Braceros

Braceros PDF Author: Deborah Cohen
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807833592
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
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 Braccros, 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 from participating in the program. These concerns and expectations, she suggests, provide a way to look at nation-state formation as a transnational process. 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, Braccros applies a cultural approach to analyze the political economy of labor migration. the rise of large-scale corporate agriculture, and state-to-state relations, showing how the World War II and postwar periods laid the groundwork for current debates over immigration and globalization. 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.

Braceros

Braceros PDF Author: Deborah Cohen
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807833592
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 Braccros, 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 from participating in the program. These concerns and expectations, she suggests, provide a way to look at nation-state formation as a transnational process. 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, Braccros applies a cultural approach to analyze the political economy of labor migration. the rise of large-scale corporate agriculture, and state-to-state relations, showing how the World War II and postwar periods laid the groundwork for current debates over immigration and globalization. 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.

The Invisible Workers of the U.S.–Mexico Bracero Program

The Invisible Workers of the U.S.–Mexico Bracero Program PDF Author: Ronald L. Mize
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498517811
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
As the first and largest guestworker program, the U.S.–Mexico Bracero Program (1942–1964) codified the unequal relations of labor migration between the two nations. This book interrogates the articulations of race and class in the making of the Bracero Program by introducing new syntheses of sociological theories and methods to center the experiences and recollections of former Braceros and their families.

Defiant Braceros

Defiant Braceros PDF Author: Mireya Loza
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469629771
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
In this book, Mireya Loza sheds new light on the private lives of migrant men who participated in the Bracero Program (1942–1964), a binational agreement between the United States and Mexico that allowed hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers to enter this country on temporary work permits. While this program and the issue of temporary workers has long been politicized on both sides of the border, Loza argues that the prevailing romanticized image of braceros as a family-oriented, productive, legal workforce has obscured the real, diverse experiences of the workers themselves. Focusing on underexplored aspects of workers' lives--such as their transnational union-organizing efforts, the sexual economies of both hetero and queer workers, and the ethno-racial boundaries among Mexican indigenous braceros--Loza reveals how these men defied perceived political, sexual, and racial norms. Basing her work on an archive of more than 800 oral histories from the United States and Mexico, Loza is the first scholar to carefully differentiate between the experiences of mestizo guest workers and the many Mixtec, Zapotec, Purhepecha, and Mayan laborers. In doing so, she captures the myriad ways these defiant workers responded to the intense discrimination and exploitation of an unjust system that still persists today.

Brown in the Windy City

Brown in the Windy City PDF Author: Lilia Fernández
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022621284X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Brown in the Windy City is the first history to examine the migration and settlement of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in postwar Chicago. Lilia Fernández reveals how the two populations arrived in Chicago in the midst of tremendous social and economic change and, in spite of declining industrial employment and massive urban renewal projects, managed to carve out a geographic and racial place in one of America’s great cities. Through their experiences in the city’s central neighborhoods over the course of these three decades, Fernández demonstrates how Mexicans and Puerto Ricans collectively articulated a distinct racial position in Chicago, one that was flexible and fluid, neither black nor white.

The INS on the Line

The INS on the Line PDF Author: S. Deborah Kang
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199757437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954 offers a comprehensive history of the INS in the southwestern borderlands, tracing the ways in which local immigration officials both made and enforced the nation's immigration laws.

Of Forests and Fields

Of Forests and Fields PDF Author: Mario Jimenez Sifuentez
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813576911
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
2016 Choice Oustanding Academic Title Just looking at the Pacific Northwest’s many verdant forests and fields, it may be hard to imagine the intense work it took to transform the region into the agricultural powerhouse it is today. Much of this labor was provided by Mexican guest workers, Tejano migrants, and undocumented immigrants, who converged on the region beginning in the mid-1940s. Of Forests and Fields tells the story of these workers, who toiled in the fields, canneries, packing sheds, and forests, turning the Pacific Northwest into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country. Employing an innovative approach that traces the intersections between Chicana/o labor and environmental history, Mario Sifuentez shows how ethnic Mexican workers responded to white communities that only welcomed them when they were economically useful, then quickly shunned them. He vividly renders the feelings of isolation and desperation that led to the formation of ethnic Mexican labor organizations like the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos Noroeste (PCUN) farm workers union, which fought back against discrimination and exploitation. Of Forests and Fields not only extends the scope of Mexican labor history beyond the Southwest, it offers valuable historical precedents for understanding the struggles of immigrant and migrant laborers in our own era. Sifuentez supplements his extensive archival research with a unique set of first-hand interviews, offering new perspectives on events covered in the printed historical record. A descendent of ethnic Mexican immigrant laborers in Oregon, Sifuentez also poignantly demonstrates the links between the personal and political, as his research leads him to amazing discoveries about his own family history... www.mariosifuentez.com

