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Irvin Ibargüen, "Caught in the Current: Mexico's Struggle to Regulate Emigration, 1940-1980" (UNC Press, 2025)
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Marshall Poe
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Irvin Ebarguin
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Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Rachel Newman
Hello and welcome to New Books in Latin American Studies, a channel of the New Books Network. I'm Rachel Newman, a host on this channel. Today we're speaking with Irvin Ebarguin about his new book, Caught in the Mexico's Struggle to regulate emigration, 1940-1980. Ervin is assistant professor of history at New York University, and this book was published by the University of North Carolina Press. Ervin, welcome to the program.
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Irvin Ebarguin
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Rachel Newman
So your work challenges some of what we think we know about Mexican emigration policy in the second half of the 20th century. Can you sketch out for us the received ideas that you want to revise and explain to us? What are the new arguments you're advancing?
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Irvin Ebarguin
I think there's a narrative both at a popular level and even within academia regarding sending countries. I think Donald Trump, for example, exemplifies some of the way in which people popularly think about sending states. He has this kind of conception of them as being these hell holes, right, Is a kind of frequent way he describes them. They kind of purposely use and rely upon migration out migration to relieve internal pressures, right? Whether this is unemployment or domestic political turmoil or what have you. And I think this kind of largely maps onto the way just people generally think about how migration from the global south to the global north works. And so what I try to kind of depict in the book is the much more subtle and ambiguous relation that some of these states, in particular, the book is about Mexico. The Mexican state has to migration, right? Mexico, like many states in the 20th century, has a much more kind of middle, middle, middle of the road kind of perspective of migration. They are kind of attracted, obviously, to some of the upsides of facilitating labor migration to the United States, including the remittances that would come back to Mexico. But they're also quite aware, right, of the potential pitfalls. They understand it ultimately as being a kind of devil's bargain, right? And so for this reason, countries like New Mexico never kind of fully toggle to the position of fully facilitating and embracing out migration, but rather kind of sit on the fence for much of the 20th century, right? Selectively conveying people to the global north, but then also kind of pulling back at times when they feel the devil's bargain is quite not working for them, right? When the kind of the cons begin to outweigh the pros. And so a lot of the book is about kind of taking us to some of these moments, right? These moments of clarity, let's say, that Mexican politicians and the Mexican political machine had regarding migration and attempts to kind of direct that migrate well, corral that migration internally and maybe even foment stability within Mexico itself. And so the book tries to get us to explore the kind of the much wider range of political ambitions that statesmen in the global south, in particular Mexico, how and. And takes up this question of, you know, what, what happened? What came of these ideas, right? Were they operationalized? Why did they fail? If they did fail, what are some of the major contributing factors to those failures? And that's more or Less where the kind of the narrative really lives for the 200 pages of the book.
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Rachel Newman
Can you tell us a little bit about how you decided to situate this work in scholarly conversations? Mexican migration history often usually connects to multiple fields, such as the one that we feature in this podcast, Latin American Studies. Is that a label that resonates with you?
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Irvin Ebarguin
Yeah, I think like many transnational works, it's a work that can be positioned across multiple fields. And so I try to situate it across at least probably four or five fields. I would say the major one would be the study of international migration writ large. In particular, this theory that often gets trafficked amongst various disciplines, which is the idea that sending states use migration as a safety belt. Right. This is a very commonly used heuristic device metaphor that is used, and it more or less echoes, right, the kind of the popular understanding that I think Trump speaks to with these kind of hell, whole countries purposely sending migration or sending migrants abroad, fraud rate. So the safety valve mechanism really kind of essentially says the same thing and just kind of more academic terms. And so I really try to kind of engage with that and offer an alternative way of thinking about it. What I try to underline is that the migration was thought of and perceived as a very fluid situation. And I think, you know, it's common for folks on the US to think about migration in terms of flows, right? Migratory flows. But this is also was the case in Latin America. They also conceived of migration as a flow. And just as the US Or US Statesmen frequently think of these flows as therefore being kind of manageable and manipulable, so did Mexican statesmen. Right. The problem, of course, both sets of statesmen faced over the course of the 20th century and into the present is that the migration seemed not to obey their policy dictator. And that's where ultimately the title of the book comes from, this idea that ultimately both Mexican statesmen and actually American statesmen end up being caught up in the migratory currents that they decide to