Cover and interior design. Copyright University of North Carolina Press.

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Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects
in the Postwar United States and Mexico
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Deborah Cohen
BRACEROS
Cohen
BRACEROS
“A compelling, path-­breaking study based on a splendid set
of oral histories, Braceros demonstrates the inseparability of
Mexican and U.S. history and offers lessons for our current
debates on immigration and guest-­worker programs.”
— Sarah J. Deutsch, Duke University
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“Deborah Cohen has written a new account of the bracero experience
extremely well suited for our time in its transnational focus, its
concern for the agency of the braceros themselves, and its emphasis
upon the importance of Mexican labor migration to the history
of both Mexico and the United States. Amid all the controversies
concerning immigration, this book deserves wide attention.”
—Arthur Schmidt, Temple University
At the beginning of World War II,
the United States and Mexico launched
the bracero program, a series of labor
agreements that brought Mexican men
to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural
fields. In Braceros, historian Deborah
Cohen asks why these temporary migrants
provoked so much concern and anxiety in
the United States and what the Mexican
government expected to gain from par-
ticipating in the program. These concerns
and expectations, she suggests, provide
a way to look at nation-­state formation
as a transnational process. Cohen re-
veals the fashioning of a U.S.-­Mexican
transnational world, a world created
through the interactions, negotiations,
and struggles of the program’s principal
protagonists including Mexican and U.S.
state actors, labor activists, growers, and
bracero migrants. Cohen argues that bra-
ceros became racialized foreigners, Mexi-
can citizens, workers, and transnational
subjects as they moved between U.S. and
Mexican national spaces.
Drawing on oral histories, ethnographic
fieldwork, and documentary evidence,
Braceros applies a cultural approach to
analyze the political economy of labor
­migration, the rise of large-­scale corpo-
rate agriculture, and state-­to-­state rela-
tions, showing how the World War II and
postwar periods laid the groundwork for
current debates over immigration and
globalization. Cohen creatively links the
often unconnected themes of exploitation,
development, the rise of consumer cul-
tures, and gendered class and race forma-
tion to show why those with connections
beyond the nation have historically pro-
voked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory
political policies.
Deborah Cohen is assistant professor
of history at the University of
Missouri–St. Louis.
The University of
North Carolina Press
www.uncpress.unc.edu
Jacket illustration: Braceros at the Monterrey,
Mexico, migratory station. Leonard Nadel
photograph. Courtesy of Division of Work and
Industry, National Museum of American History,
Smithsonian Institution.
Published in association with the William P. Clements
Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University
The University of North Carolina Press
chapel hill
ISBN 978-0-8078-3359-9
9 780807 833599
9 0 0 0 0
Printed in U.S.A.
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2. Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects
in the Postwar United States and Mexico
DEBORAH COHEN
BRACEROS
Published in association with the William P. Clements
Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University,
by The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill