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423 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This production has been made possible by a cast of thousands. I would like to acknowledge a few of its members and I hope those I miss will forgive the oversight. A small grant from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University launched the project. I appreciate the support of Christina Leigh Dietz and Mike Wasylenko. With the grant I hired Patrick Vitale, who did a fabulous job tracking down and briefing me on available archival collections and helping me see which ones might be the most fruitful for examining the bracero program not in and of itself but within the changing California landscape. Patrick’s work, I am sure, made a proposal to the National Science Foundation convincing enough for the Geography and Spatial Science to award me a grant (bcs 0550585). Without the Foundation’s support, I could not have done the depth of archival research I knew this project required. nsf’s support, of course, in no way implies that it accepts my views or interpretations; I alone am responsible for them. As is their wont, the librarians, archivists, and other staff who helped me find the documents on which this study is based were extremely generous with their time, while being exceptionally nice to a peripatetic and lonely researcher. Special thanks to all those I encountered in the Special Collections Department of Green Library, Stanford University; the Bancroft Library, University of California , Berkeley; Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego; and perhaps most of all the California State Archives. The interlibrary loan department in Bird Library at Syracuse University was unfailingly efficient and helpful; they nearly made it seem as if I were in California (despite the piles of snow under which Syracuse habitually lives). In amassing and organizing what now amounts to my own rather large library of documents relating to the bracero program I had excellent help (and excellent intellectual companionship) from a large number of students. Bora Kim trolled the agricultural censuses for me and figured out how to both summarize them and format them in a database that made my own analyses a breeze. Lisa Bhungalia tracked down and copied a mountain of fugitive documents and reports. Katie Wells ferreted out and collated for me an amazing trove of photographs. Josh Gray scanned the contemporary press for echoes of the bracero program in current immigration debates. Jacob Shell searched way- 424 • acknowledgments back issues of various journals. Jen Jeffery compiled the bibliography. Thank you all! In January 2008, at the invitation of the incomparable Barbie Zelizer, I moved to Philadelphia for a semester to join her Annenberg Scholars Program in Culture and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. I was there to teach and research issues in urban public space, but the rich scholarly atmosphere and the provision of an office in a hidden corner of the building meant I could both get the intellectual juices flowing after an interminable term as department chair in Syracuse, and hunker down and start working through the documents I had amassed over the previous two years of sometimes much-toorushed collecting. Fellow visiting scholar John Erni became a buddy, program administrators Anjali Gallup-Diaz and Emily Plowman made me feel more than at home, and a whole raft of colleagues and students—working in a field not my own—made me rethink more assumptions than I could list. The Annenberg School is lucky to have Dean Michael Delli Carpini running the show. Barbie herself made the whole experience an intellectual and social delight. Thank you for the opportunity. A year later, back in Syracuse, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship allowed me a semester and summer to pound out an early draft of about three-quarters of the manuscript. I very much appreciate the confidence the Foundation (and its reviewers) placed in my work. I hope they like the result. Mike Wasylenko once again figured out how to make the fellowship work within the context of both the Maxwell School and tax law. Matt Garcia was one of those who wrote a letter of recommendation to the Foundation on my behalf, an act of generosity that I much appreciate and made more valuable by his general support of my work, and his good ideas for making it better. Expensive as they were, the drinks among “my people” at the Langham only make a dent in what I owe him. Dick Walker also wrote for me. My—all of our—debt to him in all...

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