Papers by Naomi A Calnitsky
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Left History, 2018
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Otherness: Essays and Studies, 2018
This article considers two periods in American history and one in Canadian history to discern the... more This article considers two periods in American history and one in Canadian history to discern the ways in which Mexican farm labour experiences were uniquely shaped by employer preferences, and desires, as well as needs and prejudices. More specifically is considers how definitions of the other were constructed around national idealizations that sought out a reshaping of labour migration or labour's repatriation in accordance with officially-oriented programs of transnational labour management. It begins with the Great Depression (ca. 1929-39), then considers the Bracero Program (1942-64) and concludes with a review of the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (1974-Present). It explores the three selected time periods together with a view towards the ways in which Mexican workforces were maintained, managed, viewed, appreciated and/or derided, as far as is discernable through the archive, a reading of secondary literature, and a selection of media studies.
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How might transnationalism be applied to black and brown power consciousness-raising in the Weste... more How might transnationalism be applied to black and brown power consciousness-raising in the Western Pacific? How does Mar consider these threads in two movements, one Polynesian and another Melanesian, in their own contexts? In threading black and brown power narratives into the telling of the Vanua'aku Pati and Polynesian Panthers, how does Decolonisation and the Pacific holistically reinterpret anti-colonial and anti-racism movements across the Western Pacific?
With the Vanua’aku Pati and Melanesian decolonisation, the transnational mobilities of leaders are underscored alongside questions of pan-Pacific anti-colonial thought. Under Walter Lini’s leadership, Vanuatu’s “Party of Our Land” was dominant to 1991, persisting in its post-colonial politics ever since. The Polynesian Panthers, also founded
in 1971, promoted unity and self-defense in 1970s New Zealand from police harassment,
their local identity politics inspired by “global” ideas and events.
This paper considers how Mar’s concept of ‘imperial literacy’, a version of early anticolonial
agency highlighted in the early chapters of the book, was supplanted in the second half of the century by black and brown power liberation narratives that moved beyond an acceptance of colonialism and a faith in negotiation for reform and towards more Pacific-centered understandings of agency inspired by events occurring globally.
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Review of Pan American Women: US Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico. By Megan Threlkeld
... more Review of Pan American Women: US Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico. By Megan Threlkeld
HISPANIC AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 98.1 (2018)
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Journal of the Polynesian Society, 2017
This paper explores the historiography of Hawaiian mobility in the 19th century, with reference t... more This paper explores the historiography of Hawaiian mobility in the 19th century, with reference to mobilities that took place through Kānaka Maoli engagements as servants for the Hudson’s Bay Company of London. In recharting Hawaiian mobilities to the Pacific Northwest, it considers how Kānaka Maoli histories were intertwined with trans-Pacific networks of commerce and a broader Pacific world of aspirational mobility, extractive marine-based industries, and ultimately, a land-based fur trade centered initially at Fort Astoria. It discusses how Hawaiian engagements with the HBC in the Pacific Northwest were formative for their eventual incorporation into the colonial settler world of British Columbia, and examines their displacement from Oregon Territory in the wake of the 1846 boundary settlement. It incorporates themes of intimacy, encounter and hierarchy as key sites for locating Hawaiian social histories along the Northwest Coast. Finally, the Hawaiian presence in British Columbia is traced with attention to community formation and land acquisition. Whether or not they fit within a broader category of pioneer-settlers, the “Kanakas” displaced to the Northwest Coast were for a time first positioned along what historian Adele Perry has termed the “ragged margins” of empire.
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Introduction
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Review of Hector Torres, Conversations with Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Writers. The Oral Hi... more Review of Hector Torres, Conversations with Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Writers. The Oral History Review Summer/Fall 2017. Volume 44 Issue 2.
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Review of Karen Dubinsky, Cuba Beyond the Beach: Stories of Life in Havana (Between the Lines Press)
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In the years following World War I, women activists in the United States and Europe saw themselve... more In the years following World War I, women activists in the United States and Europe saw themselves as leaders of a globalizing movement to promote women's rights and international peace. In hopes of advancing alliances, U.S. internationalists such as Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Doris Stevens reached across the border to their colleagues in Mexico, including educator Margarita Robles de Mendoza and feminist Hermila Galindo. They established new organizations, sponsored conferences, and rallied for peaceful relations between the two countries. But diplomatic tensions and the ongoing Mexican Revolution complicated their efforts.
