Subversión y moraleja

‘In Modern Mexico… Indians would be productive citizens or be damned!’ Robert Buffington The assumption that indigenous communities were ‘unproductive’ and unfamiliar with ‘labor’ before their entry into the Bracero Program plays into long-standing narratives of indigenous racial deviancy, one that had to be corrected through state intervention. It is precisely this narrative that the Bracero Program used as it attempted to incorporate indigenous populations into the interconnected Mexican projects of modernization and mestizaje. The program was supposed to facilitate this inclusion, a promise of the Mexican Revolution, not through ‘costly state programs’ of land and wealth redistribution but through a system of labor management abroad, ‘reliev[ing] the [Mexican] state of this perceived burden’ (Loza p.9, 15). Inclusion was based on Mexican concepts of racial flexibility in which ‘being indigenous’ was a matter of culture that could be overcome through a ‘civilizing process.’ B

            Economic theories are fundamental for understanding the causes of migration. However, narrow understandings of self-regulating market mechanisms of supply and demand operating as ‘push-pull factors’ often present a limited framework to study migration, and legitimize policies that do not attend to the realities of migration. Gonzalez and Fernandez have provided a strong critique of push-pull theories in the context of Mexican migration to the U.S., arguing that a framework of imperial expansionism is better suited to explain patterns of migration since the late nineteenth century.  Guerin-Gonzales has also shown how, in the context of Mexican removal programs during the Great Depression, ‘voluntary’ deportations were officially justified under economic reasons, but were rooted in cultural prejudices and longstanding histories of racism and exclusion. Lastly, Molina’s study of birthright citizenship shows that migration is not just an economic affair but one that require