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Steeped in the oral life histories of Mexican women who shouldered the emotional, physical, and financial accountability of raising families separated from their bracero husbands across the U.S.-Mexico border, this chapter illuminates the spaces, conversations, and inroads these women shared to forge awake houses. These houses, over time, provided these women with the solace, inspiration, moral support, and information to persevere in their pursuit of developing productive outlooks, lines of communication with their families, and goals toward facing a most traumatic family situation together. This distinct brand of solidarity increasingly drew young single women to act as the most dedicated and trustworthy of allies for women married to braceros and other Mexican immigrant men.

The children of braceros drive this chapter’s historical consideration of the U.S. and Mexican governments’ failure to protect them as children when enforcing the Bracero Program’s conditions and terms. Using the oral life histories of these children and their bracero parents, the incentives behind depending on these children to labor either in the place of their absent bracero parents in Mexico and alongside them in the United States—or to journey in search of them across the U.S.-Mexico border—are discussed to magnify the underestimated consequences of the program. The employment conditions and terms, the trauma, and the educational models that cast these children as unskilled workers in the making cornered them to prove themselves exemplary and without equal.

This epilogue addresses the Bracero Program’s far-reaching consequences, as well as efforts designed to document and learn from the experience of bracero families to render productive approaches toward acknowledging and confronting the enduring trauma of the program. By focusing on the resonance of the program and this family experience, this discussion of the spirit with which these families confronted being separated from each other for indefinite periods of time across the U.S.-Mexico border enhances our understanding of the rigors of bracero family life. Treating this family experience as a meaningful and invaluable history finally provides a discussion that does not underestimate the costs and consequences of the program and, in turn, binational guest-worker programs writ large.