Faith, Conflict, and Bracero Migration in Mexico’s Greater Bajío

Authors

Alberto Garcia Maldonado, San Jose State UniversityFollow

Files

Description

Between 1942 and 1964, a bilateral initiative known as the Bracero Program allowed Mexican men to work in the United States as seasonal contract farmworkers, or braceros. All told, 4.65 million bracero contracts were distributed during the program’s duration, and a significant plurality of these contracts, at least 44 percent, went to rural workers from the Mexican states of Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacán, and Zacatecas. These five states were also an epicenter of conservative Catholic resistance to official policies like land redistribution and secular public education. This talk will explore how endemic, community-level conflicts between conservative Catholic and pro-government partisans fueled popular interest in migrating to the U.S. as braceros, influenced the bracero selection process, and shaped a regional migratory tradition that has endured into the early twenty-first century.

About the Author

Dr. Alberto García Maldonado (pronouns: he/him/his) is an assistant professor in the Department of History who specializes in twentieth-century Mexico. His research on the Bracero Program, a bilateral initiative that allowed Mexican men to work in the United States as seasonal contract farmworkers, has been published in The Hispanic American Historical Review, and his book, Abandoning Their Beloved Land: The Politics of Bracero Migration in Mexico, is forthcoming with the University of California Press. Prior to joining San José State’s faculty in 2018, Dr. García Maldonado was a Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Historical Studies. He received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.

Date of Event

Spring 2-16-2022

Keywords

bracero, Greater Bajio, conservative Catholicism, migration

Disciplines

Latin American History | Migration Studies | Political History | Social History

Comments

1 streaming video file (56 min.) : digital, sound, color. Closed-captioned for the hearing impaired.

Recommended Citation

Garcia Maldonado, Alberto, "Faith, Conflict, and Bracero Migration in Mexico’s Greater Bajío" (2022). University Scholar Series. 46.
https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/uss/46