Recently, there have been renewed calls for a more expansive Southern transnational history.  The experiences of and discussions about thousands of Mexican workers in Louisiana and Mississippi in the first years of the twentieth century offer the opportunity to trace movements of people and explore how historical actors themselves engaged in the process of comparing the racial and labor systems of these two regions, and attempted to alter their own circumstances based on those comparisons.  Not only does this moment shed light on older questions -- the economic relations that developed in the wake of emancipation -- but it also illuminates how some Mexicans mobilized images of Southern race and labor relations to foment resistance to the antidemocratic Porfirio Díaz regime.  Cornell will outline why Southern planters sought Mexican labor, describe the conflicts that developed between Mexican workers and Southern planters, and the strategies that those workers used as they sought to negotiate the South’s legal and economic system and black-white binary.  Finally, she will turn to how the leading opposition to Díaz used both the contours of what occurred in Mississippi and Louisiana and the lack of an official response to link the threat of U.S.-style white supremacy with the current government.