Braceros

At the beginning of World War II, the United States and Mexico launched the bracero program, a series of labor agreements that brought Mexican men to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural fields. In Braccros, historian Deborah Cohen asks why these temporary migrants provoked so much concern and anxiety in the United States and what the Mexican government expected to gain from participating in the program. These concerns and expectations, she suggests, provide a way to look at nation-state formation as a transnational process. Cohen reveals the fashioning of a U.S.-Mexican transnational world,…