When Braceros Summary

However, Cohen counters preconceptions that braceros only faced discrimination, since the braceros she interviewed kept their familial obligations to Mexican relatives and developed materialistic desires while abroad to claim social agency on the program. Never forgetting the masculine breadwinner traditions that their relatives raised them in and that they identified with, braceros such as don Mauricio Herrera of San Andrés, Durango wanted to return to their hometowns with household appliances, jewelry, and other gifts to offer their communities. As household heads who could not properly feed and shelter their wives and children in previous times of “not enough rain, no credit, [and] no government support” available for small family farms, such braceros realized that they held “social indebtedness” to their families as “proper patriarchs.” When braceros returned home with gifts for their families, braceros could …show more content…
because many had “desire[s] for commodities” such as Stetson hats and watches. Ergo, these braceros believed that modern capitalism provided hard-working men like themselves with merited comforts, and that they should bear such material fruits of their physical labor. Nonetheless, with these banausic and gendered snapshots of men reclaiming command over their loved ones in mind, Cohen fails to add discourse from outside North and Central America on braceros’ financial agency as wage-earners and domiciliary providers. Where are, say, Tanzanian, Japanese, or Kazakh voices on braceros’ acquirements during and after their work in the U.S. that would expand her transnational framework into an international one? Still, I find that Cohen counteracts simplistic assumptions that braceros merely faced discrimination by forming this storyline that, instead, braceros upheld family and fiscal motivations to earn foreign material comforts that they could share with their