ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which control over migrant labourers is effected principally through the state and employers, and how migrant workers organise to resist the pressure upon them. The situation facing agricultural labourers in the south-west, for example, was decisively altered in 1942 when the Bracero Program was initiated. The Program was essentially a government-to-government agreement stipulating conditions to protect the wages and living conditions of Mexican migrants. In the 1920s growers evolved a system of recruitment that used ‘crew leaders’ or ‘labour contractors’ as intermediaries between themselves and the labour force. The chapter concentrate on two aspects of interior determination observable in US agricultural workers. The first concerns the internalisation of the ascribed and heavily-promoted attribute of being an ‘alien.’ The second concerns varying manifestations of psychological disturbance and disorientation in the migrant labour camps and at work.
