San Antonio College Library

It's often taken as a simple truth that the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in the United States. In the Southwest, however, two similarly coercive labor systems, debt peonage-in which a debtor negotiated a relationship of servitude, often lifelong, to a creditor-and Indian captivity, not only outlived the Civil War but prompted a new struggle to define freedom and bondage in the United States. In Borderlands...