^1. The term “globalization,” as I use it herein, refers to the economic, political, and sociocultural processes stemming from unfettered post-Soviet capitalism (i.e., capitalism without spheres of socialism interfering with market penetration). As such, its use is not meant to connote any substantive change in the international division of labor that has obtained throughout most of the historic period of capitalism.

^2. My use of the terms “North” and “South” comes from development parlance, which currently prefers these terms to the older approximate synonym pairs of “core” and “periphery,” or “First World” and “Third World.” Although “North” and “South” do tend to correspond to lines of hemisphere, there are noted exceptions, such as Australia (part of the “North”). For present purposes, it should be noted that Mexico, while a part of North America, is considered part of the global “South,” and the same holds for Puerto Rico even though it is classified as a commonwealth of the United States. Throughout this essay my use of the term “boundary” rather than the more common term “border” derives from the distinction that geographers make between these two terms. Nevins defines “border” as “an area of interaction and gradual division between two separate political entities,” and “boundary” as “a strict line of separation between two distinct territories” (8).

^3. This is also known as the “historic compromise between capital and labor.” See Charles Bergquist, Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).

^4. See Helen Safa, “Runaway Shops and Female Employment,” Signs, Vol. 7 (1981): 418–33; June Nash and María Patricia Fernández-Kelly, eds., Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983); Jorge Bustamante, “Maquiladoras: A New Face of Capitalism on Mexico's Northern Frontier,” in Nash and Fernández-Kelly. One problematic aspect of Cowie's work is that he occasionally relies on the periodization implied by those who claim the “new international division of labor” (see, e.g., 95–96).

^5. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

^6. The city leaders claimed that Camden had “never known a major strike,” even though the militia had in fact been called to Camden to put down labor unrest in 1919. Still, Camden's record of “industrial peace” was noteworthy, especially given that by 1920, sixty percent of the foreign-born residents of Camden were “New Immigrants,” blacks who had arrived from the U.S. South during the Great Migration, or immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The labor militancy of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in particular during this historical period has been well documented. Citing John Bodnar's (1980) work, Cowie claims that the New Immigrants in Camden were most interested in job security and family stability and therefore not given to labor militancy, especially during the open-shop 1920s.

^7. Labor militancy at RCA in Memphis exploded following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and far from being a tool to keep labor divided and docile, race asserted itself on the side of militancy, as worker manifestoes circulated at the time compared RCA to slave masters (91).

^8. In this aspect, Cowie does tell an older tale, the Marxian tale of contradictions contained within capitalism and the Thompsonian tale of class formation. Cowie writes that “capital” means more than just buildings, tools, and the like. It is also a complex social relationship. Capital's desire for cheap labor brought into play social relations of industrial production, new for each set of workers who encountered RCA, and these new relations served to undermine the very qualities RCA sought: cheapness and docility (53).

^9. Puerto Rican tobacco was in decline in part because of much cheaper tobacco production in Cuba, the Philippines, and Indonesia, and Puerto Rican sugar was in decline in part because even though Puerto Rican wages were the lowest, the costs of production in Puerto Rico were higher than in Louisiana, Florida, and Hawaii (41–42).

^10. Whalen refers to this as a “central paradox” of labor migration and makes the case for viewing it as such by showing how the dominant white community's fears about Puerto Ricans limited their recruitment as laborers in spite of the need for labor in the U.S. during World War II (49). One weakness in Whalen's study is that her analysis does not factor in the Bracero Program (by which U.S. growers hired Mexican workers), and her third chapter, “Contract Labor,” makes barely a mention of it, even though this undoubtedly had tremendous effects upon shaping the Puerto Rican migrant experience. Whalen later demonstrates how during the Cold War, Puerto Rican citizenship was transformed from a liability (citizens could not be as easily deported when labor needs diminished) into an asset because (a) criticism of foreign contract labor increased; and (b) the context of the Cold War added a “patriotic tone” to a reliance upon domestic labor (50). This is a point well taken; nevertheless, this particular line of analysis could have been strengthened by taking into consideration the voices of organized labor in the U.S. mainland.

^11. Indeed, it would have been quite interesting to hear more Puerto Rican male voices on the subject of women's wage-labor, both in Puerto Rico and in Philadelphia, and how attitudes might have shifted over the time period Whalen is addressing. Nevertheless, Whalen's rebuttal of the “culture of poverty” (later transformed to the “underclass”) thesis is one of the great strengths of this work. Oscar Lewis and Oscar Handlin generated feverish responses from historians who insisted on the agency of the historical subject and who, in contrast to the “culture of poverty” thesis, tended to tell the “immigrant success story.” These treatments left out such historical facts as genuine exploitation and nativism. Meanwhile, analyses by Puerto Rican authors have addressed such structural factors as colonialism and other systems of global exploitation but often at the expense of the agency of the historical subject. While I think that we have gone a bit too far in the wrong direction when an historian feels the need to state that “policy makers had human agency, too” (9), I do think that Whalen's history succeeds in uniting the best of each of these analyses.

^12. The contributions to this book are all reprints of journal articles that appeared in Gender Issues in 1998 and 1999. One set of articles focuses specifically on the labor-force experiences of immigrant women, while the other articles are more heterogeneous. It is this first set I concentrate on here, since the others are beyond the scope of this review essay.

^13. Also problematic is one author's use of the terms “racial” and “ethnic” as qualifiers of the term “women,” to mean “women of color,” a practice which disregards the relational quality of the concept of race (see 25).

