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Dreams of Development in Mexico and Spain: A Comparative History of Guestworkers and Migration Diplomacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2022

Michael David Snodgrass*
Affiliation:
History/Global and International Studies, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA

Abstract

This history of Cold War-era migration policy compares two emblematic guestworker programs that recruited several million Mexican and Spanish migrants to labor in the United States and Germany. Proponents of the bilateral accords defended them as diplomatic achievements that secured contractual labor rights, improved foreign relations, and sent migrants home with savings and skills to achieve the diverse development goals of the sending states. The study traces the programs’ historical and ideological roots, juxtaposes the guestworkers’ experiences, and uses the cases of Mexican braceros and Spanish gastarbeiter to explore the contested nexus between migration and development.

Type
Labor in the World-System
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

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Footnotes

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to Julie Weise and Andrew Hazelton for critiquing an early version of this article; to Kevin Cramer for his German translation services; and to the dedicated CSSH peer reviewers for their insightful and inspiring comments. Grants from Fulbright-García Robles (COMEXUS), Indiana University, and the European Commission funded this research.

References

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34 Their social standing improved, however, since Germans saw the Turks “with even greater mistrust.” Garmendia, La emigración española, 241–43; Díaz-Plaja, Guillermo Luis, La condición emigrante: los trabajadores españoles en Europa (Madrid: EDICUSA, 1974), 157–60Google Scholar.

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41 Interviews in El tren de la memoria. Robert Rhoades writes, in “Guest Workers and Germans: A Study in the Anthropology of Migration,” that he found Spanish metalworkers near Stuttgart expressed no interest in “integration” (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1976, 129–33).

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45 Guy Ray, Mexico City Embassy, 6 Oct. 1943, State Department Record Group 84, United States National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA: RG 84), 840.1.

46 Joseph Lyford, “An Army of Ill-Will Ambassadors,” New Republic, 4 Mar. 1957; AFL-CIO legislative director Biemiller in Committee on Agriculture Hearings, House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1963), 197.

47 Pedro de Alba, Siete artículos sobre el problema de los braceros (Mexico, 1954), 31–36.

48 Ibid., 44–45.

49 New Deal labor legislation exempted agriculture. African American cotton workers thus took notice when Mexican consuls intervened to enforce bracero rights in the Mississippi Delta. By 1963, civil rights proponents in the U.S. Congress cited the Bracero Program as precedent for federal intervention to curtail racial segregation. Galarza testimony in House of Representatives, Hearings, Mexican Farm Labor Program (Washington, D.C., 1955); Julie M. Weise, Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 112; B. P. Trussell, “Provisions Protecting Braceros Cited as Rights-Bill Precedent,” New York Times, 25 Aug. 1963.

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53 Excélsior, cited in Burrows, Mexico City, to State Department, 7 Mar. 1950, NARA—Braceros 560, box 6. “Lands” refers to states like California annexed by the United States after the Mexican-American War.

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76 Castles and Kosack, Immigrant Workers, 126, 158; Díaz-Plaja, La condición, 200–2; Manuel Simón, “La acción de la UGT en la emigración económica Española,” in Alted, UGT y el reto, 66–67.

77 Clarkson, Fragmented Fatherland, 89–92.

78 Simón, “La acción,” 29–33. Operación Patria appears in “Los trabajadores españoles en Alemania.”

79 Virtual exhibit: “We’ve Arrived … Cologne-Deutz Train Station: Migration Stories over 40 Years.” Museum of Migration in Cologne, Germany (domid.org); interview in El tren de la memoria.

80 Juventud Obrera Católica report in Babiano and Asperilla, La patria, 98; Rhoades, “Guest Workers and Germans,” 129–33; Spicka, “City Policy.”

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84 Jose Cazorla Perez, Retorno al sur (Cadiz: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1989), 154, whereas 37 percent of migrants themselves claimed “more leftist ideas than before” (while 5 percent declared themselves “more to the right”).

85 Compliance also reflected distinct business cultures: rural American growers averse to federal intervention versus Germany’s quasi-corporatist employer associations.

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91 Eldridge, “Helping Hands.”

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96 Jerome Mintz, “Trouble in Andalusia,” Natural History 81, 5 (1972): 54–63, the ethnographic narrative that resulted in his poignant documentary Pepe’s Family (1978), https://collections.libraries.indiana.edu/IULMIA/items/show/917.

97 Even the regional savings banks channeled remittances from abroad into urban investments in Madrid, rather than rural sending regions, and emigrant associations protested against this divestment policy. Babiano and Asperilla, La patria, 244–50.

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107 Diffusion of innovation in Saldaña, Tomás Martínez and Mendoza, Leticia Gándara, Política y sociedad en México: el caso de los altos de Jalisco (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1976)Google Scholar.

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109 The “House of History” now displays the motorbike awarded to the one millionth gastarbeiter, Armando Rodrigues de Sá, who passed away in Portugal in 1979.

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112 The Other Side of Immigration, Roy Germano, director (New Paltz, NY: Team Love, 2009).

113 Hahamovitch, “Creating Perfect Immigrants,” 89–94; Rodriguez, Migrants for Export, ch. 6; Leigh Binford examines the Mexico-Canada program in Tomorrow We’re All Going to the Harvest: Temporary Foreign Worker Programs and Neoliberal Political Economy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).