Regulating Bracero Migration: How National, Regional, and Local Political Considerations Shaped the Bracero Program

This article examines how federal, state, and municipal governments administered the migrant worker selection process in the states of Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán during the initial phase of the Bracero Program, a bilateral initiative that allowed Mexican men to work in the United States as seasonal contract farmworkers. It argues that multiple political factors—such as the activities of groups that opposed the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional, organized labor conflicts, and the need to respond to natural disasters—influenced how officials allocated contracts, which rural workers were deemed eligible or ineligible to migrate, and which individual rural workers ultimately received contracts. The article shows that federal authorities delegated increased administrative responsibilities to state and municipal governments as the Bracero Program progressed, which in turn allowed regional and local officials to exercise considerable influence during selection periods.

Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora

In Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández challenges machismo—a shorthand for racialized and heteronormative Latinx men's misogyny—with nuanced portraits of Mexican men and masculinities along and across the US-Mexico border. Guidotti-Hernández foregrounds Mexican men's emotional vulnerabilities and intimacies in their diasporic communities. Highlighting how Enrique Flores Magón, an anarchist political leader and journalist, upended gender norms through sentimentality and emotional vulnerability that he performed publicly and expressed privately, Guidotti-Hernández documents compelling continuities between his expressions and those of men enrolled in the Bracero program. Braceros—more than 4.5 million Mexican men who traveled to the United States to work in temporary agricultural jobs from 1942 to 1964—forged domesticity and intimacy, sharing affection but also physical violence. Through these case studies that reexamine the diasporic male private sphere, Guidotti-Hernández formulates a theory of transnational Mexican masculinities rooted in emotional and physical intimacy that emerged from the experiences of being racial, political, and social outsiders in the United States.

Around the world in 80 waves: Addressing the nation’s immigration crisis

Immigration has a paramount effect on the size, distribution, composition, and cultural aspects of the United States. Policymakers implemented several programs, such as the Bracero program, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), and have increased border security to address migration issues. While these programs were merely short term solutions, we focused on possibilities that can address this issue in a long-term and comprehensive setting. The MIGRANT (Migrant Integration Generating Reform And New Trends) policy focuses on the objective to integrate undocumented immigrants into American society.

The Legacy Project

California Baptist University, College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, was awarded a grant through the Council of Independent Colleges that supported a community project, The Legacy Project. This project involved roughly 20 undergraduate students participating in service to the senior population in the neighboring community of Casa Blanca, in Riverside, California. Additionally, both students and seniors were immersed as participant-observers, gathering data, to include the collection of over 20 oral histories. These oral histories were of significant importance to the preservation of cultural and social history in the region, and specifically as related to the community of Casa Blanca, with roots in the Bracero Program. Data analyzed from the oral histories revealed three predominate themes: Faith and Spiritualty, Resiliency, and Oppression and Discrimination. Both project strengths and challenges were identified, most notably, both students and senior participants reported the significant benefit of their relationship built upon mutual respect and learning.

Socially Undocumented Embodiment

This chapter continues to build the argument that “being socially undocumented” entails having such a real and unique social identity. It argues that “being socially undocumented” is embodied. To make this argument, it first engages the narratives of socially undocumented people themselves as conveyed in the contexts of music, poetry, ethnographic interviews, and first-person testimonios in order to understand aspects of socially undocumented embodiment from the perspectives of those who experience it. Second, it traces the development of socially undocumented embodiment over the course of United States history, focusing on the Mexican-American war, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the Johnson-Reed Act, Repatriation, and the Bracero Program. These explorations will reveal, it is argued, that socially undocumented embodiment is both racialized and class-based in nature. This means that “being socially undocumented” meets at least one of the criteria of a “visible” social identity identified in Chapter 2.