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Today marks 78 years that Mexico's federal government decided to sanction the departure of seasonal contract guest workers, or braceros, to the United States. (The decision was made officially public one month later.)
The US government had requested braceros to replace the men who were mobilizing to fight in World War II and to placate the desires of growers in states like California and Texas who wanted access to low-wage Mexican immigrant labor.
Although the bilateral agreement, unofficially known as the Bracero Program, was initially set to expire after the war, it was continually renegotiated and renewed through the end of 1964.
All told, 4.65 million bracero contracts were distributed during the entirety of the Bracero Program. The plurality of the contracts, at least 44 percent, went to braceros from the traditionally Catholic states of Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacán, and Zacatecas.
Among those who left Michoacán was my maternal grandfather, pictured here. Like most of the braceros who left my family's hometown, he spent time working in California's Central Valley, where I grew up and where most of my immediate and extended family still lives.
For the past decade, I've been researching the political considerations that shaped how Mexican federal, state, and municipal officials administered the bracero selection process. (Pictured here: a June 1951 broadside announcing the end of a contracting period.)
As well as the complex web of national, regional, and local political factors that motivated individual decisions to migrate as braceros out of Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacán, and Zacatecas. (Pictured here: a February 1958 contract request from Zacatecas.)
My work is still in progress. But fortunately, there are a number of great recent works on the Bracero Program for those who are interested in learning more about this unique moment in the history of Mexico-US migration.
Deborah Cohen's appropriately titled Braceros examines how braceros from Durango used their earnings to affirm their social status as patriarchal caregivers. https://uncpress.org/book/9781469609744/braceros/
Ana Elizabeth Rosas's Abrazando el Espíritu looks at how suddenly transnational families adapted to their new realities. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520282674/abrazando-el-espiritu
Mireya Loza's ( @mireyalozaphd) Defiant Braceros focuses on transnational labor activism, the lived experiences of indigenous braceros, and braceros' sexual identities and practices. https://uncpress.org/book/9781469629766/defiant-braceros/
Loza was also one of the leads of the Bracero History Archive, an initiative that gathered more than 700 bracero oral histories that are publicly available. http://braceroarchive.org
A chapter of Julie Weise's ( @JulieWeise) Corazón de Dixie examines how braceros who worked in the Arkansas Delta, as well as Mexican consular officials assigned to that area, responded and reacted to Jim Crow. https://uncpress.org/book/9781469624969/corazon-de-dixie/
While Lori Flores ( @lori_flori) analyzes the interactions between braceros and US-born farmworkers in California, as well as how many early Chicana/o activists and organizers responded to the abuse of braceros. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300240146/grounds-dreaming
In The INS on the Line, S. Deborah Kang ( @kangborderlaw) pays attention to how US INS officials assigned to the Mexico-US border navigated competing interests while enforcing and crafting immigration law during the program. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-ins-on-the-line-9780190055554?cc=us&lang=en&
And in The Deportation Machine, Adam Goodman ( @adamsigoodman) examines the mass Bracero Program-era deportation campaigns that targeted undocumented Mexican workers (and that some Mexican officials profitted from). https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691182155/the-deportation-machine
