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

Abstract

Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico. By Deborah Cohen. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. x, 318. Notes, bibliography, acknowledgments, index. $39.95.) Why are there so many undocumented Mexican immigrants living in the United States in the twenty-first century? The raging immigration debate provides a myriad of false "answers" to this question. More than fifty years after the fact, a deep understanding of the bracero "guest" worker program of 1942-1964 is an absolute prerequisite for truly comprehending the "why" of undocumented Mexican immigration today. This Mexico-U.S. temporary worker program brought more than four million Mexican men to perform agricultural labor in U.S. fields. Hundreds of thousands of them worked in the Arkansas Delta, making the bracero program an important part of Arkansas history as well. Deborah Cohen's Braceros is the most important book in a generation to appraise these critical and formative years of Mexico-U.S. migration. As such, its relentlessly empirical indictment of the nationstate framework fills in a critical blind spot in both U.S. and Mexican histories. Obliterating this blindness to the profoundly transnational histories of both nations, Cohen gives interpreters of history an indispensable tool to research, understand, and communicate the long and controversial history of Mexican immigration to the United States. At heart, Cohen's book seeks to de-familiarize and reconsider the commonly understood logic of Mexican migration. "Why," she ponders, "would so many men wait hours, days even, for the chance to do stoop labor in U.S. fields?" (p. 21). Cohen argues that the question cannot be answered through the usual arguments that employ a flat understanding of economics or debate whether this "guest worker" program constituted exploitation or opportunity for Mexican men. Rather, she asserts that the meaning of the bracero program in Mexican men's lives can only be understood within the "commonsense" of their time-a transnational commonsense that celebrated all things modern. Mexican government officials believed braceros would return from their temporary work assignments in the United States with the skills and capital needed to make their futures squarely in Mexico, pulling that nation along with them on the path to modernization. Yet braceros' wages went mostly to consumable and consumer goods, which the men purchased in order to shore up their identities as modern Mexican patriarchs who could provide for their families even in an underdeveloped economy. To be fully modern, these men wanted the respect and authority they could command only in Mexico but had to purchase it with the money they could earn only in the United States. As a result, Cohen writes, "Nowhere were braceros offered a complete and secure modern package, for what they had come to know, want, and depend on required both sides of the border and the ability to move between them" (p. 198). Though the bracero program met its demise in the 1960s, this transnational subjectivity was reproduced in future generations, leading to the large-scale undocumented Mexican immigration seen today. …