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• 1 2024-09-17T06:02:22+00:00 Mexicans in Your Town: Histories of Mexican Migration to the United States in Local Television Documentaries 4 image_header 2025-01-07T21:13:34+00:00

  
  by Rodolfo Fernández and Deborah L. Jaramillo

  University of Connecticut (Fernández) / Boston University (Jaramillo)
  Abstract

  Migrants and Locals
  A Brief Overview of Mexican Migration to the United States
  >Filling a labor gap
  >The Johnson–Reed Act and revolution
  >Economic crisis and forced removal
  >The Bracero Program
  Televising Mexican Labor
  >"Braceros"
  >"Division in His House"
  Reclaiming History, Space, and Achievement: Hispanic Presence in Oregon (1980)
  “A grace period of understanding”: Una Vida Mejor (1997)
  “Even Jesus Christ couldn’t unite the locals and the Mexicans”: Postville: When Cultures Collide (2000)
  “Maybe more of them are better than the gringos”: Resettling the West: Mexicans in Wyoming (2001)
  Reflections on Immigration Narratives after 9/11
  >La familia
  >Homeland Security
  Assessing the Archive
   

  Migrants and Locals

  The prominence of immigrants’ rights on a national level fluctuates according to waves of immigration, media coverage, and political responses.¹ Coverage and responses likewise shift according to the wave and makeup of the migrants. And although national coverage speaks with the loudest voice, it does not necessarily account for regional developments and attitudes. In their study of Mexican immigration in the 1920s and 1930s, Flores underscores the influence wielded by regional media in “the public shaping of immigrants and immigration.”² The shaping and crafting of these terms can vary by city and state and by the orientation and language of the media outlet. Using the American Archive of Public Broadcasting and the Bay Area Television Archive, this paper taps into regional narratives constructed about Mexicans’ migration and labor in the late twentieth century.

  The case studies in this paper are locally produced television documentaries that belong to what we are calling the “Mexicans in” category. Each program explores Mexican immigration in a particular town or state far from the southern United States border. Most of these programs situate the appearance of Mexican nationals as a surprise and a disruption to the community’s way of life. Una Vida Mejor: A Better Life (1997), Postville: When Cultures Collide (2000), and Resettling the West: Mexicans in Wyoming (2001) show townspeople in Arkansas, Iowa, and Wyoming, respectively, struggling to adapt to a growing Mexican population in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Only Hispanic Presence in Oregon (1980) stresses the deep roots of the state’s Mexican population. Some of the other programs attempt to join their narratives to a longer history of immigration even as their conceit rests in the sudden appearance of Mexicans in their state.

  In approaching archival television as, in writer and producer John Wyver’s words, “one vital component of our shared social, cultural, and political histories and a key element in the composition of our individual and collective identities,” we argue for the enduring relevance of local television in the construction of shared histories and diverse experiences.³ Using textual and historical analysis, this paper shows how television documentaries from different regions of the country interact with and contribute to the history of Mexican migration to the United States in the late twentieth century. Taken together, the immigration narratives constructed on local television reveal not just patterns of responses to demographic shifts happening around the country but regional negotiations of race, gender, class, and civil liberties. We begin by surveying the history of Mexican migration to the US, and we subsequently approach the programs chronologically, situating them within the periods and policies that inform them.

  A Brief Overview of Mexican Migration to the United States

  Despite the common tropes that conceptualize the US as a nation of immigrants, relationships between the state, local communities, and newcomers to the country have a complicated history. Policies that encourage or discourage migrants are subject to generational fluctuations, resulting in different waves and patterns of settlement. The main driver of Mexican migration to the US in the last five or six decades has been economic. Before the 1960s, Mexicans resettling in the US faced few legal requirements or could rely on guest worker permits like those of the Bracero Program (1942–1964). Workers could head north for a season or even a few years to make money and then return to their families in Mexico. After 1970 this circular migrant flow slowed as laws became more restrictive and border enforcement increased. 

  Filling a labor gap

  The first significant wave of migration from Mexico to the US took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period characterized by global migrations. Mexicans arrived without having to clear any significant legal hurdles. Historically, few federal restrictions on migrants existed until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Asians from moving to the US. A strict enforcement mechanism was added almost a decade later, in 1891, when the Immigration Act codified deportations and created a Federal Bureau of Immigration. Significantly, it did not target Mexicans. 