In Pan American Women, Megan Threlkeld chronicles the clash of political ideologies between U.S. and Mexican women during an era of war and revolution. Promoting a "human internationalism" (in the words of Addams), U.S. women overestimated the universal acceptance of their ideas. They considered nationalism an ethos to be overcome, while the revolutionary spirit of Mexico inspired female citizens there to embrace ideas and reforms that focused on their homeland. Although U.S. women gradually became less imperialistic in their outlook and more sophisticated in their organizational efforts, they could not overcome the deep divide between their own vision of international cooperation and Mexican women's nationalist aspirations.
Pan American Women exposes the tensions of imperialism, revolutionary nationalism, and internationalism that challenged women's efforts to build an inter-American movement for peace and equality, in the process demonstrating the importance of viewing women's political history through a wider geographic lens.
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Review of Classic Maya Polities of the Southern Lowlands: Integration, Interaction, Dissolution
Classic Maya Polities of the Southern Lowlands investigates Maya political and social structure i... more Classic Maya Polities of the Southern Lowlands investigates Maya political and social structure in the southern lowlands, assessing, comparing, and interpreting the wide variation in Classic period Maya polity and city composition, development, and integration. Traditionally, discussions of Classic Maya political organization have been dominated by the debate over whether Maya polities were centralized or decentralized. With new, largely unpublished data from several recent archaeological projects, this book examines the premises, strengths, and weaknesses of these two perspectives before moving beyond this long-standing debate and into different territory. The volume examines the articulations of the various social and spatial components of Maya polity—the relationships, strategies, and practices that bound households, communities, institutions, and dynasties into enduring (or short-lived) political entities. By emphasizing the internal negotiation of polity, the contributions provide an important foundation for a more holistic understanding of how political organization functioned in the Classic period. Contributors include Francisco Estrada Belli, James L. Fitzsimmons, Sarah E. Jackson, Caleb Kestle, Brigitte Kovacevich, Allan Maca, Damien B. Marken, James Meierhoff, Timothy Murtha, Cynthia Robin, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Andrew Wyatt.
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In the context of the CHA’s upcoming theme, “From Far and Wide,” this paper will
discuss often ne... more In the context of the CHA’s upcoming theme, “From Far and Wide,” this paper will
discuss often neglected stories of seasonal “foreign” farm workers and their portrayal in
narrative discourses from political and journalistic sources in Canada in the postwar era.
The Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (CSAWP or SAWP), which also
includes farm hand migrations from the Caribbean region, had origins in an “Offshore
Program” that was initiated in 1966 with the Caribbean region only. Extended to Mexico
in 1974, the SAWP can be read as part of a longer history of managed agricultural
migration on the North American content. This form of bilateral and legalized
agricultural labour management was used in the United States with the Bracero Program
of 1942. In this paper, I will discuss key themes of interest in the history of temporary
migrations between Mexico and Canada, including the role of family and gender and the
male migrant as “breadwinner,” the later emergence of women migrants in the program,
the function of Mexican officials in Canada in reducing migrant labour disputes and
unionization efforts in Canada, and the specific, subjective, individual and “subaltern”
stories of migrant workers uncovered through an oral history case study carried out
among Mexican SAWP workers in British Columbia and Manitoba between 2012 and
2015. The paper discusses themes of exclusion and invisibility, human rights, differential
wage standards, and “complementarity” in farm work in a context of prior competition
with First Nations’ in both Ontario’s and Manitoba’s agricultural sectors.
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Between 1921 and 1940, some 21,922 Indochinese indentured workers, most from the densely populati... more Between 1921 and 1940, some 21,922 Indochinese indentured workers, most from the densely population Tonkin region, arrived in the colonial New Hebrides, now modern-day Vanuatu, a Melanesian island chain that came under the joint rule of British and French colonists as part of a Condominium established over the islands in 1906. Indentured contracts lasted five years, and also included women. The French trading firm Ballande was responsible for the recruiting and transporting ends of this Indo-Chinese labour traffic to the colonial New Hebrides in the twentieth century. Themes of interest in this talk will include the historical context of French Indo-China, the colonial context of the Anglo-French Condominium in the New Hebrides, and other contexts of native Melanesian labour in the colony. While cash cropping in the New Hebrides commenced in the 1860s, the plantation sector in the colonial New Hebrides long experienced labour shortages due to poor conditions and low wages since the nineteenth century. Recruitment from Tonkin produced mobile work forces that moved from one plantation to the next and earned four to five times as much as the local native population would earn, and in most cases, natives of the New Hebrides were not easily induced into plantation work in their own “backyards.” The talk will also draw on the scholarship of the anthropologist Margaret Rodman, whose work on the spatial-colonial history of the New Hebrides touches on the themes considered here.
