Gazing Back at the Academic Gaze

Bracero-Bashing, or, Racism Dressed Up as Academic Reformist Feminism?

by Lucy S.

As part of my research for my final project on Francisco Jimenez’s trilogy (his story of immigrating as a young child with his family from Mexico to do agricultural migrant work and finally making it to college), I have been reading a book about the braceros. The braceros were men from Mexico given a temporary work permit by the U.S. government to come and do agricultural labor without their families for a period of time. The program was in effect from 1942 to 1964. I read some things yesterday in the 2011 book, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico by Deborah Cohen that really angered me.

In one section, Cohen quotes some of the former braceros as they talk about doing their laundry (by hand, after working 12 or more hours a day six or seven days a week in the sun).  Andres Morales picked cotton on a Mississippi farm; he says that "local women - they were all black women - used to come once a week to wash our clothes. We had to pay ... It was much better than doing it ourselves ... I wanted to save money, so in the beginning I washed my own clothes ... But it was hard work, and after working all day, I didn't want to do it . So I had a woman wash my clothes ... It was worth it."  (128 ellipses in original).

Then Cohen analyzes what he said:

In this man's remarks, the gendered framework that legitimated migration becomes evident along with the implicit contrast between Durango homes and U.S. labor camps. Not paying for his own laundry service demonstrated his prioritization of family needs over his own, for in saving money he could send more to his family and thus reclaim his manhood and title as household patriarch. Yet even as his claim was undone by the "hard work" that washing clothes entailed, all was not lost to him. The washer of his clothes - a woman - was someone to whose labor he, as proper patriarch, should have had access, maintaining the accepted gendered boundaries of domestic responsibilities. Thus the ongoing struggle between spending money, making bracero life easier, and supporting the proper division of labor, on the one hand, and saving money, making life harder, and undermining this labor division on the other, was framed as a struggle over rights to the title of proper patriarch (128).

Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t, for Cohen here, it seems. Her reading of this seems so patently disingenuous and – I have to say – racist to me that it’s hard to know where to begin. Repeatedly in this book, she emphasizes the patriarchy and 'loss of manhood' of 'these Mexican men.'  What bothers me about it is that it reinforces certain stereotypes and implies a silent juxtaposition against – what? – white American men who aren't patriarchal?  In the 1940s to 1960s?  

I am more concerned with the social division of labor between the “heads and hands,” as Eduardo Galeano calls them – “the intellectuals and the manuals” – than I am between men who labor all day at low wages to work in fields to harvest food for Americans and women who labor all day at low wages to wash the clothes of those laborers by hand.  I would like to know what exactly Cohen thinks she is accomplishing here in her constructed reading of this man’s comments. I would also like to know if she reads her own behavior in similar terms.  Does she think to herself that she has the choice to grow her own food or rely on the labor of others (almost all Hispanic or African-American at this point, based on my research) – and if she chooses the former, does she think that she affirms a white co-optation of native ownership of the land while reinforcing rugged individualism, but if she chooses the latter, does she think that she, as a proper white middle-class woman, is entitled to access to the labor of those who harvest the food, maintaining the racist boundaries of manual labor?  Does she think this also when she buys clothes rather than sewing them herself? If this man's comments prove his enactment of patriarchy for Cohen, does her use of the aforementioned poorly paid labor enact white supremacy and American hegemony?  (And the pay is likely to be far more disproportionate if we compare her wages to the workers who harvest food and then compare the wages of the braceros and the women who washed their clothes).

And I would like to know how it is that sending money home to try to support their wives and kids and/or parents and siblings who were not allowed to come along under the terms to the U.S. bracero program makes them patriarchs who are trying to reclaim their manhood.  When my friend (well, really, for me she is my other mother; she calls me her fifth daughter) – when in the 1960s, Carmen left Colombia and left her very young kids and husband behind to come to come to the U.S., because she’d obtained a visa and lined up work in a sewing factory, did she somehow turn into a patriarch trying to reclaim her manhood as she sent money back home?

