Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom by Mireya Loza (review)

The Bracero Program, initiated in 1942 as an agreement between the United States and Mexico and terminated in 1964, was a scheme that brought in primarily agricultural workers to the United States to help fulfill a wartime labor shortage. In Defiant Braceros, oral historian of the Bracero Program, Mireya Loza, reconsiders the storied history of the bracero worker along numerous planes of attention. Themes of indigeneity, mobility, memory, and modernity all occupy the work’s pages and approaches in significant ways. Written as a contribution to the David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History, the work sets out to “shed new light on the private lives of migrant men” by departing from prevailing views that have framed bracero men as a “family-oriented, productive, legal workforce” (book jacket). Also highlighted in the title is the term defiant, a word that suggests cultural agency and/or power in the face of difficulty, oppression, or injustice. The book draws upon archival collections in the United States and Mexico, newspapers, secondary literature, and an oeuvre of oral history interviews conducted by Loza with the collaborative help of many others between 2002 and 2011. Loza herself documented some ninety oral histories, and she oversaw the collection of 800 for the National Museum of American History’s Bracero Archive, thus contributing significantly to the creation of “public memory” and knowledge surrounding the guest worker program’s place in American history. These oral histories were featured in the 2009 exhibit, “Bittersweet Harvest,” at the National Museum (171).

In her introduction, the author refers to the term deviance to denote bracero behaviors, focusing on braceros’ use of “defiance in order to reveal the power and interest of both Mexico and the United States in normalizing a particular type of masculinity tied to family, ethnicity, labor, and modernity” (15). Here Loza makes the provocative suggestion that braceros not only “blurred the boundaries between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal,’ indigenous and mestizo,” but also challenged the ruling powers to organize for improved conditions, and, retroactively, compensation for lost wages (15). Powered by a sense of urgency to record the memories of living subjects and to expand and build upon what lay in the archives, Loza’s efforts to compile a digital archive of bracero social history pushes into the corners and reaches of memory to resuscitate braceros as subjects and agents of American history. Defiant Braceos is organized into four chapters: “Yo Era Indígena” (I am Indigenous); “In the Camp’s Shadows”; “Unionizing the Impossible”; and “La Política de la Dignidad” (The Politics of Dignity). An introduction, epilogue, and interludes reveal Loza’s unique personal experiences of field research, allowing the work to span geographies and territories, persistently traversing boundaries that are at times figurative and in other cases literal.

Loza commences her study with a description of her interview with a more educated bracero, Luis Barocio Ceja, who recalled a climate of patriotism in his California host town of Corona during his early years in the program, when braceros were initially viewed as instrumental to the US’s effort in World War II. Loza links her subject matter to contemporary events, suggesting that the Bracero Program “pav[ed] the way for the unjust and unequal system we have today” (6). She also highlights how “remittances[s] reinforced structures of patriarchy” across bracero families through “long-distance fathering,” when working men expected their wives to maintain traditional roles (7). Loza raises the question of indigeneity as a form of “racial deviancy” and a creator of divisions within organizations that sought to represent braceros, such as the Alianza de Braceros Nacionales de Mexico en los Estados Unidos (10). Importantly, the author conceives of bracero memory as a tool through which the recuperation of lost wages might be effected, describing the Bracero Justice Movement’s struggle as “one of the largest legal cases for the recovery...