Rural Peace through American Agriculture? The Bracero Program and Mexican Emigration Policy in Comparative Perspective

In l942, a bilateral agreement between Mexico and the United States opened the door to the seasonal migration of Mexican farm workers. What began as an emergency program to alleviate wartime labor shortages in US agriculture endured for twenty-two years. The so-called Bracero Program became the USA's largest experiment with the importation of foreign guest workers. Within Mexico, a program that both encouraged and regulated the export of Mexican labor became the most controversial policy adopted by the state in the l940s and l950s. It would also prove to be among the most consequential. More than one million braceros (‘farm hands') labored in the US during the program's history, and the majority came from a five-state sending region in west-central Mexico. Based upon research in Mexico's National Archive and Ministry of Foreign Relations, this paper examines the migratory labor agreement in the context of Mexico's evolving post-revolutionary emigration policy. It explores debates among influential statesmen and social scientists who theorized the potential rewards and possible pitfalls of emigration and return migration. Much like policymakers did themselves, the paper compares the Mexican case to the emigrant nations of southern Europe, especially Italy, which explicitly promoted emigration as a solution to rural underdevelopment and an anti-communist safety valve meant to relieve social tensions in the countryside. In postwar Mexico, the state selectively rewarded migratory permits to workers from the west-central states with histories of anti-government activism. This paper asks whether state officials utilized the Bracero Program to maintain rural peace through emigration, as both government critics and contemporary social scientists argued. It is one chapter in a broader study that explores Mexico's twentieth-century evolution into a nation of emigrants.