Mexican Inmigrants To The United States
Mexican Inmigrants To The United States
Mexican Inmigrants To The United States
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Kelly Lytle Hernandez
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Mexicanos who returned to Mexico during the decade, an estimated ers in the southwestern United States increased to meet the needs
400,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans participated in official of wartime production. This time, however, the U.S. and Mexican
repatriation programs. These were sponsored by private groups in- governments hoped to manage labor migration to the United States.
cluding the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, charities such as On August 4, 1942, the United States and Mexico signed a bilateral
the Mexican Comité de Repatriación, municipal governments in the agreement establishing the Bracero Program, under which the U.S.
United States, and the Mexican federal government. The repatriation government contracted Mexican laborers to work in the United States,
programs encouraged and facilitated the return of Mexicanos to Mexico particularly on southwestern and northwestern farms. Although first
by easing the expenses of return. For example, U.S. -based charities introduced as a wartime effort, the Bracero Program lasted until 1964.
and municipal governments provided train fares to the border while In that time, over two million Mexican laborers - typically young men
the Mexican government waived many of the duties and fees that were from rural regions within Mexico - fulfilled nearly five million bracero
levied against goods that repatriates brought to Mexico such as phono- contracts in the United States.
graphs and cars. Mexicanos had helped to build one of the nation's most The Bracero Program represents a critical era in the history of
significant and profitable industries, but when the economy collapsed Mexican labor migration to the United States and scholars have of-
many argued they were now an unwanted burden. Under threats of fered various methods for understanding this U.S. and Mexican effort
deportation, municipal officials, U.S. immigration authorities, and lo- to manage Mexican labor migration. Working as a labor activist with
cal social leaders placed enormous pressure upon Mexican immigrants California farm workers during the 1940s and 1950s, Ernesto Galarza
and their U.S.-born children to leave the United States (8). wondered aloud about the condition and status of bracero workers in
At the same time that U.S. officials were pressuring Mexicanos the United States: "Is this indentured alien - an almost perfect model
to leave the United States, Mexican government officials encouraged of the economic man, an 'input factor' stripped of political and social
their compatriots to return home. Mexican authorities believed that attributes that liberal democracy likes to ascribe to all human beings
Mexican immigrants could contribute to social and economic develop- ideally - is this bracero the prototype of the production man of the fu-
ment by bringing their experiences with U.S. technology, agriculture, ture?" (10). Galarza critiqued the Bracero Program as a system of "ad-
business, and culture to the development of modern agricultural com- ministered migration" by which U.S. agribusinesses extracted labor
munities within Mexico. Dr. Manuel Gamio, Mexico's foremost schol- and profit from a reserve labor supply contained south of the border. It
ar of Mexican immigration to the United States during the 1920s and was an indictment conceived at the intersection of theory and practice
1930s, explained that Mexican immigration to the United States pro- in the fields where California farmers had strategically used braceros
vided Mexico with "injections of modern culture" (9). With Gamio's to lower wages, break strikes, and demean working conditions.
assistance, the Mexican government established several agricultural Gilbert González and Raúl Fernández have built upon the work
colonies for returning migrants. Most failed to flourish, however, due of Galarza by placing the Bracero Program within the context of U.S.
to insufficient infrastructure and a sense of cultural alienation among imperialism and examining the program as a system of "colonial labor
repatriates and their U.S.-born children in Mexico. By the close of the exploitation" (11). Against this backdrop of the Bracero Program as a
1930s, many of the repatriates had abandoned the agricultural colo- system of cross-border labor exploitation, new research by Deborah
nies and began to return to the United States. Cohen and Ana Rosas offers a textured social and cultural interpreta-
tion of the Bracero Program. As their work reminds us, not all Mexi-
Bracero Program cans were eligible for Bracero contracts. Only healthy, landless, and
Although some repatriates returned north by the late 1930s, it was surplus male agricultural workers from regions not experiencing a
not until World War II that mass labor migration from Mexico to the labor shortage within Mexico were qualified to apply for Bracero con-
United States surged once again. The demand for agricultural labor- tracts. Many Mexicans - those who were too young, too old, or too sick
and rural landholders, urban dwellers, or female - were all categori-
cally ineligible for the Bracero Program. Examining the interests of
Mexican elites and considering the gendered dimensions of Mexico's
effort to manage the international labor migration of rural Mexican
men, presents opportunities for a richly nuanced understanding of
the Bracero Program.
