Abrazando El Espiritu - (American Crossroads) by Ana Elizabeth Rosas (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Structured to meet employers' needs for low-wage farm workers, the well-known Bracero Program recruited thousands of Mexicans to perform physical labor in the United States between 1942 and 1964 in exchange for remittances sent back to Mexico. As partners and family members were dispersed across national borders, interpersonal relationships were transformed. The prolonged absences of Mexican workers, mostly men, forced women and children at home to inhabit new roles, create new identities, and cope with long-distance communication from fathers, brothers, and sons.

Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, Ana Elizabeth Rosas uncovers a previously hidden history of transnational family life. Intimate and personal experiences are revealed to show how Mexican immigrants and their families were not passive victims but instead found ways to embrace the spirit (abrazando el espíritu) of making and implementing difficult decisions concerning their family situations-creating new forms of affection, gender roles, and economic survival strategies with long-term consequences.

From the Back Cover

"With profound nuance, Ana Rosas provides a searing, intimate history of the women and children left behind during the Bracero Program and the subsequent ruptures that span generations. A landmark transnational study, Abrazando el Espíritu speaks volumes about the hidden costs to Mexican families as it takes readers on journeys of possibility, pain, and resilience. With each turn of the page, Rosas powerfully demonstrates the relevance of historical insight and research to contemporary immigration policy." --Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America

"What happens to the families of male labor migrants who go abroad to work? Ana Rosas examines the emotional costs borne by men, women, and children of the bracero era and families' strategies for coping and for seeking reunion. Their strategies were both creative and daring as they confronted U.S. and Mexican governmental power (border patrol, surveillance, welfare authorities) as well as conventional gender norms, transforming the nature of labor migration and the family in the process. Abrazando el Espíritu enlarges our knowledge and our hearts." --Mae Ngai, author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

"This significant work offers a critically important assessment of the enduring force of U.S. border governance and labor regulation in determining the fortunes of working-class Mexican communities in both countries. Abrazando el Espíritu affirms the ardent struggle migrant communities have waged to assert their belonging--and the creativity they bring along with their sweat--beyond the fields and factories."--Alicia Schmidt Camacho, author of Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Review Quotes

"This is not just another book on the bracero "guest worker" program . . . Rosas fills a huge gap in the scholarship by focusing on the women and children of the families left behind . . . [and] humanizes Mexican migrant male workers."--E. Hu-DeHart "CHOICE" (5/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)

"In an age when political rhetoric regularly characterizes temporary migrant laborers as direly threatening to the American economy and way of life, Rosas's insistence upon their humanity provides a vital counterweight that is as well a salutary contribution to the fields of Mexican American, migration, gender and family, and social history studies."-- "Canada and the United States"

About the Author

Ana Elizabeth Rosas is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the departments of History and Chicano-Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine.