ABSTRACT
When the “bracero” program of contract labor importation ended in 1964, and for up to a decade thereafter, Mexican migration to California consisted mainly of a circular flow of mostly undocumented, mostly young adult males who left their immediate relatives behind in a rural Mexican community to work in seasonal U.S. agriculture for several months (normally six months or less) and then returned to their community of origin. Most came from a small subset of communities, located in seven or eight Mexican states that for many years had sent the bulk of Mexican migrants to the United States. Thus, the typical undocumented Mexican worker of the late 1960s and early 1970s strongly resembled his legal contract-worker predecessor. In fact, in many cases the post-1964 illegal entrants had themselves worked in the United States as braceros up to 1984. This was the picture that emerged from data collected from apprehended “illegals” interviewed in the United States (North and Houstoun, 1976), returned migrants interviewed in traditional “sending” communities (Cornelius, 1976a), and a national sample of sixty-twothousand Mexican households interviewed by CENIET, a Mexican government agency, in 1978 (Bustamante and Martínez, 1979; Zazueta and García y Griego, 1982; Ranney and Kossoudji, 1983).
