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From Peasant to Worker: Migration, Masculinity, and the Making of Mexican Workers in the US

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2006

Deborah Cohen
Affiliation:
University of Missouri St. Louis

Abstract

This article examines Mexican migration to the US during the Bracero Program, the unofficial name for the series of US-Mexico agreements that brought Mexican men to work in US agricultural fields from 1942 to 1964. Juxtaposing Mexican and US states' goals for the Program to migrants' understandings of their journeys, the article shows how this migration disrupted men's subjectivities, even as it simultaneously provided the mechanisms to resecure gender and class subjectivities and claims in crucial way. Revealed, ultimately, is what was forged in the wake of this migration: a new kind of historical actor, transnationally gendered and classed.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2006 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.

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