Logics of debt: rethinking im/mobility and coercion in the context of the Programa Bracero, 1942–1964

The agricultural workforce in the United States has historically been shaped by the enduring, yet evolving legacy of slavery. In the so-called Black Belt of the post-emancipation period, contract and waged labor created new opportunities for coercion. Employers fabricated, manipulated or simply benefitted from workers’ indebtedness to cut labor costs, control mobility and perpetuate racialised hierarchical relations. In 20th century United States, Mexican migrants replaced African-Americans on the fields in some locales, such as the cotton fields in Texas since the 1920s and in Arkansas in the 1950s. However, even as agribusiness expanded and conquered new agricultural areas in Florida, Texas and California, the cultural legacy of the unfree labor conditions to which African-Americans had been subjected since emancipation continued to bear on the circumstances in which Mexican workers found themselves.
In this paper, we examine the intertwined “logics of debt” that characterized the subjective experience of Mexican migrants in southwestern US agricultural fields. The paper challenges established scholarship that considers indebtment limited to specific labor sites, or only as a material burden for workers. We adopt a broader perspective by identifying both the material and immaterial dimensions as constituent and related components of debt; by understanding debt both as a mean of coercion that allows workers immobilization and as a workers’ strategy to develop social mobility; by considering indebtment as a process of debt accumulation that starts in the migrants’ community of departure and increases while workers navigate the labor regime; by investigating the role of contract and its enforcement in fostering debt and spatial coercion.