This article examines how U.S. and Mexican policies in the 1920s aimed at preventing and regulating Asian, South, and Eastern European immigration, shaped migrant smuggling strategies. By tracing the journeys of Chinese, Italians, and Jews to the United States, the article explores the construction of immigration regulations and methods to circumvent them. Focusing on transit migration, I show how U.S. immigration quotas and Mexican controls spurred the smuggling business and enabled corruption in Mexican immigration offices. The article underscores the role of transnational communities, family networks, and migrant contacts in financing and facilitating unauthorized migration through Mexico, at times using stopovers in Central America. This analysis illustrates how racialized immigration surveillance redirected migration routes and fostered businesses that evaded or enforced immigration controls in Mexico, shedding light on the factors shaping U.S.-Mexican borderland migration patterns.
During the Vietnam War, the US military and associated contractors employed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and third country nationals. The U.S. Office of Civilian Personnel (OCP), charged with overseeing labor relations in Vietnam, introduced grievance processes, labor-employer councils, training programs, union-friendly policies, and other reforms—with the goal of serving U.S. war aims and modernizing the Vietnamese workforce. The results were mixed. Work stoppages, in particular, presented serious challenges, as did the U.S. demobilization completed in 1973. Still, U.S. labor policies in Vietnam hardly resembled the oppressive, racialized imperialism depicted by some scholars. The OCP’s story adds yet another level to our understanding of the complex American mission in Southeast Asia and the equally involved debates among South Vietnamese about democracy and modernization.
This article traces the history of the Phoenixonian Institute, one of the earliest sites of Black education in the state of California, which operated from 1862 to 1875. Although it entered the Union as a free state, California’s public schools initially barred Black students (along with Indigenous and Chinese students) from admission. In response, Black Californians worked to build an educational infrastructure of their own. This article argues that Black communities pursued schooling actively throughout the state’s early history, relying on the transcontinental activism of Black educators, who carried traditions of abolitionist politics, community activism, and legislative appeal with them as they migrated to the West. In doing so, this study adds a needed dimension to the history of Black education in the United States, expanding a literature which has traditionally centered the South, and deepens our understanding of community formation and political activism in the Black West.
