Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and immigrant workers in the north American west, 1880-1930. . - Reviews - book review

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2001 by James R. Barrett

Peck employs the padrone's story to illuminate problems in several distinct fields. For labor historians, he documents the workings of the labor market and its implications in the daily lives of the immigrant workers and their dependents, but he also probes the interstices between these markets and legal and state structures, business organizations, and the workers' own ethnic cultures, organizations, and movements.

Like much of the most recent work in immigration history, the study shuns the analysis of established communities for a study of mobility itself and the national and international forces shaping immigrant life. With his comparative approach and transnational context, Peck aims to "decenter" Western history and challenge its strong tendency toward exceptionalism. For historians of contract law, he shows that labor coercion was widespread in an era of "free contracts" and ostensibly "free labor". Scholars in all these fields can read Peck's book with great benefit.