2019 Labor Studies Workshare Series
"Challenging Border Confinement: Organized Labor, the Chicano Movement, and the Transborder Politics of Farmworker Healthcare" w/Michael Aguirre, PhD Candidate, UW History The Labor Studies Workshare features UW faculty and graduate students presenting works-in-progress on labor-related topics for feedback from an interdisciplinary audience of labor scholars from across campus. Workshares are typically held over the lunch hour and attendees are invited to bring their lunches. Abstract: This chapter argues that migrant healthcare by the United Farm Workers (UFW) and the Chicano Movement’s Clinica de Salubridad de Campesinos (Clinica) in the Imperial-Mexicali borderlands was a labor and social movement politic to provide access to medicine to marginalized farmworkers from both sides of the international border. Though growers and conservative voices continued to see the border as a site of exploitable labor, the UFW and Clinica offered a counternarrative that understood the borderlands as a place of opportunity to launch an innovative social and labor policy that challenged the confines of a regulated and bifurcated border space. Michael D. Aguirre is completing his PhD in the Department of History at the University of Washington, Seattle. He will be an Inequality in America Initiative postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University beginning in Fall 2019. His work appears in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era, edited by Maylei Blackwell, Maria Cotera, and Dionne Espinoza (UT Press, 2018). Workshare Format: Workshare papers are circulated to registered attendees a week in advance of the workshare. Participants are expected to have read the paper before the meeting and be prepared for a discussion. Registration required. To register, e-mail hbcls@uw.edu |