The Transnational Informal Bracero Economy in the Imperial–Mexicali Borderlands, 1954–65

This article explores how the Bracero Program’s unintended consequences increased undocumented immigration and, in turn, created a transnational informal bracero economy from 1942 to 1964. As a case study, California’s Imperial Valley and Baja California’s Mexicali Valley demonstrate how the treaty’s formal immigration and labor provisions hampered braceros’ rights and living conditions through stolen wages, unsanitary housing, and unfulfilled labor contracts. At the same time, braceros and receiving communities forged a contiguous informal economy—characterized by informal and illicit commerce—to address workers’ needs. In turn, small-scale entrepreneurship of families and borderland residents, like informal eateries, garment work, and street vending, helped them confront unemployment and underemployment. Despite the inherent problems of the Bracero Program and the transnational informal bracero economy, the U.S. Congress failed to address such issues when it passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (INA). In the post-bracero era, the inequities of this economic immigration structure continued under the transnational informal INA economy. Although scholars have examined the Bracero Program’s effects on undocumented immigration and bribery, this history is incomplete without comprehending how the treaty’s policies intersected with the informal economy that supported braceros, their loved ones, and unofficial vendors, economic systems that conflicted with the dominant formal structures in the United States and Mexico across the program’s history and in the present.