Maria L. Quintana, "Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

New Books in American Politics

Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) explores the origins of twentieth-century U.S. guestworker programs from Mexico and the Caribbean. It investigates these government-sponsored programs as the unexplored consequence of the history of enslaved labor, Japanese American incarceration, the New Deal, the long civil rights movement, and Caribbean decolonization. Quintana shifts the focus on guestworker programs to the arena of political conflict, revealing how fierce debates over the bracero program and Caribbean contract labor programs extended and legitimated U.S. racial and imperial domination into the present era. Her work also unearths contract workers' emerging visions of social justice that challenged this reproduction of race and empire, giving freedom new meanings that must be contemplated

Dr. Quintana earned her Ph.D. at the University of Washington and taught at San Francisco State’s College of Ethnic Studies before joining the Department of History at California State University, Sacramento.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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