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Today in the United States, critics of guest worker programs liken them to legalized slavery. Many cite the Bracero Program (1942–64) as the precedent. How did a program embraced by Mexican workers for the opportunities it offered become so stigmatized by scholars and activists? Matthew Snodgrass's article, "Bracero Stories: Mexico’s Guest Workers in History, Historiography, and Public Memory," published in the new issue of Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, analyzes the historiography of the bracero program, comparing today’s narratives to contemporaneous depictions. We asked Michael to tell us more about his reasearch in the Q&A below.

You began your career as a historian of industrial workers in northern Mexico. What drew you to research this particular aspect of Mexican labor history?  

Histories of labor and migration always intersect in the Americas. Consider Monterrey. Its earliest industries recruited workers from regional farming and mining communities. Other migrants passed through that railway hub towards El Norte, including hundreds of thousands of braceros. (This remains the case today.) Most of the steel and brewery workers I interviewed for my dissertation research had migrated to Texas as seasonal laborers or refugees in the early 20^th century and then returned. Moreover, I found surprisingly extensive press coverage of emigration in the 1920s. I now realize that it became as contentious an issue back then as it was in 1996, when I lived in Monterrey and heard my friends and neighbors lament the exodus and what it meant for Mexico’s identity and future. Yet emigration remained strangely neglected in the historiography of Mexico (in contrast to the immigrant experience across the border). So I set out to research the evolution of state migration policy and the underexplored history of return migration. In hindsight, my undergraduate professor at Iowa, Charles Hale, inspired this interest. His prescient readings for our Mexican history survey, way back in 1985, included Augustín Yáñez’s novel, Al filo del agua (1947), Paul Friedrich’s Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (1970), and Luis González’s microhistory of San José de Gracia (1968). These classic texts all feature so-called norteños who returned from El Norte in various guises: as moral threats, inspirational political activists, or young adventurers with new boots. Like Professor Hale, these authors astutely foreshadowed emigration as a key chapter in the national narrative several generations before Mexico became the world’s premier ‘nation of emigrants.’ 

I found the comparative references you make, say to Jamaican migrant workers, also interesting. What could a comparative or global history of migrant workers in this period tell us that we don’t know? 

For one thing, we see that postwar guest worker programs resulted from bilateral accords, offering migrants contractual guarantees backed by sending and host states. Outcomes did not always comply with the promises, but the protections contrast greatly with today’s privatized systems of global labor recruitment that render migrants more vulnerable to exploitative trafficking schemes, be they H-2A workers in Georgia or Filipinas in Lebanon. In the past, sending states like Mexico and Spain defended their ‘assisted migration’ policies as a preferable alternative to undocumented migration. And conditions did improve, from California to Cologne. West Germany presents a fascinating comparative case in the freedoms it offered migrants arriving from Turkey, Greece, or Spain, whose authoritarian governments all (rightly) feared the guest workers’ exposure to oppositional ideas and practices. Braceros only encountered the occasional Protestant missionary while labor unions opposed their very presence. Compare that to the 1910s and 1920s, when such disparate actors as anarcho-syndicalists, Cristero exiles, and Mexican consular officers all try to organize ‘Mexico de afuera’. 

Why do you think that the reality of many braceros’ experiences has been obscured by a kind of new black legend (if we can call it that)? Who are its purveyors? 

The ‘black legend’ of bracero trauma is of recent origin. Its purveyors include the actors involved with the Braceroproa movement, the journalists who repeat their claims, and several scholars I cite. One also hears it from very well-intended activists who associate today’s troubled H-2A contracting system with the pioneering Bracero Program. In terms of public memory, the bracero story evolves from a wartime narrative of citizens on a mission who knew their rights to a revisionist tragedy of migrant suffering that misguided activists dare to associate with slave markets or the Holocaust. Despite its well-documented shortcomings—in terms of corruption and compliance—one could defend a ‘white legend’ based on the beneficial results of return migration. This counter-narrative would build on a trope of the norteño as the innovative and progressive repatriate, an outcome predicted by Manuel Gamio’s ethnographic surveys and proven by social science researchers during and after the Bracero Program. As a labor historian, I insist on centering bracero solidarity and resistance (versus victimhood) while recognizing the hardships they faced as field laborers or absent fathers. One hopes that former braceros and/or their descendants come to reject a ‘black legend’ that contrasts mightily with their own oral history recollections. 

Finally, why do you think a “narrative of progress” better accounts for the generality of bracero experience?

First, this narrative bridges the experiences and memories of both the migrants who returned home and those who settled in the United States. In both cases, one hears expressions of pride and dignity for the sacrifices they made so their children could succeed as teachers or engineers in California or Guadalajara. This narrative is not some scholarly conception applied retroactively either. Employees at the Rio Vista contracting station perceived it among the migrants who returned in the 1950s as “changed men.” I heard it directly from former braceros, many of whom contrasted El Norte with their own sending communities. Working in the U.S. “opened our eyes”, one told me upon explaining why so many invested their savings in home improvements, children’s education, or community development. “The idea was to progress,” said another, “to become a capitalist.” By that he meant to purchase tools, open a business, acquire land or livestock. Trinidad Rodríguez (pictured) still grows sugar cane on the farmland he acquired while raising twelve children. He did well for himself. But in 2007 Rodríguez lamented the struggles of Mexico’s small farmers, who contrast their neoliberal hardships with the subsidies offered to U.S. producers. (Roy Germano’s excellent documentary, which I cite in the article, captures that dichotomy well.) I met others who now blame the Bracero Program for fostering a culture of migration that caused the abandonment of rural communities. Only two of Mr. Rodríguez’s children remain in Mexico. So the means of achieving progress shifted across the generations. Those who departed in the 1920s or 1950s saved, returned, and stayed on the land, whereas state policy and demographic pressures led later generations to leave el campo for urban Mexico or the USA. 

We invite you to read Matthew Snodgrass's article, "Bracero Stories: Mexico’s Guest Workers in History, Historiography, and Public Memory," for free online for a limited time.

Print copies of Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos's Fall 2025 issue (issue 41.3), in which the article appears, as well as other individual issues of MS/EM, can be purchased on the journal’s site. 

For ongoing access to Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, please ask your librarian to subscribe and/or purchase an individual subscription.