Abstract
This paper investigates the dynamic relation between the transnational social practices of migrant workers and the continuous attempt to capture them into articulated labour regimes across Mexico and the United States. In the first half of the twentieth century, the attempts of capturing workers’ kinship networks and their turbulent movements across the border by the individual action of employers and recruiters was then supported and reorganized by governments under the so-called Bracero Programme. This became the constitutive and permanent inner workings of the capitalist mode of production during the Western economic boom that aimed to valorize the mobility, disposability, and precariousness of migrant workers. Through secondary and primary sources, this paper aims to study the creation of a factory of mobility through the analysis of the tumultuous relation between migrant practices and capitalism’s transformation. This chapter aims to present precarity as coextensive with the inner workings of wage labour already in the Fordist regime, and as a constitutive element of the capitalist mode of production beyond Western borders in order to shed light on the issue of precarity in a transnational, non-European space.
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Acknowledgements
The research for this paper was financially supported by the Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs at Harvard University during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (2014–2015), and it was discussed at Cardiff University during the British International Studies Association conference thanks to a travel grant issued by Georgia Institute of Technology on October 2016.
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Bernardi, C. (2021). Within the Factory of Mobility: Practices of Mexican Migrant Workers in the Twentieth-Century US Labour Regimes. In: Vij, R., Kazi, T., Wynne-Hughes, E. (eds) Precarity and International Relations. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51096-1_10
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