Event Date
In this book talk, Dr. Quintana will explore the government-sponsored Bracero Program and the Caribbean guestworker programs of World War II, addressing these government-sponsored farm labor programs as the unexplored consequence of Japanese American incarceration and the New Deal. She will show why and how organizations in Puerto Rico, the British West Indies, and the United States benevolently managed the movement of labor migrants, to uplift Puerto Rican and Bahamian workers in the 1940s and 1950s.
Maria Quintana is an Assistant Professor of History at Sacramento State University, where she teaches courses on race and empire, civil rights and labor history, immigration history, and Latinx history. She is the author of Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) and received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2016.