Even the Women Are Leaving by Larisa L. Veloz

Author:Larisa L. Veloz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520392694
Publisher: University of California Press

MEXICO IN THE 1940S

Mexicans living in the 1940s had just lived through the era of Cárdenas and the Revolutionary Family and were now on a course toward Manuel Ávila Camacho’s vision of National Unity.4 The rhetorical shift resulted in real political and economic consequences, the sum of which acted as a counterbalance to the radicalism of expropriation, land redistribution, and the syndicalism of Cardenismo. The shift was a reaction to both internal divisions and external challenges. The country, still reeling from the diplomatic consequences of expropriating and nationalizing oil, went from experiencing deep tension with their northern neighbor, to ambiguous neutrality in the lead up to world war. The onset of World War II led to reconciliation, alliance, and mutual support between Mexico and the United States.5

A growth in population sparked intense urbanization and fueled state initiatives aimed at rapid production in agriculture and the industrialization and modernization of technology. Ávila Camacho’s administration (1940–46), while seeming to rhetorically stay in line with Cárdenas’s agrarian policies, favored private property over ejidos, or state-regulated communally held land, as the basis for Mexico’s agricultural production. A slow neglect of the ejido by government programs and a decrease in agricultural credit and technological support lent to ejidatarios posed a challenging set of obstacles to Mexican farmers. President Miguel Alemán (1946–52) would move even further from the ejido system by reforming laws that amplified small plots and created larger land holdings. Small- and medium-sized property owners were privileged over individual farmers and resources and investments were directed toward export crops. Industrialization was encouraged and ejidos were expected to be productive units that would contribute goods to regional and national markets, rather than utilized as a collective good for community subsistence.6 The overall Mexican population grew from 23.4 million in 1946 to 27.8 million in 1952, while migration to cities led to a growth in urban population from 21.9 percent in 1940 to 31 percent in 1952.7 In Mexico City, urban factory jobs could not keep up with the population, which ballooned from 1,757,530 in 1940 to 3,050,442 in 1950.8

It was within this rapidly changing, urbanizing, and modernizing context that the bracero program promised to deliver much needed wages and capital to Mexican men and their families through a new system of migration. With the onset of World War II and a renewed US growers’ demand for imported labor, the US and Mexican governments began to discuss the possibility of a temporary labor program. The wartime context proved to be politically advantageous to the Mexican government, which justified the bracero contracts as a means for Mexico to contribute to the overall war effort. By supplying manpower for production, Mexico would be lending critical support to the Allied forces. A mutually beneficial labor program also fell within the framework of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, first articulated in 1933, but tenuously followed due to tense diplomatic relations during the Cárdenas era.9

Even before the United States declared war against the Axis powers, rumors began circulating about the need for Mexican workers to fill labor shortages.

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