The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History

How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom

Mireya Loza

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781469629773
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Mireya Loza sheds new light on the private lives of migrant men who participated in the Bracero Program (1942–1964), a binational agreement between the United States and Mexico that allowed hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers to enter this country on temporary work permits. While this program and the issue of temporary workers has long been politicized on both sides of the border, Loza argues that the prevailing romanticized image of braceros as a family-oriented, productive, legal workforce has obscured the real, diverse experiences of the workers themselves. Focusing on underexplored aspects of workers' lives--such as their transnational union-organizing efforts, the sexual economies of both hetero and queer workers, and the ethno-racial boundaries among Mexican indigenous braceros--Loza reveals how these men defied perceived political, sexual, and racial norms. Basing her work on an archive of more than 800 oral histories from the United States and Mexico, Loza is the first scholar to carefully differentiate between the experiences of mestizo guest workers and the many Mixtec, Zapotec, Purhepecha, and Mayan laborers. In doing so, she captures the myriad ways these defiant workers responded to the intense discrimination and exploitation of an unjust system that still persists today.

Chapter One: Yo Era Indígena

Race, Modernity, and the Transformational Politics of Transnational Labor

Their sombreros and serapes undoubtedly hung in those dreary bunkhouses, for they were bareheaded, and their rough black hair look[ed] as if [it was] never combed. These mestizos and Indians varied in skin color.

—TED LE BERTHON

Indians from Tlaxcala, small wiry men who spoke only the tribal tongue, showed up in Yuba City.

—ERNESTO GALARZA

Published seven years after the initiation of the Bracero Program in 1949, Aventuras de un Bracero: Relatos de Seis Meses en Estados Unidos, remains one of the few bracero memoirs depicting the conditions Mexican workers experienced in the United States.¹ Bracero-turned-author Jesús Topete has his protagonist recount his six-month experience in the United States as a guest worker. His narrative not only reveals details about the bracero experience but also highlights popularly held notions of race in Mexico. In one anecdote, he writes about the excitement that the protagonist and his fellow workers felt when they heard that women would be coming in to work alongside braceros harvesting potatoes in California. The men were looking forward to working alongside tall, beautiful “gringas,” because they spent so much time laboring only in the company of men. The protagonist was then extremely disappointed when “chichimecas speaking English” arrived. Here he used a term that technically refers to the Nahua people of Mexico, but it is also used as a derogatory way to indicate indigeneity. Thus, he both insulted the women and emphasized racist concepts of idealized Mexican beauty in which indigenous women are unattractive. He even claimed that some of the men in the camp were better looking than these groups of women.

Topete says he developed a tense relationship with these Mexican American women because they made fun of the braceros, viewed them as unmodern, and often asked them if cars and telephones existed in Mexico. When one of the women asked him why he did not speak to them, he told her that he did not like to be mocked. Furthermore, the women spoke English boastfully in front of the braceros as if they were gringas and Spanish in front of the gringos, claiming they were Mexican. But the Spanish she spoke, according to him, was not even that good because it was clear that she used terms from the most remote mountains in Mexico. He went on to say, “La cara de totonacas se les ve a tres kilómetros [You could see their totonaca (indigenous people of Totonacapan) faces from three kilometers away].”² Here he references another indigenous population as a way to insult these women, while he also maps indigeneity onto Mexico’s rural and remote areas.

The protagonist saw himself as belonging to a group that stood above rural indigeneity; as he explained, he was a cosmopolitan man from Guadalajara who had experienced modern Mexican cities with skyscrapers, movie houses, theaters, and parks. The memoir thus reveals the racialized perception that indigenous communities conflicted with or only existed outside of cosmopolitan modernity, in both Mexico and the United States. In Topete’s schema, one could not be both “Indian” and modern. Although these women also strived for a cosmopolitan identity, the protagonist felt he could decipher their true identity as “Indian.” His indictment also illustrates racialized relationships of power, where his modern cosmopolitan identity trumps what he perceived as these women’s “true” racial identity. The protagonist intended the words “totonaca” and “chichimeca” to be insulting and belittling. Although these women inhabited new lands in which these notions of racialized appearance were understood differently, they continued to be racially inferior in his eyes, and many braceros shared this sentiment. Mexican racial systems were at once flexible and rigid. Indians could become mestizos, but a hierarchy still existed, with whiteness at its pinnacle. That is to say, although mestizaje functioned as a spectrum of mixture, whiteness had more value, and Topete felt more entitled to it.