activate in World War II when they have this kind of strong labor need in the American Southwest. And so I would say the first level of intervention is just how we think about international migration in general. Right. A second layer of contributions, I would say, is for the US Field. I try not to talk about the US Too much in the book because I find that the discussion around immigration is. Is very navel gazing in this country. All the emphasis is always on, you know, how does migration affect us, the American economy, the American individual, the American cultural tapestry, and so on. And so Forth it's a very kind of me, me, me situation. And so what I try to do in this book is try to understand the, the Mexican perspective, right? How did not just Mexican politicians, but even Mexican civil civil society, right? Business groups, agrarian groups, labor unions, how did they interface with this phenomenon? What did they think about it? What they, what did they think should be done in terms of policy regarding migration rate? And by giving a spotlight to those voices, I ultimately, I think, allow readers to see what it is that the US ends up kind of running, running over, I think in the 1950s. So a lot of the book, the first half of the book is showing some of these kind of counter migratory ideas that develop in Mexico both at a popular and a political level. And how in 1954 in particular, the US is able to kind of intervene in Mexican politics in such a way that it kind of undermines all these various alternative political visions, right? And so I think, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's been a long term trend to think about the US as an empire, but I think in order to think about US empire and to think about what it means to trample over the sovereignty of another nation, you actually have to sit with the voices of that nation to actually see what was sacrificed or what kind of got, what possibilities were truncated, right. By any given act of American intervention. And so the book really tries to give specificity, I think, to American intervention in Latin America and in particular to Mexico. And I ultimately do think that that's very important because that conversation about US empire vis a vis Mexico tends to operate in sort of extremes from my perspective. I think there's a group of scholars who generally sees empire as kind of saturating the US Mexican relation, right? It's kind of always already imperial, right? No matter what the US does, it's kind of already has these kind of contours of domination. And then there's kind of like more political science camp, right, that doesn't use that word, that they see the relationship between US and Mexico more being about asymmetrical power imbalances. And so you have this very neutral, almost like medical discussion of the power differentials. And so what I really want to guide us towards the book, towards in the book is to looking at concrete moments where the US operationalizes, deploys its power advantages vis a vis Mexico in ways that fundamentally kind of undermine Mexican sovereignty on matters of migration. And I think a final area that I try to kind of intervene in is how we think about Migrants themselves. Right. I think a lot of the emphasis on migration literature is in how migrants operate within the US and they're very kind of truncated political power in the US specifically in realms of like, labor or like, urban development, urban housing, and so on and so forth. And so what I try to situate them in this book as is, as political subjects who actually have quite a bit of power on the Mexican side because they ultimately are the linchpin of many of Mexico's counter migratory plans. Many of Mexico's counter migratory plans that I survey in the book ultimately kind of rely upon Mexican migrants assenting to them volunteering to remain in the homeland rather than go abroad to the United States. And so. And those moments where the rubber hits the road, right. They're actually quite able to negotiate, I think, their, their mobility vis a vis the Mexican state and sometimes even flat out undermine Mexican efforts. Right. And so I think it shows us a more capacious face of migrant agency and in particular how citizenship works for these migrants and ultimately how kind of counterintuitively, time after time, they ultimately choose mobility itself as gained more importance. Right. Than kind of remaining within Mexico. They are not at any point really pulled by the kind of sentimental arguments that Mexico makes about the need to remain in the homeland, and nor do they remain in any way optimistic about the arguments that Mexico makes about integrating them into the kind of the political economic fabric in a better way. And so I think that's another vista that the book offers us. But I think, I think readers, those are the, those are the lenses I impose upon the book. But I think what is cool about the book is that because it's a transnational work and there's just such a plethora of actors that move across it, readers can kind of go into whatever kind of angle or rabbit hole that they are interested in. I try not to, like, overwrite the book. Right. I tried to make it so that, you know, if you have a particular perspective and interest and say, like, I don't know, northern cotton manufacturers, you're able to actually explore that. Right. And it's not as if I'm kind of just insistently hammering either the Mexico State, the USA or migrants. I'm trying to have a kind of a more capacious and organic view of all the actors that are involved in the story.
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Rachel Newman
So let's talk about the first decade or so of the Bracero program. Maybe you'll need to tell us a little bit about what that program is. And during that era, you described the Mexican state's Approach as autonomous flexibility. So what did that approach look like on the ground and how did it work in the 1940s and early 1950s?
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Marshall Poe
Yeah.
