Migrant Imaginaries

Latino Cultural Politics in the U. S. -Mexico Borderlands

Alicia Schmidt Camacho

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814717349
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2009 Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association

2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Migrant Imaginaries explores the transnational movements of Mexican migrants in pursuit of labor and civil rights in the United States from the 1920s onward. Working through key historical moments such as the 1930s, the Chicano Movement, and contemporary globalization and neoliberalism, Alicia Schmidt Camacho examines the relationship between ethnic Mexican expressive culture and the practices sustaining migrant social movements. Combining sustained historical engagement with theoretical inquiries, she addresses how struggles for racial and gender equity, cross-border unity, and economic justice have defined the Mexican presence in the United States since 1910.

Schmidt Camacho covers a range of archives and sources, including migrant testimonials and songs, Amrico Parede’s last published novel, The Shadow, the film Salt of the Earth, the foundational manifestos of El Movimiento, Richard Rodriguez’s memoirs, narratives by Marisela Norte and Rosario Sanmiguel, and testimonios of Mexican women workers and human rights activists, as well as significant ethnographic research. Throughout, she demonstrates how Mexicans and Mexican Americans imagined their communal ties across the border, and used those bonds to contest their noncitizen status. Migrant Imaginaries places migrants at the center of the hemisphere’s most pressing concerns, contending that border crossers have long been vital to social change.

PART I
Border Crossers in Mexican American Cultural Politics

CHAPTER 2
Migrant Modernisms

Racialized Development
under the Bracero Program

Is this indentured alien—an almost perfect model of the economic man, an “input factor” stripped of the political and social attributes that liberal democracy likes to ascribe to all human beings ideally—is this bracero the prototype of the production man of the future?

—Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor (1964)¹

The fact that here are body-men means that there are men without bodies.

—Etienne Balibar, “Class Racism” (1991)²

The advent of World War II intensified and transformed the longstanding economic and social ties between the United States and Mexico. The migratory circuit between the two countries gained new prominence in the wartime economy of the United States. This chapter examines the cultural politics of the Bracero Program, a joint venture of the U.S. and Mexican governments, which sought to bring the vast transnational labor market under full state regulation. This labor loan spanned the years 1942 to 1964 and brought hundreds of thousands of Mexican contract workers to over two dozen states for seasonal jobs in agriculture and the railway industry. An estimated five million men participated in the program over its two decades, with many thousands more coming as undocumented migrants. State representatives for Mexico and the United States sought to use the contract system to control the massive migration flow between the two countries. In practice, however, this regulation merely sanctioned the capitalist demand for a flexible workforce made up of laborers stripped of effective civil and labor rights. The Bracero Program ultimately cemented the vision of Mexican migrants as temporary workers in the United States, to the detriment of both migrants’ labor autonomy and Mexican American civil rights.

By the 1940s, migrant Mexicans, alternately vilified and valued, were the embodiment of tractable labor, fulfilling a capitalist fantasy of endless productivity. The imported stoop laborers of cotton and food cultivation became, in Etienne Balibar’s phrase, the “body-men” of the wartime economy, workers whose entire existence could be appropriated for generating profit. The term “bracero” derived from the Spanish word brazos [arms], a designation that captured the limited terms of the men’s recruitment. Carted to and from the border, they were valued as laboring bodies, mere arms detached from intellect or political will. Braceros were designated not by name but by a serial number on their contracts. As the United States and its Latin American allies assembled the necessary labor and natural resources for combating fascism in Europe and the Pacific, the war provided a new cast to modernization discourse. The bracero, shuttling between a developing nation and the advanced industrial power of the United States, served not as a soldier of national combat but as a soldier of labor.

Even as the war revitalized a militant nationalism that made Mexicans and Mexican Americans vulnerable to racial terror and exclusion, the war against fascism also provided a new language of citizenship and democracy for border communities, and for migrant workers who aspired to greater gains from their mobility and labor power. The discourse of development would not simply belong to the nation-state and its corporate interests, but would find expression in the border communities’ campaigns for social justice. Whether the emergent ideology of reform and revolution would accommodate the migrant presence remained a troubling question for transborder communities during the Cold War and the civil-rights period.

The leading Mexican American scholar of migration and labor in the postwar years, Ernesto Galarza—himself an immigrant from the Mexican state of Nayarit—rightly questioned the creation of a floating army of workers. For Galarza, the bracero was neither a guest, in the sense of being a voluntary migrant, nor a temporary worker, in the sense of operating as a free agent, but was, rather, a category apart—a captive worker uprooted from home, unable to integrate into U.S. society. Galarza viewed braceros as a threat to the livelihood of U.S.-born farmworkers. Claims for inter-American friendship and national progress, he knew, acted as a powerful sanction for racial and class discrimination against both migrants and U.S.-born Mexicans. The importation of “indentured aliens” as farmworkers was less a resolution to the problems of unequal development in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands than an expansion of a neocolonial caste system within the globalizing agricultural economy. As such, the presence of thousands of imported workers in labor camps, or encamped outside Mexican recruitment centers, recalled the longer history of racialized class struggle both within Mexico and in the agricultural labor market.

