“In Pursuit of A Double-Edged Sword: The Politics of Racial Liberalism and Racial Triangulation in Seattle, 1940-1975” examines the historical constructions of racial liberalism in Seattle and analyzes their impact on the sociopolitical standing of the city’s Asian Americans and African Americans, its two largest nonwhite communities. Between 1940 and 1975, programs and accomplishments in the area of racial politics reinforced a widespread notion that Seattle, a city amenable to liberal policies and social experimentation, had few racial problems. While many major cities experienced outbreaks of racial violence and witnessed development of expansive ghettoes during this period, Seattle was never site to any race riots, nor did it have any ghettoes comparable in size or deterioration to those that would capture the national spotlight in the 1960s. Bolstering perceptions of Seattle as a paragon of race relations were a series of prominent undertaking by city officials and residents that sought to promote core tenets of racial liberalism--such as racial integration, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism—as well as allocate unprecedented levels of civic resources and government assistance funds to nonwhite populations. Using four such projects as case studies, I explore the implications that Seattle’s brand of racial liberalism bore for national constructions of racial hierarchies and white privilege during the height of U.S. liberal politics. Throughout my analyses, I will demonstrate that racial liberalism was a double-edged sword for Seattle’s nonwhite populations. Even though Asian Americans and African Americans gained unprecedented access to socioeconomic mobility and governmental resources, a critical examination of Seattle’s racial liberalist projects reveals that socioeconomic gains were very limited and were frequently circumscribed by political devices that served to reinforce white privilege and racial triangulation of the city’s Asian Americans and African Americans. In the end, racial liberalism and racial triangulation served to position the city’s Asian Americans and African Americans against one another in competition for resources while still allocating the lion’s share to white populations. Such developments in a city that labeled itself to be a paragon of racial liberalism is thus highly instructive of how comparable projects functioned on a national scale.

This dissertation argues that the agriculture industry in California’s Imperial Valley has enjoyed ample access to cheap labor since the mid-twentieth century because Mexicali, Baja California Norte, its Mexican neighbor, has subsidized the reproduction of a transborder labor force employed in agriculture but otherwise denied social membership in the United States. This subsidy from Mexicali to the Imperial Valley began in 1942 with the start of the Bracero Program and continued well past the program’s end in 1964. The guest worker program produced contrasting socioeconomic transformations on each side of the border: the Imperial Valley obtained a cheap source of labor, while Mexicali faced mounting socioeconomic pressures from a growing and urbanizing population.

Cheap for Whom demonstrates that key individuals and institutions on both sides of the US-Mexico border learned important lessons about the profitability of creating a transborder labor force that externalized labor maintenance and reproduction to Mexico. The Bracero Program normalized the practice of employing workers—or as the Spanish term “bracero” suggests, employing brazos (arms)—without incorporating them into the communities where they labored. The social costs of maintaining a seasonal migrant labor force, in other words, remained hidden under the Bracero Program because braceros were employed in the United States during seasonal periods of labor need and expected to return to their families and communities in Mexico once they were no longer required in American fields. The Bracero Program was thus a pivotal moment in the US transition from importing workers to exporting jobs; it served as a first exercise in outsourcing the responsibilities of maintaining and reproducing workers.

This dissertation is about the relationship between Indigenous people’s efforts to create conditions in which communal life was possible, which I term worldmaking, and the world capitalist crises that strove to incorporate them and the people of southern Mexico as a new racialized labor force along the US/Mexican Pacific Coast from 1968 to 1994. I argue that Indigenous people from Oaxaca enacted collective processes of worldmaking which transformed their placed-based communal life of their pueblos into a key source to confront and expose the overlapping histories of racial capitalism between Mexico and the United States. Indigenous people built new relationships among each other and with other racialized groups they met along the way while they also transformed the spatial organization of their specific local context that they found themselves in. The years between 1968 and 1994 are chosen to denote an era of ongoing capitalist crises in which Oaxacan Indigenous people confronted the forces of globalization, specific to their regional contexts, that reverberated across different populations and vast regions in Mexico and the world. Yet as I show, the emergence of the particular migrant circuit from Oaxaca was never inevitable. Some Indigenous people and nonindigenous campesinos through worldmaking activities challenged the changes in their local economies that disrupted communal life in Oaxaca, others left their homelands and struggled across multiple landscapes of Baja California and California, all while they attempted to create new worlds for themselves that provided alternatives to imperial borders and the divisions reinforced by the expansion of racial capitalism during this era.