Prizes in Working-Class History and the State of the Field

Each year since 2008, the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) has sponsored the Herbert Gutman Dissertation Prize in cooperation with the University of Illinois Press. Named to honor one of the founders of what came to be called the "New Labor History," the prize recognizes an outstanding dissertation in the field and includes a cash award, recognition at LAWCHA's annual meeting, and a contract to publish the work in the University of Illinois Press's The Working Class in American History series. This year's competition was a little unusual. In earlier years, committees received an average of around ten or twelve dissertations, sometimes fewer. This year's group included twenty-five dissertations, far more than any year in the past. The increase might be due in part to more effective advertising, but the explanation seems to involve more than that.

The group was unusual not only in size, but also in the range of topics represented: an intellectual and social history of what came to be called "automation"; a history of runaway factories in postwar New York City; turn-of-the-century mining engineers and transnational extractive capitalism; sex workers and sexual politics over the past fifty years; women clerical workers in higher education; a study of wage theft in the contemporary District of Columbia; a long-term study of political realignment in a key industrial state with public workers at its center; William Riddell's study of sailors and their unions in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century empire (University of Toronto, advised by Rick Halpern), which won a rare honorable mention.

There were some missing elements. The competition is not attracting many dissertations involving black workers and very few on nineteenth-century topics. The former represents a need to define and more carefully represent African American history, including slavery, as a key element in working-class history. As most advisors will recognize, the latter gap is largely explained by the interests of doctoral students: They are choosing twentieth-century topics with a strong tendency toward the postwar and even the early twenty-first century. This is perhaps understandable, but it does mean that we are getting little new work on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One target should be the vibrant field of slavery studies, which, again, needs to be more firmly integrated into our understanding of working-class history.

The 2019 Gutman Prize winner was Alina R. Mendez, "Cheap for Whom? Migration, Farm Labor, and Social Reproduction in the Imperial Valley-Mexicali Borderlands, 1942–1969" (University of California, San Diego). That year's field also included other dissertations involving Latinx workers. For the second year in a row this year's prize went to a dissertation in Latinx working-class history, in this case, Eladio Bobadilla's "'One People without Borders': The Lost Roots of the Immigrants' Rights Movement, 1954–2006" (Duke University, advised by Nancy MacLean). Bobadilla argues that the "invasion" of undocumented immigrants was the very force that ultimately produced a Mexican American–led immigrants' rights movement. He shows that Mexican American activists and their Filipino coworkers were at first pro-restriction; they were particularly vulnerable to low-wage competition. But these activists came to understand immigration policy, debates, and reform to be central to their own struggle for labor and civil rights. Bobadilla engages but goes beyond recent, more critical analyses of the United Farmworkers movement. Given their weak labor market position, the diversity of the labor force, their extreme poverty, and the hostility of elements within the labor movement, their organizing successes were impressive. It is important, Bobadilla stresses, to acknowledge all this even as one documents their weaknesses and failures—a bold argument well put. Perhaps because of Professor Babadilla's personal connections to its story, the work exudes a passion that makes for compelling reading.

At the same LAWCHA meeting in April 2020 where Bobadilla received his award, Eduardo Contreras's Latinos and the Liberal City: Politics and Protest in San Francisco (University of Pennsylvania Press), again in competition with a large group of outstanding...