Bracero Program Essay

Under the Bracero Program Mexicans were contracted to United State farmers to tend the land (Espinosa). These Mexicans are known as Braceros. In order to be legal, Bracero’s had to obtain permits and enter the United States through recruitment centers where they had to be deemed physically capable of the hard labor work they were signing up for. One poplar recruitment center was Ciudad Juarez, across the border of El Paso, Texas (Espinosa). Barcero’s were under contracts with the employer Farm Security Administration of the Department of Agriculture of the United States of America. Farm Security Administration of the Department of Agriculture of the United States of America could enter into contracts with farm owners known as sub employers (Marentes). The contracts were to be written in Spanish but often times they were written in English and the Bracero’s would sign without comprehending what the contract mandated.

Hispanics have been immigrating to America since the beginning of the Spanish Colonial era. Up until the 1920’s Mexican Americans have boomed in rural places in america. The 1920’s was meeting the beginning of a renaissance, a better promised life for both native americans as well as immigrants. Businesses were booming, wages were higher, and the industry was creating a bright future for America. However, Mexican Americans continued to face hardships as well as few successes leading up to the 1920’s. Whether these were Native born Americans with a Hispanic background or newly immigrated Mexicans, Mexican Americans faced the hardship of poverty, discrimination, segregation, and struggles during the 1920’s.

David G Gutiérrez’s Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity discuss the deep and complex understudied relationship between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. This relationship was a natural consequence of the mass illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States that had constantly been increasing the population of “ethnic Mexicans” and along with it brought tensions between those who were Americans of Mexican descent and had been living here for generations and those who had freshly arrived to the United States and as such did whatever they had to do to make a living.

The logos used in this book are through politics. Urrea makes clear that it’s Mexico's blame for putting people on the "devil's highway" through corruption and dense politics. But he also shows how misguided the United States policy has been. The author describes the conditions and historic events that lead to the beginning of the illegal immigration into the United States and draws a clear parallelism with our times, when there are several tasks in the United States that Americans are

Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz’s, Labor and Legality is a book written on the Mexican immigrant network in the U.S. She centers it on the Lions, a group of Mexican men from Leon, Mexico that all share their lives and help explain the many networks and strategies that are used in order to excel and gain happiness. There have been many different sorts of misconceptions about immigrants, and in recent years about undocumented immigrants from Mexico. The U.S. has made a sort of war on illegal immigrants and has made it a seemingly high priority in the media and in politics. Therefore, many Americans have been mislead and ill-informed about the history of immigrants/undocumented immigrants. Gomberg-Muñoz’s Labor and Legality helps set us straight. She unveils undocumented immigrants for the people that they are instead of the criminals that the media leads many to believe. Although she doesn’t have a wide range of participants for her study, I believe that she addresses many of the misconceptions and just plain ignorance that American people have of people that are undocumented; why stereotypes are supported by the people themselves, why politicians include stronger illegal immigration laws, and everything in between. Many of her topics reveal a sort of colonialism that the U.S. practices on Mexico; the exploitation of undocumented peoples to the benefit of the U.S. through economics, hypocritical laws and campaigns, and the racist and prejudice consequences.

In Harvest of Empire’s “Mexicans: Pioneers of a Different Type” Juan Gonzalez outlines how Mexican descendants contributed to U.S. prosperity and culture. Gonzalez’s assertion is that the Mexicans and their culture have been in the United States long before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the establishment of settlements and trade along the Rio Grande by Mexican pioneers, and the important factor Mexican-American workforce had in the nation. He supports his argument using historical records, individual’s stories and local papers. Respectively, Gonzales provides information that Mexicans greatly affected the economic uprising and culture of United States across the border.

Around sixty ranchers submitted a petition to the Congress protesting the unfair legal process that each landowner had to go through to prove their claims to the lands. Although this petition did not stop the legal structures from continuing to exploit the vulnerability of the Mexicans, it undoubtedly reflected the stark contrast between the lives of Mexicans before and after entering the American society, served as a criticism and a challenge for the unjust legal system, and demonstrated that the Mexicans were very capable of standing up for themselves, as opposed to being submissive. Aside from this petition, many of the dispossessed Mexicans formed “a community of the dispossessed” where they shared their experiences and stories and showed support for each other (Takaki 169). Through sharing their stories with others, their stories were passed down to the future generations and through these stories, history was preserved. Both the petition and the community worked to shed light upon the inequality in United States, and how the legal system contradicted itself by serving as the tool of discrimination while advocating for the equality of all

Many Mexican Americans have been able to accomplish their own versions of the American dream by attending a 4-year college, owning businesses, and taking on political and public service careers. However, Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants continue to face the hardships that their ancestors went through in the 20th century. The ethnic Mexican experience in the United States has been a difficult one for Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans of the first generation. Two key factors that continue to shape the lives of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants are labor laws and the citizenship process. Focusing on the research, statistics, and information provided by Mai Ngai “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration”, Natalia Molina’s, “In a Race All Their Own": The Quest to Make Mexicans Ineligible for U.S. Citizenship”, and George J. Sanchez, “Becoming Mexican American” will provide the cause and effect of labor laws and citizenship laws that made an impact on the lives of Mexicans during the 20th century.

