, Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University-San Antonio, shares with us a bit about his research.

Tell me in four sentences why I should read your book.

Dr. William Kiser: This book broadens our historical understandings of slavery during and after the Civil War era by examining two relatively obscure forms of involuntary servitude: Indian captivity and Hispanic debt peonage. It focuses on American legal and political understandings of slavery and free labor in the 19th century, and the impact that the Hispanic Southwest’s alternative slaveries had on abolitionist ideology and jurisprudence. People should read this book because it challenges prevailing conceptualizations of slavery and free labor by emphasizing the expansion of Thirteenth Amendment jurisprudence to include peonage and captivity in addition to the more familiar chattel slavery of the Old South.

What was the most surprising thing you encountered when researching your book?

Dr. Kiser: The most surprising thing to me was just how little had previously been written about debt peonage in the American Southwest. In the past 20 years, historians have increasingly taken notice of Indian captivity and slavery in North America, but peonage in the Hispanic Southwest has somehow managed to linger in the shadows of public and academic awareness until very recently.

What do you hope people will take away from our conference on trafficking, forced labor and labor exploitation?

Dr. Kiser: The main takeaway that I’d like to see is a better understanding of just how complex and complicated slavery is in the modern world and that, contrary to popular belief, forced labor remains prevalent but largely invisible throughout parts of the United States. In this sense post-Civil War Reconstruction truly is, to borrow Eric Foner’s words, an unfinished revolution that continues to impact modern America.

What challenge(s) raised by your research are you still trying to reconcile?

Dr. Kiser: The paper I am presenting at this conference actually address this very issue. In Borderlands of Slavery, I took the story of peonage into the late 19th century, but I did not follow it into the 20th century. I am currently researching the persistence of forced labor—particularly the peonage and partido systems–in the modern American Southwest and attempting to reconcile the national ban on debt peonage in 1867 with the ongoing existence of the system, in disguised forms, into the late 20th century.

Also check out:

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest
By William S. Kiser (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017)

Categories: Center for the Study of the Southwest, Events, News, Research, Spotlights

“Chasing Slavery” Participant Spotlight: Dr. Manu Karuka

Today, conference participant Dr. Manu Karuka, Assistant Professor of American Studies, and affiliated faculty with Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, shares with us a bit about his research. He can also be found on Twitter.

Tell me in four sentences why I should read your book.

Dr. Manu Karuka: Empire’s Tracks situates the history of the transcontinental railroad within an international history of imperialism. This framework helps dispel U.S. exceptionalism, as it has constrained historical imaginations. It also clarifies the relationships between processes occurring in North America, and those occurring elsewhere in the colonized world. Such insights can solidify internationalist understandings of North America in the past, and in the present.

What was the most surprising thing you encountered when researching your book?

Dr. Karuka: Working through the archives of Indigenous life in relation to the railroad, I came across records that have been cited in scholarship, and in Congressional testimony, often to deny or dismiss the collective land claims of Indigenous nations. I was surprised to consistently find records that scholars have cited as facts, which actually appear as rumors or questions in archival documents. Thinking about this pattern, I came to call it the “prose of counter-sovereignty.”

What do you hope people will take away from our conference on trafficking, forced labor and labor exploitation?

Dr. Karuka: I believe that unity and solidarity are the primary tools to fight these forms of social suffering. I hope that participants in the conference can build their understanding, and their confidence, towards the necessary work of forging unity and solidarity in our historical moment.

What challenge(s) raised by your research are you still trying to reconcile?

Dr. Karuka: Empire’s Tracks is driven by the question: What does a genuine anti-imperialism look like, from the vantage of North America? I continue to grapple with finding an answer to that question.

Also check out:

Empire’s Tracks Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad
By Manu Karuka (University of California Press, 2019)

Categories: Center for the Study of the Southwest, Events, Research, Spotlights

“Chasing Slavery” Participant Spotlight: Dr. Annie Isabel Fukushima

Today, conference participant Dr. Annie Isabel Fukushima, Assistant Professor in the Division of Ethnic Studies with the School for Cultural & Social Transformation at University of Utah, shares with us a bit about her research. She can also be found on Twitter.

Tell me in four sentences why I should read your book.