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Why bother writing or collecting oral histories? What is the usefulness of oral accounts in a w... more Why bother writing or collecting oral histories? What is the usefulness of oral accounts in a world consumed by information overload? Do oral histories matter?
This paper will seek to untangle the reasons for pursuing oral history research in an academic context, to re-examine the broader social implications of academic work in the real world. When pursuing labour history, oral histories can serve as a highly democratizing method for intervening in existing bodies of literature, and in archives dense with information but often occluding human voices.
As part of my PhD dissertation research in history, I conducted a set of oral history case studies in Manitoba and British Columbia with migrant farmworkers from Mexico, both women and men, employed through the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. While pursuing research in the field, I quickly found that migrants were more willing to converse in their native language, and were typically averse to consenting to participate in my project if they were required to sign a form. By using an oral consent in the field approach, and a more conversational interview structure, rather than approaching the interview with a structured questionnaire, I was able to collect a better record of the migrant workers’ thoughts, opinions, stories, expectations, hopes and dreams. By offering a window into their opinions on life and work in Canada, my work sought to complicate the existing record on migrant labour in Canada. By also critiquing existing academic approaches that consistently viewed migrant farmworkers as victims, I was able to construct an alternate archive that highlighted real workers’ voices and thoughts.
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Born in 1942 in Mexico City, Graciela Iturbide would emerge as one of the most celebrated Mexican... more Born in 1942 in Mexico City, Graciela Iturbide would emerge as one of the most celebrated Mexican female photographers of the twentieth century. She worked as assistant to Manuel Alvarez Bravo, once husband of Lola Alvarez Bravo after attending film school at the UNAM, enrolling at twenty-seven. In 1978, Iturbide would later photograph the Seri Indians of Sonora for the Ethnographic Archive of the National Indigenous Institute of Mexico, published as " Those Who Live in the Sand / Los que Vivos en la arena " (1981). The following year, Iturbide began a decade-long project with a Zapotec Indian community in Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca, upon invitation from the artist Francisco Toledo, culminating in the publication of her photographic book, Juchitán de las Mujeres. Notable among this collection of photographs was Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, or " Our Lady of the Iguanas, " a gelatin silver photograph taken in 1979 that details the dignity, power and self-assured gaze of a defiant female Zapotec woman crowned by iguanas. The collection shows how female dominance over ritual and culture proved an anomaly in the matriarchal town of Juchitán, where a queer culture also flourished. The photograph, " Magnolia, " taken in 1986, depicted a man in a dress whose face is reflected in a hand-held mirror, one of the most overt expressions of queerness captured in Iturbide's oeuvre. Although she did not define herself as one, Stanley Brandes referred to her an " innate anthropologist. " This paper will examine Iturbide's work in the context of her emphasis upon female and feminine subjects in the Juchitán collection, including transvestitism and cross-dressing that help define a " third gender " known as muxhes. Graciela's photographs of indigeneity and waywardly culture in Juchitán came to embody a subversive village poetic that ran countercurrent to depictions of female subjects in Mexico as subservient.
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Papers by Naomi A Calnitsky
With the Vanua’aku Pati and Melanesian decolonisation, the transnational mobilities of leaders are underscored alongside questions of pan-Pacific anti-colonial thought. Under Walter Lini’s leadership, Vanuatu’s “Party of Our Land” was dominant to 1991, persisting in its post-colonial politics ever since. The Polynesian Panthers, also founded
in 1971, promoted unity and self-defense in 1970s New Zealand from police harassment,
their local identity politics inspired by “global” ideas and events.
This paper considers how Mar’s concept of ‘imperial literacy’, a version of early anticolonial
agency highlighted in the early chapters of the book, was supplanted in the second half of the century by black and brown power liberation narratives that moved beyond an acceptance of colonialism and a faith in negotiation for reform and towards more Pacific-centered understandings of agency inspired by events occurring globally.
