El primer programa bracero y el gobierno de Mexico, 1917-1918 (review)

El primer programa bracero y el gobierno de México, 1917-1918. By FERNANDO SAUL ALANIS ENCISO. San Luis Potosí: El Colegio de San Luis, 1999. Tables. Bibliography. 119 pp. Paper.

In 1917 Mexico signed into law the new constitution, and the United States entered the First World War. The author of El primer programa bracero y el gobierno de México, 1917-1918 seeks to explain how both events shaped relations between these bordering nations, especially regarding issues of labor migration.

Fernando Saúl Alanís Enciso organizes his study around four central arguments. First, as the U.S. war effort drew millions of workers away from fields and factories and created new demands for foods and other supplies for the troops abroad, U.S. employers faced labor shortages, aggressively recruited workers from Mexico, and successfully campaigned for more open migration policies. Second, the northern "pull" of demand for labor and recruitment efforts, more so than "push" factors from Mexico, resulted in significant migration (both authorized and clandestine) of Mexican working-class families seeking jobs in a variety of U.S. private and public enterprises, such as railroads, aluminum factories, shipbuilding and other construction operations, fish-packing plants, rice and sugar plantations, and even government military camps. At the same time, however, poor working conditions, anti-Mexican hostilities, and a panic caused by Mexican nationals being drafted into the US military combined to lead many migrants to cross back over the border in 1917 and 1918, as Alanís Enciso notes in his third point. Finally, contrary to some accounts, the author argues that the Carrancista government took a number of measures to reverse the migration trend, including warning would-be emigrants of the hardships they would endure north of the Río Bravo and promoting repatriation among those already in the United States. Even so, there remained a steady outflow of workers from Mexico in 1917 and 1918.

Alanís Enciso's use of Mexican consular reports, Mexican Department of Labor records, and daily newspapers from both Mexico and the United States generally supports the individual points and leads to some fresh insights and perspectives. Most notably, the author shows that many important border policies and migration agreements originated not from the president's quarters in the national capital, but from initiatives and negotiations carried out by consular offices in the U.S. For instance, a loosely defined bracero "program" began to emerge when Mexican consuls in border states met directly with employers and U.S. federal and state government authorities to coordinate the movement of laborers, and to press for better working and living conditions, employer-paid transportation to and from the border, and protection from mistreatment. Consuls also called for an end to the drafting of Mexican citizens into the U.S. military and intervened directly in hundreds of cases to effect the release of conscripted Mexicans. Although these local diplomatic offices lacked power to enforce the agreements, Alanís Enciso does show that many initiatives were independent of federal directive. Further, the author provides extensive and colorful documentation of employers' energetic efforts to recruit Mexicans, including the use of often deceitful enganchadores, who operated both in border regions and in the interior of Mexico, as well as misleading advertisements in Mexican newspapers.

Weaknesses of this study derive primarily from its narrowness. The author makes no effort to situate this two-year episode in the context of a longer trajectory of Mexican migration patterns (not even for the revolutionary years of 1910 to 1920), to explain war-related pressures for diplomatic support at the highest levels of government in both nations, to compare experiences of other workers targeted by U.S. employers, or to respond to the many historiographical contributions and debates made in the study of U.S.-Mexican border and migration issues in the past two decades. This work, which rests on a...