This chapter theorizes social reproduction as one of the material processes that sustains collective wellbeing in democracies. Through a historical genealogy of racialized labor recruitment among Mexican and Mexican-American families, I identify the brown family as both a central unit of support of social reproduction of the US economy and society and a target of destructive measures that made it abject and decimated its own resources for self-care and reproduction. I trace how conquest, settlement, and immigration control in the US Southwest operated subsequently as regimes of domination that guaranteed access to cheap social reproduction for white waged labor. Building upon recent work on capitalism and social reproduction and Black, Indigenous, and Latinx feminist writings, I reconstruct the segmentation of labor that relegated brown workers to physically strenuous work outside and inside the home, while white workers accessed relatively more skilled and less exploitative conditions of labor. Eventually, white women left the home to access paid work. This process entailed attachments to a normative white privatized family, whose existence depended both on the social reproductive work of racialized others, and on its construction in opposition to the active creation of abject nonwhite families, which were posited as deviant and unassimilable.

This chapter extends the argument of anticolonial critics, such as Ania Loomba and Sylvia Wynter, to suggest that we think of race less as a distinct, autonomous category and more as an underpinning force contributing to the destabilizing elements of the fin-de-siècle social world. By expanding our theoretical framework to consider late-nineteenth-century manifestations of anti-Blackness, the chapter argues that we can enrich our mapping of the ways that “race” as an expansive category both propped up and disordered the British empire and thereby build on earlier critical interpretations of the workings of empire and difference in fin-de-siècle narratives. To help write toward this reframing, the author turns to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Story of the Brown Hand” (1899). This short tale about the ghost of an Afghan hillman haunting a British surgeon upon his return from Mumbai (“Bombay”) to Wiltshire teaches us how the brownness of Asians took shape through biocentric terms against the period’s longstanding anti-Blackness in ways that are historically specific but also ongoing in the present.