  The late nineteenth century saw rapid capitalist development in Mexico defined by an export-oriented economy and the building of infrastructure. Despite its expanding economy, Mexico was one of the few large countries in the hemisphere that did not attract large inflows of foreign workers. The asymmetries between the economies of the neighboring North American countries primarily account for this case of Mexican exceptionalism in an era known as a golden age of migration.⁴ Agents recruited Mexican agricultural workers to the United States even as Mexico’s commercial agricultural sector was booming. Capitalist agriculture in the US needed to fill the labor gap created by the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was reaffirmed and strengthened by the Geary Act of 1891. To convince workers to join the US workforce, recruiters had to offer substantial advances on wages; these enganches attracted Mexican workers to commercial farms for decades.⁵ The enganche system became even more necessary when the US government enacted new restrictions on Asian (specifically Japanese) migration in 1907, leading to increased demand for Mexican workers.⁶

  The Johnson–Reed Act and revolution

  US capitalist agriculture found it easier to attract Mexican workers after the beginning of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). In his demographic analysis, Robert McCaa estimates that about 300,000 Mexicans were displaced north during the conflict; 230,000 more were displaced during the 1920s. These numbers are considerable given that Mexico’s population hovered around twelve million.⁷ This age of migration began to decline in the 1920s with restrictive laws like the Johnson–Reed Act of 1924.

  Coming at the end of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century waves of migration, the Johnson–Reed Act restricted migration in an unprecedented way. It practically banned immigration from Asia while assigning strict quotas for migration from Europe. These quotas did not affect countries in the Western Hemisphere, so people continued to arrive from Mexico throughout the 1920s, still mostly attracted to agricultural work. The Mexican population in the United States rose more than sevenfold in the first three decades of the twentieth century—from 100,000 in 1910 to 740,000 in 1929.⁸ The Johnson–Reed Act did not apply to migrants from the Western Hemisphere for three reasons.⁹ First, Mexican agricultural labor was essential to industrial farming, especially in the Southwest. Second, from a diplomatic perspective, the United States did not want to antagonize the governments of Mexico and Canada. Finally, as articulated by Bon Tempo and Diner:

  a widespread assumption existed that Mexicans would eventually return home, so allowing Mexican workers into the country would not lead to their permanent settlement. Inherent in this thinking was the belief that Mexicans could not fit easily into the United States. Even some of the harshest critics of national origins policy, such as Representative Samuel Dickstein of New York [ . . . ] supported this position: “One can not say, for instance, that a Mexican alien readily becomes Americanized, or is of the same blood or language with us.”¹⁰

  The idea that Mexicans were fundamentally unassimilable and therefore incompatible with—and uninterested in—a permanent living situation in the US has endured, as we will discuss later. Another enduring concept is that of “illegal” immigration, which was created during these debates. In 1929 Congress made unauthorized entry a misdemeanor. It also expanded the Border Patrol for the first time. Even when not officially barred from entering the US, Mexicans were excluded and harassed by Border Patrol through arbitrary health inspections and literacy tests.¹¹

  Economic crisis and forced removal

  The first large wave of Mexican migration in the twentieth century ended with the start of the Great Depression. In the decade following the 1929 crash, the government forcibly removed (deported, repatriated, or otherwise expelled) almost half a million (469,000) people to Mexico.¹² Many of those deported were US citizens, sons and daughters of those who fled the chaos of the Mexican Revolution. The number is particularly shocking considering that between 1931 and 1940, only 528,431 immigrants came to the United States from all over the globe.¹³ In other words, “from 1932 to 1935, more people left the [United States] than arrived.”¹⁴

  The organized and systematic expulsion of Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the Great Depression after decades of being invited in has been characterized by Balderrama and Rodríguez as a “Decade of Betrayal.”¹⁵ The lack of jobs in the depressed US economy discouraged migrants from arriving, but the US government’s actions played as much of a role in the flow of migration. The federal government was not alone in the forced removal of Mexicans during this period; states like Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, and even local governments like that of Los Angeles, organized the expulsion of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.¹⁶ The expansion of government into the economy during the Great Depression also entrenched racial segregation by targeting jobs and relief programs to people perceived to be more “American” than others.¹⁷

  The Bracero Program

  Policy toward Mexican migrants did another about-face after a decade. Border enforcement grew lax after the beginning of World War II in 1939, and the migratory flows reversed as growing industry in the US attracted Mexican workers. The US negotiated the Bracero Accord with Mexico in 1942 to offer temporary worker visas for Mexican laborers. The government struck similar agreements with other nations in the Western Hemisphere.¹⁸ Although the agreement was designed to help with the war effort, it ended in 1964, outliving WWII by almost two decades. 

