This panel brings together four historically grounded book projects that examine how borders, labor regimes, and environmental landscapes have been constructed through U.S. state power and imperial formations from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century. Celeste Menchaca reexamines the origins of the U.S.-Mexico border by tracing its nineteenth century construction through land survey practices, transportation infrastructure, race science, and natural history. Laura Gutiérrez focuses on how U.S. immigration policies managed U.S. labor needs by creating a racialized underclass of temporary workers, while the Mexican state experimented with how to address the influx of forcibly removed migrant workers. Maria Quintana places the Bracero Program within the context of the other labor programs that emerged contemporaneously during World War II, including guest worker programs with Puerto Rico, the British West Indies, and the contract farm labor program that recruited prisoners as farm labor during Japanese American incarceration. From Southern California berry fields to Japanese American concentration camps, from Chinese cooks in national parks to Chicano Civilian Conservation Corps workers, Stevie Ruiz traces how the racialized labor and environmental knowledge of Asian migrants and Chicana/o communities built the material foundations of modern environmentalism. Together, these papers offer a reinterpretation of U.S. history that foregrounds the interconnected development of border enforcement, labor exploitation, and environmental transformation.