Dr. Annie Isabel Fukushima: Migrant Crossings examines the experiences and representations of Asian and Latina/o migrants trafficking in the United States into informal economies and service industries. It is an interdisciplinary analysis through sociolegal and media analysis of court records, press release, campaigns, filmic representations, performance and the law. The book is an invitation to readers to query how readers will bear witness to migrants who experience violence in these migratory times. Anyone interested in issues regarding migration, citizenship, law and society, race, gender, transnational processes, and security should pick up this book. Readers encounter ghosts, notions of victimhood, court-performances and translation, zombified figures, and technologies of violence.

What was the most surprising thing you encountered when researching your book?

Dr. Fukushima: Part of the work was informed by my own work in community organizations. I found that a contradiction occurred. That as migrants navigated a range of institutions, they were bound to being seen in dualities of victim/criminal, legal/illegal, and citizen/noncitizen. I focused on a range of informal labor, however, informal labor cannot be disaggregated from formalized industries. And that in the campaigns and movement efforts to eradicate trafficking, the complex personhood migrants embody has been historically, socially and legally, reduced to nonhuman. And to see people for the complexity requires new modalities of witnessing. What I call, an “unsettled witnessing”.

What do you hope people will take away from our conference on trafficking, forced labor and labor exploitation?

Dr. Fukushima: I hope people will see the significant role of history and the history of the present as central to our lived realities. That while we may not be laboring in the very industries where we see as ripe for exploitation, and that we not see trafficking as “everywhere” even our “neighbor.” But instead, we see how institutions and everyday realities structures the lives and conditions that create trafficking. A complex issue, it requires a complex response from multiple fronts—social, political, legal, historical, environmental, and cultural.

What challenge(s) raised by your research are you still trying to reconcile?

Dr. Fukushima: I was left with the hauntings of how militarisms in the form of sexual slavery during war and militarized peace and (in)security served as the backdrop of my book. Additionally, Migrant Crossings is a book about labor. Therefore, I am currently working on my next book project which will dig deeper into militarisms and trafficking—however, with a particular interest in the role of contract workers. Amazing work has been done already, on sexual economies and militarized contexts. There is more to be understood regarding other forms of labor beyond sexualized industries.

Also check out:

Migrant Crossings: Witnessing Human Trafficking in the US.
By Annie Isabel Fukushima (Stanford University Press, 2019)

Categories: Center for the Study of the Southwest, Events, History at Texas State, People, Research, Spotlights

“Chasing Slavery”: An Interview with Dr. John Mckiernan-González

Today, conference co-organizer Dr. Mckiernan-González, Director of the Center for the Study of the Southwest and Associate Professor of History at Texas State University, helps introduce the conference for our readers. He can also be found on Twitter.

Give us your elevator pitch for the conference. What is it about?

Dr. John Mckiernan-González: In a broad way, this conference aims to help us understand why forced labor continued after the 13^th amendment banned slavery in the United States, and how people used the constitution to change their situation. There is a thread in anti-immigrant politics in the United States that uses the rank exploitation of people in a given community to justify the expulsion or restriction of the presence of that community in the United States – rather than treating exploitation as a shared situation and part of a broader economic relationship. This problem has been explored in depth in the U.S. South for year, from the rise of peonage during Reconstruction to the establishment of Jim Crow, and that deserves continuing exploration. By bringing a variety of perspectives, we can understand the many ways the 13^th amendment shaped labor relations in the past and present of our multi-ethnic, indigenous and immigrant Southwest. I want people to consider the criminal exploitation of workers, when conditions become visible and harsh enough to be considered a crime worth prosecuting.

In another sense, people should consider the way the challenge to forced labor, from peonage to labor trafficking, also involves a transnational response. Our keynote speaker, Ambassador Luis C. de Baca, worked with the founders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to prosecute their contractors and, in the aftermath, the C.I.W workers went on to create one of the more successful migrant labor movements in the country. As historians, we have the disciplinary space to explore what happens before and after a labor conflict becomes a criminal matter, and track what different people do after slavery and human trafficking has been charged. One answer can be: create a labor movement. Most of all, the conference should help us become more aware of the ways forced labor has shaped the Southwest.

What was the most surprising thing you encountered when researching the conference?

