Deborah Cohen theorizes and documents Mexican workers in the United States in the mid-twentieth century as complex transnational and gendered agents acted upon by two governments but also acting on their own behalf for various reasons. Her analysis offers the most complicated view yet of these workers in the World War II and Korean War eras, part of a growing movement to capture these men’s stories, which are increasingly becoming unavailable.Cohen positions her narrative between those black-and-white analyses of the bracero program as either exploitation or opportunity; her account is rather one containing nuanced voices. The book focuses on the multiple stakeholders, expectations, and rationalized agendas of nations, interest groups, and individuals involved with the program. She builds national, transnational, and supranational themes as they intersect with individual workers, their families, and their communities. Located within these multiple discourses is the Mexican worker, neither a victim nor a martyr but a historical agent perhaps hoping to gain wealth, occasionally a war hero, or a transnational spouse and father taking a chance on working in the United States.The book is structured around three unofficial phases of the bracero program: 1942–1947, 1948–1951, and 1951–1964 and its legacy. Cohen’s analysis of the diplomatic rhetoric and agendas of the two nations is superb, highlighting the irony of the Mexican government touting the modernizing effects the program would have on the country through workers returning from the United States with new technological skills, competencies that they were often denied as growers favored braceros serving as hand workers. Instead, the little technological access and modernization received by Mexico came from the individual consumption and products braceros brought back from the United States. The Mexican government’s goal of elevating the country through exposure to returning mexicanos, while perhaps more symbolic and discursive than anything, did not preclude braceros from being agents of change for their home families and communities, as Cohen aptly demonstrates in her interviews with many returning workers. She also documents the costs of the program to transnational bracero families, particularly to women and children left in Mexico, not just the benefits of returned income and goods.The US government and agribusiness sectors had their own goals and narratives. Cohen excels at explaining the rhetoric by which US farmers positioned themselves as Jeffersonian models of self-sufficiency, which masked the massive governmental aid they received, of which braceros were a part. Growers also presented themselves as beleaguered businessmen, national heroes during two wars who desperately needed help. Yet, in reality, by 1940, 50 percent of the nation’s food was grown on less than 10 percent of its farms; one-third of farmworkers labored on less than 3 percent of the farms. The mythic image of the yeoman farmer as a small businessman trying to scrape by was just that, mythic, and it shaped the trajectory of the bracero program and the treatment of the men coming from Mexico.Cohen also details how the individual worker fared within both these larger themes of modernization in Mexico and salvation in the United States. As other scholars have, Cohen describes the hurdles and processes for selection into the program from the Mexican side, but she highlights better than any previous researcher the role the United States played in manipulating workers in Mexico through selective opening of the border or the use of Operation Wetback. Again, the strength of Cohen’s work lies in those sections that describe the need for applying workers to appear to be Indian and in need of modernization in order to be selected, or that chronicle the attempts by the US government and social service agencies to control men and their bodies. Both sides attempted to circumscribe bracero agency as individuals in favor of a broader national agenda.The book concludes with critical analysis of contemporary guest-worker issues such as the H-2A provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act or missing bracero pensions from over a half-century ago. Cohen effectively predates and predicts the contemporary immigration and guest-worker debate due to her profound understanding of these historical policies and discourses. These “ambassadors in overalls” (p. 251) were suspect in the eyes of their countrymen for leaving and in the eyes of US residents for coming. This distrust prevented workers on either side of the border from finding common cause with braceros, a lesson that still resonates in the present as competing interests once again politicize, imagine, and rhetoricize another transnational labor agreement.