Short Bio: Mireya Loza is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and the American Studies Program at Georgetown University and a curator in the Division of Work and Industry at the
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Loza is a public historian who contributed oral histories, trained communities, and helped amass over 800 oral histories with bracero communities featured in the Bracero History Archive. These oral histories became a cornerstone of her book, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual and Political Freedom (UNC Press). Her first book won the Theodore Saloutos Book Prize awarded by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize.
Title: Beyond Braceros: How Temporary Labor Shaped Industrialized Agriculture in California,1942-1965
Abstract: As the largest employer of Mexican guest workers during the era of the Bracero Program, California growers stand center stage in this talk about race and food production in America.
Beyond braceros, growers relied increasingly, but not exclusively, on Mexican undocumented workers and actively recruited laborers from Japan and Puerto Rico. California growers’
global search for cheap labor challenges long-held assumptions that Mexican workers were the logical, if not inevitable, ideal farmworker. This talk will explain the lobbying efforts, political reach, and racial meaning-making of California growers as they handpicked their most coveted farmworker and explain how the contemporary reality in American agriculture was not inevitable but created by design through policy and grower influence.
This event is co-sponsored by CESR and CLAS, and is part of Latinx & Hispanic Heritage Month!