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Irvin Ebarguin
So the, the Bracero program, for listeners who may not be familiar with this particular period of migration history, is a really ambitious effort between the U.S. coordinated by the U.S. of Mexico, beginning of World War II and 1942, to bring millions of Mexican workers to the United States as guest workers. This essentially means that they would come with baseline contractual guarantees about their housing, their food provisions, and so on and so forth. And both at the time and after the fact, analysts regarded the Brazil program as actually being kind of a historic, you know, hallmark of worker rights. It kind of institutionalized certain protections for migrant workers that had simply not been afforded to them. And so the Brazil program does in principle kind of have this kind of built in power for the Mexican state. Right? The Mexican state ensures that there are standards, or at least on paper ensures that there are standards migrant workers should be afforded in terms of their working conditions, and affords itself kind of power to monitor that, monitor conditions on the ground. And so really what this looks like on a kind of every. Every, I would say every day, but like a. A monthly, let's say, basis, is that right? The Mexican state would frequently send, you know, envoys and such to try to survey the situation of migrant workers in these camps, to try to kind of find information and try to blacklist in particular, employers who were not kind of respecting the provisions that were afforded in the Bracero program. Right. In practice, of course, this approach was problematic. Trying to obtain information from migrants about abuse is a little bit difficult because as one might imagine, all the incentives are actually on the side of migrants remaining silent. Right. You know, them initiating these kind of proceedings into abuse could imperil their own jobs and so on and so forth. And so silence is, though, there are these kind of investigative procedures, there is kind of this built in mechanism or incentive system that guides them more towards actually restraining themselves from making too many allegations, too many complaints. The second kind of problem that emerges from this kind of system is that Mexico actually doesn't have that great of a power to blacklist employers. Right? All it has the power to do is initiate blacklisting procedures. But ultimately it turns out that, you know, the US and Mexico both engage in this kind of very prolonged deliberations and investigation processes. And so for that reason, it's not actually a very effective mechanism at stopping farmers or growers who are abusing migrant workers. And so ultimately, Mexico, you know, has this this Brazil program and it. It perceives itself as having the flexibility to control that migration and the circumstances of that migration. But in practice, what it learns over the first, like, 10 to 15 years is that that power is not as strong as they had imagined, right? And so the end of this period of Autonomous flexibility is 1954, where I argue that precisely because of this issue of blacklisting, Mexico really moves away from wanting to renew the Bracero program, right? The Brazil program expired every few years since it was based on the treaty. And essentially by 1954, the Mexican government under President Cortinas decided that, you know, it would be better to explore other possibilities, right? That the kind of. That. The kind of the mi. The very malleable migration and controllable migration that they had imagined was just not kind of operating that way. They only agreed to kind of initiate any potential reopening of the Bracero program if the US agreed to grant Mexico essentially full power of the MIG over the migration, which meant granting Mexico the power to unilaterally blacklist employers, Right? Because once Mexico could unilaterally back blacklist employers, then it could just get rid of any farmer or grower who was abusing migrants without, you know, engaging in prolonged deliberations. And so in that way, Mexico would remain the kind of the ultimate authority over the migration. And so that first part of the book really talks about this period of autonomous flexibility where, again, Mexico perceives itself as being capable of. Of actually maintaining a high degree of control over the migration, even as, you know, over the years, it gradually becomes clear, right, that the migration is kind of slipping away from its control, in particular, the conditions that migrant workers face in the various fields that they are contracted to. So good, so good, so good.
- [18:10]
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Rachel Newman
So in your book, 1954 comes up as a watershed moment in which there are some crises, some big events that happen that also contribute to this move away from autonomous flexibility. Can you tell us about what exactly happened in 1954 that, you know, sort of contributed to this shift?
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Irvin Ebarguin
Yeah. So 1954 is, to me, the zenith of content, migratory policymaking in Mexico. It is. And again, I try to point this out throughout the book. It's not only that I perceive it as being an important moment in Mexico's kind of migratory policymaking. The more important point is that the actors themselves perceive it as a historic turning point, potentially, in the history of how the government relates to migration rate. So in 1954, in January of 1954, once Mexico publicly decides to not renew the PACERO program and to kind of stonewall any renegotiation process, there is just an explosion in Mexico of these ideas, right. Both at a popular level and within the kind of, you know, these kind of elite political circles of ideas for how to actually corral migration permanently. Right. It is seen as not just an opportunity to break away from a guest worker program, but actually as an opportunity to redefine the Mexican state and it's the nation and its relationship to migration. Right. And in particular, to foment stability. Right. Within or to make it possible for people in Mexico to live internally without having to go abroad, face exploitation in order to make a living. And so this is essentially what we see happen in early 1954, when Mexico signs, Refuses to sign on to the Bracero program. Logistically speaking, Mexico really digs its heels in on this stance. It begins to not just kind of rebuff the United States and its renegotiation attempts, but it also closes off exit. I keep port. I keep border. Points of crossing. I keep border crossing. Sorry. In particular, placing much of its attention on the. On the town of Mexicali, because at that time, many migrants were headed in that direction anyway because they were expected to pick the lettuce crop in Southern California in early 1954. Right. So Mexico really makes kind of a strong stand in terms