"Borders of Bodies and Nations: Immigrant Women and Their Intimacies in Modern North America"

This paper examines the dynamics of state policing practices and national belonging at North American borderlands during the early twentieth century. Through a reading of the bodies of African American, Canadian, and Mexican immigrant women accused of practicing prostitution, border-crossing female migrants came to symbolize a wide variety of sexual and national meanings at the borders of North America. Focusing on deportation practices in the first half of the twentieth century, Delgado investigates the role of the U.S. government in shaping global processes of sexuality, labor, and legality on the northern and southern edges of North America. In Canada, early attempts to gender-populate its borderlands through its bonus immigration program made visible a nascent deportation regime that set the moral compass of Canadian nationalism through a gendered rhetoric of imperial democracy. Notably, Mexico’s immigration law prohibited prostitutes from entering the country, but did not did criminalize the commerce in sex. Once immigrant prostitutes arrived in Mexico, they joined the ranks of a working-class whose commerce was regulated by local and state governments. Yet, when presumed prostitutes attempted to enter the United States from Mexico, they were reconstituted as white slaves, a status that erased their identities as legitimate laborers and marked them as sexual poisons of the American body politic. While this paper operates within a North American framework of analysis, it keeps in central focus the borderlands of Canada, the United States, and Mexico as important landscapes in the formation of sovereignty and sexual identities.