The specter of hundreds of thousands of these “production men”—mere arms detached from the enfranchised body of the citizen—crossing into the United States revealed the lineaments of class racism in the transborder society. For Mexican Americans, the Bracero Program forced a reckoning with far more than their economic vulnerability in the United States: it revealed, once again, their own alienated status within the nation. The mass arrival of braceros increased Mexican American ambivalence toward the migrant newcomers, with whom they shared ethnic ties, class identity, and a history of racial discrimination. While intellectuals like Galarza exposed capitalist modernization as a racializing project, Mexican Americans contested the conversion of their vibrant laboring culture into nothing more than an “input factor.”

For Galarza, as for many of his generation, migration was “the failure of roots.”³ In the aftermath of World War II, the predicament of stateless people cast emigration in a new light, making visible the meager protections for emigrants and refugees. The postwar discourse of human rights placed new obligations on nation-states to track and protect their subjects; internal displacement and transnational emigration raised the specter of the state’s failure to act as guarantor of rights.

This chapter examines the years of the Bracero Program through the lens of print culture, in the photojournalism of the Hermanos Mayo in Mexico City, and by way of the writings of Ernesto Galarza and Américo Paredes, whose documentary and fictional work indicted the national failures that created a permanent market in migrant people. The Hermanos Mayo [Mayo Brothers] were five Spanish émigrés who developed new aesthetics for photojournalism as they documented the mass labor exodus from their adoptive Mexico. As refugees from the Spanish Civil War, the photographers observed the mass mobilization of Mexican workers through the lens of their own history of displacement and leftist struggle. The dignity of their portraits contrasted strongly with the prevailing attitudes of Mexican nationalists, who used the figure of the bracero to indict the failures of the postrevolutionary government. The Hermanos’ pictorial record mirrors the writings of Ernesto Galarza, whose studies of Mexican laborers in the 1950s established new transnational frameworks for viewing class and civil-rights struggles in the Americas.

A committed trade unionist, Ernesto Galarza navigated the precarious straits between naming the costs of institutionalized contract labor and blaming the migrants themselves, whose mobility frustrated organized labor and civil-rights leadership (just as it posed a problem for state authorities). Américo Paredes, writing without the strictures of making policy, used the imaginative space of the novel to explore the contradictions within national ideals of progress and order. For Paredes, the taint of colonialism, and in particular its racial ideology, was at the very core of the transnational labor economy. His novel The Shadow explores the post-revolutionary crisis in Mexico, in which the failure of roots derived from the collapse of the ejido system; but the slim text also attends to the ways economic development doubles as a project in subject formation.

Both Ernesto Galarza and Américo Paredes were ultimately less concerned with the economic or class features of capitalist domination of Mexican and Mexican American communities than they were interested in how postwar developments functioned as a new regime of subjection for the discriminated and displaced communities of the Mexican borderlands. Through the figure of the immigrant—for Paredes, the peon, and for Galarza, the bracero—the two intellectuals explored the uncertain subjective worlds of laboring Mexicans, citizen and noncitizens, whose marginality and mobility precluded their access to rights or the goods of the modern order that their labor helped produce.

The Bracero Program, which represented the largest historical transfer in contract workers in the Western Hemisphere, could only be sanctioned through an enormous expenditure of resources. Historians have shown that the wartime claim to a labor shortage was a convenient fiction for growers accustomed to using labor surpluses to control both foreign and U.S. workers. The ideologies that defined and legitimated the temporary-worker program deserve attention beyond the question of its economic or political impact for domestic workers. Mae Ngai terms the contract-labor system a mechanism of “imported colonialism” for the way the delivery of temporary workers mimicked colonial labor systems abroad. As Cindy Hahamovitch has shown, the guest worker has been a global feature of capitalist development dating to its initial emergence in colonial plantations and slavery.⁴ It is distinguished from slavery because it is a voluntary rather than involuntary labor transaction; nonetheless, the contract most often stipulates the isolation of the imported workforce from integration into the national society. That is, the guest worker is a temporary alien presence, rather than a candidate for naturalization. State controls over the movement of workers, and their ultimate repatriation, give powers to employers that mirror the unfree economies of indentured labor and slavery. Workers do not determine the sale of their labor but are subject to the brokerage of the state and employers’ agents, and they are thus given limited enjoyment of their “legal” status in the labor market and host society. Inequality and opportunity for exploitation, then, are inherent in guest-worker contracts.⁵

