Centering the Forbidden: Race and Labor in Texas

• In Event: In Pursuit of Racial Justice: Contesting State Violence With a Pedagogy for the People

Abstract

Racial justice and labor struggles are interconnected, but seldom receive the attention they deserve in politically hostile terrains such as Texas. While some state politicians promote the notion that Texas is a “great place to do business,” the reality is that a large underclass of racialized and exploited laborers work for low wages and in harsh working conditions. Located near the U.S.-Mexico border, San Antonio and the rest of South Texas are situated at the nexus between U.S. capital and Latin American economic circuits in a way that sustains an impoverished local labor class largely of Mexican origin while perpetually inviting opportunistic investors to reap the benefits of this exploitative labor system. It is this long standing crisis of racial labor exploitation within a state bent on obscuring it that drove the People’s Academy of the Democratizing Racial Justice project at UTSA to host a labor panel in April of 2022. The panel included labor organizers, past and present, from across the city and region to exchange ideas and solutions to the area’s widespread labor exploitation with a public audience. This paper revisits the rich dialogue from that event, one that pushed the audience to consider the relationship between race, racism, and labor exploitation. I argue that educators must consider and confront the ways in which their schools/institutions exist as processing plants for the distribution of racially segmented labor classes if we are to pursue the worthwhile goal of racial justice. This paper discusses several strategies for doing so and serves as a model for community-engaged, public-facing scholarship.
Racial capitalism refers to the interconnectedness of capital accumulation and racial exploitation. In South Texas, the lived experiences of most Mexicans have served as clear examples of this theory for over a century. In 1927 a Chicago-based land company created a silent film (“Lure of the Rio Grande Valley”) targeting White Midwesterners to convince them to buy farmland in “the Valley” of South Texas. One scene sold these prospective land purchasers on this investment idea by highlighting that the “Mexican labor force in the Valley is ideal: abundant, peaceful, obedient, and cheap.” As a consequence of these prevailing racial attitudes, what emerged in the early 20th century in much of South Texas was an agricultural empire managed almost exclusively by Whites while the local Mexican population toiled at wages far lower than other parts of the country as a racialized labor class. Today, South Texas remains highly Mexican and highly exploited. The Valley leads the nation in cases of wage theft and San Antonio, South Texas’ metropolis, is the poorest metro city in the United States.
Beyond a review of the labor panel, this paper includes analysis from years of ongoing ethnographic research on Latinx laborers in the U.S. which includes a wide array of data sources from interviews to archival data. This data paints a grim picture for Latinx workers in the U.S., but also reveals ways in which people push back against labor exploitation.

Author

• Jose Villagran, University of Texas - San Antonio