of actually closing the gates at the border crossing station, sending military personnel to police the area, make sure no migrants go abroad. And they're really trying to make the argument to Mexicans, to Mexican migrants both there and across the country, right. That this was a historic moment. Right. That it was in their best interest. In the best interest of the nation if they remained in their homeland, right. The, the particular argument that they made to Mexican migrants was that, you know, if they decided to go abroad, they would get. These migrants would be so abused in the United States, the Mexican consuls stationed in the US would just not be able to help them, right? There would just be so many cases of abuse that, you know, Mexico would not be able to actually intervene and help them. And so that this was a moment in which Mexico actually needed to kind of come together as a policy, right. Both at a popular and kind of elite political level to try to chart a different direction for the country. And so a lot of what I do in chapters two and three of the book is etch out some of those, give air time to some of these political visions again. So I look at, you know, various letters and even newspaper articles that are written by labor unions, agrarian groups, business groups that all seem very enthusiastic in the moment about using this as opportunity to channel migrants internally. Now, mind you, not all of this is meant as a kind of benevolence project. So, for example, one of the key actors in beginning in 1954 are business groups, especially business groups in northern Mexico, who argue that this would be the perfect time, right. To actually direct migratory labor flows internally, right. Specifically to vegetable, vegetable crop production in northern Mexico. Right. Many of the same crops that grow in the American southwest essentially grow in northern Mexico. Right. And so for a long time, these industries in northern Mexico complain that they're losing out on migrant labor rate because it's all headed over to the United States. And so in 1954, they make the case like this is. This is the moment in which Mexico really has to hold the line, right? Especially using the military to make sure that people are not leaving abroad, but they are instead being of service to their country. And so that's kind of happening at a popular level. But the Mexican government itself is also kind of engaging in a strong bit of ideation in the moment. And so they develop, you know, various ideas, including kind of prolonged white papers, right, Discussing potential agencies that might be able to form to create a foment stability within the country. And so one of the ones that kind of spotlight the most of the book is a white paper for a commission called Polo Nisadora, which would be a commission to create colonies internally within Mexico. Right. And so the Mexico state had all these plans, right, for how to create state supported agrarian settlements in the works as it made its way through this kind of conflict with the United States in 1954. Ultimately as I kind of try to show in the book this, it ends up being both the Scenith and the. And the kind of very bottom most moments of concert migratory policy making in the United States. Because ultimately both Mexican politicians and you know, at a popular level, we see that this shift towards thinking about permanence is really discouraged by the way in which migrants end up behaving at the border. There is initially when the US when Mexico refuses to renew their agreements, there's a huge fear in Mexico that migrant workers will not obey Mexico's dictates and will simply just head over to the United States, right, to work, to work there, even if it exposes them to certain abuses. Right. And so a lot of the coverage of this event in January and February 1954 is all. Is very apocalyptic, actually. So again, this is a very intense emotional moment actually in Mexican politics. And so a lot of commentators fear almost this kind of migratory Armageddon where migrants will kind of throw aside the state and move to the United States even if there is no Brazil program in place. And ultimately, you know, the US by late January 1954 really steps in to augment those fears, right? The US Department of Labor in particular steps in to declare a open border, kind of an open border policy of unilateral hiring is the technical term that they use that essentially allows any Mexican, any able bodied Mexican willing and able to cross into the United States to arrive to its borders, right? So very much at the time, at the same moment, right, you have this kind of Mexican state cohering around this idea of corrali migration. You have the American state cohering around the opposite idea of welcoming these migrants. The kind of, the concrete impulse on the American side is that the lettuce crop is actually beginning to rot on the American side in the Imperial Valley of Southern California. And so they really have this kind of material imperative, right, to make sure that that migratory flow tomarket doesn't stagnate, right. But instead continues to move into the United States. And so really it's that decision by the US that really begins to animate a kind of a stronger movement by migrants against the Mexican military that's stationed at the, at the border. There's kind of outbreaks of violent skirmishes between them and ultimately Mexico. Mexico is forced to kind of desist from policing this migration. They essentially take them take the position that the embarrassment of having to fight back their migrant citizens is worse than the embarrassment of having them be exported in the United States. Great. And so this, you know, in the Aftermath of this, Mexico kind of renews the Brazero program or agrees to kind of begin talks to. To renew the Bra program. And it really begins to mark the. The declension of very aggressive counter migratory thinking on the part of Mexico. It will continue to kind of formulate ideas, but they will no longer be as kind of as idealistic, let's say, uh, nor as kind of optimistic about their transformative reach. Right. And so that's kind of where I leave that particular section.
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Rachel Newman
So one of the pivots that happens after 1954 may surprise some of your readers in that, you know, a lot of the time if we hear the word migration, we immediately assume that we're talking about crossing an international border. But not all mobility actually involves leaving the territory of the nation state. So your book actually connects the history of how Mexico's immigration policy is linked up is inextricable from policy that also is sort of trying to move people around within Mexico. And as you mentioned before, there were growers in northern Mexico who also needed labor. So what is this internal bracero program that gets created and how well does it go in its early years?