HISPANIC AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 98.1 (2018)
In Pan American Women, Megan Threlkeld chronicles the clash of political ideologies between U.S. and Mexican women during an era of war and revolution. Promoting a "human internationalism" (in the words of Addams), U.S. women overestimated the universal acceptance of their ideas. They considered nationalism an ethos to be overcome, while the revolutionary spirit of Mexico inspired female citizens there to embrace ideas and reforms that focused on their homeland. Although U.S. women gradually became less imperialistic in their outlook and more sophisticated in their organizational efforts, they could not overcome the deep divide between their own vision of international cooperation and Mexican women's nationalist aspirations.
Pan American Women exposes the tensions of imperialism, revolutionary nationalism, and internationalism that challenged women's efforts to build an inter-American movement for peace and equality, in the process demonstrating the importance of viewing women's political history through a wider geographic lens.
discuss often neglected stories of seasonal “foreign” farm workers and their portrayal in
narrative discourses from political and journalistic sources in Canada in the postwar era.
The Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (CSAWP or SAWP), which also
includes farm hand migrations from the Caribbean region, had origins in an “Offshore
Program” that was initiated in 1966 with the Caribbean region only. Extended to Mexico
in 1974, the SAWP can be read as part of a longer history of managed agricultural
migration on the North American content. This form of bilateral and legalized
agricultural labour management was used in the United States with the Bracero Program
of 1942. In this paper, I will discuss key themes of interest in the history of temporary
migrations between Mexico and Canada, including the role of family and gender and the
male migrant as “breadwinner,” the later emergence of women migrants in the program,
the function of Mexican officials in Canada in reducing migrant labour disputes and
unionization efforts in Canada, and the specific, subjective, individual and “subaltern”
stories of migrant workers uncovered through an oral history case study carried out
among Mexican SAWP workers in British Columbia and Manitoba between 2012 and
2015. The paper discusses themes of exclusion and invisibility, human rights, differential
wage standards, and “complementarity” in farm work in a context of prior competition
with First Nations’ in both Ontario’s and Manitoba’s agricultural sectors.
This paper will seek to untangle the reasons for pursuing oral history research in an academic context, to re-examine the broader social implications of academic work in the real world. When pursuing labour history, oral histories can serve as a highly democratizing method for intervening in existing bodies of literature, and in archives dense with information but often occluding human voices.
As part of my PhD dissertation research in history, I conducted a set of oral history case studies in Manitoba and British Columbia with migrant farmworkers from Mexico, both women and men, employed through the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. While pursuing research in the field, I quickly found that migrants were more willing to converse in their native language, and were typically averse to consenting to participate in my project if they were required to sign a form. By using an oral consent in the field approach, and a more conversational interview structure, rather than approaching the interview with a structured questionnaire, I was able to collect a better record of the migrant workers’ thoughts, opinions, stories, expectations, hopes and dreams. By offering a window into their opinions on life and work in Canada, my work sought to complicate the existing record on migrant labour in Canada. By also critiquing existing academic approaches that consistently viewed migrant farmworkers as victims, I was able to construct an alternate archive that highlighted real workers’ voices and thoughts.
With the Vanua’aku Pati and Melanesian decolonisation, the transnational mobilities of leaders are underscored alongside questions of pan-Pacific anti-colonial thought. Under Walter Lini’s leadership, Vanuatu’s “Party of Our Land” was dominant to 1991, persisting in its post-colonial politics ever since. The Polynesian Panthers, also founded
in 1971, promoted unity and self-defense in 1970s New Zealand from police harassment,
their local identity politics inspired by “global” ideas and events.
This paper considers how Mar’s concept of ‘imperial literacy’, a version of early anticolonial
agency highlighted in the early chapters of the book, was supplanted in the second half of the century by black and brown power liberation narratives that moved beyond an acceptance of colonialism and a faith in negotiation for reform and towards more Pacific-centered understandings of agency inspired by events occurring globally.
HISPANIC AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 98.1 (2018)
In Pan American Women, Megan Threlkeld chronicles the clash of political ideologies between U.S. and Mexican women during an era of war and revolution. Promoting a "human internationalism" (in the words of Addams), U.S. women overestimated the universal acceptance of their ideas. They considered nationalism an ethos to be overcome, while the revolutionary spirit of Mexico inspired female citizens there to embrace ideas and reforms that focused on their homeland. Although U.S. women gradually became less imperialistic in their outlook and more sophisticated in their organizational efforts, they could not overcome the deep divide between their own vision of international cooperation and Mexican women's nationalist aspirations.
