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

Online ISBN:
9781469603391
Print ISBN:
9780807833599
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
Book

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

Published:
15 February 2011
Online ISBN:
9781469603391
Print ISBN:
9780807833599
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press

Abstract

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. This book 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. It 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. The book 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, it 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.

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