Description
After 1986, border fortification pushed more Mexican men and women to permanently settle in the United States, ending a largely masculine and temporary migrant circuit that dated back to the Bracero Program. While they left much behind, migrant women carried diverse entrepreneurial strategies they had used in their hometowns to survive Mexico’s late-century economic crises. Through oral interviews, private ephemera, and archival records, this paper explores how migrant women embedded familiar ventures into their social lives to fill in for shortcomings in migrant labor markets and exclusions from public and private services in the late-twentieth century United States. Averting the state’s eyes and limiting their paper trails, they sold food in backyards, cared for neighborhood children at home, sold cosmetics and cookware in living rooms, and more. Beyond sustaining their families, migrant women bolstered transnational local economies through their ventures. In doing so, they subverted the individualistic ethos of U.S. entrepreneurialism and transformed Mexico—long viewed as a labor-sending state—into a place from which countless entrepreneurs also departed.
About the Speaker
Gabriel Panuco-Mercado is a PhD student in history at Stanford University with a focus on late-twentieth century Mexican migration to the United States. His research explores the gendered contours of migration, racial capitalism, and spatial politics and draws extensively on oral history. He is an EDGE Fellow and a RAISE Fellow, and he co-founded and co-organizes the Mexican and Mexican American Studies Reading Group, the Latin American and Caribbean History Workshop, and the Global Studies in Migration and Diaspora Workshop.
About the Borderlands and Latino/a Studies Seminar Series
The Newberry Borderlands and Latino/a Studies Seminar provides a forum for works-in-progress from scholars and graduate students that explore a variety of topics in the field. Seminars are conversational and free and open to faculty, graduate students, and members of the public, who register in advance to request papers.
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This event is free, but all participants must register in advance. Space is limited, so please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend.
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