Dr. Ana Elizabeth Rosas - Abrazando el Espíritu. Bracero Families Confront the US-Mexico Border

This history would have never been written had it not been for Dr. George J. Sanchezs mentorship. Beginning in 1998 and to this very day, Dr. Sanchez has been a generous mentor to me, and the more I am a part of this profession the more I am convinced that he is one of the best mentors in the nation. Upon enrolling in his undergraduate course The History of the Mexican American at the University of Southern California (USC), I became inspired to research further a subject that was at best a fraction of what Dr. Sanchez shared with his students in this course and, over time, with the thousands of women and men participating in his many conferences, programs, workshops, and forums in support of a truly interdisciplinary and diverse education at this and countless campuses nationwide. His affording us the confidence, trust, and funding to pursue our own research with honesty, rigor, and heart at a campus in which this was a rarity for a first-generation working-class Mexican immigrant female undergraduate student like me transformed my thinking and in turn my world. Dr. Sanchezs brilliantly expansive investigation and teaching of the Chicana/o experience reaffirmed for me that becoming a Chicana historian was not only possible but worthwhile.

More concretely, since day one, Dr. Sanchez refused to give up on me or on what would become my publication of this history. With unparalleled high standards and humanity, he mentored me through my participation in USCs Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program; a cruel first year of graduate study at USC; USCs Ahmanson Foundations Fellowship Program; USCs first dissertation workshop in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity; a Latina/o Studies Fellowship from the Smithsonian Institutions National Museum of American History; a Doctoral Fellowship from the Ford Foundation; and a fellowship from Stanford Universitys Bill Lane Center for the Study of the West. He provided extensive comments and editorial recommendations on what went on to become an award-winning dissertation; with his equally supportive wife, Debra Sanchez, he opened his family home to me when I was transitioning out of USC; and he was most persistent in my not allowing my perfectionist streak and voluminous research to delay my submission of this history for publication.

Years of working with me on my BA and doctorate in history did not discourage Dr. Sanchez from selflessly giving of his precious energy, time, and editorial wizardry to advance the publication of this book. Hence, it is with great respect that I detail his unwavering and meticulous efforts in support of my working in a profession as part of a larger struggle for a more just society that has immeasurably improved my life. I hope that if he reads this expression of my gratitude he understands why, even after more than fifteen years, I still call him Dr. Sanchez and not George as other colleagues do: it is my small way of honoring his commitment to my education. He will always be a person worthy of my utmost and wholehearted respecta true profesor, as my late grandmother Francisca Medina Ramirez used to say.

Among the introductions that my participation in Dr. Sanchezs dissertation workshop made possible, none was as generative as my meeting to share and discuss my dissertation proposal with Dr. Vicki L. Ruiz. In 2003, when I first met Dr. Ruiz, she made sure that I left with a renewed confidence in the promise of pursuing a doctorate in history. Before this meeting, no other professor of womens history had treated my work with the respect with which Dr. Ruiz reviewed my dissertation proposal. Our working well together at this workshop and in continued correspondence resulted in her serving on my dissertation committee, acting as my faculty mentor for the University of California Presidents Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and now being my chair and colleague as part of the University of California Irvines (UCI) departments of Chicano-Latino studies and history. These stages of my career and her role within them have substantially strengthened my investigation and writing of this history. She has transformed each of these opportunities and interactions into invaluable projects from which I have been able to grasp what is possible when one writes from the heart. Throughout the last couple of years, her support of my publication of this book and my work at UCI have made evident just how much she believes in the promise of being generous with what we know.