From Braceros to Pineros: Labour, Migration, and Changing Geographic and Social Landscapes in the United States

In Why Cybraceros? (1997), filmmaker Alex Rivera creates a short satire of labour importation by mocking the marketing film distributed by the California Grower’s Council, Why Braceros? (1959), which promoted to a mainstream audience the rationale for a guestworker program. Rivera references the arguments made for a necessary labouring body and mocks the reality of the importation program that demanded a cheap and docile labour force. Why Cybraceros? revamps the program to extract labour without employing actual bodies, and subsequently eliminates the problems that accompany the employment of real workers. Why Cybraceros? instead offers an alternative labour importation program that extracts Mexican labour for American farms without the bodies of the workers. This short film provides the premise for Rivera’s later film, Sleep Dealer (2008), a sci-fi movie that futuristically captures the desire of industries to extract the labour of Mexican bodies without the workers, without their lives. The three books reviewed in this essay – They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle Over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California (2012) by Don Mitchell; Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (2011) by Deborah Cohen; and Pineros: Latino Labour and the Changing Face of Forestry in the Pacific Northwest (2012) by Brinda Sarathy – all address the struggles over labour that are referenced satirically in Rivera’s films. Namely, the desire to maintain a cheap and exploitable labour force that will sustain the various U.S. industries, without the accountability to the labouring bodies that potentially pose a threat to the capitalist endeavours of industries.

These three texts are timely given the current debates taking place in the U.S. that place Latina/o migrants as perpetual foreigners and as a threat to mainstream America. As immigration continues to be debated in the White House, and in the everyday lives of all Americans – citizens and noncitizens alike – migrants are scapegoated for the economic problems of the U.S., surveilled and hunted by the state, and subjected to the deportation regime that continues to construct a racialized, exploitable, and disposable group of people. Under Obama’s administration, more than 1,000,000 undocumented immigrants (primarily Latina/o) have been deported, with approximately 400,000 deported during 2012, the stated annual goal by the Department of Homeland Security. Don Mitchell and Deborah Cohen’s historical account of the Bracero Program along with Brinda Sarathy’s contemporary account of Latino labourers in the forestry industry of the Pacific Northwest provide a lens to consider the ways in which labourers are objectified and commoditized with the aim of economic gains and development on behalf of industries and governments alike, as well as to highlight the unintended consequences of labouring bodies that have the power to alter geographic and social landscapes. In what follows, I will review the three books separately and will provide concluding springboard questions that these three texts raise with regard to migration and labour as these processes intersect with the “fatal coupling,” as Don Mitchell puts it, with class, race, gender, family, and citizenship. (229)

In They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle Over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California, Don Mitchell takes on a multilayer approach to exhaustively examine California’s landscape vis-à-vis the growth of industrial farming at the expense of Mexican migrant bodies during the bracero era. The book considers the historical geographical logic of the bracero program and examines how and why the program was struggled over, and how it unfolded, in California. By examining the program as intertwined with the industrial agricultural growth of California, Mitchell argues that the bracero era was...