TRANSNATIONAL CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE BRACERO PROGRAM, 1946-1952.

Studies of the political and regional debates currounding the topic of Mexican labor migration that seek to explain why the Bracero Program was maintained, have focused predominantly on the administration of migratory flows by the U.S. government. This essay, in contrast, adopts a view of the global dynamics of the negotiations held between 1947 and 1952 to offer a more integral history of the Bracero Program. Based on a reconstruction of various narratives, it adopts the focus proposed by histoire croisée to observe the roles played by diverse actors at the regional level of migration, in order to determine the influence they wielded during the process of bilateral negotiations. The approach is applied primarily to the case of Guanajuato, a state that sent significant contingents of labor migrants to the U.S., and the context of the state of California (U.S.A.), whose agroindustrial sector absorbed most of those Mexican workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]