Abrazando el Espíritu: Bracero Families Confront the US-Mexico Border
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Abrazando el Espíritu: Bracero Families Confront the US-Mexico Border
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Overview
Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, Ana Elizabeth Rosas uncovers a previously hidden history of transnational family life. Intimate and personal experiences are revealed to show how Mexican immigrants and their families were not passive victims but instead found ways to embrace the spirit (abrazando el espíritu) of making and implementing difficult decisions concerning their family situations—creating new forms of affection, gender roles, and economic survival strategies with long-term consequences.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520958654 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/26/2014 |
| Series: | American Crossroads , #40 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 298 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Abrazando El Espíritu
Bracero Families Confront the US-Mexico Border
By Ana Elizabeth Rosas
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95865-4
CHAPTER 1
Bracero Recruitment in the Mexican Countryside, 1942–1947
On August 7, 1942, Gabino Preciado, president of the rural town of San Martin de Hidalgo, Jalisco, faced an unenviable challenge. Mexican president Manuel Avila Camacho had ordered him to embrace the spirit behind the recruitment of the townsmen into the Mexican Emergency Farm Labor Program, more commonly known as the Bracero Program. With the repatriation of three hundred thousand Mexican American and Mexican immigrant children, women, and men during the 1930s still fresh in their minds, unskilled rural Mexican men would be asked to immigrate to the United States in pursuit of Avila Camacho's vision of national progress.
Avila Camacho's vision went beyond strengthening ties to the United States in a time of war. He believed firmly that unskilled rural Mexican men were an inferior race who could acquire the qualities, skills, and wages necessary for Mexico to advance socially and technologically only by being exposed to elements of more developed countries like the United States. He believed the program suited unskilled rural Mexican men perfectly. According to this racial logic, rural Mexican men's mastery and implementation of US agricultural methods and skills "improved the character of [the Mexican] people, advancing Mexico's social and technological development." Temporary US contract labor would modernize them and, upon their return, indirectly influence generations of men throughout the Mexican countryside.
This chapter considers Bracero Program recruitment, focusing on San Martin de Hidalgo's appropriation and translation of Avila Camacho's vision. In doing so, it enriches historical interpretations that have overlooked how rural towns throughout Mexico embraced the program's enactment, reinforcement, and redefinition of concepts of race, gender, and national and personal advancement. The Bracero Program exacerbated racial and gender inequality in Mexico as well as in the United States. Reduced to an intellectually, culturally, and socially inferior race worthy of exploitation in Mexico and the United States, unskilled rural Mexican families countered the program's logic with strategies to realize their own visions of advancement in Mexico and the United States. Yet rural Mexican men's visions consistently took women's labor for granted and preserved gender and race inequality, just as the vision of Mexican president Avila Camacho did.
FEDERAL VISIONS, LOCAL IMPLEMENTATION
Avila Camacho entrusted rural Mexican town and village presidents throughout the states of Jalisco, Michoacán, Sonora, Veracruz, and Zacatecas to recruit an estimated seventy-five thousand men for the Bracero Program. He issued a confidential mandate to them, announcing that the Mexican and US governments had agreed to the program after months of negotiation. Under its terms the US government would import Mexican men to build and repair railroads and harvest crops throughout the United States for three- to six-month contract periods. Contracted men, who would be known as braceros, would be exempt from the usual immigration requirements, such as literacy tests, head taxes, and other admission fees. In addition, they would be exempt from military service and protected from social discrimination. The US government guaranteed employment for at least 75 percent of their contract period at the "prevailing wage rate," as well as housing, meals, and transportation to and from the United States. Once their contracts expired, they would be required to return to Mexico. Both governments agreed to compensate fairly and to penalize program violations.
Avila Camacho emphasized that braceros would return with something to show for their time in the United States. The program required the US government to withhold 10 percent of braceros' semimonthly earnings. These funds were to be deposited into a rural savings fund, then transferred to Mexico's Agricultural Credit Bank, and would be redeemable upon the braceros' return. Avila Camacho imagined that with these savings braceros would purchase agricultural equipment to plant and harvest plots of land efficiently and profitably and in this way would apply the program's knowledge, skills, and wages to help Mexico achieve economic, social, and technological progress.
The president of San Martin de Hidalgo, Gabino Preciado, received Avila Camacho's mandate. Rural Mexican town and village presidents like Preciado were charged with recruiting men carefully and selectively. In the mandate they were cautioned against promoting the benefits of the program too aggressively. US grower associations administering the program were not too committed to the terms of the program and had never been obligated to provide such guarantees for US domestic workers. Even as the program stipulated that braceros would not be contracted to displace US domestic workers, that they would not serve as strikebreakers in labor disputes, and that they would work for the "prevailing wage" or the current average wage paid by the piece or by the hour to US domestic workers for the same job in the same region of the United States, the program actually facilitated administrative violation of these very conditions. The braceros were to be warned that US government officials, instead of conducting independent surveys of regional wages, would survey US grower associations and then accept their responses without investigating the accuracy of their claims. This process would depress wages, as grower associations would mobilize into regional associations that collectively set the regional wage far below the accepted wage for the tasks in question. US domestic workers would then refuse to work for such wages, making grower associations eligible for program contracts. Such covert and carefully planned program violations had the potential to go unnoticed and to confine braceros to exploitative and unprofitable employment. Preciado was among the presidents advised to consider that this program would not automatically promote braceros' economic advancement and that it was in their interest to avoid promising more than the program could deliver in their local recruitment efforts. This would prevent the promotion of an unreliable process with improper incentives that could lead to a return migration reminiscent of repatriation.