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Irvin Ebarguin
Yeah, thank you for that question. To me, one of the more exciting parts of the project is precisely this kind of moment after 1954 where we see that the Mexican state begins to adapt to the power imbalance that exists between it and the United States. So its ideas regarding migration from 1954 onwards still involve trying to kind of corral and massage that migration such that it has kind of internal payoffs for Mexico. The only. The main difference is that Mexico no longer pretends that it can fully stop migration at any given moment. It begins to kind of shift more to the idea that it can opportunistically and selectively stagnate that migration. Right. Slow that migration, you know, channel it here and there in ways that do not fundamentally undermine the migratory flow to the United States and thus disturb American corporate interests, but nonetheless allow some kind of payoffs for different internal groups within Mexico. And so what I kind of spotlight with chapters four and five of this particular book are this and this. This is essentially this internal bracero program that kicks off from 1955 in Mexico and lasts all the way up to 1963 and basically involves Mexican migrant workers who want to participate in the bracero program first having to work in northern Mexico cotton cultivation. Right? The promise that kind of the. The promise that is made to them is that if they first work in Mexican cotton cultivation for a couple weeks, they will be given A passage over, expedited kind of passage over to the United States. So in this way Mexico is able to link the incentive to work in the United States with work in northern Mexico, which up to that point, as the growers themselves admitted, had been a kind of a. An uninteresting proposition for many migrant workers. So rather than kind of challenge the existence of the bracero program or try to, you know, trample the migration altogether, what Mexico does is see if it can exist within the migration in ways that are nonetheless productive for its cotton industry. And so the question of how well did it go? Depends on who you ask or what kind of subjectivity you take. From the perspective of the growers themselves, the program was a fantastic success because it came at a time in which northern Mexico was actually beginning to move out of a drought, a years long drought, and so actually quite needed and could make use of expanded influx of migrant labor rate. And so we see that from, you know, in the late 1950s, cotton production in northern Mexico rises to record levels year after year, partially because the drought has been overcome, but also because there is a, a migrant labor influx through this internal program that conveniently allows these growers in various Mexican, northern Mexican states like Sonora and Baja California to take advantage. Right. Of these new favorable climactic conditions. Right. And so from their perspective, you know, the internal bracero program was the. It crystallized exactly what they hoped. What they hoped out of the Mexican states intervention. From the perspective of migrant workers, the internal bracelet program was a, in their own words, a kind of racket, A some of the migrant workers discusses as always being blackmailed. Right. Because in the first instance it, though it sounded like a reasonable thing to like or a reasonable enough kind of incentive in practice, it was actually very difficult to meet some of the demands of growers in northern Mexico. Migrant workers were frequently bought in, brought in to engage in the very last stage of patent picking. So after like the first two rounds have been completed and the last stage would be called what was known as. And so, you know, at that point there's very little cotton left on the stock. And so it's actually very difficult to pick that kind of cotton and kind of satisfy the growers demands in that sense. But beyond that, really what bothered migrant workers was that there seemed to be no honor in the program. There seemed to be no honesty in the program. Many of them kind of publicly went public with accusations in Mexican newspapers and also before different authorities, be it police authorities or you know, municipal authorities or local governments, that their service to northern Northern cotton growers was not being honored, right, that they were showing up to the contracting centers with the relevant paperwork having show that that showed they had picked cotton, but that they were actually not being given expedited passage to the United States. Instead, the people who were given being expedited passes to the United States were people who were paying bribes on the side to immigration authorities to get them over to the United States. To the United States. So for the migrant workers, this was, this was a, just in the very structure of it, they felt it was a kind of a blackmailing attempt. And then in the actual practice of it, they felt it was an entirely kind of dishonest racket and a dishonest affair. And so ultimately it really, it is the criticism of the migrant workers that really undermines the prestige or the viability, let's say, of this particular initiative. And this goes back to kind of what I was saying earlier about how, you know, if we turn the lens to how migrants are actually citizens in Mexico, we can see the greater range of power that they operated. And so, you know, as it refers to the Internet bracelet program, they launch really kind of public kind of outreach efforts, especially with Mexican newspapers, to try to unmask the ring of co conspirators, right, that are actually running this immigration racket. And they're able to get the newspapers to actually, you know, name names, right? And this is very dangerous, as the migrants themselves acknowledge, because many of the people involved in the racket both have kind of official, official positions, either official position in the Mexican government or have some kind of connection to kind of criminal underworld, right? And so many of them, you know, fear for their life when they actually accuse some of these, some of these agents of, of the Mexican state of engaging in this kind of corrupt practices. But they nonetheless do it, right, understanding that by only by critiquing the Mexican state and it's kind of this, this, this, this, this program that they're piloting can they ever undermine it, right? And so they're actually very successful in bringing public attention to the issue. It gets to the point where, you know, the head of the immigration office in Sonora actually gets called in by the governor, so ask questions about his participation in this, and then event eventually ends up being actually prosecuted by the Mexican government for handling the internal sale program in, in the kind of corrupt way. And so from the perspective of the migrant workers, the program never quite worked to its ideals. And the only thing it worked to do was to activate their kind of civic involvement and their activism. And so on and so forth. For the northern growers, obviously the program was the opposite, was a program that actually did how them expand their coffers. And they were quite sudden in 1963, right. When the Mexican state, essentially the size of this whole program, this whole thing, whatever's going on, is too much of a headache, right? And they asked the growers to just figure, figure this internal labor shortage thing on their own, right, by like, you know, contact to nearby municipalities or nearby states and somehow kind of creating kind of an internal migratory labor program independent of the Mexican state. So the Mexican state essentially takes a position of like this seemed like a good idea at the beginning, but just leave us out of this going forward, please.
