Ana Elizabeth Rosas
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780520282667
- eISBN:
- 9780520958654
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520282667.003.0010
- Subject:
- Sociology, Migration Studies (including Refugee Studies)
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Ana Elizabeth Rosas
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780520282667
- eISBN:
- 9780520958654
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520282667.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Migration Studies (including Refugee Studies)
Embracing the Spirit/Abrazando El Espíritu is an interdisciplinary investigation of the underestimated emotional, physical, and financial exploitation framing the U.S. and Mexican governments’ ...
More
Embracing the Spirit/Abrazando El Espíritu is an interdisciplinary investigation of the underestimated emotional, physical, and financial exploitation framing the U.S. and Mexican governments’ conceptualization and implementation of the binational mid-twentieth-century guest-worker program most commonly known as the Bracero Program in the United States and Mexico. The oral life histories, correspondence, photographs, songs of love, and writing of Mexican children, women, and men—bracero families recruited to participate and sustain this contract labor program—renders a history that reveals these governments’ overdependence on these families’ spirited confrontation of a most inhumane family situation at the margins of U.S. and Mexican society. Being separated from each other across the U.S.-Mexico border for indefinite periods of time—without adequate information, protections, resources, rights, wages, or guarantees of ever seeing each other again—paved the way for these children, women, and men becoming daringly honest, invested, and ingenious in their pursuit of a humane and just family life that often transcended state-manufactured conceptualizations of borders and contract labor. Indeed, the bracero family experience is at heart a history about the hard truths of Mexican immigrant family separation.Less
Embracing the Spirit/Abrazando El Espíritu is an interdisciplinary investigation of the underestimated emotional, physical, and financial exploitation framing the U.S. and Mexican governments’ conceptualization and implementation of the binational mid-twentieth-century guest-worker program most commonly known as the Bracero Program in the United States and Mexico. The oral life histories, correspondence, photographs, songs of love, and writing of Mexican children, women, and men—bracero families recruited to participate and sustain this contract labor program—renders a history that reveals these governments’ overdependence on these families’ spirited confrontation of a most inhumane family situation at the margins of U.S. and Mexican society. Being separated from each other across the U.S.-Mexico border for indefinite periods of time—without adequate information, protections, resources, rights, wages, or guarantees of ever seeing each other again—paved the way for these children, women, and men becoming daringly honest, invested, and ingenious in their pursuit of a humane and just family life that often transcended state-manufactured conceptualizations of borders and contract labor. Indeed, the bracero family experience is at heart a history about the hard truths of Mexican immigrant family separation.
