This work treats more than one hundred years of the brick industry of the lower Rio Grand Valley in Mexico and the United States between the twin cities of Brownsville/Matamoros and Laredo/Nuevo Laredo. Long before the advent of the maquiladora, brick production was a transnational affair, combining the knowledge, skill and labor of low-wage Mexican workers with judicious injections of Anglo, Mexican American, and Mexican capital to produce hand-molded bricks, products of what Cook refers to as “Mexican brick culture.” In an age of mechanization, Cook argues that the labor-intensive production of Mexican brick culture was a rational response to construction industries characterized by cycles of boom and bust. South Texans successfully mechanized many aspects of the production process, but from the 1930s to the 1950s they remained dependent on (mostly undocumented) Mexican labor for molding bricks. When Mexican workers were deported during the xenophobic Operation Wetback in the 1950s,...

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