Degree Year
2018
Document Type
Thesis - Open Access
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
History
Advisor(s)
Danielle Terrazas Williams
Keywords
Michoacan, Bracero Program, Purepechan women, Transnational families, Womens labor, Catholicism, La purisima, Transnational migration, Labor migration, Cardenismo, Bracero families, Gender roles
Abstract
Between 1942 and 1964, the U.S. and Mexico made a series of labor agreements collectively referred to as the Bracero Program. The Mexican men, Braceros, contracted through this program worked temporarily in agriculture and industry across the U.S. This paper examines the lives of ten women in the Mexican state of Michoacan whose male family members worked as Braceros. The mens' absences disrupted the family in an economic sense, requiring women to take on labor that was non-traditional for women at the time, as well as in a social sense, as the stability and respectability of their household came into doubt in the eyes of their village. Women recognized that the social consequences that could come from this disruption of the patriarchal family structure posed a real threat to their family's economic survival. Thus, while they transgressed certain patriarchal boundaries by taking on new and nontraditional types of work, they also performed the ideological labor of justifying their situation. The women narrated the Braceros' absences and mitigated against ensuing social consequences by employing Catholic gender ideologies that had developed in the region. In other words, as a method of survival, women met the Bracero Program's disruption of the rural peasant family structure with the reinscription of traditional gender values.
Repository Citation
Lindberg, Eleanor Inez, "Sí, me afectó: The Women of Bracero Families in Michoacán, 1942-1964" (2018). Honors Papers. 165.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/honors/165