What also makes me mad is that as someone from a very ethnically mixed extended family and group of close friends who have become family, I have seen a lot more sexist division of labor among whites than among Hispanics or African-Americans, especially when I was a kid, and even in years since then.  That is just my personal experience; it doesn’t in itself prove anything in any scholarly sense. But she isn’t proving anything, either. She’s taking this man’s words about the reality of the situation and reading them in a way that feels like “common sense” to her. It’s the very thing academics warn against – relying on what feels like common sense – and yet when she does it, this is supposed to be a critical, analytical reading.

I will also say that Jimenez tells about taking care of his baby brother when he himself was a young child, watching him in the family’s old car all day while his parents and older brother worked in the fields. Under the logic of capitalism, his mother’s labor harvesting could not be spared for care-labor during the day. Care-labor paid nothing; harvesting did; and they needed all the wages they could get, since they were paid so poorly. Thus, the person least able to earn money but barely able to provide care-labor had to care for the baby, changing his diapers, feeding him his bottle. At a later point, Jimenez tells of washing diapers outside in a bucket with a hose while his mother cared for another baby brother who was very sick. This was in the 1950s, and I am just wondering how many American white boys were changing the diapers of their siblings and watching them all day at that time. I know that my (white) father and uncle were not, and they were from a working-class family themselves.

And if there is something patriarchal about the fact that women rather than men were the ones hired to wash these men's clothing, does that not say more about social divisions of labor in the U.S. than about "Mexican men" and their "gendered boundaries"? 

Here is where I see more racism:

In another part, the men talk about going to bars when they got paid, and drinking and meeting women. Cohen mixes together totally different accounts from different places; so there are some talking about prostitution and some not.

Here is what one man, don Alvaro, says about drinking and going to bars. "I wasn't married. I still sent money back to my parents, so it was okay."

Then Cohen interjects in the text; "Thus being single (partially) negated the need for limits." What? 

Then don Alvaro says, "I met lots of women that way. Lots. They knew we'd come on Saturday nights and they'd be there. They liked Mexicans.... They liked that we were hard workers; they liked that we dressed well and had money. They used to come around the bars that we went to... They really liked the Mexicans" (133).

Her analysis:  

The complexities of the bar are hinted at in don Alvaro's claim that local women "liked Mexicans."  This gives clues to the kind of women braceros met and the relationships they had. Although men were rumored to have met, married, and stayed with U.S. women, no man with whom I spoke admitted to knowing anyone who had done so; in fact many noted the limited interactions between braceros and locals. In short, the relationships that don Alvaro raved about were most likely ones in which men exchanged cash directly or indirectly, for socializing and sex, even though he portrayed these relationships as based on love and heterosexual attraction, ones in which gifts and favors were given for romantic possibilities. That is, the men saw and justified their actions vis-a-vis Mexican gender conventions (133).  

What clues does it give about the "kind of women"?  What is Cohen saying – that she knows that no white women would have been interested in those Mexican men unless the women were paid? Without putting some kind of moralistic judgment on the prostitution situations from either side, does anyone nonetheless see this as problematic? Insulting? Racist?  Again, what is the basis for her leap here? Her vibes? Her own racism? Her academic ‘common sense’?  

And I find her phrasing strange: that no man whom she spoke to admitted to knowing anyone who'd married an American woman.  Why the convoluted sentence structure? How many did she ask?  Why use the word “admitted”?  Also, the braceros were there on temporary work permits. It’s not surprising that it would be difficult to forge long term relationships.

Yet Jimenez's own brother married a white woman in the 1950s.  And many among my family and friends formed similar relationships during the same years that the bracero program was in effect. Cohen’s reading says so much more about her own prejudices and ideologies than it does about the braceros. What are the special "Mexican gender conventions" here? It is discouraging to find that after that much research, Cohen still failed to accept those whom she was researching as equal human beings. At least that is what her readings communicate.