Pan American Women exposes the tensions of imperialism, revolutionary nationalism, and internationalism that challenged women's efforts to build an inter-American movement for peace and equality, in the process demonstrating the importance of viewing women's political history through a wider geographic lens.
discuss often neglected stories of seasonal “foreign” farm workers and their portrayal in
narrative discourses from political and journalistic sources in Canada in the postwar era.
The Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (CSAWP or SAWP), which also
includes farm hand migrations from the Caribbean region, had origins in an “Offshore
Program” that was initiated in 1966 with the Caribbean region only. Extended to Mexico
in 1974, the SAWP can be read as part of a longer history of managed agricultural
migration on the North American content. This form of bilateral and legalized
agricultural labour management was used in the United States with the Bracero Program
of 1942. In this paper, I will discuss key themes of interest in the history of temporary
migrations between Mexico and Canada, including the role of family and gender and the
male migrant as “breadwinner,” the later emergence of women migrants in the program,
the function of Mexican officials in Canada in reducing migrant labour disputes and
unionization efforts in Canada, and the specific, subjective, individual and “subaltern”
stories of migrant workers uncovered through an oral history case study carried out
among Mexican SAWP workers in British Columbia and Manitoba between 2012 and
2015. The paper discusses themes of exclusion and invisibility, human rights, differential
wage standards, and “complementarity” in farm work in a context of prior competition
with First Nations’ in both Ontario’s and Manitoba’s agricultural sectors.
This paper will seek to untangle the reasons for pursuing oral history research in an academic context, to re-examine the broader social implications of academic work in the real world. When pursuing labour history, oral histories can serve as a highly democratizing method for intervening in existing bodies of literature, and in archives dense with information but often occluding human voices.
As part of my PhD dissertation research in history, I conducted a set of oral history case studies in Manitoba and British Columbia with migrant farmworkers from Mexico, both women and men, employed through the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. While pursuing research in the field, I quickly found that migrants were more willing to converse in their native language, and were typically averse to consenting to participate in my project if they were required to sign a form. By using an oral consent in the field approach, and a more conversational interview structure, rather than approaching the interview with a structured questionnaire, I was able to collect a better record of the migrant workers’ thoughts, opinions, stories, expectations, hopes and dreams. By offering a window into their opinions on life and work in Canada, my work sought to complicate the existing record on migrant labour in Canada. By also critiquing existing academic approaches that consistently viewed migrant farmworkers as victims, I was able to construct an alternate archive that highlighted real workers’ voices and thoughts.
eonomist Paul Schuster Taylor, this article sets the question of Mexican otherness into a
comparative temporal discussion that incorporates material from the interwar and postwar
periods in United States and Canada. In the interwar accounts from Paul S. Taylor, the
Mexican worker in an array of interviews and correspondence is often weighed against
other real or potential working groups. These accounts have the potential to offer unique
insights into the formation of American nativist sentiments and ideas towards Mexicans
in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Accounts of foreignness and labour from the Taylor
archive are here presented alongside a view towards the impact of interwar, wartime and
postwar agricultural labour relations in the United States with particular attention to the
historical impact of the Bracero Program (1942-1964). Finally, the Canadian Seasonal
Agricultural Workers Program and its inner workings is briefly considered to examine the
ways in which Mexican labourer continues to constitute a non-citizen other tied in to the
parameters of a migratory work scheme designed to be of utmost benefit to the Canadian
neoliberal state as a result of postwar shifts in migrant streams and flows.
The Fields Are Dressed in the Spring: The Mexican Farm Worker in the Canadian Imagination (UBC Press, 2018)
The modern Independent nation of Vanuatu, formerly the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides, is a small Pacific Island nation that forms a Y-shaped archipelago to the west of Fiji and to the Northeast of New Caledonia. It is comprised of more than eighty islands. William Miles referred to the colonial Condominium, which began jointly on the islands in 1906 and based at the capital center of Port Vila, as a “co-sovereign experiment.” Between 1921 and 1940, some 21,922 Indochinese indentured workers, most from the densely population Tonkin region, arrived in the colonial New Hebrides, a period of European rule that would last for the greater part of the twentieth century. The joint vision of “condo-colonialism” set in motion a new colonial structure that would last until Vanuatu’s ultimately achievement of decolonization and political independence in 1980. Under the terms of the 1906 Condominium, a joint administration governed the islands in such a way that made judicial reasoning a key lever around which settler powers could be stabilized and secured.