  The vast majority of those who arrived in the United States through the Bracero Program came to work in agriculture. Mexicans who joined this program were not technically allowed to migrate; nevertheless, the number of Mexicans living in the United States increased. Many overstayed their visas, while others were born as US citizens. Less than half a million immigrant visas were provided to Mexicans during the 1960s, but the Mexican-born population in the US grew by more than six times that number.¹⁹ By the mid-1960s, migration from Europe slowed while Mexican migration continued to accelerate, even as the Bracero Program came to an end in 1964.

  Televising Mexican Labor

  The Bracero Program began and ended as television was still maturing. While national television broached the subject of migrant farmworkers along the eastern United States in a CBS Reports documentary, Harvest of Shame (1960), local California stations confronted the agricultural labor crisis closer to home. Before attending to our late twentieth-century case studies, we must touch on two earlier examples of this regional engagement with Mexican workers. These documentaries warrant attention because they fix on the rights of Mexican and Mexican American populations at a key juncture in immigration and labor history. Additionally, they set the stage for a sizable shift in the response to the presence and rights of people of Mexican heritage in the US. The Bay Area Television Archive houses two documentaries we would like to highlight: Assignment Four: Braceros (1963) from KRON-TV and Division in His House (1965) from KPIX-TV. 

  “Braceros”

  Although only a mostly silent rough cut of Braceros exists, its images and few words indicate a notable intervention in the public’s awareness of the farmworkers’ welfare. Coming one year before the end of the Bracero Program, the documentary features interviews with Braceros facing deportation and a dramatic change to their livelihoods. Viewers see evidence of labor organizing as well as evidence of the impoverished living conditions of the Braceros and their families. Without more audio, it is impossible to ascertain the documentary’s agenda fully, but the images themselves evince a respect and sympathy for the workers. Additionally, the words and actions of the farmworkers demonstrate their agency in such a tumultuous moment.
  

  “Division in His House”

  The end of the Bracero Program in 1964 did not mean Mexicans disappeared from the agricultural sector. Mexican Americans and undocumented Mexicans continued their lives as farmworkers in the southwestern United States. Coming on the heels of this abrupt policy change, Division in His House grapples with the role of religion, specifically the California Migrant Ministry (CMM), in the struggle for the rights of presumably Mexican American—rather than Mexican—workers after the Bracero Program but does not attempt to distinguish between the two groups. Stark, silent footage of farmworkers laboring, living, and marching unfolds throughout the program, visually contextualizing the stakes of the divide between CMM and church members. The voices that dominate the narrative, however, are those of Chris Hartmire, director of CMM—who explains why Christianity requires activism and organizing on behalf of the workers and their families—and various church members, including those from the agricultural industry—who oppose CMM’s activities. Opponents of Hartmire’s work use “Mexican” and “Mexican American” interchangeably as they address the unacceptability of “radical” ideas in their church. Indeed, one landowner sees CMM’s activities on behalf of Mexicans as endangering his livelihood.

  Division in His House crafts a story of migrant civil rights championed not by government but by Protestant activists. It concludes with no real resolution, its images of farmworkers’ children cramped together in a shabby room clashing with the silliness of the children’s story being read to them by a white woman. Without a voice of their own, the farmworkers at the center of the issue are made passive; their toil and poor living conditions, demonstrated for the camera, define them just as Hartmire and his opposition define the workers’ struggles. Crucially, where Braceros gives a voice to workers from Mexico on the brink of expulsion from the US, Division speaks to the movement that arose in opposition to the Bracero Program (see Figure 1). 

  Hartmire made waves in the Presbyterian community by calling for an end to the program, arguing that it stifled the upward mobility of Mexican Americans by favoring cheaper Mexican labor.²⁰ Indeed, labor unions, immigrant rights groups, and religious organizations pushed back against the program.²¹ This political conflict escalated because industrial farms had mechanized to the point where they required less labor.²² Hartmire’s concern for Mexican Americans dovetailed with Cesar Chavez’s pursuit of a union for Mexican American farmworkers. Spaced only two years apart but bookending the final year of the Bracero Program, these two documentaries share a preoccupation with labor but indicate the presence of a sizable fault line: immigration, or specifically, how the rights of immigrants were perceived to infringe upon the rights and well-being of US citizens. Our “Mexicans in” case studies, all accessible in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, seize upon this issue, but our analysis reveals a shift in emphasis from labor to culture and from the group toward individual achievement. 

