Scholars and journalists have looked mostly to Mexico's own economy and society for the chief causes of Mexican migration to the United States. This book presents a strikingly contrasting explanation and offers a persuasive historical re-examination of the history of relations between the two countries. Gilbert Gonzalez dispels the myth that Mexican migration conforms to the pattern of earlier European migrations. Mexican migration, he shows, is the social consequence of U.S. economic domination over Mexico. Since the late nineteenth century, powerful U.S. capitalist enterprises have controlled important sectors of the Mexican economy, a dominance that uprooted peasants and small farmers from traditional farming villages. Those uprooted turned to internal migration and then proceeded into the U.S. to be integrated into the largest capitalist corporations in the world. The mass migration has had a number of implications, from indentured labor to legal and illegal labor. Gonzalez's book examines recent Bush initiatives, NAFTA measures, and the history of antecedent bracero programs supported by the U.S. government and business to show how colonial explanations of migration better fit historical patterns.

The essays in this collection address issues significant to labor within regional, national and international contexts. Themes of the chapters will focus on managed labor migration; organizing in multi-ethnic and multi-national contexts; global economics and labor; global economics and inequality; gender and labor; racism and globalization; regional trade agreements and labor.

The essays in this collection address issues significant to labor within regional, national and international contexts. Themes of the chapters will focus on managed labor migration; organizing in multi-ethnic and multi-national contexts; global economics and labor; global economics and inequality; gender and labor; racism and globalization; regional trade agreements and labor.

A Century of Chicano History argues for a radically new interpretation ofthe origins and evolution of the ethnic Mexican community across the U.S. This book offers a definitive account of the interdependent histories of the US and Mexico as well as the making of the Chicano population in America. The authors skillfully link history to contemporary issues, emphasizing the overlooked significance of late 19th and 20th century US economic expansionism to Europe in the formation of the Mexican community.

This book offers a definitive account of the interdependent histories of the US and Mexico as well as the making of the Chicano population in America. The authors skillfully link history to contemporary issues, emphasizing the overlooked significance of late 19th and 20th century US economic expansionism to Europe in the formation of the Mexican community.

A decade of political infighting over comprehensive immigration reform appears at an end, after the 2012 election motivated the Republican Party to work with the Democratic Party's immigration reform agendas. However, a guest worker program within current reform proposals is generally overlooked by the public and by activist organizations. Also overlooked is significant corporate lobbying that affects legislation. This updated edition critically examines the new guest worker program included in the White House and Congressional bipartisan committee s immigration reform blueprints and puts the debate into historical and contemporary contexts. It describes how the influential U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO agreed on guidelines for a new guest worker program to be included in the plan. Gonzalez shows how guest worker programs stand within a history of utilizing controlled, cheap, disposable labor with lofty projections rarely upheld. For courses in a wide variety of disciplines, this timely text taps into trends toward teaching immigration politics and policy.Features of the New Edition"

A decade of political infighting over comprehensive immigration reform appears at an end, after the 2012 election motivated the Republican Party to work with the Democratic Party's immigration reform agendas. However, a guest worker program within current reform proposals is generally overlooked by the public and by activist organizations. Also overlooked is significant corporate lobbying that affects legislation. This updated edition critically examines the new guest worker program included in the White House and Congressional bipartisan committee s immigration reform blueprints and puts the debate into historical and contemporary contexts. It describes how the influential U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO agreed on guidelines for a new guest worker program to be included in the plan. Gonzalez shows how guest worker programs stand within a history of utilizing controlled, cheap, disposable labor with lofty projections rarely upheld. For courses in a wide variety of disciplines, this timely text taps into trends toward teaching immigration politics and policy.Features of the New Edition"

Chicano history, from the early decades of the twentieth century up to the present, cannot be explained without reference to the determined interventions of the Mexican government, asserts Gilbert G. Gonzalez. In this pathfinding study, he offers convincing evidence that Mexico aimed at nothing less than developing a loyal and politically dependent emigrant community among Mexican Americans, which would serve and replicate Mexico's political and economic subordination to the United States.

Gonzalez centers his study around four major agricultural workers' strikes in Depression-era California. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, he documents how Mexican consuls worked with U.S. growers to break the strikes, undermining militants within union ranks and, in one case, successfully setting up a grower-approved union. Moreover, Gonzalez demonstrates that the Mexican government's intervention in the Chicano community did not end after the New Deal; rather, it continued as the Bracero Program of the 1940s and 1950s, as a patron of Chicano civil rights causes in the 1960s and 1970s, and as a prominent voice in the debates over NAFTA in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

"Providing a fresh interpretive analysis...Gilbert Gonzalez argues convincingly that the study of Mexican immigration to the United States, and the delveopment of the Chicano community, demands an understanding of the consequences of America's economic domination of Mexico, which followed the U.S. Civil War." -- Southwestern Historical Quarterly Amidst ongoing efforts to conceptualize the inevitable but often agonistic intersections of Latin American and Latino studies, Gilbert Gonzalez's Culture of Empire comes as a refreshing and valuable intervention. -- The Journal of Latin American Anthropology "Culture of Empire is an intersection of intellectual history with Chicano history, labor history, and Mexican history. It is a historically rich and well-organized study that promises to confirm the author's profile as one of the preeminent scholars of Chicano history and transborder studies." -- Zaragosa Vargas, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara

A history of the Chicano community cannot be complete without taking into account the United States' domination of the Mexican economy beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writes Gilbert G. Gonza lez. For that economic conquest inspired U.S. writers to create a "culture of empire" that legitimated American dominance by portraying Mexicans and Mexican immigrants as childlike "peons" in need of foreign tutelage, incapable of modernizing without Americanizing, that is, submitting to the control of U.S. capital. So powerful was and is the culture of empire that its messages about Mexicans shaped U.S. public policy, particularly in education, throughout the twentiethcentury and even into the twenty-first.

In this stimulating history, Gilbert G. Gonza lez traces the development of the culture of empire and its effects on U.S. attitudes and policies toward Mexican immigrants. Following a discussion of the United States' economic conquest of the Mexican economy, Gonza lez examines several hundred pieces of writing by American missionaries, diplomats, business people, journalists, academics, travelers, and others who together created the stereotype of the Mexican peon and the perception of a "Mexican problem." He then fully and insightfully discusses how this misinformation has shaped decades of U.S. public policy toward Mexican immigrants and the Chicano (now Latino) community, especially in terms of the way university training of school superintendents, teachers, and counselors drew on this literature in forming the educational practices that have long been applied to the Mexican immigrant community.