The formation of segregated barrios and the development of a wealth of community-provided services showed that Mexican-Americans were not content to be marginalized by the United States. Instead, they were embracing an empowering new sense of self-determination and referring to themselves as “Mexicanos or as members of a larger, pan-Hispanic community of La Raza.” At this time La Raza referenced individuals of the Mexican “race”, whether they were in Mexico or in the United States, and was particularly important in the United States, where race was more important than citizenship. In the late 19th and early 20th century United States, race was determined by purity of blood, and there were only two races—white and black. White meant the individual had “pure blood” (European blood); black meant that the individual’s blood included indigenous or African influences. Being white meant being able to exercise one’s constitutional rights and being treated as a normal member of society’s dominant group. Being black meant that, regardless of whether he or she was a citizen, the individual would face discrimination similar to that which I described earlier. When the Spanish conquerors mixed with the people of Latin America, forming the mestizo, or mixed race, population that now composes most of the region, they removed themselves from a “white” classification in the United States. Thus, by engaging with the concept of La Raza, which connotes a mestizo race and population, Mexican-Americans rejected the binary nature of race in the United States and embraced what made them different—their indigenous-mixed blood and the cultural heritage that accompanied it. While the abuse directed towards Mexican-Americans may have

Mario García’s study of this era could also be considered prophetic to many Mexicans in the mid-nineties as the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed, it sank México’s economy, lands that the Mexican revolution had provided for farmers were gone, and as México was now obliged with treaty to buy produce from the United States. Mexican farmers unable to compete fled México once again in search for a better life to the United States.

The Mexican Migrant Farm Workers’ community formed in Southern California in the 20th century because of two factors that came together: farming emphasized by migrations like the Okie farmers from the East and Mexicans “imported” to the U.S. because of the need for cheap labor as a replacement of Americans during World War II. The migrant labor group formed after an already similar group in the U.S had been established in California, the American farm workers from the East, known as the Okies. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s caused the movement of the Okies to the West and was followed by the transition from American dominant farm labor to Mexican migrant labor. The Okies reinforced farming in California through the skills they took with them,

The Bracero Program was a temporary contract labor program initiated in 1942 by the United States and Mexico. Designed originally to bring a experienced Mexican agricultural laborers to harvest sugar beets in Stockton, California, but soon spread to most of the United States and to the railroad industry. Although the railroad program ended in 1945, after World War II the agricultural program continued until 1964. Originally, the program was designed to protect the illegal migrant workers against the exploitation by American farmers. However, it was criticized and was viewed as a failure from the humanitarian point of view.

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies wastes no time to highlight the key ideas about migrant farmworkers in the United States. The objective for the first chapter, was to determine whether migrating to the U.S. was worth being caught and deported back to San Miguel. In chapters 2 and 3 it discusses the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico when it comes to migration and how the labor segregation in American agriculture introduces a pecking order of citizenship, ethnicity and hardship.

The book “Fresh Fruits, broken bodies, Migrant Farmers in the United States By Seth Holms, is about Triqui migrants, who migrated up and down the west coast of the United States and Mexico, traveling between rural hometowns in Oaxaca and ideas of industrialized agricultural production in California and Washington. From reading this, he came to an understanding that the ethnography of how they made a living, the sorts of problems and harassment they faced, and the dreadful realities of a food system made on the backs of poor migrant workers.  He experienced how the poor suffered taking a hint from his informers, who warned Holmes that crossing the border is a particular kind of suffering, that he needed to hold in order to understand their lives.

That answer was sufficient when the United States did not possess the power to stave off a potato famine affecting an entire populace and could only open its ports to the people coming to the United States to escape its ravages or when the California Gold Rush of the late nineteenth century attracted multitudes of Chinese immigrants(2.), but it does not hold up to the scrutiny of current times as the United States is no longer experiencing a singular, uncontrollable driving force of immigration that it cannot curb or hope to control. Instead, the problem faced by the United States in terms of immigration currently is the largely illegal immigration of various peoples stemming from the Central and South America area. The question again arises of why. Closer examination reveals that the massive amounts of both legal and illegal of immigrants coming from these areas is fueled by a multi-tentacled beast having its roots in the over-arching problems of poverty, instability, and recessions faced by the peoples inhabiting these