Managed Migrations: Growers, Farmworkers, and Border Enforcement in the Twentieth Century by Cristina Salinas (review)

Despite the American public's perception that migration policies are determined at the national level, Cristina Salinas suggests in Managed Migrations: Growers, Farmworkers, and Border Enforcement in the Twentieth Century that immigration practices at the Texas border evolved in response to regional concerns. Salinas describes the permeability of the U.S.-Mexico border, where immigration policy has historically been negotiated between growers with their expanding demand for labor, border officials needing to meet deportation quotas, and undocumented Mexican farmworkers supplementing their income from subsistence farming in Mexico while maintaining cross-border kinship ties.

Salinas focuses primarily on undocumented farmworkers who labored in the Rio Grande Valley agricultural economy, especially during the bracero program of the 1940s and 1950s. She challenges the past unidirectional, assimilationist "immigrant-to-citizen progression" model (p. 4). Instead, Salinas argues that workers followed an omnidirectional pattern, working seasonally in South Texas and returning to their land in Mexico, with the border region a relatively seamless community and workspace allowing movement in both directions.

Through her six chapters, Salinas describes how federal agents and growers managed the migration of Mexican labor to meet the goals of all involved parties in a region that "was simultaneously a federal and a local space" (p. 3). She chronicles the agricultural development of South Texas in the 1920s with the recruitment of midwestern farmers, persuaded to buy land with an existing Mexican labor force, that transformed the region from cattle ranching to crop-based farming, primarily citrus and cotton. Building on the work of one regional grower, who in the 1970s published a book describing his workers, she interviewed the workers and their descendants fifty years later and illustrates the agency of these employees in their own voices. Workers were drawn to particular growers in kinship groups, and growers' "self-constructed" patriarchal and paternalistic relationships were maintained over decades (p. 50).

Salinas then explores the management of workers by the U.S. Border Patrol, labor contractors, and the bracero program. From the 1920s to the 1960s, border patrol officers influenced, shaped, and contested immigration policy through daily interactions with growers and workers. The controversial labor contractor system and the racist treatment of Mexicans in Texas became points of contention in bracero program negotiations between Mexico and the United States, as evident in the so-called El Paso Incident of 1948.

Salinas then describes the American public's shifting views of undocumented Mexican migrants in the border region during the 1950s as a result of the publication of the racist pamphlet What Price Wetbacks? (1954) by anti-communist Texas labor unions and the Mexican American, anti-immigrant American G.I. Forum. The pamphlet further marginalized Mexicans, stigmatizing them as dangerous criminals and "a threat to the social and economic well-being of the American people" (p. 200).

Managed Migrations proposes new ways to look at labor, grower, and government interplay in developing a social system and workspace in South Texas's agricultural border region. Many of the points that Salinas makes are directly linked to the geography and farm sizes of Rio Grande Valley agriculture, making the book less comparable to work of other scholars and on other regions. Her reinterpretation of Mexican immigration history as an omnidirectional process is also specific to the Texas border region. As a case study, Salinas's book focuses on a mid-sized grower representing the average farm size in this region, which differed greatly from the large farms in agricultural regions such as California's San Joaquin Valley. While other historians have described the development of stable, segregated Mexican colonias within American communities before the 1970s, Salinas's unique contribution to the field is the description of a distinctive transborder farmworker community, an amalgam of social and work space that turned out to be fragile and dependent on highly local conditions.