  Reclaiming History, Space, and Achievement: Hispanic Presence in Oregon (1980)

  For Hispanic Presence in Oregon, the first of our “Mexicans in” programs, the problem at hand is not so much the labor struggles of the 1960s and 1970s but rather the erasure of Mexicans and Chicanos from Oregon’s history. The context of this production is key to understanding its mission; it was created at a time when the passage of Mexicans back and forth across the border was growing more difficult. Consequently, Mexicans started settling permanently. 

  The end of the Bracero Program in 1964 marks the beginning of what has come to be known as the “Era of Undocumented Migration,” when guest worker visas virtually disappeared.²³ There were 438,000 temporary work visas available in 1959; in 1979 only 1,725 were issued.²⁴ Nevertheless, employers still expected workers to cross the border irregularly and work without authorization, a condition that translated to lower wages and an erosion of their rights and security. Even though crossing the border to find work became more expensive, dangerous, and potentially exploitative, workers were still able to return to Mexico. 

  Packaged as a lecture-style narrated slideshow, Hispanic Presence in Oregon—made for Southern Oregon Public Television by José Ángel Gutiérrez—builds a bridge from the earlier labor-oriented programs to those concerned with social and cultural integration. Here we see a celebration of the group and the emergence of individual achievement. Gutiérrez positions the film as a refutation not of anti-Mexican or anti-Hispanic sentiment but of the “official white version of history”; the facts contained within the film articulate an overarching concern with correcting the record. Indeed, the narration implicitly argues against narratives that erase Mexicans from US history, downplay Mexican influence on US places and names, and diminish or negate the achievements of Mexicans in the US. 

  Gutiérrez takes viewers from the period of Spanish exploration to the migration spurred by the Mexican Revolution, to the Bracero guest worker program, and finally to anti-Mexican discrimination and the rise of Chicano activism. His breakdown of Mexicans’ generational attitudes toward migration speaks to one set of reasons for settlement north of the US–Mexico border and for the movement of the children of immigrants into the political mainstream. Referred to by Gutiérrez as “Oregon’s best kept secret,” Hispanics put down roots, and Chicanos, especially, transitioned out of farm work to occupy blue- and white-collar fields.

  Hispanic Presence in Oregon calls on history to establish longevity as well as hardship. It straddles two major themes: (1) settlement and Mexican-Americanness and (2) the reality of continued immigration and perilous flows to and from Mexico. For example, Gutiérrez lauds the achievement of individual Hispanics but concludes by reminding viewers of the economic contributions of undocumented Mexicans and the ongoing efforts to deport them. The program precedes additional restrictive policies that worsen conditions at the border and heighten tensions between immigrants and citizens.
  

  “A grace period of understanding”: Una Vida Mejor (1997)

  The era of circular migration began to decline in the second half of the 1980s and 1990s, first with the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, known as IRCA, the Simpson–Mazzoli Act, or Amnesty Bill. IRCA regularized 2.7 million undocumented people and created a limited number of guest worker visas but also increased enforcement at the border and beyond. In the 1990s, the Cold War stopped being the logic that structured relations between the United States and other countries in the hemisphere. Instead, an escalating number of drug wars led to violence, militarization, and a hardening of the border to human transit. As a result, border communities became less hospitable to migrants from Mexico. Workers also stopped envisioning their travels north as temporary and began looking to settle and form families farther inside the country.

  We see this shift reflected in our remaining primary sources, which lean in to the “surprise” migration of Mexicans to non-border states. These programs were produced at a time when families, not just temporary workers, were arriving in the United States. The combination of restrictive border enforcement and the decline of nonindustrial agriculture in Mexico after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 had profound consequences for migration flows. Fewer single men moved back and forth across the border, and more migrant families sought roots in US communities and became more visible beyond the border states. After IRCA and throughout the 1990s, restrictions on migration became significantly more onerous. The Mexican economy also suffered as neoliberal reforms like NAFTA devastated traditional agricultural ways of life, forcing many to leave the Mexican countryside. 

  Una Vida Mejor: A Better Life, from Arkansas Educational TV Network, examines Mexican migration to Arkansas and relies heavily on the stories of a select group of migrants from the Mexican states of Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Durango, and Jalisco. The program opens with the statement “America was built by immigrants,” and it stands out for its willingness to let Mexican migrants tell their own stories. 

