Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona

On any given day in Arizona, residents encounter a common circumstance: thousands of Mexican-descent workers labor each day to make living in urban and rural areas possible. The majority of such workers are largely invisible. Their work as caretakers of children and the elderly, dishwashers or cooks in restaurants, hotel housekeeping staff, and in many other settings remains in the shadows of an economy dependent on their labor. Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona centers on the production of an elastic supply of labor, revealing how this long-standing approach to the building of Arizona obscures important power relations and the role of the state in aiding the position of corporations vis-à-vis labor in the production of wealth. Building on recent scholarship about Chicanas/os and others, the volume insightfully describes how U.S. employers such as railroads, mines, and agriculture fostered the recruitment of Mexican labor, thus ensuring the presence of a surplus labor pool that expands and contracts to accommodate production and profit goals. Taking a longer perspective, the volume's contributors delve into examples of migration and settlement of the Salt River Valley; the mobilization and immobilization of cotton workers in the 1920s; miners and their challenge to a dual wage in Miami, Arizona; Mexican American women workers in midcentury Phoenix; the 1980s Morenci copper miners' strike and Chicana mobilization; Arizona's industrial and agribusiness demands for Mexican contract labor; and the labor rights violations of construction workers today. This volume fills an important vacuum in our understanding of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Southwest by turning the scholarly gaze to Arizona, which has had a long-standing impact on national policy and politics.