GilbertG. Gonzalez - Guest Workers or Colonized Labor?

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GUEST WORKERS OR COLONIZED LABOR?

GUEST WORKERS OR
COLONIZED LABOR?

MEXICAN LABOR MIGRATION TO
THE UNITED STATES

Gilbert G. Gonzalez

First published 2006 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2006 by Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Chapters 1 and 6 are reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd. from articles of the same title by Gilbert G. Gonzalez in Sage Race Relations Abstracts, Vol. 30, no. 1 (2005) and Vol. 29, no. 3 (2004) respectively.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Guest workers or colonized labor?: Mexican labor migration to the United States /
Gilbert G. Gonzalez.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-59451-150-0 (hardcover)
1. Alien labor, MexicanUnited States. 2. MexicoForeign economic relations
United States. 3. United StatesForeign economic relationsMexico. I. Title.
HD8081.M6G6648 2005
331.62372073dc22

2005012207

Designed and Typeset in New Baskerville by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-151-6 (pbk)

Contents

A S IN EACH OF MY WORKS I owe special thanks for the assistance and support of a number of people. This book emanated from a previous work that I authored with Raul Fernandez, in which we developed a theoretical approach to explaining Mexican migrationan approach that is applied in this work. However, my interest in the topic, brace-ros, I owe to Henry Anderson, whose invaluable works on the bracero program, including The Bracero Program in California, spurred me to investigate braceros as a variation of Mexican migration. Henry graciously supplied important papers, documents, and other materials from his personal archive that I included where appropriate in this study.

Alicia Anaya worked as my undergraduate research assistant and assisted me in interviewing braceros in northern California as well as transcribing the interviews. A grandchild of a bracero and a one-time migrant laborer herself, Ms. Anaya participated in important ways and contributed significantly over the course of this study. Academic staff support is most essential as well, and, indeed, administrative assistants Barbara Abell, Renee Martin, and Stella Ginez never failed to answer my continual requests for assistance, small or large. I owe a great deal to their commitment and skills, which made my work so much easier than would otherwise have been the case.

In addition, I want to thank the many students in my courses who expressed much interest in the topic of braceros, the guest workers of the mid-twentieth century. I have been continually surprised by the number of students and administrators at the University of CaliforniaIrvine (UCI) with a family history in which a bracero formed a part, a factor that has only increased my own interest in the bracero program.

My colleagues from the UCI Chicano Latino Studies Program and the Labor Studies Program were crucial to this study; their suggestions and comments on drafts of chapters or of articles that led to chapters were important to the development of my ideas. I am especially indebted to my colleagues Rosaura Tafoya, Lisa Garcia Bedolla, Roberto Gonzales, Rodolfo Torres, Vivian Price, and Linda Trinh Vo. I also wish to note the interest and support Ive received over the years from Anna Gonzales and Sunny Lee at the UCI Cross Cultural Center; many thanks are extended to them. Helen Chenut, Doug Haynes, Vinayak Chaturvedi, and Amelia Lyons of the UCI History Department offered their timely and important suggestions for further reading, which are integral to this book. I thank them, too, for their valuable responses to my queries.

Funding is critical to the success of research, and this work is no exception. The University of California Institute for Labor and Employment, the UCI Labor Studies Program, the Latinos in a Global Society Program, and the Office of Research and Graduate Studies all provided the financial support necessary to complete this study.

My familys constant encouragement and abiding interest in my research has made my work a much more valuable undertaking than I alone could ever have made it. I can only offer simple but sincere thanks to Frances, Antonio, Alicia, Xochitl, Ramon, Ninaz, and Aric for their abiding support.

Although I was fortunate to receive the support and assistance of a good number of people, there should be no doubt that I am ultimately responsible for the content of this work.

Gilbert G. Gonzalez

A LONG-STANDING CONVENTION EMPLOYED BY American academics specializing in Mexican migration, as well as by legislators concerned with migration policy affecting Mexico, maintains that U.S.-Mexico relations are normal relations, an expression of reciprocity, interdependence, and equality. The convention further holds that a hundred years of Mexican migration comprise one more migrant stream coming to America to struggle for and experience the mythological American Dream. However, this commonly held perspective of U.S.-Mexico relations has not always been borne by Americans, particularly large-scale investors and corporate heads, who in the late nineteenth century deemed Mexico a colonial prize to be exploited for its natural resources as well as for its cheap and easily accessed labor.

Well into the twentieth century a widespread imperial mindset regarding Mexico mirrored an ongoing economic expansionism, or what amounted to a neocolonial strategy to systematically exploit Mexicos resources and labor. That international relationship, which assumed a central place in U.S. State Department policy going back to the late nineteenth century, bears the imprints of imperialist domination. The major social consequences of this U.S. imperialist dominationthe mass uprooting of people from the countryside and the migration of that labor to the heart of the U.S. economywill be the subject of the chapters that follow.

U.S. Imperialism and Mexican Migration

The U.S. imperialist agenda and, specifically, the labor policies contained within that agenda provide the context for this study. The analysis covers the long-standing American tradition by large-scale enterprises of employing temporarily imported Mexican workers, known today as guest workers. Particular attention is accorded here to the bracero contract labor agreements lasting from 1942 until 1964, designed and initiated by U.S. agribusiness interests and signed onto by the Mexican government. By examining the bracero program (with attention to the 19171921 labor importation program and the current H2-A guest worker program), we can better understand the historic antecedents for the currently discussed guest worker agreements proposed by President George W. Bush (as well as those of thenDemocratic presidential candidate John Kerry) and thereby more effectively evaluate current guest worker proposals.

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