Evaluation

For this reason, your paper should have an intro paragraph and a thesis sentence, because these are essential to effective organization.  However, please do not focus your attention on these; rather, our focus for this paper is on evaluating the sources.  A rather vague and inexact thesis sentence is fine for this paper, something along the lines of: “When assessing the purposes and consequences of the Bracero Program, historians must carefully consider how power and inequality affected the written record,” or, “Awareness of the authorship, audience, and original purpose of primary source documents is vital to assessing their value for understanding the Bracero guestworker program.”

Your paper should be organized in the traditional college paper format:

Intro Paragraph (which orients reader and ends with a thesis sentence)

Body Paragraph 1 (which should start with a topic sentence, then provide evidence/argumentation, and end with a concluding sentence)

Body Paragraph 2 (which should start with a topic sentence, then provide evidence/argumentation, and end with a concluding sentence)

Body Paragraph ….. etc. etc.

Conclusion Paragraph (which sums up the main points of your paper)

Bracero Program

The Bracero Program was a guestworker labor agreement between the US and Mexican governments that from 1942-1962 granted 4.6 million work contracts to Mexican laborers who worked on American farms.  The demand for these positions in Mexico was intense, and there were far more applicants than there were spots in the program, as young men (the program was only open to men over 18 years) in Mexico saw this as an opportunity to make a lot of money in a few months money they mostly aspired to use to invest in land, a house, or education.  After a vetting process Mexico City, they were shipped north to the American West, where they were contractually bound to work and reside on a single farm estate. 

Many of these workers were disillusioned by what they found in the US.  Circumstances varied, but many complained that their pay was illegally docked (even the Mexican government was guilty of this), that the food was abysmal and insufficient, that the housing was decrepit, that labor protections were unenforced and the work was dangerous, and that overseers used abusive language and even violence.  Indeed, many historians assert that for employers the purpose of the program was to gain a highly exploitable and racially constricted workforce.  Historian Mai Ngai calls the Bracero Program a form of “imported colonialism” that created patterns of “social segregation and isolation of [Mexican laborers]” that continue to this day, especially in the agricultural, meat processing, and construction industries. 

If you missed it, I linked a few brief summaries of the Bracero Program last week: Week 4: Photographs and Guestworkers

Sources

For this paper, you are evaluating three sources about the Bracero Program:

1.  “Why Braceros?” A propaganda film by the Council of California Growers, 1959 https://www.c-span.org/video/?407381-1/why-braceros

I want to emphasize that this is propaganda created by a business association of large agricultural companies (including the DiGiorgio Fruit Co. mentioned in the 2nd source) that profited off the underpaid and exploited labor of American and Mexican farmworkers.  Who was the intended audience for this propaganda?  What was their intended message?  Why?  

2.  A press release by the US Department of Labor, 1960 Press Release on Braceros as strike breakers.pdf 

This source was created by the US Department of Labor — a federal government agency that is supposed to make sure labor laws are followed.  What does this source show us about agricultural companies’ relationship with American laborers and their intentions in bringing in Mexican laborers?  This was a press release that was supposed to be disseminated through American news agencies.  What was the government trying to convey to the American public?

3.  A letter by a Mexican postal worker to his friend, a Bracero worker in Ohio, dated 1944 Letter to a Bracero 1944.docx

This letter was written by a Mexican postal worker to his friend who was working in the USA.  The author (at least before writing this letter) had never traveled to the USA.  Nonetheless, this letter can be an important source when researching the Bracero Program.  How so?  What can we learn from this about what ordinary Mexicans thought about the Bracero Program? And how did his correspondence with a Bracero affect this man’s thoughts about his own nation and government?

Prompt:  What can each of these sources contribute to a research project on the Bracero guestworker program? 

These are the main questions you need to apply to each of the sources: 

• Who created the source?  Not just names and titles, but who were they?  What kind of position and power did they have?  What was their relationship to the Mexican workers being brought to the USA?  USE YOUR IMAGINATION AND CONTEXT CLUES TO MAKE EDUCATED GUESSES
• Who was the original audience for this source?  Why? Again, the point is not just names, but the wider significance of the document.  What sort of people was a document of this type intended for?  What bureaucratic entities produced and used such documents?  How did the author imagine a future reader would use this document?
• What was the creators’ purpose or agenda?  What function did this document have in the context?  How did it relate to the functions of government and economy?  What was this author’s specific purpose, and by extension what was the purpose of documents of this sort?  AGAIN, IMAGINATION IS KEY