- [36:07]
Rachel Newman
So in the 1960s, after we see the end of both the bracero agreements with the United States and, and this internal bracero program comes to an end, Mexicans continue to migrate in large numbers and for the most part without documents. And you show in the book that the Mexican state responds, continues to respond. But you describe this response as flailing. So what did the struggle look like in terms of policy? What did they try to do to regulate immigration? What was preventing any successful policy solutions for coming about in 1960s and 70s.
- [36:44]
Irvin Ebarguin
Yeah, so. One sec. All right, so the, the, the period after the bracero program is kind of the topic of those chapters that you're mentioning there. And you know, the, the, the through line here is that, you know, if, if migrant abuse had been bad during the bracero program, in some ways it just got worse, right. In the aftermath of, of its kind of conclusion, its termination in 65. Because as you mentioned, now we begin to see that, you know, even though the Brazil program is no longer in effect, essentially migrant workers and growers in the US have been essentially habituated to one another. And so even as these states remove their, the state apparatus as a contraption to facilitate the migration, the migration by its very inertia and is kind of again, the way it has been habituated and embedded within, on both sides of the border, simply continues to grow just now without the formal sanction of both states. Right? And so this is where we see that we have a rise of, you know, what's popularly known as undocumented immigration. Right? And so with this undocumented immigration, we get a even wider range of abuses, right, Than, than in, during the Brazil program. The main, the main reason for this is that of course, with the guesswork program, the states themselves are the ones mainly involved and implicated in kind of conveying migrants from one side to the other. With undocumented migration, it's the migrants themselves, via their own internal networks or via human traffickers that are the ones kind of orchestrating their passage. And so this is where they begin to rub up against, in particular, the US Border Patrol, right? And so there's just an uptick in very public cases in the 1960s and 1970s, late 1960s and 1970s, of Border Patrol officials committing, you know, essentially heinous acts of violence against Mexican migrants, sometimes, you know, even executing them right across the border, almost as a playful exercise amongst themselves of kind of cruel deterrence, right? In some ways kind of foreshadowing maybe the present era of immigration enforcement. And so this becomes then very kind of problematic for the Mexican state, right? Because nonetheless there's. Even though they're not actively kind of orchestrating the migration, nonetheless kind of public commentators and critics essentially see migration as an index of the Mexican state's own economic failings, right? That is to say, you know, if people are migrating, it must be because something is not being done correctly in terms of our domestic, Mexico's domestic economic policy rate. And so for that reason, throughout the 60s and 70s, Mexico kind of feels the need every time there, there are these kinds of cases of migrant abuse to engage in some kind of act of remediation rate to try to kind of explore to what extent maybe even at this late stage, right. The migration might be corrected. And the reason I call it kind of a flailing state is because they are very much caught by this, by this point in 1960s, 1970s, they're very much caught up in the current and just kind of throwing out different rafts semi chaotically and semi randomly to see if they can save themselves from the course that the migration has taken, right? And so there are various kind of rafts, to use that metaphor, that they throw out there. One of them is to kind of begin to bury down onto these kind of colonization efforts that they had briefly explored in 1954. Essentially kind of colonization again revolves around this idea of creating kind of state supported agrarian settlements. This is interesting because of course, at this moment, by this moment in Mexico history, in Mexico history, Mexico is very well committed now to urbanization and industrialization, right. As pillars of its kind of future economy. But migration at times prods it to kind of throw back to an earlier era where it's still imagined that, you know, Mexican and the Mexican peasantry can live off the land, right? It kind of the struggles with migration drive the Mexican state to kind of of actually remain connected and tethered to its kind of revolutionary discourse and ideology about, you know, fomenting agrarian uplift and that sort of thing. And so in that sense it's kind of, it's an indispensable linkage between kind of past and present in Mexican policymaking. I would say the, the reason why none of this ends up really working is that as I argued throughout the book, the, the chief flaw of Mexican statesmen when it comes to migration is that they always sit on the fence, right? It's always very like, you know, maybe, maybe something can change in the context of this migration that might make it so that we can continue essentially leasing workers to the United States, right? So anytime they have this kind of counter migratory gambits, they're always very experimental, even when they're like boldly phrased, right? It's more like the officials are like dipping their toes in the water rather than fully diving in, right? There is they never again, even when their discourse rises to like very fully throat full throated, like defenses of permanence, there's always this kind of, this kind of substrate of fear and reticence, right. On Mexican officials side, right. A sense that maybe actually they are not capable of devising solutions to this migration. And so in those chapters I go through again, various of these kind of policy rafts again that Mexican officials throw out there to try to kind of stanch the migration. But again, they never really give any of them kind of full, full follow through. Right. The one that they pursue most assiduously is the, the idea that the way to cure or nix out migration is to get the US to limit tariffs or sometimes even fully eliminate tariffs on Mexican products. The idea here is that, you know, if, you know, tariffs are eliminated for certain Mexican products specifically from specific areas in Mexico that contribute to out migration, then commerce can grow in those areas, right? People will be able to find jobs there and