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Project Directors: Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Chicano Latino Studies, UC Irvine; Vivian Price, Interdisciplinary Studies, Cal State Dominguez Hills.
The debates are heating up once again on Capitol Hill and around the U.S. about what is paradoxically framed as the threat of immigration and the need for imported farm labor. This recurrent debate is a polarizing one, and yet in the distant background looms a predictable form of guest worker program. The politics behind growers’ advocacy for guest worker programs are rarely discussed publicly. Nor are the leading assumptions that labor shortages in agriculture, or that Americans do not want to do the work, examined as requiring the recruitment of a disenfranchised group of workers.
The documentary is intended to provide a social and historical context within which to understand the repeated measures proffered to create a state-managed imported and controlled labor force. When completed the film will demonstrate that the Bracero Program, a series of agreements between the U.S. and Mexico to import temporary contract labor into the U.S. that operated between 1942 and 1964, is a critical paradigm for explaining how Mexican immigrant labor has been integrated into the heart of the U.S. economy over the 20th and now the 21st century.
The film will show that proposals for new guest worker programs that have surfaced from time to time since the early twentieth century are but examples of a standing convention to import Mexican labor via state management. It will also show that the migration of Mexican and now Central American workers to the U. S. is less a result of push-pull factors than a consequence of Mexico's economic relationship with its northern neighbor, now made increasingly problematic since the institution of NAFTA. Guest worker programs, we will argue, result not from labor shortages, but from the dependence of agribusinesses on low-cost workers who labor with few rights, little government oversight, who depress the wage scale and keep unionization efforts weak.
Although a number of studies have carefully examined the key aspects of the Bracero Program, no scholarly documentary of this historically significant program has yet been produced in the US. In our estimation there is no labor policy more pivotal to understanding the nature of Mexican labor migration to the U.S. (and of Mexico's economic relationship with the U.S.) than the Bracero Program, which brought approximately 450,000 braceros over a 22 year duration. When completed this documentary intends to build upon the existing scholarship on this subject as well as contribute our own research that explores the bracero experiences in the U. S. and document previously ignored aspects of the Program. The documentary will examine the recruiting, processing and transporting in Mexico as well as the fate of the wives and families left behind, utilizing the voices of former braceros, their wives and families, archival and privately held film and photographs, interviews with academics who studied the program and former administrators and managers of the Program in both the U. S. and Mexico. The voices of the former braceros and their families, their music, paintings, poetry and personal accounts, will form key components of the documentary. Finally, the film will examine parallels between the Bracero Program, previous guest worker programs such as those implemented by Britain and France, and the currently discussed guest worker proposals.
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