Abandoning Their Beloved Land: The Politics of Bracero Migration in Mexico. By Alberto García

Abstract

In a 1948 letter to Mexico’s federal agrarian officials, Cleofas Hernández and Alberto Rodríguez expressed their desire to migrate to the United States as braceros. For years, socio-economic precarity in Southern Guanajuato made it difficult for them to provide for their families. Then came the final straw: Presa del Aguacate’s ejidatarios seized their land. Authorities refused to intervene on campesinos’ behalf. And so, the pair decided, they had one choice: to “abandon their dearly beloved land.” This is one of many evocative testimonies that Alberto García skillfully mines—along with a trove of government documents from federal, state, and municipal archives—to unravel the politics of bracero migration in Mexico. For García, bracero migration was much more than a socio-economic phenomenon. Instead, it was shaped by the ideologies and ambitions of Mexican elites, Catholic activists, local powerbrokers, and migrants themselves. As the author convincingly explains, the roots of bracero migration lie in the failures of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional’s (PRI) agrarian reform and the upheaval generated by conservative Catholic opposition to the revolutionary state’s secular agenda. Importantly, García reveals that while politicians of all stripes treated prospective braceros like pawns, the men who wished to join the program were anything but pliable victims. At its core, the decision to migrate was a shrewd rejection of the PRI regime and the endemic corruption that gripped large swathes of Mexican society.