Topete’s description of this scene reveals popular perceptions about the place of indigenous communities in Mexican racial hierarchies, while it also demonstrates how race is an important construct that defined social boundaries in the transnational communities of Mexico and the United States during the Bracero Program. Although many braceros were in the process of inhabiting new geographic areas, they rooted their racial frameworks in Mexican social hierarchies and discourses of Mexican modernity. In the United States, migrant workers challenged and reconfigured Mexican meanings of beauty, belonging, and labor, thus reframing racial categories. Braceros negotiated American and Mexican racial constructs, as well as their implications, when being managed by American growers. While Topete’s novel demonstrates how braceros grounded racial meanings in perceptions of Mexican indigeneity, his writing simultaneously renders indigenous braceros invisible. By 1940, the Mexican census estimated that “Indians” composed about 20 to 25 percent of the population.³ However, the population of Mexican indígenas was perhaps much higher, given that census takers, politicians, and anthropologists held the power to determine whether an individual was “Indian.” Furthermore, the state was invested in decreasing the population identified as Indian in order to reinforce the national racial identity of mestizo.⁴ The state pressure to transform indigenous communities into mestizos makes it very difficult to determine the numbers of indigenous braceros that participated in the program.

Scholars have explored the racism embedded in the discourses of Mexican president Manuel Ávila Camacho and other government officials as they envisioned guest workers to be the racially undesirable members of the Mexican nation and most in need of modernization. Historian Ana Rosas argues that the Mexican government viewed braceros as an “intellectually, culturally, and socially inferior race.”⁵ They constructed the indigenous subject as socially and racially deviant and an impediment to Mexican modernity. This racism was based on the Mexican history of colonization, the oppression of indigenous communities, and nation-building strategies that focused on the mestizo as the ideal citizen. If the mestizo rural peasantry was marginalized because of its indigenous heritage, where did that leave populations that identified only as indigenous and did not claim whiteness or mestizaje? Historian Robert Buffington keenly observes, “In Modern Mexico … Indians would be productive citizens or be damned!”⁶ That is to say, there was no place for a modern indigenous future. The Bracero Program thus became a way for indigenous communities to become “productive” citizens by learning to labor in the United States. Their bodies would be disciplined abroad and ready for integration upon their return to Mexico.

This chapter focuses on the experiences of indigenous braceros and their crucial role in shaping narratives of Mexican modernization through the Bracero Program. Mexican elites viewed indigenous people as deviant subjects who needed to be remade into Mexican mestizos for incorporation into the nation.⁷ Their stories reveal how some indigenous bracero communities strived for this inclusion in the project of Mexican modernity by marking their transformation from indigenous peasant to Mexican laborer, while others rejected this premise. In learning the framework of modernity, bracero communities increasingly used the discourses of civilization, class, and race to explain the changes happening in their families, towns, and rural villages. Indigenous women evoked these discourses and argued that their husbands became more “civilized and modern” because of the program.⁸ Indigenous braceros often highlighted the impact of language and attire as manifestations of the modernizing power of migration. In indigenous communities, such as the Zapotecs of Teotitlán del Valle, braceros recalled buying their “first pair of shoes and coming home with tailored pants.”⁹ In this context, they viewed the Mexican rural past as uncivilized, and dress standards signaled a world of difference.¹⁰ Changes in attire became emblematic of the transformative power of bracero modernity. Men experienced the modernizing powers of the program through the Mexican and U.S. states’ management of their bodies, through their new purchasing power and consumption, and finally through language and literacy, all of which shaped racial and ethnic identity and changed how these men understood and represented themselves.