According to Cohen, the Mexican officials of the 1940s continued
to invest in the social, political, and cultural possibilities of mass la-
bor migration to the United States. They cast the Bracero Program as
a modernization project that would transform Mexicans and Mexico
by sending rural campesinos to learn, save, and absorb all that they
could from their experience in the United States (12). Ana Rosas, on
the other hand, examines the Bracero Program as "a transnational and
gendered immigrant family experience" (13). By sponsoring the exo-
dus of millions of rural Mexican men, the Bracero Program, argues
Rosas, interrupted family life and reshaped gender norms and rela-
tions within Mexican communities. In turn, however, braceros and
their families significantly impacted the development of the Bracero
Program by refusing its limits, exploiting its opportunities, and de-
fying the ideals pinned to managing their labor migration between
the United States and Mexico. The Bracero Program was all of these
"Operation Wetback," 1954. Mexican deportees prepare to board deportation things - a system of labor exploitation, a matter of empire, a project of
buses at the Elysian Park bus depot in Los Angeles, California. (Courtesy of
masculinity and modernization, a family experience, and a site of gen-
Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA, Collection 1387)
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dered resistance. The Bracero Program's enormous impact upon life
and labor both north and south of the U.S. -Mexico border continues to
be debated by historians of Mexican immigration to the United States.
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the growing low-wage, service-sector of the United States' deindus-
trializing economy. Despite this significant role, opposition mounted
against them, especially the undocumented, as native-born workers
and labor unions attributed the decline of wages, working condi-
tions, and labor's political clout in the 1970s and 1980s to the rising
number of unsanctioned workers in the United States. Further, many
Americans grew anxious about the social, cultural, linguistic, and de-
mographic changes that immigration created as Latino immigrants
emerged as the majority of immigrants during the 1970s. Social, cul-
tural, and economic anxieties pushed immigration control onto the
American political landscape with most observers focusing their at-
tention on the rise of unsanctioned Latino immigration crossing the
U.S. -Mexico border region.
The United States Congress attempted to stem unsanctioned mi-
gration with the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act
(IRCA) of 1986. IRCA provided amnesty for the previous generation
of unsanctioned border crossers comprised of undocumented immi-
grants who had continuously resided in the United States since Janu-
ary 1, 1982; penalized the employers of unsanctioned workers; and
Part of the latest wave of immigration from Mexico, Felipe Macias and family, increased funding for the United States Border Patrol. More money,
from Guadalajara, stand by their trailer in Colonia Pueblo de Palmas in the Rio officers, and resources increased Border Patrol operations in the U.S.-
Grande Valley of Texas, in 2004. (Courtesy of Corbis, © Alison Wright/Corbis) Mexico borderlands, however, against Mexico's economic decline
and ongoing problems of poverty and violence in Central America,
manufacturing jobs along Mexico's northern border region. These enhancements in the United States Border Patrol only resulted in
jobs paid wages that are higher than elsewhere in Mexico and drew increased apprehensions with little impact upon the overall flow of
migrants to the border region. Still many of the transnational cor- unsanctioned migration. Unsanctioned border crossers from Mexico
porations, which located their factories in Mexico to take advantage and Central America simply took more desperate measures to surrep-
of cheap labor and minimal trade barriers, paid unlivable wages and titiously enter the United States and, when successful, stayed longer
the working conditions provided for the overwhelmingly young and north of the border (22).
female factory workforce were often dangerous, if not outright fatal. By the turn of the twenty-first century, over one hundred years of
Displaced campesinos, border factory workers, and their families often Mexican and Latino immigration had forged a large Hispanic popula-
weighed the risks of their employment and unemployment options in tion in the United States, which signified a fundamental shift in U.S.
Mexico against the dangers of crossing into the United States, where demographics and carried a significant impact upon American society
daily wages continued to dwarf those available in Mexico. At some and culture. However, the century of mass migration from Mexico
time in their lives, particularly when they are young, a good number of and, more recently from Central America, was dictated by develop-
Mexico's poor, male and female, made the trek north to earn enough ments that spanned far beyond the borders of the United States. Un-
to live in Mexico (20). even capitalist development and U.S. foreign policy framed the story
of Latino immigration to the United States. □
New Immigration Boom
Endnotes
Under these conditions, Mexican labor migration boomed after
1. John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the
the collapse of the Mexican Miracle in the 1970s. Many of Mexico's
Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);
migrants entered legally, but many others entered the United States
Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Porfirians, Liberals and Peasants
without official inspection or documentation. Alongside Mexico's (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and, Moisés González
sanctioned and unsanctioned labor migrants, a growing number of Navarro, Sociedad y cultura en el porfiriato (México: Consejo Nacional para
Central Americans immigrated to the United States in hopes of flee- la Cultura y las Artes, 1994)-
ing wars in their home countries. The United States government was 2. Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mex-
directly implicated in the Central America wars, but when Salvadoran, ican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Guatemalan, and Honduran immigrants began arriving in the United Press, 1995), 5-26. See also, Lawrence Cardoso, Mexican Emigration to
the United States: 1897 - 1931 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980),
States, U.S. immigration officials refused to grant them refugee sta-
1-38; Mario T. Garcia, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880-
tus (21). Threatened with deportation to their war- torn homelands -
1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 1-64; and, Douglas Monroy,
carrying a certain sentence of death, brutality, and conscription for Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression
many - Central American immigrants chose to resist the mandates (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 75-83.
of U.S. immigration law. Religious leaders throughout the country 3. Fourteenth Census of the United States (1920), vol. V: Agriculture
supported their efforts by offering their churches, temples, and syna- (Washington: G.P.O., 1922), 699 and7io-n.
gogues as sites of sanctuary for those who refused to quietly submit to 4. Fifteenth Census of the United States (1930), vol. I: Agriculture
U.S. immigration laws. The sanctuary movement for Central Ameri- (Washington: G.P.O., 1931), 32, 58, 412, and 604.
5. Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farm Workers, 1870
can immigrants ignited a powerful social movement that reignited
-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 40-70; Lawrence J. Jelinek,
the religious left in the United States.
Harvest Empire: A History of California Agriculture, 2nd ed. (San Francisco:
Since the 1970s, regardless of their origins or immigration status, Boyd & Frasur, 1982).
Latino immigrants played crucial roles in the shifting U.S. economy. 6. Testimony of S. Parker Frisselle, U.S. Congress, House of Representaives.
Not only did they work in agriculture but they also quickly moved into Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. 69th Cong., ist sess.,
This content downloaded from 131.170.6.51 on Tue, 05 Jul 2016 05:26:54 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
January 28 and 29, February 2, 9, 11, and 23, 1926 on H.R. 6741, H. R. 15. Kelly Lytle Hernández, "The Crimes and Consequences of Illegal
7559, H.R. 9036. 7. Immigration: A Cross-Border Examination of Operation Wetback, 1943-
7. Gabriela F. Arrendondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916- 1954," Western Historical Quarterly 37 (Winter 2006): 421-44.
1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 28. 16. Hector Aguilar Camin and Lorenzo Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican
8. For more information on the repatriation movement see the following: Revolution: Contemporary Mexican History, 1910-1989 (Austin: University
Balderrama and Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal, D. H. Dinwoodie, of Texas Press, 1993), 203. See also Douglas S. Massey with Jorge Durand,
"Deportation: The Immigration Service and the Chicano Labor Movement and Nolan J. Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in
in the 1930s," New Mexico Historical Review 52 (July 1977): 193-206; an era of Economic Integration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002).
Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: 17. Ibid., 228.
Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900-1939 (New 18. Ibid., 229.
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Josiah Heyman, Life and 19. Wayne Cornelius, Mexican Migration to the United States: Causes,
Labor on the Border: Working People of Northeastern Sonora, Mexico, 1886- Consequences and U.S. Responses (Cambridge: Migration and Development
1986 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 33. Study Group, Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of
9. Manuel Gamio, Mexican Immigration to the United States; A Study of Human Technology, 1978).
Migration and Adjustment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), 64. 20. Massey and Durand, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, 105-164.
10. Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (Charlotte: 21. Susan Bibler Coutin, The Culture of Protest: Religious Activism and the U.S.
McNally and Loftin, 1964), 16. Sanctuary Movement (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); Maria Christina
11. Gilbert G. González, Guest Workers or Colonized Labor: Mexican Labor Garcia, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United
Migration to the United States (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), States, and Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
2. See also Gilbert González and Raúl Fernández, A Century of Chicano 22. Wayne Cornelius, "Death at the Border: Efficacy and Unintended
History: Empire, Nations, and Migration (New York: Routledge, 2003). Consequences of US Immigration Control Policy," Population and
12. Deborah Cohen, "From Peasant to Worker: Migration, Masculinity, and the Development Review 27 (December 2001): 661 - 689.
Making of Mexican Workers in the US," International Labor and Working
Class History 69 (2006): 81-103; Cohen, "Caught in the Middle: The
Mexican State's Relationship with the US and Its Own Citizen-Workers, Kelly Lytle Hernandez is assistant professor of history at UCLA, where she
1942-1958," Journal of American Ethnic History 20, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 110- received her PhD in 2002. She is the author of "Persecuted Like Criminals":
32. See also, Howard Lloyd Campbell, "Bracero Migration and the Mexican The Politics of Labor Emigration and Mexican Migration Controls in the
Economy, 1951-1964," PhD diss., The American University, 1972. 1920s and 1930s," Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 34 (Spring
13. Ana Rosas, "Familias Flexibles (Flexible Families) Bracero Families' Lives 2009): 219-39. Her ho°k> MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol
across Cultures, Communities, and Countries, 1942-1964," PhD diss.,
in the U.S. -Mexico Borderlands, is forthcoming with University of Cali-
University of Southern California, 2006: 8.
fornia Press. Hernandez is the Associate Director of the UCLA Chicano
14. Kitty Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law and the Control of Labor, 1820-1924
(London: Academic Press, 1984).
Studies Research Center and her current research focuses on the social
world of imprisonment in Los Angeles between 1890 and 1940.
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