Nahomi Linda Esquivel

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract: This presentation rewrites historians' current understandings of immigration historiography by positing a new reading of the Mexican labor contracting system’s, or “Bracero Program’s” demise. The presentation is a socio-legal and labor history of Mexican “Green Card Commuters,” -- workers whom the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) admitted into the US as permanent residents but who chose to maintain their homes in adjacent Mexican cities and cross the border for work. It shows that the INS created this paradoxical status through administrative fiat, situating it outside the purview of statutory immigration law and enabling agencies within the US State, Justice, and Labor Departments to govern the program informally. Thanks to this informality, I show that agribusinesses gained access to cheap, legal, and tightly tethered foreign labor at the very moment when the Bracero Program, was set to expire in 1964. In addition to examining the roots of its expansion, this paper argues that the green card commuter program preserved some of the contracting system’s most exploitative features while retaining none of its regulations or safeguards. I show that the INS allowed growers to sponsor Mexican contract workers for permanent visas while restricting men’s families from entering the US, thus binding laborers to the international migratory circuit and cementing commuters’ status as social, political, and territorial foreigners. I demonstrate that by the time the United Farm Workers began their infamous grape strikes in 1965, growers had already secured the labor market insurance they needed to circumvent labor reforms.