Between 1948 and 1964, cotton planters in the Mississippi and Arkansas Deltas imported more than 300,000 temporary guestworkers from Mexico to help produce the region’s cotton crop. Animated by what they perceived as a labor shortage caused by wartime migration to industrial centers, they embraced the Bracero Program wholeheartedly, accounting for nearly 10% of the total number of Braceros employed in the United States. In the process, they remade cotton agriculture in the region.
Much of the literature on the Bracero Program in the Deep South focuses on the challenge Mexican immigrants posed for the Jim Crow social order, with several historians arguing that Braceros complicated the black/white racial binary in ways that significantly undermined the system. My paper, instead, seeks to understand the labor market consequences of Bracero workers in the region. To this end, I employ sources such as congressional farm labor hearings, representative-constituent correspondence, agricultural labor reports, plantation company records, and documentary evidence from the Delta Council—a Mississippi-planter-led economic development organization. The result of this research answers three key questions: 1) Why did cotton producers in Arkansas and Mississippi come to rely on expensive Bracero labor in favor of less expensive domestic options; 2) How did producers view Braceros as workers and how did their experiences of the program compare to their expectations; and 3) Did Braceros displace African American farmworkers or did they simply replace them as some scholars have suggested?
The Great Depression and World War II set processes into motion that destabilized the tenant farming model of cotton production that had reigned in the Deep South for nearly a century. The invention of the spindle-type combine harvester made a “modern” mechanized cotton industry possible in the Deep South, but the dispersion and adoption of this technology took nearly two decades to reach ubiquity. Cotton producers increasingly came to prefer highly-mobile racialized migrant guestworkers over permanent racialized tenant farmers.