^14. It is important to note, as the authors do, that the gender analysis in this work is confined to “human capital and labor market issues,” and that “other important topics such as reproductive health and violence” are not addressed (7).

^15. Neither does Knaul offer sufficient analysis of agricultural labor, which, again, is often child labor and which would interfere with schooling, although she does at least recognize that this issue needs more attention.

^16. A case in point occurs when Pagán and Sánchez write, “Nonetheless, the empirical results are also consistent with the conjecture that women are disproportionately represented in self-employment as a result of relatively lower barriers to entry into this sector, perhaps as a result of labor market discrimination in the wage and salary sector” (221, emphasis added).

^17. Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Jorge I. Domínguez, ed., Technopols: Freeing Politics and Markets in Latin America in the 1990s (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).

^18. Throughout most of the twentieth century and continuing through the present, organized labor in Latin American export sectors has often been able to wield more power than workers in domestic sectors and has also, on occasion, been subject to much harsher crackdowns because of these workers' importance to their national economies in the generation of foreign exchange. See, e.g., Jonathan C. Brown, ed., Workers' Control in Latin America, 1930–1979 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Charles Bergquist, Labor in Latin America.

^19. Murillo writes, “It is worth noting that the behavior of individual unions was not very constrained by the CGT, in contrast to what happened in Mexico and Venezuela where the confederations were more centralized. Indeed, although SMATA [Related Trades of the Automobile Industry] and FOETRA [Federation of Telephone Workers and Employees of the Argentine Republic] had joined the proreform CGT, they increased their militancy during the period of the division based on their internal dynamics. The decentralized authority of the CGT permitted the largest unions to control the confederation and allowed the coexistence of diverse strategies even among loyal unions” (169).

^20. Murillo attributes the fact of greater partisan competition to a much longer tradition of partisan plurality in the labor movement in Venezuela, as opposed to Mexico and Argentina. In Venezuela, a proportional representation electoral system allowed minorities to be included in union executive committees. The Argentine system did not have this feature, and it was prohibited in Mexico through the “exclusion clause”; therefore, leadership competition within unions was relatively low in these two countries (203).

^21. This book is the English translation of a work originally published as De la finca a la maquila: modernización capitalista y trabajo en Centroamérica, by Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (San José, Costa Rica: FLACSO).

^22. Two of the authors Pérez Sáinz relies upon most heavily are Edelberto Torres-Rivas and Victor Bulmer-Thomas. He draws upon Torres-Rivas for much of his economic analysis. See Edelberto Torres-Rivas, Interpretación del desarrollo social centroamericano (San José, Costa Rica: FLACSO, 1989); Edelberto Torres-Rivas, “Quién destapó la caja de Pandora?” in Daniel Camacho and Manuel Rojas, eds., La crisis centroamericana (San José, Costa Rica: EDUCA/FLACSO, 1984); and Edelberto Torres-Rivas, Centroamérica: la democracia posible (San José, Costa Rica: EDUCA/FLACSO, 1987). Bulmer-Thomas provides the groundwork for the author's political analysis, especially the 1989 work of Bulmer-Thomas in which he delineates the historic similarities in the paths taken in state-labor relations in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua on the one hand; and how divergent this path was compared to those taken by Costa Rica and Honduras. See Victor Bulmer-Thomas, La economía política de Centroamérica desde 1920 (Tegucigalpa: Banco Centroamericano de Integración Económica, 1989); and Victor Bulmer-Thomas, “La crisis de la economía de agroexportación (1930–1945),” in Victor Hugo Acuña Ortega, ed., Historia general de centroamérica: las repúblicas agroexportadoras (1870–1945) (Madrid: FLACSO/Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario, 1993).

^23. Other exceptions include the opening passage of the book (cited above) and his use of a FLACSO regional survey of worker attitudes on treatment and overtime (124).

^24. The mechanistic metaphor is not always the most apt, especially when the authors are describing processes much more organic than mechanistic, such as the social and economic processes that emerged gradually over the years to support migration flows in both directions. Also, given that the audience is “policymakers and citizens”—implicitly in the United States the use of the term “owner's” is unfortunate, reinforcing U.S. dominance and implying that Mexican migration would serve us if only we would leave it alone and let it proceed.

^25. Information presented in chapter four derives from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP), an excellent source of two decades' worth of binational data, and these data are well presented here.

^26. The authors do give this issue brief consideration (see 152), but they do not address, for example, migration's effects upon family members remaining in Mexico.

^27. One aspect in which Nevins' analysis could be strengthened is his treatment of the nexus of race, class, and gender. To be fair, he does recognize this, stating, “[T]he conflation of concerns about ‘illegal’ immigration with those concerned with the race/ethnicity of immigrants themselves ignores the role that issues of class and gender also play in fueling anti-immigrant sentiment (an omission for which I must also plead guilty)” (118). I should also note that lest one fault Nevins for attributing all agency to “the state” and none to actors within civil society, he treats the discourse concerning illegality as one that is, albeit state-led, wholly dialectic. See 121–22.

^28. The 1911 quote from the Dillingham Commission on “the Mexican”—‘he is less desirable as a citizen than as a laborer’ (104)—reminds us of Whalen's analysis of the ways Puerto Rican migrants were treated throughout the time period she considers.

^29. One oversight is that Nevins' discussion of labor's opposition to immigration and immigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century generally makes little distinction between the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor.