Maria L Quintana

Maria L. Quintana received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2016. She was also a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Dr. Quintana is the author of Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Guestworker Programs (University of Pennsylvania, 2022). The book situates the post-World War II Mexican Bracero Program and Caribbean guestworker programs within the unexplored historical contexts from which they originated, including the New Deal, Japanese American Incarceration, the U.S. Civil rights movement, the anti-colonial movements in the Caribbean, and the history of transatlantic slavery. As the book demonstrates, guestworker programs couched in languages of liberalism cannot be divorced from continued imperialism, coercion, control, and worker precarity.