Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico

by Deborah Cohen

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807899670
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	02/15/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	360
Sales rank:	779,601
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

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

Editorial Reviews

This is an important contribution to the history of relations between Mexico and the U.S. Recommended. Graduate students and above.—Choice



Enlightening and thought provoking.—Journal of American History



A wonderful read, one that might be assigned to graduate students or undergraduates in a wide range of classes. Any course that deals with the history of race, ethnicity, labor, or gender, in the United States or Mexico, will benefit from reading Cohen's book.—American Historical Review



These narratives are interesting and important to understand. . . . [Cohen] has found such a rich group of ethnographic to help her tell them.— Journal of Historical Geography



Cohen brings [braceros's] actions to the forefront by allowing them to tell their stories in their own words, capturing the workers' struggles and souls as they navigated the demands of the program. . . . The book encourages readers to consider migrants' views of how their actions shaped immigration policies at the national and transnational level.—Western Historical Quarterly



Cohen's careful consideration of bracero subjectivities will enrich our understanding of the expansiveness of the mid-twentieth century Mexican immigrant experience.—New Mexico Historical Review



Cohen's ability to illustrate the complexity of the transnational space that came to comprise the bracero program renders her work a must read for scholars interested in the history of transnational im/migration. . . . An excellent example of transnational historiography.—H-Borderlands



The most important book in a generation to appraise these critical and formative years of Mexico-U.S. migration.—Arkansas Historical Society



An important work that fits well into any classroom due to an engaging writing style and the ever-present issues that Cohen tackles.—Diplomatic History



Braceros is a very rich, full text, and the author has certainly done her best to not leave out anything important.—H-Diplo Roundtable Review

From the Publisher