Bracero Programs Pros And Cons

When contextualized by historical precedent, does the ethnographic method expose the contrasted emotions that migrants have felt as inhabitants of Mexico and the United States? In historian Deborah Cohen’s first book entitled Braceros! Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar U.S. and Mexico, readers follow the voyages of the Mexican-born men who chose to leave their homeland for the United States as agricultural laborers in the so-called Bracero Program between 1942 and 1964. Throughout her historiography, Dr. Cohen’s credentials as a dedicated investigator of U.S. and Mexican socioeconomic policies manifest themselves in her findings. Currently, Dr. Cohen is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri

in St. Louis, and her work focuses on transnational and gender studies. In 2011, the University of North Carolina (UNC) Press published Dr. Cohen’s aforementioned book in association with Southern Methodist University’s William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, yet the UNC Press did not release her book as part of a series. Presently, Cohen’s Braceros! remains popular among historians, labor activists, and immigration researchers. In particular, one might say that these members of her audience engage with her text to grasp how braceros experienced social marginalization as well as economic advancement on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Since Braceros! employs first-hand perspectives and documented facts to analyze social inequality, Cohen’s book would fit well in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history courses.
In this book, Cohen argues that even though braceros faced constant discrimination from private and public-sector actors while migrating, many braceros felt that the program helped them to improve their work ethics and gain financial capital in the U.S.

Yet, she tries to show that U.S. and Mexican military and customs officials as well as farm owners and colleagues caused great stress to the braceros through their discriminatory inspection and hiring practices. To begin with, Cohen quotes U.S. and Mexican people, newspaper articles, and government documents to show that the Mexican state aimed to modernize the Mexican agricultural workforce by determining which adult male applicants to the program seemed like hard-working Mexican citizens, and then sent those who passed public screening exams to the U.S. While there, Mexican politicians presumed, braceros would learn mass growing techniques and bring this new technical knowledge back to Mexico upon return. However, the author also cites her interviews with elderly braceros who returned to northern Mexico in addition to other socio-historical sources to claim that U.S. customs officials and the agribusiness companies that employed braceros sought to civilize them. While braceros lived in workcamps on large farms in California, Texas, and elsewhere, and when they passed through U.S. customs, authorities inspected the braceros’ bodies and taught them hygienic behaviors to see if the braceros could perform the backbreaking farm

work that U.S. soldiers had vacated to fight in World War II. If U.S. officials and employers did not find the men capable of filling these jobs, then the braceros’ private and public-sector superiors would denigrate them as unfit to remain in the country.
Nevertheless, Cohen’s interviewees indicated that they could not have started farms and shops to support their families after returning to Mexico if they had not earned money and acquired consumer goods while abroad. Moreover, the braceros’ feelings that the program had social and material benefits contradict pessimistic literature that claims that braceros only faced exploitation from U.S. actors when migrating. In this essay, I argue that Cohen portrays braceros as seeking to develop modern transnational identities because they wanted to maintain their patriarchal responsibilities to their Mexican families and prove that they could earn foreign material comforts despite the humiliation they endured at the U.S.-Mexico border and on the job.
Firstly, Cohen emphasizes that the Mexican government selected applicants to the bracero program based on geopolitical and physiognomic characteristics that officials deemed as semi-modern to idolize the men who fit those criteria and abnegate those who did not.

Above all, political leaders believed that men from Durango had European racial characteristics that made them “ready for modernization” as opposed to more indigenous-looking peasants. In other words, Mexico’s government imagined modernization as a process in which men who looked like the light-skinned inhabitants of the nation’s prosperous northern neighbor had the best chances of succeeding in the agribusiness enterprises that flourished there. During the program’s application process, Cohen found that duranguense applicants had to pay for labor contracts or solicit politicians to confirm that they possessed good moral character, and pass comprehensive physical examinations to migrate north. Subsequently, men would have to pay between fifty and two-hundred pesos each to obtain mica cards permitting them to work in the U.S. or “plead their cases” in letters to Mexican officials if they could not get cards, travel to Durango’s Francisco Zerca Stadium so that the regional program director could see that they had the “callused” hands and strong bodies that would aid their hard work abroad, and endure doctors examining them for lice, new scars, and internal infections. As Cohen discovered from her interviews with barber

and migrant don Álvaro as well as officials’ statements, the Mexican state prioritized lighter-skinned men who it thought had money, wore nicer clothes, and had more durable bodies over those who did not hold such qualifications. Therefore,