Bracero Spaces: Creating New Social Relations in Segregation

Summary

This is a poster submission presented at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Bracero Program was the largest guest worker program in US history, being active between 1942 and 1964. Over its 22 years of operation, the program brought millions of Mexican American men to work as cheap labor, primarily on farms and railroads. These large groups of men were forced to live in close proximity to each other in state run processing facilities and camps. This poster will explore the social relations developed between the braceros in these private, segregated, homosocial spaces using Nicole Guidotti-Hernández's transnational approach to affect and intimacy. I draw on Leonard Nadel's Texas-focused photography archive of the program and architectural maps from intimate bracero spaces, like camps, to explore, through the lens of historical archaeology, the adapted dynamics the men experienced in this modified private sphere. This work is the first step in an archaeological investigation into the daily lives of “braceros” in Texas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• 2025 SHA Poster Submissions

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow