US Corporate Interests

For many of the texts we have looked at, the role of United States capitalistic and business interests emerge as determiners in domestic and foreign policy. With Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson showcases the recruitment of black workers from the south as they could be exploited since many unions were not integrated, and how Ida Mae was used as a strike breaker. In Kelly Lytle Hernandez’s Migra!, she traces the emergence of the border patrol and particularly how the emerging Southwest’s agribusinesses determined much of the policies and policing of Mexican immigrants, since they were  a valuable and expendable workforce. Immigration policies have been shaped by business interests, as demonstrated byt the Bracero program and more recent guest-worker programs. However, I am interested in mapping overseas U.S. ventures and how those intertwine with imperialism, and create the conditions that push people to immigrate, in many cases to the United States, thus further benefiting US corporations. 

Land dispossession emerges as one of the strongest tools of corporations to profit in countries such as Colombia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, and to create a workforce that no longer has their traditional means of subsistence farming and is either forced to work in there home country for these corporations or migrate to another country, such as the United States, to seek employment for many of those same corporations. 

I’d like to focus on Mexico and Puerto Rico as US corporations played powerful roles in shaping policies and removing locals from their lands and small farms. 

The early 1900s in Mexico were defined by shifting periods of foreign investment into infrastructure, and a civil conflict. For the United States and its growing southwestern agricultural industry rail lines to and from Mexico and the US created the means for a mobile, migrant workforce to tend US agriculture for cheaper than US workers since they lacked the class, social, language, and union powers to defend fairer wages and working conditions. In addition, this time period brought greater privatization and the buying up of land from small time and subsistence farmers. This created an economic imperative to migrate, many times to the US, increasing the size of the dispensable migrant workforce. In addition, to the historical land dispossession by US corporations of poorer Mexicans, is the effects of Mexico joining NAFTA on smaller Mexican farmers. As discussed in Harvest of Loneliness: The Bracero Program, NAFTA meant that US goods priced incredibly cheaply flooded US markets pushing out homegrown products, thus these Mexican agricultural laborers now needed to migrate to the US or work for a larger agricultural business such as Chiquita, which is headquartered in North Carolina. 

Puerto Rico has a similar journey where prior to US colonization in 1898, most Puerto Ricans ustilized subsistence famring to survive. As Iris Lopez charts in Matters of Choice: Puerto Rican Women's Struggle for Reproductive Freedom, that "with the arrival of North American corporations [...] These corporations took land from peasants and replaced subsistence crops with profitable sugar commodity agricultrue. This changed Puerto Rican agriculture from subsistence famring to a one-crop economy" that largely benefited US corporate holdings in the country and left much of the population forced to migrate to cities to find industrial jobs in US owned facotries (Lopez 6). The initial US invasion of corporate power left a impact on Puerto Rico that has not ceased. More Puerto Ricans live in the US than on the island due in a large part to the economic ravaging by US companies to the original subsistence ways of life on the island.

As Chavez notes in The Latino Threat, these mass Latinx migrations are not random, they are not as the "Latino Threat" dialogue presents an invasion, but merely the response of individuals to unlivable conditions that were in many ways created and exacerbated by US policy, which is driven by corporate interests. The past as we see mirrors the present where the "War on Drugs" was initiated in part to secure US and foreign investments in Colombia, Mexico, and other South American and Latin American countries.