Defiant Braceros

This week, our class took a week off from our usual discussions of assigned readings to work on our label write-ups and research for our project on the 1918 Influenza outbreak. Our labels seem to be coming along smoothly. Yet, the real treat of the week was getting to hear historian and now Smithsonian curator Mireya Loza’s presentation “The Bracero Program, Migration, and Political History.” Loza’s research examines the Bracero Program of the mid-twentieth century that brought millions of Mexican to work in the Southwestern United States’ agricultural industry on guest-worker visas.

While Historians have studied the Bracero Program for decades, Loza’s research provides a new intimate lens with which to view this labor program, excavating stories of changing ethnic identities and queer relationships. Such stories of personal identification remain difficult to grasp solely from traditional primary source research. In fact, much of Loza’s findings emerge from her oral history work with the Bracero History Archive that conducted hundreds of oral histories with former Bracero workers in both the United States and Mexico.

From these exchanges, she discovered the prevalence of Indigenous people who participated in this program. Furthermore, such participants told Loza of how the program exposed them to the Eurocentric societal norms and Spanish vernacular of Mexican society and enabled them, in their mind, to shed their indigenous identity. As someone who conducts oral histories in their own research, I often worry about the ethical concerns that emerge with this process. Unlike reading documents in an archive, oral history involves the developing of relationships with another person, as well as their recounting of intimate details to the researcher. In my opinion, this creates a higher set of stakes around placing a narrative upon someone else’s experiences. The questions of how a person is portrayed and how the exposure of certain tidbits of information will affect this person’s life become extremely important. In these instances, it is tempting for the researcher to push concerns of their subject aside and solely focus on crafting a ground-breaking, exciting historical narrative. Oral History really drives home the point that people’s reputations and dignities remain involved the creation of these narratives.

During the question and answer section of the talk, I asked Loza about these ethical concerns and she revealed that she too occasionally grapples with these issues. However, in her case, Braceros felt incredibly invested in having their stories told, stressing the need to reveal the brutality and dehumanization of the program. Oftentimes, Braceros asked to appear vulnerable and exposed in their historical depictions because that is how they felt as events unfolded. In this sense, the relationships that Loza formed with her subjects enabled an environment of shared authority to flourish. The stories that interviewees told Loza eventually made up the arguments of her book Defiant Braceros and her Smithsonian exhibit “Bittersweet Harvests.” With the help of her subjects, Loza exposed the U.S. and Mexican governments’ roles in exploiting these workers and, on a personal level, the effects of such a program upon workers’ sense of themselves. Loza’s work remains truly collaborative and inspiring.