The racial and ethnic identities of distinct bracero populations also shaped how individuals understood their place in the racialized landscape of the United States and their relationships with other braceros. Examining the experiences of indigenous braceros can help us question assumptions that these guest workers were racially and ethnically homogeneous. Furthermore, placing indigenous workers at the center highlights how American labor management created and perpetuated a distinct racialized system when hiring Mexican migrants. Some indigenous communities yearned to secure bracero contracts, but American officials informally barred them from the program simply because of their inability to speak Spanish proficiently. As a result, indigenous migrants were more likely to enter the United States as undocumented workers. In Mexico, official documents and processing stations utilized the dominant language of Spanish, making it more difficult for non–Spanish speakers. Conversely, other employers targeted populations to work in specific crops deemed suitable for indigenous bodies, such as picking dates. Discriminatory practices often placed these groups in dangerous jobs. This forced many indigenous braceros to rely on assistance more from hometown social networks than from other immigrant communities. For example, while many mestizo braceros from northern states like Jalisco had prior experience working in the United States and could rely on their social networks for support, many of the indigenous braceros from the central and southern states of Mexico did not share this advantage.¹¹ Some men from these geographic areas were the first of their communities to enter U.S. territory.¹²

The communities I focus on include the Purépecha residing in Michoacán; Mayans residing in the Yucatán; and Mixtecs, Nahuas, and Zapotecs from central Mexican states who relocated to Southern California. These communities created strong ties with the Bracero Justice Movement and were willing to be interviewed for the Bracero History Project. I trace indigenous populations through archival documents that label individuals as “Indian” and through oral histories with indigenous populations and nonindigenous populations. Many within the bracero community claimed indigenous identities because of language, while others did so through narratives emphasizing family history and culture. The lines of racial and ethnic identity were not always clear-cut; accordingly, interviewees spoke about their complicated dances across these lines and along spectrums of mestizaje. While few historians have focused on these intersections of Mexican indigeneity and migration, several anthropologists, such as Seth Holmes, Lynn Stephens, Liliana Rivera-Sánchez, and Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez, have produced pioneering works that document the contemporary migration of these communities.¹³ In addition, organizers in the Bracero Justice Movement have identified indigenous communities affected by the Bracero Program in almost every geographic region of Mexico, from the northern border to southern states like the Yucatán. While my research does not encompass all the indigenous communities that participated in the Bracero Program, it does include some of those who settled permanently in the United States.

Like mestizos, indígenas wrote to the Mexican presidents pleading for work contracts. These letters reveal not only the conditions that caused them to seek out contracts, but also the additional burdens they faced. In March 1944, a group of Purépecha wrote to President Manuel Ávila Camacho requesting entry into the program because of the disaster caused by the eruption of the Paracutín volcano in Michoacán. They asked the president for the immediate “immigration of the Purépecha race,” because the eruption had ruined their crops.¹⁴ Once in Mexico City, the group of indígenas spent more then sixty days trying to enter the program. Their situation grew “precarious” because they had been lied to and deceived by false promises of contracts.¹⁵ The next month, they wrote to the president yet again, explaining that they could not return because many had sold everything they owned to get this far and that their poverty in Mexico City had driven the men to sleep in public parks. Returning home would mean that they had “failed.”¹⁶ Over 200 indígenas signed the letter. Some wrote their names confidently in cursive, while others had shakier signatures or wrote in block print, and still others simply left their thumbprint in lieu of a signature.

Situations like these had become such a problem that a group of women in Mexico City wrote to the president to complain that their streets and sidewalks had become “dorms” and “public urinals.” They saw these men as a “danger to families” and children.¹⁷ Three years later, Josefina González Flores, a fifteen-year-old young woman from the predominantly Purépecha area of Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, wrote to the president. “For the sake of God, can you give my father, Zacarias González Flores, a card so he can go work?” In the past, her father had held a six-month contract that had enabled him to buy a small lot, and with much sacrifice they had managed to cover their small home with a roof. Josefina added that if they had to sell it, “Where will we go?”¹⁸ While indigenous men from Michoacán traveled a long way in the hopes of enrollment, those from southern states with large indigenous communities traveled much further, adding to their costs. Félix Aguilar gave up after he found it nearly impossible to enter the program in Mexico City in March 1944. He wrote to the president simply requesting fare to return to his home state of Yucatán.¹⁹ Aspiring braceros continu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Yo Era Indígena
• Chapter Two: In the Camp’s Shadows
• Chapter Three: Unionizing the Impossible
• Chapter Four: La Política de la Dignidad
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index