Abandoning Their Beloved Land offers an essential new history of the Bracero Program, a bilateral initiative that allowed Mexican men to work in the United States as seasonal contract farmworkers from 1942 to 1964. Using national and local archives in Mexico, historian Alberto García uncovers previously unexamined political factors that shaped the direction of the program, including how officials administered the bracero selection process and what motivated campesinos from central states to migrate. Notably, García’s book reveals how and why the Mexican government’s delegation of Bracero Program–related responsibilities, the powerful influence of conservative Catholic opposition groups in central Mexico, and the failures of the revolution’s agrarian reform all profoundly influenced the program’s administration and individuals’ decisions to migrate as braceros.
Table of Content
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 • “The Urgent Need to Regulate Departures”: Federal-Level Administration of the Bracero Program
2 • “According to the Jurisdiction’s Necessities”: State-Level Administration of the Bracero Program
3 • “Long-Standing Political and Religious Differences”: Political-Religious Conflicts and Bracero Migration in the Greater Bajío
4 • “Lack of Work and Lands to Sow”: The Agrarian Reform and Bracero Migration in the Greater Bajío
5 • A “Mockery of Responsibility”: Municipal-Level Administration of the Bracero Program
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Alberto García is Assistant Professor of History at San José State University.
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