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US Latina and Latino Oral History Journal, Vol. 1, 2017© 2017 by the University of Texas Press published by the University of Texas Press on behalf of the Center for Mexican American Studies and the Latino Research Initiative DOI: 10.7560/OHJ110 Book Reviews Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom by Mireya Loza University of North Carolina Press. 2016. 254 pages. paperback $29.95. REVIEWED BY MARIA L. QUINTANA Mireya Loza’s recent book Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual , and Political Freedom is a much-needed and innovative attempt to understand the social worlds Mexican guest workers inhabited and the nonconformist identities they purposely engaged to defy the power of the United States and Mexican governments over their lives. Employing a vast set of oral histories and testimonios Loza collected from braceros, the book challenges traditional state-centered historical narratives to question the very nature of public memory and bracero history. As research member of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History ’s (NMAH) exhibition “Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program, 1942–1964,” Loza is well placed to make such an interrogation. In her book, she relies on the extensive oral histories she collected from Mexican migrant men with the NMAH research team as a methodological guide to interpret her archival sources, placing Mexican migrant laborers’ memories of the labor program at the center. Loza notes that oral histories are a performance of memory produced by individual actors participating in a particular scenario, which cannot produce a singular record. However, it is precisely this multiplicity of memory and performance that enables Loza to engage the diversity of the bracero experience, as she examines the full dimensions of bracero memory, as well as how Mexican guest workers have used memory to challenge or commemorate state authority. Defiant Braceros begins with an examination of the experiences of Mixtec, Zapotec, Nahua, Purépecha, and Mayan communities in the Bracero Program. Loza unearths the voices of multilingual indigenous braceros that the Mexican national government attempted to incorporate into its vision of a “modern society” through the Bracero Program. As Loza states, “The absence of indigeneity in historical studies of migration is a product of both the Mexican national project of mestizaje and the difficulty of examining a category that can fluctuate within the life span of one individual” (10). However, she attempts to overcome this problem by specifically engaging with the many ways migrant men rejected mestizaje, as well as state narratives of racial transformation and modernity, and defiantly embraced indigeneity. By framing bracero history in this way, Loza skillfully challenges mestizo-centered histories of the Bracero Program and narratives that solely focus on Anglo-Mexican racial tension or interethnic tension between Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans. The book then moves on to examine constructions of masculinity, the maintenance of transnational families, the complex forms of sexual desire, and the very nature of camp life. Loza argues that braceros challenged the heroic nationalist vision of masculinity, family, and labor created to legitimize the national contributions of these men, by engaging in a world of vice, sexual experimentation, gambling, prostitution , and queer sex acts at the labor camps. Loza’s research here unveils a history of braceros as sexualized subjects with potential desires, participating in acts of leisure , pleasure, defiance, and adventure. She does this not to detract attention from the high degree of exploitation they suffered or the state’s complicity in alienating the men, but to write an inclusive narrative that challenges the history of national patriarchy and “legality” to stress the humanity of the braceros, as they moved in and out of the categories of “legal” and “illegal.” As she argues, “Their defiance opens up new avenues to think about state power and resistance that can dislodge mestizo and heteronormative tropes that rely on lauding particular types of masculinity and patriarchy” (183). Not only does Defiant Braceros reveal how migrant men defied political, sexual, and racial norms; it also describes the trajectory of transnational labor organizing that occurred within the Alianza de Braceros Nacionales de México en los Estados Unidos (National Alliance of Mexican Braceros in the United States). It then...

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