Scholars of Mexican American history have pointed to several important key events to understand immigration policy and community formation for Mexican migrants in the U.S.−Mexico Borderlands region. During the twentieth century, Mexican Repatriation, the Bracero Program, and the labor rights struggles of the United Farm Workers (UFW) movement were particularly consequential in shaping communities and creating new forms of resistance.

From 1929-1940, approximately one million Mexicans, a majority of whom were U.S. citizens, were expelled to Mexico from the United States. Meanwhile, from 1942-1964, the U.S. and Mexican government agreed to allow five million Mexican men to travel to the United States for primarily agricultural work. What followed was a series of struggles for agrarian reform and farmworkers rights that culminated in the efforts of César Chávez and the UFW in the borderlands.

In the U.S. and Mexican governments’ attempts to experiment with instrumentalizing migration, scholars have recently brought notice to the struggles of Mexican American and Mexican migrants to gain rights and human dignity as a central feature of their experience. These efforts on behalf of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent and Mexican migrant families, points to the negotiation of social, political, legal, and economic realities that they and state officials participated in to shape agrarian reform in the borderlands. Historian Marla A. Ramírez’ research focuses on the untold history of how Mexican American women navigated their banishment during Mexican Repatriation, rethinking this history through a gendered and transgenerational lens to highlight Mexican American women’s voices as well as social reformers’ gendered biases and exclusions.

Irvin Ibarguën’s research on the Bracero Program provides greater insight on the Mexican state program to recruit braceros to work on the cotton harvest in northern Mexico, addressing the limitations of the P.R.I. regime and Mexican business influence, especially in local efforts to improve migrant worker treatment. Maria L. Quintana provides an overview of the other guestworker program that emerged alongside the Bracero Program to investigate how progressive officials conceived of each program as beneficial labor reform efforts, even as they engendered state violence and power. Michael Damien Aguirre analyzes the creation of state sanctioned medical visas to cross into and remain in the United States by the United Farm Workers (UFW), excavating how workers challenged the power of the federal government to determine entry into the United States.

Taken together, each panel participant analyzes how Mexican migrants shaped borderlands politics, even while negotiating repressive and limiting state efforts to control their labor, livelihoods, and lived realities. Verónica Muñoz-Castillo, as chair, will lead the panel with her expertise on the links between these historical moments, analyzing them on regional, national, and transnational scales. The result will be a rich discussion that blends legal and political processes of institutions with the sociocultural and economic reality of the everyday lives of migrants to broaden the scope of both institutional and migration histories.