Dr. Mckiernan-González: Putting together the conference and the associated class on forced labor in the Southwest has been deeply educational. I now tend to see forced labor almost everywhere, either directly or lying in the wings. Most frustrating, of course, is when you realize key chapters in your work – in my case, my chapters on the (African American) Tlahualilo Colony and Camp Jenner in Eagle Pass would have been vastly improved.[1] I wish I had named the ways the medically detained refugees in Eagle Pass had to explain and challenge the contract they signed with William Ellis and the Tlahualilo corporation to demand help and resources from U.S. federal agencies. Along with a deeper appreciation of the presence of forced labor, organizing the conference has helped me think more broadly about the labor constraints facing men and women in stigmatized communities – from juvenile inmates in state asylums to deaf migrants in a transnational forced labor key chain ring.

What do you hope people will take away from our conference on trafficking, forced labor and labor exploitation?

Dr. Mckiernan-González: Hope. People have consistently challenged the constraints they have faced. Hopefully, people will leave the conference aware of the ways institutions maintain and have maintained forced labor in the Southwest and leave with an awareness that these struggles have a long and continuing history.

What challenge(s) raised by your research are you still trying to reconcile?

Dr. Mckiernan-González: Talking about the Chasing Slavery conference with soccer teammates and extended family has highlighted the way solidarity and coercion often coexist, from people sharing stories about adoption, smuggling debts to coyotes, to informal apprenticeships in semi-skilled trades like housecleaning and construction. As a historian who prefers text, I see a distant connection between what appears on paper and the everyday coercions working-class people face; the challenge lies in tracing these connections.

[1] John Mckiernan-Gonzalez, “’At the Nation’s Edge’: African American Migrants and Smallpox in the Late Nineteenth-Century Mexican American Borderlands,” Martin Summers, Laurie Green and John Mckiernan-Gonzalez, ed. Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 67-90

Also check out:

Fevered Measures Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942
By Dr. Mckiernan-González (Duke University Press, 2012)
Precarious Prescriptions Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America
Edited by Drs. Laurie B. Green, John Mckiernan-González, and Martin Summers, (Minnesota University Press, 2014)

Categories: Center for the Study of the Southwest, Events, Faculty, History at Texas State, News, People, Research, Undergraduate Students

“Chasing Slavery”: An Interview with Dr. Jessica Pliley

Today, conference co-organizer Dr. Jessica Pliley, Associate Professor of the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities at Texas State University, helps introduce the conference for our readers. She can also be found on Twitter.

Give us your elevator pitch for the conference. What is it about?

Dr. Jessica Pliley: This conference tackles the question of the various ways that forced labor has persisted in the US after emancipation. My interest in this topic was born out the research I conducted for my first book, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI. While I was deep in the investigative case files of the FBI looking for cases of investigations into violations of the 1910 White Slave Traffic Act, I regularly encountered investigations into cases of peonage in the American South. After my book was published in 2014, I became more involved in international conversations occurring among scholars thinking about trafficking and forced labor, which led me to co-organize the Working Group on Modern Slavery and Trafficking at Yale University. That two-year working group considered the ways that history can and should shape our understandings of the development of liberal political economy that is predicated on unfree labor. Partnering with the Center for the Study of the Southwest allows me to look at the ways that forced labor persisted in a discrete region—the borderlands of the Southwest. This conference aims to being together historians, sociologists, and other scholars to consider the different sites of persistent labor abuse, while attending the ways that race, ethnicity and gender shape that abuse. The other aim of the Chasing Slavery project that excites me is more pedagogical. John Mckiernan-González and I are co-teaching a graduate seminar that features the writings of many of the participants of the conference. By hosting this conference, we are providing our students a unique opportunity to meet the scholars whose ideas they have been substantively engage with in class.

What was the most surprising thing you’ve encountered when considering forced labor?

Dr. Pliley: I am consistently struck by the routine quality of extreme labor exploitation. In many ways it hides in plain view, both historically and now. It is almost impossible to find products with supply chains that are clean of labor exploitation. Everything from the tea we drink to the fast fashion we wear is produced through extreme labor exploitation. Until workers’ voices are more firmly incorporated into accountability schemes, I fear this will remain the case.

What do you hope people will take away from our conference on trafficking, forced labor and labor exploitation?

Dr. Pliley: I hope the conference will prompt attendees to look at work in new ways. I also hope that it will lead to dynamic conversations among the attendees.

What challenge(s) raised by your research are you still trying to reconcile?

