They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California. Don Mitchell. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012. xii and 529 pp., maps, notes, photos, and index. $26.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8203-4176-7).

The Bracero Program, until quite recently, lay dormant in the annals of U.S. history—as both public memory and scholarly accounts of the period from 1942 to 1964 rendered it either forgotten or ignored. Don Mitchell's They Saved the Crops takes its place among an emerging revisionist history that situates the program at the confluence of labor history, immigration history, Chicano/a studies and the political economy of large-scale agriculture. Mitchell's extensively researched tome on the central role of the Bracero Program in changing the landscape of California's agricultural labor and property relations both covers well-tread ground and breaks new ground by uncovering the central role of the California state government in its provision of extensive subsidies to growers to create the labor conditions necessary for fully industrialized, large-scale agriculture.

Chapters are organized thematically and chronologically to detail the main features of the Bracero Program's political economy, initially a wartime labor relief measure designed to provide U.S. agribusiness with temporary workers from Mexico but continued at the behest of growers until 1964. The single largest recipient of braceros was California, but a total of thirty U.S. states participated in the binational government program. Mitchell covers the main events of California's Bracero Program—from the initial employment and housing of workers in Stockton's fairgrounds, through the 1954 forced repatriation program dubiously named “Operation Wetback,” to the eventual demise of the program. Between each chapter, sidebar theoretical discussions unfold to demonstrate how the Bracero Program articulated capital, labor, migration, and state relations to reshape California's rural landscapes. As Mitchell summarizes, “If nothing else is apparent from the history of the bracero era in California, it is that creating a productive, capitalist farming landscape—agribusiness as it came to be in the twentieth century—together with the labor processes and systems of social reproduction that make such a landscape possible, has been a struggle” (398).

What stands out in Mitchell's detailing of the era is the central role of California state subsidies in reshaping the bracero-era landscape. The California Farm Production Council (FPC) was a key captured agency that provided various state subsidies to growers. Mitchell catalogs that by September 1943 the FPC housed 20,000 workers and subsidized private operators of labor camps for another 10,000, adding yet another 38,000 in the following year (60–62). Although financial figures are not disclosed, the FPC massive housing subsidy clearly denotes its impact as the “largest, most comprehensive, and most rapid program of state-sponsored and subsidized housing in the history of the state—and its transformative effects on the landscape … were profound” (53). Mitchell's meticulous detailing of the subsidies is unprecedented in the literature and his attention to the central role of California state subsidization of the wartime Bracero Program is the novel and unique contribution to the growing body of scholarly research.

Mitchell's theoretical contributions lie in the adjectives used to describe the production of particular landscapes reproduced, altered, or shaped by the Bracero accords. Specifying distinct landscape forms (rational, persistent, imperialist, and solid) explains how class relations of social production, reproduction, labor processes, and resistance are imbricated onto the complex of labor, capital, and state relations. If subjectivities and lived experiences read as overly economically determined, it is quite intentional as citizenship, racialization, masculinities, and transnational identities are epiphenomenal to Mitchell's analysis of the Bracero Program's political economy. The recent literature on the Bracero Program tends to downplay the longstanding economic-first emphasis so Mitchell's contribution can be read as a reassertion of the need to return to this focus.

Yet, mostly disregarding the large body of current research on the Bracero Program necessitates two criticisms of Mitchell's exclusive emphasis on California and the narratives lost, or more accurately silenced, in his archive-based reconstruction. Although California was the largest recipient of braceros, the fact is thirty U.S. states participated in the program. The enduring significance of the Bracero Program is less in terms of reproducing agribusiness in California than creating the conditions for growers in every region of the United States to employ California-style agribusiness (i.e., the industrial farming model). Bracero-era agribusiness supplanted labor systems such as family farming in the Midwest and plantation/sharecropping in Southern states such as Texas and Arkansas. This is not to take away from Mitchell's thorough analysis of how the Bracero Program unfolded in California, but the fact is the Bracero Program affected the entire nation and shaped migrant streams to many of today's “new destinations.”

A more substantive engagement with the existing literature on the program would have better situated Mitchell's theory of the U.S. state as it interfaced with bracero labor, the Mexican government, and California agribusiness. He posits (29) that the choices for conceptualizing the state are either imperial (based on Gonzalez 2008) or pluralist based on the first era of political scientists analyzing the program. Mitchell's reference to the least plausible “pluralistic inter-group” politics slights transnational governance regimes and the full range of state theories (pluralist/interest group, instrumentalist, structuralist, rational-bureaucratic/institutional) previously deployed by scholars of the Bracero Program. The point of critical policy analysis is that all too often the state's official description of the contours of a program are accepted as prima facie proof of actual conditions and the two questions so rarely considered are this: (1) How were the workers themselves impacted by binational governance decisions, and (2) did the program operate in actuality as it was written on paper? The most recent edited collection on the Bracero Program (Lopez 2010) incontrovertibly makes the case that the program rarely operated as intended and the voices of braceros and their families are crucial for understanding the transnational impact of the program. State-centered theories of Bracero accords most often silence the voices most relevant for policy analysis and Mitchell's government archive-based reconstruction only highlights the dire need for workers' voices to come through. If this work was published ten years ago, it might have been an excusable oversight but the recent developments in open access historical research make the braceros' voices easily accessible through the online Smithsonian's Bracero History Archive and the University of Texas at El Paso's Bracero Oral History Project. Similarly, braceros' voices are well represented in Gilbert Gonzalez and Vivian Price's recent documentary, “Harvest of Loneliness/Cosecha Triste.”

Moreover, the archival record continually perpetuates the myth of the bracero as the “preferred” worker. Even though this characterization has been repeatedly refuted by direct testimony contained in bracero oral histories, Mitchell reproduces this view, the result of a U.S.-centric approach to a binational issue, by stating: “Conditions for braceros could sometimes be quite good” (380). Characterizing braceros as preferred labor fits with a dated secondary literature that relied exclusively on government sources, yet neither characterization fits with the lived experiences of former braceros. A life story I conducted in 1997 with Don Antoñio points to the differences between policy prescriptions and lived realities:

Well, we would arrive and we would work all day and they would pay us about three dollars. It was by contract for how much work we did. … Sometimes they put us in some pretty bad places. Like cotton for example. Places where cotton was very small [arm gesture to knee-height] and those that were from here, they would put them in better places. So there were still locals working here and they got the better jobs.

The segregation of work crews not only minimized Don Antoñio's earning power when he was relegated to the lowest yield crops, but it also corroborated a longstanding practice in the fields that established workers were given the best pickings and braceros were less likely, due to their new and temporary status, to be treated liked preferred laborers.

Mitchell's deep interrogation of the archival record afforded the possibility of answering many questions posited but currently left unanswered by the secondary literature. For instance, Mitchell might have answered the unexplored linkages between Japanese internment and the Bracero Program. He notes on how the FPC took control of the Japanese assembly centers (51) and covers ground previously discussed by Carrasco (1996) that similar housing was one linkage but the biggest unanswered question beyond the internment–bracero camp link is how and to what extent the prominent removal of Japanese farmers in California during World War II was connected to bracero employment in lands forcibly vacated by Japanese farmers. The oversight of unanswered research questions asked by the interdisciplinary group of scholars interested in the Bracero Program renders a walk down well-worn paths that would have been greatly enriched by a secondary literature that Mitchell would have been well served to consult. In an otherwise magisterial archival account of California's Bracero Program, even a cursory consultation of the emerging secondary literature would identify the U.S.- and grower-centric vantage point and silencing of braceros' voices that has sedimented in the official archival record.