Challenging Border Confinement: Organized Labor, the Chicano Movement, and the Transborder Politics of Farmworker Healthcare, Michael D. Aguirre (Labor Studies Workshare , 5/22/2019)
Posted: 5/13/2019 (Local Events)
This paper, a chapter of Aguirre’s dissertation, 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).
Date: 05/22/2019
Time: 12:00-1:30 PM
Location: Smith Hall, Room 306