This is why many feminists around the world, as well as poor and working class feminists in the U.S., have had difficulty finding common ground with bourgeois, Western, reformist, privileged (mostly white) feminists. Our sons, fathers, brothers, male partners, and male friends are not our enemies. To be sure, there is patriarchy, and we all experience variations of it, but her framing does nothing to identify it, nor to seriously challenge it. She would do better to start with her country’s patriarchal relationships with other countries around the world or the patriarchy of the bosses who treated the braceros like children (though certainly not beloved ones), and continue to treat so many workers that way. In what ways does the academy participate in and perpetuate that?

I will add here that I do not imply here that partners are always male, but am only saying that when they are, they are not inherently the enemy. And I am not saying patriarchy does not manifest at times in these relationships, but in my view Cohen has not shown it in her readings of these comments and events. Instead, I believe she is enacting another kind of patriarchy herself, a power relation of U.S. to Mexico; academic to laborer; white person to person of color; affluent to poor.

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Postscript: I am writing this after my exchanges in the comments below - or to be more clear, I am writing this on a snowy Sunday April 14th morning. I want to add, in case it wasn't clear, that I don't actually see Cohen's own options in the terms I laid out, but was only trying to construct a parallel set of  'choices' that left her damned either way, as the braceros were in her analysis of their options.  But in my view, personal purity is not the point. Aspiring to it, or trying to hold others to it, only leaves us either falsely self-righteous if we actually believe we have attained it, or, more likely, guilt-ridden as we decide that it's no use, that we're just not 'good enough' to live purely. Or it leaves us deconstructing others' behavior and lives in ways that never lead to solidarity. 

We can try to live with integrity, and we may find that what used to appeal to us isn't appealing anymore as we understand how it fits into the larger picture, and we may care enough to support the endeavors of others who labor to make the world more just.  We may even feel excited and joyful being part of those efforts in some way. At the same time, we need systemic change, so that no one labors under the conditions of the braceros or the present-day migrant workers. 

Why should some lives be used up so brutally so that others can -- do what? -- pile up a glut of material goods, or do other easier but mostly pointless work in the larger context, or in a multitude of ways live lives that structurally harm others and that create nothing that matters? In his introduction to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, David Blight writes, “A major argument of Douglass’s Narrative, and something he would repeat in many forms down to the Civil War, is that the ‘prison’ of slavery housed blacks and whites, slaves and slaveholders, the entire nation in a single fate” (15). In what ways do our contemporary versions of horrendous exploitation and exclusion of so many from circles of care and rights imprison us all?

Cohen's assessments angered me because I expected her to gain insight and deeper ethics from her research into the labors and difficult lives of the braceros, and to not fall into cliches and stereotypes about Mexican men and patriarchy and who might form what relationships. I don't think there is something wrong with research and writing about other people's lives. When I used the term "academic gaze," what had come to mind was what is often called 'the gaze.'  Here is something helpful from Wikipedia: 

Michel Foucault elaborated on the gaze to illustrate a particular dynamic in power relations and disciplinary mechanisms in his Discipline and Punish. Foucault uses the term gaze in the distribution of power in various institutions of society. The gaze is not something one has or uses; rather, it is the relationship in which someone enters. "The gaze is integral to systems of power and ideas about knowledge." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaze

 Cohen writes academic books as a professor. The braceros and other agricultural migrant workers then or now do not have access to the same systems of power. They do not get to turn their gaze upon academics or others who would analyze them in order to analyze the analyzers in any comparable way. I believe that research becomes the gaze when academics relate to the people whom they study as objects, when they see the people, not holistically, but for what they can get out of them - when they gaze upon them looking for pieces of them that can be exploited for the uses of the academic.

I do believe that we have to confront racism, sexism, and the many ways in which people are more egregiously exploited and excluded, not to embrace identity politics, but because we need to stand in solidarity with one another.