The government officials of Mexican rural towns were asked to specifically target for recruitment experienced agricultural laborers with wives and children because their family obligations would motivate these workers to accept the offer and to comply with government-sanctioned return schedules. The Mexican government speculated that single men would be more likely to skip out or to continue to work after their contract's expiration.
Preciado was also urged to promote the program as crucial to the war against the Axis powers and participation in it as what Avila Camacho called a "manly act of loyalty to country and progress." Braceros' labor promised to strengthen wartime US-Mexico efforts and relations, since it would prevent US labor shortages. It would also lay the material foundation for braceros' own advancement, since upon their return US training and savings for equipment and supplies would raise their earning potential by allowing them to grow and harvest crops more efficiently and skillfully. Rural town and village presidents were instructed to paper their respective communities with promotional materials offering local men these inducements.
After carefully assessing the program, Preciado concluded that it was a risky yet crucial first step toward exposing San Martin de Hidalgo's men to the United States. He too was confident that men's mastery of US skills and earning of US wages would prove a welcome change from town life at home. Ironically, contracted men would perform work similar to what they had always done, namely unskilled and poorly paid manual agricultural labor, hence the term bracero—literally "arm man." Preciado realized that despite the Bracero Program's promise, town families could participate only by paying for transportation to this program's selection center in the nation's capital: Mexico, Distrito Federal. Indeed, the transportation cost for each prospective bracero was an estimated 150 pesos, roughly the equivalent of four months of a typical unskilled town family's earnings. This made the town's unskilled rural working class, those most in need of new economic opportunities, ineligible. In San Martin de Hidalgo, only middle-class men could afford such recruitment fees. Their temporary absence would drain the town's economy and resources, doubling unemployment among the unskilled rural working class. Preciado needed the middle class's investment and purchasing power to keep businesses open and employment opportunities intact. His administration could not afford to lose middle-class families to immigration without a plan in place. This local assessment did not conform to Avila Camacho's vision or to the financial interest of Preciado's administration.
Even worse, participating families were required to pay for the public notarization of letters confirming the men's moral and physical eligibility to work in the United States and their financial ability to afford transportation to the program's selection center. After careful deliberation, Preciado strategically decided to enlist the town's middle-class families to finance rural working-class men's participation. By developing and facilitating a local discourse and financial agreements that went beyond Avila Camacho's mandate, he laid the foundations for a deceptive yet comprehensive local appropriation and translation of the program. Securing middle- and working-class families' participation would prevent further unemployment and complete disinvestment in the town. This required conveying a narrowly defined set of identities, roles, and values that would mobilize the town's women, children, and men to act collectively for the town's advancement.
To recruit these families effectively, Preciado aggressively pursued a local discourse on program conditions and incentives that would resonate among middleclass families. Convincing successful entrepreneurs, teachers, and professionals to immigrate to a country that had recently repatriated town families and to undertake physically demanding labor in agriculture and railroad construction was difficult. Like other Mexican rural town presidents, Preciado speculated that the Bracero Program's conditions and terms could potentially advance braceros and, in turn, towns economically if the town's vision of advancement centered on women, children, and men working collectively across borders. Certainly, temporary US wages and training were preferable to unemployment. He promoted a vision of family progress through program participation to enlist families to weather the hardships that the program would involve. But casting participation as a means of rising out of poverty would offend middle-class families and draw unwanted attention to class differences, fueling existing town hostility between the middle and working classes.
Like Avila Camacho, Mexican rural town presidents idealized the contract labor that participants would undertake and the opportunities that would be available to them on their return. In doing so, they were complicit in his failure to protect prospective braceros and their families from exploitation and the hardships of family separation. Neither developed employment opportunities that accommodated short-term family separation or facilitated returning braceros' transition out of contract labor into profitable long-term settlement in Mexico. In San Martin de Hidalgo, Preciado recruited middle-class families by presenting the program as an excellent opportunity brimming with potential for middle-class entrepreneurs. Middle-class braceros were expected to return and invest their earnings into an already profitable business or trade. As for working-class families that were financially dependent on male laborers, their program participation and return would involve paying existing family debt, fulfilling recruitment loan agreements, and creating employment opportunities within and outside agricultural labor on their own.
Like Avila Camacho's vision, the vision developed by local officials did not prevent overwhelming debt and exploitation from occurring. According to Mexican government officials, only legal access to US skills and wages could make profitable long-term settlement patterns throughout the Mexican countryside possible. Families interested in economic betterment had no other choice but to struggle collectively and across borders. It was men's responsibility to work as contract laborers while their families patiently worked and waited behind.
