At the beginning of World War II, the United States and Mexico launched the bracero program, a series of labor agreements that brought Mexican men to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural fields. In Braceros, historian Deborah Cohen asks why these temporary migrants provoked so much concern and anxiety in the United States and what the Mexican government expected to gain in participating in the program. Cohen reveals the fashioning of a U.S.-Mexican transnational world, a world created through the interactions, negotiations, and struggles of the program's principal protagonists including Mexican and U.S. state actors, labor activists, growers, and bracero migrants. Cohen argues that braceros became racialized foreigners, Mexican citizens, workers, and transnational subjects as they moved between U.S. and Mexican national spaces.
Drawing on oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, and documentary evidence, Cohen creatively links the often unconnected themes of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, and gendered class and race formation to show why those with connections beyond the nation have historically provoked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory political policies.
ISBN-13: 9781469609744
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication Date: 08-01-2013
Pages: 360
Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)
Deborah Cohen is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
What People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
A compelling, pathbreaking study based on a splendid set of oral histories, Braceros demonstrates the inseparability of Mexican and U.S. history and offers lessons for our current debates on immigration and guest-worker programs.—Sarah J. Deutsch, Duke University
Deborah Cohen has written a new account of the bracero experience extremely well suited for our time in its transnational focus, its concern for the agency of the braceros themselves, and its emphasis upon the importance of Mexican labor migration to the history of both Mexico and the United States. Amid all the controversies concerning immigration, this book deserves wide attention.—Arthur Schmidt, Temple University
Braceros is a pathbreaking, transnational history, that shows us how, in both the United States and Mexico, ideas and practices about the modern were shaped by the farm workers who criss-crossed the border.—Mae Ngai,Columbia University
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