Bracero Blacklists: Mexican Migration and the Unraveling of the Good Neighbor Policy

BRACERO BLACKLISTS: MEXICAN MIGRATION AND THE UNRAVELING OF THE GOOD NEIGHBOR POLICY Timothy J. Henderson Auburn University, Montgomery Prior to the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, the Bracero Program was by far the most ambitious effort at binational cooperation between the United States and Mexico in history. That program brought some 4.5 million Mexican contract laborers to the United States during the years from 1942 to 1964. Like NAFTA, the Bracero Program was sold to skeptics as something that would benefit the United States and Mexico in roughly equal measure. The United States would get its crops picked and its railroads maintained at a time when a large part of its workforce had been diverted to the military or to wartime industries; Mexico would contribute to the war effort, export some its unemployed workers, reap the economic benefits of bracero remittances, and gain from the modern knowledge, ideas and attitudes that braceros would bring home with them from the United States. According to this notion, migrants would learn the arts of modern agriculture, use a portion of their wages to buy modern farm machinery, and return to Mexico prepared to become middle class farming entrepreneurs.1 Sometimes overlooked, the Bracero Program was also closely linked the Good Neighbor Policy, an effort, dating from the late 1920s, to improve hemispheric relations by curtailing US interventionism and promoting cooperation and mutual respect among the American nations. Attitudes engendered by the Good Neighbor Policy very likely averted major conflict between the United States and Mexico during the relatively turbulent 1930s. During that decade, the United States angered Mexico by carrying out mass deportations of Mexican immigrants, while the leftist administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas raised international tensions by expropriating large amounts of land owned by American individuals and corporations and, in 1938, foreign oil company holdings. Some scholars argue that, in fact, Mexico deftly outmaneuvered the United States in the diplomatic dealings of those years.2 By the early 1940s, Mexican officials looked to the future with great confidence and optimism. Having gained greater control over its own resources, improved its infrastructure, and tamed its turbulent politics, Mexico seemed on the brink of a future that would bring rapid development of industry and commercial agriculture. The Bracero Program added to that optimism because, in contrast to so many episodes in the past, the United States approached Mexico, hat in C  2011 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 199 The Latin Americanist, December 2011 hand, asking for help: Without Mexican labor, US officials said, crops would rot in the fields and the war effort would be imperiled. Those officials invited the Mexicans to essentially design the program to their liking, imposing any reasonable conditions they deemed necessary. In many ways, the early 1940s witnessed something of a high water mark in the history of U.S.-Mexican relations, an apparent vindication of the Good Neighbor Policy. Having resolved the expropriation dispute peacefully, the two nations cooperated closely as Europe descended into war. Vice-president Henry Wallace traveled to Mexico to attend the inauguration of President Miguel Avila Camacho, the first vice-presidential visit to any Latin American country; three years later, Franklin Roosevelt celebrated a series of meetings with Avila Camacho, becoming the first U.S. president ever to travel to the interior of Mexico. Mexico declared war on the Axis powers; made its airfields available for U.S. military flights; sent a small fighter squadron to the Philippines; and allowed a quarter million of its citizens residing in the United States to be drafted into the U.S. military (Americans living in Mexico were likewise liable for conscription into the Mexican military). The two nations agreed to negotiate reciprocal trade agreements, while the United States promised to help provide loans to stabilize the peso and to make regular silver purchases at a fixed rate. The Export-Import Bank opened credits to Mexico to help it expand its highway system, develop its railroads and shipping, construct a high-octane gasoline plant, and carry out other such development initiatives. And the Rockefeller Foundation launched a program to improve Mexico’s agriculture , leading to...