Prior to the arrival of official colonization of colonial Vanuatu, a number of key strategic agreemenst were reached between British and French interests, including the establishment of a Joint Naval Commission in 1888 and an agreement, prior to this in 1878 respecting the independence of the islands. With the onset of French plantation agriculture in the New Hebrides, a scattered network of plantations would develop which would, for a time, come to rest upon the mobility of Indochinese indentured workers as a key backbone within the French sphere of influence in the colony. Themes of interest in this article will include setting and examining the historical context of French Indo-China alongside the colonial context of the New Hebrides; a view to the limited role played by “New Hebridean” indigenous islanders (now referred to as ni-Vanuatu) in the Frencha dn British plantation labour sphere; and the nature and experiences of indentured Tonkinese labour on French plantations. In some cases, resistance among Tonkinese was met with severe retribution.
Further into the twentieth century, Tonkinese would also serve as cooks, domestics and gardeners for colonials in the islands, just as numerous Indochinese would migrate to metropolitan France to work similar tasks. The manuscript, ultimately, will revisit Tonkinese mobility as an understudied theme in the story of French colonial Indochina and the French Pacific more broadly. Often discussed as a footnote, the Asian indentured presence in the French Pacific was part and parcel of a wider effort to extract profit from colonial activities; for this reason, much of the historiography on colonial Vanuatu, including more recent islands-centered or Pacific-focused studies and approaches, in their effort to revive agency amongst the colonized and indigenous peoples, have still evaded attention to the place and role of Asia in the broader colonial dynamic and story of the development of the French component of this colony.
Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, or “Our Lady of the Iguanas,” a gelatin silver photograph taken in 1979 that details the dignity, power and self-assured gaze of a defiant female Zapotec woman crowned by iguanas. The collection shows how female dominance over ritual and culture proved an anomaly in the matriarchal town of Juchitán, where a queer culture also flourished. The photograph, “Magnolia,” taken in 1986, depicted a man in a dress whose face is reflected in a hand-held mirror, one of the most overt expressions of queerness captured in Iturbide’s oeuvre. Although she did not define herself as one, Stanley Brandes referred to her an “innate anthropologist.” This paper will examine Iturbide’s work in the context of her emphasis upon female and feminine subjects in the Juchitán collection, including transvestitism and cross-dressing that help define a “third gender” known as muxhes. Graciela’s photographs of indigeneity and waywardly culture in Juchitán came to embody a subversive village poetic that ran countercurrent to depictions of female subjects in Mexico as subservient.
dissertation probes how migrant agricultural workers have occupied a longer and more complex place in Canadian history than most Canadians may approximate. It explores
the historical precedents of seasonal farm labour in Canada through the lens of the interior or the personal on the one hand, through an oral history approach, and the
external or the structural on the other, in dialogue with existing scholarship and through a critical assessment of the archive. Specifically, it considers the evolution of seasonal farm work in Manitoba and British Columbia, and traces the eventual rise of an “offshore” labour scheme as a dominant model for agriculture at a national scale. Taking 1974 as a point of departure for the study of circular farm labour migration between Mexico and Canada, the study revisits questions surrounding Canadian views of what constitutes the ideal or injurious migrant worker, to ask critical questions about how managed farm labour migration schemes evolved in Canadian history. In addition, the dissertation explores how Mexican farm workers’ migration to Canada since 1974 formed a part of a wider and extended world of Mexican migration, and seeks to record and celebrate Mexican contributions to modern Canadian agriculture in historical contexts involving diverse actors. In exploring the contexts that have driven Mexican out-migration and transnational integration, it bridges oral accounts with a broader history that sets Mexican northward migration in hemispheric context. It reads agricultural migration upon various planes, including corporeality, experience, identity, masculinity, legality, “contra-modernity,” and the management of mobilities.
With the Vanua’aku Pati and Melanesian decolonisation, the transnational mobilities of leaders are underscored alongside questions of pan-Pacific anti-colonial thought. Under Walter Lini’s leadership, Vanuatu’s “Party of Our Land” was dominant to 1991, persisting in its post-colonial politics ever since. The Polynesian Panthers, also founded in 1971, promoted unity and self-defense in 1970s New Zealand from police harassment, their local identity politics inspired by “global” ideas and events.
This paper considers how Mar’s concept of ‘imperial literacy’, a version of early anti-colonial agency highlighted in the early chapters of the book, was supplanted in the second half of the century by black and brown power liberation narratives that moved beyond an acceptance of colonialism and a faith in negotiation for reform and towards more Pacific-centered understandings of agency inspired by events occurring globally.