they won't have to migrate to the United States. But of course, that particular idea, for example, relies upon US collaboration rate. And so they do try to reach out to various administrations on the US side, including Nixon, including Carter. But what they find time after time is that the US is not really interested, right. In helping stanch the very migratory flow that they had. The US had obviously been instrumental in stimulating the migration flow, but by the late 70s, it wasn't in any way really interested in helping Mexico kind of create internal policies that might kind of deter that flow. Really the US emphasis insofar as deterrence was a kind of mindset, was to kind of expand the Militarization of the border and the budgets of the border Patrol and that sort of thing. The US Kind of took the, took the stance or the, the posture that it was kind of its problem to solve from, from that perspective, that kind of unilateral perspective. And so in the end, we're left with this kind of flailing Mexican state, you know, looking for different raps, sometimes internally, sometimes externally, with like, trying to get tariff relief from the United States, but ultimately really unable to kind of get a hold of, of the migration that it had thought it could somehow mastermind. Right. And so I think I close those chapters by talking about predictions that Mexico has that it'll take, like at the present rate. I think they mentioned it might be like 50, 60 years before we ever begin to actually get a hold of migration and kind of create and kind of reverse, let's say, the migratory flow to the United States.
- [44:18]
Rachel Newman
So when we get to the book's conclusion, we've moved from flailing to what you'd call a surrender.
- [44:24]
Irvin Ebarguin
So.
- [44:25]
Rachel Newman
So who exactly is surrendering to what? And I don't know, how do you think about the past 40 years of immigration policy making differently, having studied this earlier era and the sort of many different policy attempts that don't quite land.
- [44:42]
Irvin Ebarguin
Yeah. So the conclusion ends with this idea of the Mexican state or Mexican statesman, regardless of political party. But I mean, one of the things that happens in the past 40 years is that power shifts from various parties. So from, from P. Morena. But the, the, the kind of, the unifying trend or the general trend would be that there is kind of general surrender to migration. Right. So instead of flailing and throwing out different rafts, policy rafts, internally or externally, to try to kind of solve the migration or, you know, nix that process, essentially, these know, the statesman gave in to migration. They begin to accept, accept its existence, no matter. It's, I think, you know, from 1940 to 1980, there was again this idea that it was this devil's bargain in migration. There was much more of a, of a caution when it came to migration. And again, you know, the, the party in power gestured towards and sometimes actually operationalized plants to kind of constrain out migration. You don't see that in the aftermath of the 1980s in general. Right. Insofar as the Mexican government begins to, or continues to think about migration, it's more in terms of how it can derive value from the migrants already in the United States. So the idea there from the 80s onwards is no longer how to, like, how do we Pull back this population, like physically, literally the bodies, get these people back into Mexico. It's more just how do we get their money in their pockets to come over to the, to the Mexican side, right. And so the, the kind of, the concrete policy initiatives that Mexico undertakes and really got kind of guides its attention to in the 1980s are about encouraging remittances back to Mexico, right? Encouraging, you know, Mexican migrants to contribute some of the dollars they're earning in the United States and bring them over to the Mexican side to format economic developments and community development over in Mexico. And this involves various things including for example, making sure that Mexican consuls are forming kind of much more strong diasporic communities and diasporic ties within the United States, including people like sponsoring language, Spanish language programs for Mexican migrants so that Mexicans and their children remain, for example, connected or feel that they remain connected to some kind of ancestral homeland, that they can then invest their money, their money, hard earned money into it. And so the, I think the, the presidencies under the regime of and Morena have been a little bit less emphatic publicly about that sort of encouragement of remittances that they, they at times gesture towards a kind of an embrace of migrants remaining within Mexico. But there is very little in terms of concrete policies that they are, they have kind of piloted to try to integrate Mexicans within the homeland. They're not again, to go back to this idea of the rafts. They're not really throwing out any particular kind of rafts to kind of think about rooting Mexicans internally. There is much kind of a, more of a general surrender to migration. And so far as they think about integrating Mexicans, it's more to integrate, for example, people who have been repatriated or deported from the United States, you know, by providing them, you know, bus passages and that sort of thing. But those are very like small things that allow for kind of short, short term stability or short term passage right to your, you know, hometown, but are not, you know, in any way kind of geared towards creating long term fixity. And again, a lot of the ideas I mentioned earlier in the book are not about short term fix, are about long term. How do we, how does, how does Mexico, how can Mexico create long term fixity for its populace? And so I think that that's essentially where the politics stand at the moment with, with the Mexican state. I think it continues to exist in this kind of state of surrender. And again, to go back to my earlier point, there's an acceptance of it no matter what the, the undersides. And so no matter what, how draconian the US Gets, right, no matter how you know, crazed the ideas, the anti migration discourse and ideas seem to get in the US you don't really see a kind of a corollary burgeoning in Mexico of some kind of like counter migratory discourse and politics. Right. To match that. And I think that that is something you did see in the earlier era. Right. You did see that there was some kind of, there was some kind of fundamental interplay between American nativism and, you know, Mexican anti migratory policymakers.
