Within the factory of mobility. Practices of Mexican migrant workers in the 20th century US labor regimes

This paper investigates the dynamic relation between the transnational social practices of migrant workers and the continuous attempt to capture them into articulated labour regimes across Mexico and United States. In the first half of the 20th century, the attempts of capturing workers’ kinship networks and their turbulent movements across the border by the individual action of employers and recruiters was then supported and reorganised by governments under the so-called Bracero Program. This became the constitutive and permanent inner workings of the capitalist mode of production during the Western economic boom that aimed to valorise the mobility, disposability and precariousness of migrant workers. Through secondary and primary sources, this paper aims to study the creation of a factory of mobility through the analysis of the tumultuous relation between migrant practices and capitalism’s transformation. This chapter aims to present precarity as coextensive with the inner workings of wage labour already in the Fordist regime, and as a constitutive element of capitalist mode of production beyond Western borders in order to shed light on the issue of precarity in a transnational, non-European space.