COMMUNITY FORUMS AND THE LOCAL GENDER SCRIPT
To deflect attention from international, national, and local negligence and to fulfill recruitment quotas, Mexican rural town presidents developed a local script that appealed strategically to middle-class families and excluded working-class families. Confident that the news of potentially earning an estimated sixty pesos for eight hours of agricultural labor in the United States—the equivalent of three weeks' worth of a local agricultural laborer's wages—would spread widely throughout their respective towns, Preciado, like many other Mexican rural town presidents, did not bother to recruit the town's working class because he simply assumed that working-poor men would add their names quickly to the list and because he feared that active recruitment of families from different class backgrounds with the same rhetoric would lessen middle-class families' support and enlistment. The middle class were needed as contract laborers and, ever more urgently, as lenders to others. Their willingness to lend large sums of money toward the recruitment fees of the working poor would ensure the participation of those most in need of economic betterment, a recruitment goal that fulfilled Avila Camacho's vision.
On August 10, 1942, Consuelo Alvarez, a middle-class town resident, helped her husband Jesus bake orders of sourdough bread, pan dulce (sweet bread), and cakes before rushing off to walk her children to school and attend a town forum on the Bracero Program on her family's behalf. She sat alongside fellow bakers, barbers, cooks, doctors, merchants, seamstresses, tailors, and other enterprising married and single middle-class women and men, but she noticed that agricultural laborers were absent. Men in attendance were given handbills announcing the Mexican and US governments' demand for their "brazos, lealtad y hombría" (arms, loyalty, and manhood)—essentially calling upon them to separate from their families in order to build and repair railroads and harvest crops throughout the United States.
Consuelo read her older brother's copy because this document was not distributed to women. Despite the history of US repatriation and the fact that most in attendance had struggled to maintain their own businesses or trades to avoid this line of work, most of these families did not object to performing railroad or agricultural contract labor in the United States. Consuelo and other forum attendees were receptive to earning US wages. As she would later recall, at the time the Bracero Program had struck her as a sound investment of energy and money. San Martin de Hidalgo families believed that they stood to earn a healthy profit, especially if they did not have to take out a loan in order to enlist.
Preciado's decision to recruit middle-class families caught middle-class interest, while reconceptualizing the Bracero Program as a sound business venture. The program was thus promoted as a sound investment of energy, money, and time among middle-class families, and worthy of men of moral and physical strength. Discussions of Avila Camacho's racial logic were replaced by characterizations of program participation as a loyal and responsible assertion of the masculinity of middle-class men, effacing the stigma of contract agricultural labor. Moreover, Preciado assured middle-class men that by serving their country they would improve their ability to provide for themselves and their families.
Notions of traditional masculinity and femininity also influenced Preciado's recruitment of middle-class women. Regular town hall meetings were already restrictively gendered, family-oriented events. During these meetings, women were prevented from expressing concerns and opinions beyond suggesting future meeting dates and times to organize town events that did not conflict with their household chores. Often they were restricted to hosting and organizing town fund-raisers and festivals after a town committee composed of men had settled on the events. Women's accommodation to the Bracero Program's conditions did not initially include increased decision making or purchasing power. Their potential empowerment through their adaptations to program conditions was overshadowed by discussions that neglected women's concerns regarding power relations within and outside their households, businesses, and trades.
Convinced that women were often the driving force behind men's success, program officials encouraged women to adapt to the program's conditions, particularly family separation, by appreciating the long-term advantages of US wages. Without ever acknowledging potential changes in the decision-making roles in families and businesses, officials recruited entire families to support and participate in the Bracero Program. They assumed that men were entitled to control and demand women's labor and flexibility, so they urged women to work, under the direction of their male relatives, in already promising family businesses that male recruits would be leaving behind. Exaggerating the financial benefits and the brevity of their male relatives' absence was meant to efface doubts about how these families would manage to adjust emotionally and financially.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Abrazando El Espíritu by Ana Elizabeth Rosas. Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Emergencies
1. Bracero Recruitment in the Mexican Countryside, 1942–1947
2. The Bracero Program as a Permanent State of Emergency
3. Special Immigration and the Management of the Mexican Family, 1949–1959
Part Two: Love and Longing
4. Government Censorship of Family Communication, 1942–1964
5. In Painful Silence: The Untold Emotional Work of Long-Distance Romantic Relationships and Marriages, 1957–1964
6. Hidden from History: Photo Stories of Love
Part Three: Decisive Measures
7. Awake Houses and Mujeres Intermediarias(Intermediary Women), 1958–1964
8. Ejemplar y sín Igual (Exemplary and without Equal): The Loss of Childhood, 1942–1964
9. Decididas y Atrevidas (Determined and Daring): In Search of Answers, 1947–1964
Epilogue: The Generative Potential of Thinking and Acting Historically
Notes
Bibliography
Index