Dr. Pliley: I struggle with the dominance of contractual thinking as it pertains to ‘labor’. Often times reformers will argue that the solution to poor working conditions is a better contract. But when you look at the history of contracts it becomes clear that large swaths of people, like women and people of color—the very same people who are most vulnerable to labor exploitation—were excluded from liberal contract theory. And instead the work these people labored at became racialized and gendered to justify unfree, uncompensated or poorly-compensated work. In my own area of expertise of intimate labor, the question revolves around the paradox of intimate labor. In tradition liberal thinking, laboring is a public act that can come under the protections of a contract, yet work that is intimate labor—child care, elder care, domestic labor, wifely labor, sex work—is often done in private domains of the family outside of public view.

Also, I am endlessly vexed and fascinated by the ways that extreme labor exploitation has been conflated with trafficking under the rubric of modern slavery. Like many other scholars, I am deeply critical of the use of the term “slavery,” yet I find myself bound be the term. Again and again, historical actors pulled on the evocative power of the metaphor of “slavery” to describe their own experiences or to agitate for reform. Yet, the term slavery can have a conflating effect, on the one hand, while also dismissing the horrors of chattel slavery, on the other hand. Furthermore, once ideas of trafficking get introduced into the mix, what I find is a general lack of precision about the specific abuses, processes, and choices people have faced and continue to face. I am hoping that our conversations at the conference will help me find a better vocabulary to describe the practices associated with forced and coerced labor.

Also check out:

Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI
By Dr. Jessica Pliley (Harvard University Press, 2014)
Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890–1950 Fighting Drinks, Drugs, and ‘Immorality’
Edited by Drs. Jessica Pliley, Robert Kramm, and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Categories: Center for the Study of the Southwest, Events, Faculty, News, Research, Undergraduate Students

Introducing Dr. Casey Nichols!

We are excited to welcome Dr. Casey Nichols to Texas State this semester. She studies African and Mexican American history, urban history, and social movements.

Growing up in Long Beach, California (often referred to as “The LBC”) piqued my interest in Black/Brown relations. The relationship between African Americans and Mexican Americans was fundamental to debates about urban space, education reform, and local politics in my majority people of color community on the Eastside of Long Beach. Earning a PhD provided an opportunity to construct a scholarly profile that focused on a set of issues that shaped the world I grew up in and would allow me to play a leadership role in narratives designed to tell our history.

Graduate school mentors encouraged me to cultivate an identity as a historian through my Long Beach background and inspired me to embrace my unique perspective as a historian. Thus, I turned inward and wrote a dissertation about the relationship between African Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles within the context of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. My current book project in progress, Poverty Rebels: Black and Brown Protest in Post-Civil Rights America, is a love letter to the Eastside of the LBC. <3

Teaching students from similar backgrounds as myself has always been central to my goals as an academic historian. I had the wonderful privilege of teaching students at CSU, Long Beach, Dickinson College, and CSU, East Bay before making my way to Texas State. As an undergraduate student at CSU, Long Beach, Ethnic Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies courses taught me to understand education as a gateway to freedom. As a professor, my courses focus on themes of race, ethnicity, social justice, and diversity, including my U.S. history surveys. This year I am teaching History 1320: U.S. Since 1877. I plan to offer additional courses in African American history and U.S. social justice history in the near future. My primary goal as a history professor is that students walk away from my courses with an understanding that their history matters.

Outside of research and teaching, two of my favorite activities are watching movies at the theater and baking cookies. Popcorn and a cherry Coke make any movie worth watching. Fun fact: I’ve also had Beyoncé’s Lemonade album on repeat in my car since 2016 and lost count of the how many times I’ve watched Homecoming.

Categories: Faculty, History at Texas State, Research, Spotlights

New Spring 2020: Queer Youth History

Texas State University’s Department of History will be offering its first undergraduate queer history course spring 2020. Taught by Dr. Louie Dean Valencia-García, the course will be offered on Monday/Wednesday from 12:30-1:50pm. Feel free to email Dr. Valencia-García with any questions.

What should students expect?

LDVG: Students will learn about the long history of young queer people beginning in the 16th century through today. The course crosses the Atlantic between the Americas and Europe and beyond.We will read graphic novels, watch films, and learn about what is really a vibrant field. Students will research, create a digital projects, look at primary and secondary sources, and study the ways young queer people have made space for themselves.

Who should take this course?