Grounds for Dreaming

Grounds for Dreaming PDF Author: Lori A. Flores
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300216386
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
Known as “The Salad Bowl of the World,” California’s Salinas Valley became an agricultural empire due to the toil of diverse farmworkers, including Latinos. A sweeping critical history of how Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants organized for their rights in the decades leading up to the seminal strikes led by Cesar Chavez, this important work also looks closely at how different groups of Mexicans—U.S. born, bracero, and undocumented—confronted and interacted with one another during this period. An incisive study of labor, migration, race, gender, citizenship, and class, Lori Flores’s first book offers crucial insights for today’s ever-growing U.S. Latino demographic, the farmworker rights movement, and future immigration policy.

The Tracks North

The Tracks North PDF Author: Barbara A. Driscoll
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292715929
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
As part of a bilateral commitment to focus on winning World War II, over 100,000 contracts were signed between 1943 and 1945 to recruit and transport Mexican workers to the United States for employment on the railroads. A little-known companion to the widely criticized agricultural bracero program, the railroad bracero program corresponded in its implementation more closely to the original intent of both governments than did its agricultural counterpart. In spite of pressure from the railroad industry to continue the program indefinitely, the U.S. government was adamant about terminating it on schedule and returning the workers to Mexico. The railroad bracero program still stands as the only historical example of a binational migration agreement between the two countries that was executed and concluded in the spirit of the original negotiations. The abuses commonly associated with the agricultural program were controlled in the railroad program by the organization of international committees wherein the Mexican government could, and did, force the U.S. government to be accountable for the plight of railroad braceros. The Tracks North is the only book-length study devoted to the railroad bracero program. Barbara Driscoll examines the program and its place in the long history of U.S.-Mexican relations. In so doing, she uses a wealth of materials seldom used by investigators of the bracero program, and also provides a clearer picture of the internal workings of the bracero program in Mexico than any other study produced to date.

Between Two Worlds

Between Two Worlds PDF Author: David Gregory Gutiérrez
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780842024747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Although immigrants enter the United States from virtually every nation, Mexico has long been identified in the public imagination as one of the primary sources of the economic, social, and political problems associated with mass migration. Between Two Worlds explores the controversial issues surrounding the influx of Mexicans to America. The eleven essays in this anthology provide an overview of some of the most important interpretations of the historical and contemporary dimensions of the Mexican diaspora.

They Saved the Crops

They Saved the Crops PDF Author: Don Mitchell
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082034401X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 574

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Book Description
At the outset of World War II, California agriculture seemed to be on the cusp of change. Many Californians, reacting to the ravages of the Great Depression, called for a radical reorientation of the highly exploitative labor relations that had allowed the state to become such a productive farming frontier. But with the importation of the first braceros—“guest workers” from Mexico hired on an “emergency” basis after the United States entered the war—an even more intense struggle ensued over how agriculture would be conducted in the state. Esteemed geographer Don Mitchell argues that by delineating the need for cheap, flexible farm labor as a problem and solving it via the importation of relatively disempowered migrant workers, an alliance of growers and government actors committed the United States to an agricultural system that is, in important respects, still with us. They Saved the Crops is a theoretically rich and stylistically innovative account of grower rapaciousness, worker militancy, rampant corruption, and bureaucratic bias. Mitchell shows that growers, workers, and officials confronted a series of problems that shaped—and were shaped by—the landscape itself. For growers, the problem was finding the right kind of labor at the right price at the right time. Workers struggled for survival and attempted to win power in the face of economic exploitation and unremitting violence. Bureaucrats tried to harness political power to meet the demands of, as one put it, “the people whom we serve.” Drawing on a deep well of empirical materials from archives up and down the state, Mitchell’s account promises to be the definitive book about California agriculture in the turbulent decades of the mid-twentieth century.