Abandoning Their Beloved Land: The Politics of Bracero Migration in Mexicoa

Alberto García's highly informative study examines the Mexican government's decision-making processes behind sending braceros to the United States during the lifetime of the Bracero Program, a guestworker agreement between the two nations that existed from 1942 to 1964. Unlike most studies of braceros, which primarily examine workers’ experiences in the United States, Garcia explores the political factors that went into the bracero selection process in five Mexican states—Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacán, and Zacatecas. García argues that the decentralization of this program's oversight “made municipal officials the Bracero Program's ultimate powerbrokers within Mexico,” shaping not only individual migrants’ experiences with the program, but also further calling into question the Partido Revolucionario Institucional's dominance over the mid-twentieth century Mexican state (p. 10).Mexico's federal officials tried to manage the Bracero Program directly upon its inception in 1942. Problems persisted from the beginning. The federal government attempted to ban ejidatarios, or peasants who held communal-use land grants, from the program, which ultimately contributed to many would-be migrants obtaining fraudulent contracts. Official corruption also led to a violent episode at the Mexico City Contracting Center, effectively spelling the end of federal oversight of the program. State governments found the task of administering the program after 1944 similarly unwieldy, largely delegating the task of bracero selection to municipal presidents, union leaders, and local representatives of state governments, all in an effort to maintain a sense of order over the program. As García argues in chapter 3, widespread conflicts between agraristas—farmers demanding further land redistribution from the post-revolutionary federal state—and conservatives who were fearful of the state's seeming anti-clericalism, led members of the “losing faction” in various fights to make bracero contract requests (p. 71). Likewise, federal implementation of agrarian reform itself also brought with it certain limitations that prompted ejidatarios to seek bracero opportunities despite the federal ban. Finally, as García examines in chapter 5, local autonomy within the program's administration, along with corruption, contributed to municipal officials reaping more benefits than their state and federal-level counterparts did in administering the program. Municipal officials sold bracero eligibility cards, used the program to advance their own political initiatives, and implemented extortion schemes that often drove prospective braceros to migrate as undocumented immigrants. “Flagrantly self-interested financial and political corruption,” García concludes, “was the defining aspect of the Bracero Program's municipal-level administration from the moment local governments became responsible for selecting braceros in 1944 until the program ended twenty years later” (p. 147).García's thorough and exceptionally well-researched study is significant on multiple levels. First, the author uses his analysis to prove that the post-revolutionary Mexican federal state's power was limited, perhaps to a surprising degree. Second, García's analysis will give readers a greater appreciation for braceros’ lived experiences on both sides of the border, which is of value given that bracero historiography overwhelmingly focuses on workers’ experiences in the United States. Perhaps most importantly, however, scholars who study Mexican immigration to the United States will also appreciate how García's work complicates the “enduring but relatively simple narrative” that “treats the migration phenomenon as a straightforward socioeconomic affair that can be effectively managed via government intervention” (p. 152). García rightly points out that recent expressions of the possibility of re-initiating the program—primarily from Mexican political leaders, though of course there has been some interest in a guest worker program in the United States, as well—are misguided. Proponents of such a program lack an understanding of how virtually impossible it was to administer such a complicated international agreement in ways that were truly fair and of widespread benefit to the greatest number of Mexico's struggling working class. Abandoning Their Beloved Land shows that Mexican immigrants, even when under the seeming protections of a bilateral agreement with the US federal government, sometimes left Mexico with great difficulty, but always at their own peril.