- [49:29]
Rachel Newman
I really enjoyed reading this important book and it's been great chatting with you about it. But before I let you go, would you tell us a little bit about what you're working on lately so we know what to look forward to?
- [49:40]
Irvin Ebarguin
Yeah, thank you. Yeah. I love this particular book, but I was looking forward to starting a different project about a different set of questions. And so I think in this book I'm very kind of attuned to, you know, the fine interplay of Mexican statecraft and American statecraft. Right. And so for a second book, I'm really much more interested in thinking about the lived experience of migration, lived experience of Latino migration in particular. And so the project that I'm developing now is called True north. And it takes the perspective and the story of Central American migrants in the 1970s and 1980s in the aftermath of various civil wars, often US sponsored or US supported civil wars that drove people from El Salvador and Guatemala into places like Mexico. And really what I want to show in that book is the way in which the north is not just a geographic destination, right, meaning America, but is actually actually a kind of a conceptual apparatus, right, that north gets really defined actively by Guatemalan and Salvadorian migrants, really in the moment, at a kind of everyday level. And sometimes the compass directs them to cross over into the Mexican side, sometimes it directs them to go into certain churches looking for sanctuary. Sometimes it guides them into the jungles of Chapa. Sometimes the compass ends up directing them to like far away Yucatan in coordination with the Mexican state efforts to kind of support their refugee relocation. So I really tried to think about migration less in terms of these kind of this epic movement from like a here to there, so from like Central America or Latin America to us. I really tries to live in what I call the kind of the messy middle of the migration, right, where migrants are. Migrants have lives that are full of kind of these setbacks and these kind of false turns and this kind of constant relocation rate because I think ultimately that gives us a much more. More honest picture of kind of the texture of migrant life. I think that I guess the closest concept would be something like this location, you know, the way migrants are constantly kind of shuffled about by larger forces. But I really want to kind of emphasize a different way of looking at the migrants as thinking of them as people who have what I call a kind of an immigrant compass. Right. That kind of constantly adapts to the circumstances at play rate and allows them to kind of find niches of survival in particular in Mexico. So that's kind of the book I'm exploring. So it'll begin with kind of the. It'll begin with the kind of the proceed kind of in three stages. The first being, you know, the initial kind of push out of Central America. The second being this kind of multi directional history within Mexico. And then the kind of last stage of the book will be looking at the way in which these, some of these migrants, some of their, some. For some of them the immigrant compass pointed them to remain in Mexico. And for some of them the immigrant compass actually pointed them to return back to their homeland in the aftermath of the Civil War. So it'll proceed to kind of in those three acts. And I guess I'm doing. I'm looking forward to not, not thinking about the States so much for a little bit. I mean they do feature in the story, but really it's one that tries to kind of direct our attention more to the. The way in which migrants live at a very granular level across these kind of very precarious borders and spaces.
- [52:49]
Rachel Newman
Well, I'm really excited to keep learning about this research going forward. So today we've been speaking with Irvin Nibarguin about his new book Caught in the Current Mexico's Struggle to regulate emigration 1940-1980. Thank you for the interview, Irvin.
- [53:04]
Irvin Ebarguin
No problem. Thank you for having me again.
- [53:18]
Rachel Newman
Limu Emu.
- [53:20]
Marshall Poe
And Doug, here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [53:36]
Irvin Ebarguin
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [53:38]
Marshall Poe
Cut the camera. They see us.
- [53:40]
Irvin Ebarguin
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty. Liberty Savings. Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.