LDVG: This will be the type of course I wish was offered when I was an undergraduate. I hope it is of interest to all students who are interested in marginalized people. This isn’t a course that is just about the obstacles people face; we also spend a fair amount of the course trying to see how they confronted adversity both politically and in their every day lives.

Categories: News, Undergraduate Students

Who was Retta Murphy?

One hundred years ago, in 1919, Retta Murphy arrived to San Marcos, Texas to teach history on the faculty of what is now Texas State University. Although she did not have her PhD when she arrived, she eventually went on to become the first Texas State University woman faculty member to hold a Ph.D. (Latin American History from U.T.-Austin in 1938.) Thousands of people have taken classes in the building that bears Dr. Murphy’s name, Taylor-Murphy Hall—the home of the Texas State Department of History.

In his book, Up the Hill, Down the Years, Dr. Ronald Brown writes: “When the History Department moved into the old Fine Arts Building, the faculty requested that the building be renamed to honor James Taylor and Retta Murphy, who had shaped the modern History Department and were early advocates of gender equity.” Dr. Murphy certainly left her mark on the University.

Dr. Emmie Craddock—a history professor, former mayor of San Marcos, and the founder of what is now the Texas State University Honors College—shared an office with Dr. Retta Murphy for a time. She called Dr. Murphy “one of the great legendary figures” of Texas State University.

Many years after Dr. Murphy’s death, Dr. William C. Pool said of Murphy, “She was a tower [of] strength… in the department…[She had] a fine dry wit that was almost unbelievable. Yes, we all loved Retta Murphy.”

Describing Dr. Murphy at a commencement address, Dr. Craddock said, “For years on end Dr. Murphy arrived at her office every morning at nine and left at five, except on Saturdays when she went home at one; and she studied as diligently on the last day she ever taught as she had from the first day of her teaching.”

Dr. Craddock continued, “Literally thousands of students who were lucky enough to have a course with her felt the clarity of her mind, the absolute integrity of her life in all of its aspects. She had no time for preten[s]e or sloppy thinking and she dearly loved to deflate the arrogant, a feat she could accomplish instantly with a comment both cryptic and deadly.”

Although she was known for “a rather brusque exterior” Dr. Craddock said underneath that “lay a heart as malleable as a child’s and a generosity of spirit which knew few bounds.” For Dr. Craddock, “[Murphy] never demanded more of others than she asked of herself, and few ever left her classes without feeling the rapier thrust of her mind and the breadth of her learning. She also had a quick and wonderful wit.”

Although, as a woman, Dr. Murphy certainly faced her obstacles. Despite temporarily serving as chair of the Division of Social Sciences, Dr. Murphy was not offered the position permanently. When asked why she was not named chair herself, she replied, “Because I wear my pants on the inside instead of the outside.’”

“She was a marvelous Presbyterian, a wonderful history teacher, straight as a die, and not afraid of anything, the devil included,” Dr. Craddock said of Dr. Murphy.

To celebrate the 100^th anniversary of Dr. Murphy coming to San Marcos, we wanted to share with you her 1909 travels through Europe, 110 years ago, which lasted from 14 June-4 September 1909. Her entire scrapbook is available online through Texas State University Archives.

Here is a sneak peek:

Categories: Faculty, History at Texas State, Spotlights

Texas State History condemns bigoted speech

The Texas State Department of History embraces all of our students and all of our histories, and strongly condemns bigoted speech. Our entire faculty has met today and want to thank Texas State students for their courage in confronting racism. Please always feel welcome to come speak to our Chair or any faculty member if you feel uncomfortable in class-related activity.

Our Statement on Diversity and Inclusion

The department of history recognizes that the students, staff, faculty, and administration of Texas State University have been threatened because they adhere to the University’s stated value of “A diversity of people and ideas, a spirit of inclusiveness, a global perspective, and a sense of community as essential conditions for campus life.” As historians, we are acutely aware of the diversity of historical narratives. As teachers, we are dedicated to introducing our Texas State students to the variety of cultures and peoples that co-exist in our world. Therefore, committed as we are to the freedom of expression, we condemn bigoted speech, which threatens public safety, restricts academic freedom, and tacitly justifies hate. This rejection affirms our belief that a fuller understanding of our diverse pasts is essential to understanding our shared history and our common present.

Categories: History at Texas State

Sidebar

About us