Advocates for agricultural workers in the United States uniformly opposed the Bracero Program. No unionist could abide giving employers the power to repatriate workers. Braceros who protested their dissatisfaction with their contracts in the United States were often summarily deported. But Mexican American labor leaders in the bracero period also contended with nativism within the labor movement that left all Mexicans, citizen and noncitizen, and especially farmworkers, without access to collective bargaining and effective representation. The bracero posed a threat not only because imported labor undercut the bargaining power of U.S. workers; their presence intensified the racialization of Mexican people as a subordinated class in the United States. The Bracero Program stipulated that Mexican laborers were a temporary or reserve labor force, a fiction that had a corrosive effect on Mexican American efforts to move beyond their identification with stoop labor. Ernesto Galarza was above all painfully aware of the demands that this labor relation imposed on his people: it deformed kinship and communal bonds, and it deprived Mexicans of full cultural expression.

While the Bracero Program enabled a tactical negotiation at the level of the state between capitalist demands and anti-immigrant forces, it left the fundamental problems of racial and class domination intact. The Bracero Program design of the ideal immigrant worker threatened to coopt all of Mexican labor, under the ideological projection of the “production man.” The managed labor migration reinforced the historical pattern of treating Mexican migrants as “always the laborer, never the citizen.”⁶ If employers valued Mexicans’ supposedly unique predisposition to stoop labor, this designation worked against their social integration, since their very suitability for degraded work indicated their disqualification from full citizenship in the United States. The expansion of the contract-labor system further imperiled historical claims of Mexican peoples to the Southwest as a rooted community, integral to both national landscapes.

Emigrants Made to Order

As the United States emerged from the Depression in the late 1930s, U.S. growers and railroad industrialists raised complaints about labor shortages, seeking permission to import Mexican workers for the harvest and building season. Unionists and civil-rights leaders protested that employers were simply using foreign workers to create a labor surplus and keep wages artificially low for the U.S. labor force. Even before the United States entered World War II, California agriculturalists had initiated procedures for bringing Mexican workers into fields and railyards as a protective measure against shortages caused by the draft. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the labor concerns of growers became a matter of national security.

On August 4, 1942, Mexico and the United States implemented the first of several historic agreements for the large-scale transfer of Mexican workers from Mexico to the United States. The “Mexican-United States Program of the Loan of Laborers,” known informally as the Bracero Program, lasted until 1964 and oversaw the emigration of five million Mexican citizens to U.S. soil for temporary, unskilled work. The two governments sought to protect their own interests through the labor loan. Both hoped that state regulation would control the informal traffic in migrant labor. For Mexican leaders, the Bracero Program offered a solution to mass unemployment and unrestricted emigration. The bracero was to act as a modernizing agent, by sending needed revenue in the form of wages and by resettling in Mexico with knowledge of industrial agriculture and having discarded provincial customs. U.S. legislators envisioned the program as a means to curtail illegal immigration while also obtaining a low-cost source of stoop labor, without the costs of providing for their social welfare.

Despite concerns about the notorious mistreatment of Mexican migrants in the enganche [subcontract, literally “hook”], Mexican policymakers in the Comisión Inter-Secretarial responded positively to the U.S. solicitations. Mexican officials demanded strict quotas and contract regulation in order to protect the rights of nationals and to offset potential negative effects on domestic agriculture. Most pressing was the question of how to prevent a mass exodus of Mexican laborers, given the profound disparities in wages and job opportunities between the two countries. Officials outlined ways to track the movement of workers and retrieve them when necessary, with the hopes of deterring the out-migration of skilled nationals and securing the return of the emigrant labor force.

The legal documents that governed the contracts were a study in bureaucratic fantasies of total control: the contracts, in both English and Spanish, bore the signatures of U.S. and Mexican officials who pledged to keep bracero work free and secure and to guard against coercion and exploitation. The contract guaranteed that braceros would obtain, at minimum, a wage of thirty cents an hour and would receive medical benefits, insurance policies, the right to refuse unwanted work and the right to unionize, and access to consular services while abroad. Employers could subcontract their imported workers, but braceros could not move from their jobs to new sites of employment. These provisions allowed both governments to represent the labor loan as a patriotic sacrifice to the war effort and as a symbol of cooperation between the two countries.

In practice, these standards were never secured. Employers resisted the authority of the federal oversight and hired masses of unauthorized workers. Mexican laborers arrived to filthy work camps, encountering poor food, minimal care, and a hostile work environment. Their wages routinely fell well below the required minimum and consular officials did little to intervene on behalf of injured or discriminated nationals. Emigrants often could not read their contracts, and many did not even know their ultimate destination. The design of the program gave employers a variety ...