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RESEÑA BIBLIOGRÁFICA/BOOK REVIEW

Deborah Cohen has written an 
insightful book on the Bracero 
Program, the unofficial name for 
the series of labor exchange agree-
ments between Mexico and the 
United States that lasted from 
1942 to 1964. Nearly two million 
Mexican men worked temporarily 
in the United States as braceros. 
Concentrating on the Mexican 
state of Durango and the Impe-
rial Valley of California, Cohen’s 
monograph incorporates the voic-
es of the diverse program partici-
pants, ranging from the braceros 
and other domestic farm workers 
in the United States to the lead-
ers and members of agricultural 
labor unions, growers and their 
foremen, government officials and 
Catholic priests. Braceros is a criti-
cal study of the interactions be-
tween labor, race, transnational 
migration, and nation-building 

that helped transform the mean-
ing of the U.S.-Mexico border in 
the postwar period.

Braceros is organized into three 
sections that tell a sophisticated, 
at times heart-wrenching history. 
Section one, “Producing Transna-
tional Subjects” situates the pro-
gram and braceros in the larger 
historical context on both sides of 
the U.S.-Mexico border. Section 
two, “Bracero Agency and Emer-
gent Subjectivities”, opens with 
material from Cohen’s many oral 
interviews with braceros: “One 
warm afternoon, Álvaro García 
told the crew in the barbershop 
how proud he was to have been se-
lected [for the Bracero Program]. 
‘I was proud, too’ said Ramón 
Avi tia. State officials, ‘…told us 
we would teach the Americans 
about Mexico, that we’d bring 
progress to Mexico, to Durango’” 

Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects 
in the Postwar United States and Mexico

Deborah Cohen, 2011, Chapel Hill, United States, The University 
of North Carolina Press, 328 pp.

Torrie HESTER
Saint Louis University



MIGRACIONES INTERNACIONALES, VOL. 7, NÚM. 1, ENERO-JUNIO DE 2013290

(p. 89). In this section, Cohen re-
counts the experiences and sub-
jectivities of braceros like Garcia 
and Avitia. The reader does not 
see as deeply into the lives of the 
women and families left behind 
in Durango, but Braceros’ analy-
sis of the meaning of patriarchy in 
explaining why the men left and 
the legacy of the program are im-
portant contributions to the study 
of gender. In the final section, 
“The Convergence of Elite Alli-
ances”, Cohen explores the ques-
tion of whether the program was 
one of opportunity or exploitation 
and the relationship of “progress” 
to both. It leads the reader to fur-
ther understand the importance 
of the Bracero Program in larger 
issues of state formation and the 
tra nsnationalism.

Cohen frames the history of 
the Bracero Program around the 
concept of the modern, “the then 
broadly accepted term for the 
ideological package that figured 
progress, democracy, and tech-
nological and scientific advance-
ment as unquestionable goals” 
(p. 3). Using this concept as a 
frame, Cohen’s book contributes 
to a number of historical fields. 
For those interested in the histo-
ry of the Mexican state; Braceros 
makes the provocative case that as 
the Mex ican government proved 
unable to address the needs of its 

migrant citizens, braceros “acted 
in the interests of themselves and 
their families, weakening the 
state’s leverage, from which they 
would have benefited significant-
ly. That is, the braceros’ actions 
steadily wrote the state out of its 
own national story” (p. 219). For 
those interested in farm labor and 
business history, Cohen notes that 
the Bracero Program represented a 
source of federal support for U.S. 
growers, helping to explain the 
enormous success of California 
agri business and the eventual ter-
mination of the Bracero Program. 
Cohen writes: “This support 
came in two forms: first, allow-
ing grow ers to employ and control 
low-wage labor, from which they 
accumulated capital for equip-
ment and additional land … and 
second, funding research on seed 
and soil requirements for sustai-
ned mechanized farming”. She 
continues: “only after these tech-
nologies were readily available 
at reasonable cost (in the 1960s) 
would the Bracero Program be 
terminat ed” (pp. 39-40).

As a whole, Braceros will be 
of great use to scholars and stu-
dents interested in the histories 
of Mexico and the United States, 
gender and masculinity, race and 
class, border studies and western 
history, state formation and trans-
nationalism.