  Una Vida Mejor introduces viewers to the entrepreneurial spirit that newcomers have brought to towns like De Queen and Rogers, Arkansas. One such newcomer, Robert Martínez of Zacatecas, bought a 40-acre farm and over time expanded it to 450 acres. His case is not presented as the norm, but it supports the themes of opportunity and hope that representatives from the Catholic church espouse in the film. At the other end of the spectrum is Israel Sánchez, who holds a degree in engineering but must work in the poultry plant.

  Institutional responses to this new wave of migration appear constructive. The Catholic church plays a central role in helping migrants adjust to Arkansas and the US more generally. Services include workshops on immigration law, discrimination in the workplace, civil rights, and the citizenship process. City officials and educators present themselves as “proactive,” tackling information gaps and language issues early while also building community by spotlighting Cinco de Mayo and celebrating multiculturalism. But the daily lives of immigrants test the tolerance of the locals. The mayor of Rogers describes the initial problem of men clustering in homes when only men made the journey to Arkansas and then the problem of “cookouts,” “loud music,” and the “slaughtering of animals” once the men’s families arrived. He explains that town ordinances had to change to address these new issues. But he insists that the “biggest challenge” has been “growth” rather than demographics. 

  The program’s conclusion pardons Arkansans for any attitudinal problem because overall, the experience has been less tumultuous than in the border states. According to a lawyer interviewed for the documentary, there was “a grace period of understanding and maybe checking each other out” because Arkansas was new to this wave of immigration. The last words come from immigrants who discuss leaving home, retaining the culture for their children, and becoming “a full part of American society” while remembering “where they came from.”

  Ultimately, the program underscores the efforts made by town institutions to address acculturation and civil rights, but the documentary also attends to the personal sacrifices made and emotional weight carried by the immigrants and their families in Mexico. Here, the category of Mexican is understood in relation to individual hardship and achievement as well as acceptable and unacceptable cultural displays. 

  “Even Jesus Christ couldn’t unite the locals and the Mexicans”: Postville: When Cultures Collide (2000)

  Mexicans are not the sole focus of Postville: When Cultures Collide; in this program from Iowa Public Television, the movement of Hasidic Jews and Mexicans to Iowa broadens the conversation about immigration in some ways and contracts it in others. Postville is presented as an isolated town of 1,500 grappling with the influx of 700 new migrants. At the heart of the documentary reside the clash of cultures and the longing for a “small-town code of ethics.”

  Postville opens playfully, if simplistically, with shots of Jewish people praying and Mexican people eating tacos. In doing so, it establishes the rudimentary understanding of cultural difference that dominates Postville residents. On the soundtrack, a rendition of “America the Beautiful” is played in the styles of stereotypically Jewish and then Mexican music. The narrator adopts a slightly ironic and playful tone, describing Iowa as “all but removed from melting pot America.” Less concerned with telling the story of Mexican migrants, the film relies primarily on the voices of locals to expose their fear, bigotry, and hypocrisy.

  The narrative about Jewish migrants, which emphasizes their economic value to the small town and their insulated lifestyle, illuminates religious and class-based tensions, while the narrative about Mexican migrants, whom the new Jewish residents hired, centers on policing and the fear of crime “because the Mexicans hang around in groups.” Despite the migrants’ close-knit families and membership in the local Catholic church, the locals fixate on skin color and non-European heritage. As the narrator states, it “became clear that even Jesus Christ couldn’t unite the locals and the Mexicans.”

  Postville ultimately understands immigration and the meeting of cultures as a “struggle” while also advancing the idea that immigrant labor has saved this and other towns across the nation. The documentary also renders Mexicans simultaneously mysterious and bland; without an on-camera spokesperson, they exist solely in clips that tie them to religion, work, food, and the townspeople’s fear of crime (see Figure 2).
  

  “Maybe more of them are better than the gringos”: Resettling the West: Mexicans in Wyoming (2001)

  Concerned with the integration of Mexican immigrants in several regions of Wyoming, Resettling the West, from Wyoming PBS, constructs its narrative through personal stories and broader context from both sides of the border. The film begins with a Mexican cumbia on the soundtrack and a montage of Mexicans living and working in Wyoming. We see them working construction, housekeeping in a hotel, driving, playing soccer, making tortillas, broadcasting, performing roadwork, cleaning a pool, doing laundry, and performing folkloric dances. Despite the strange comment at the outset that Native Americans “shake their heads” and say, “now it’s happening to you,” implying that white people are now suffering the same intrusion that Native Americans did, the film works throughout to explain the systemic problems that have met Mexican immigrants as they settled and established homes. In this way, the documentary echoes Hispanic Presence in Oregon; it is a primer on the positive contributions of Mexican immigrants and the challenges they have faced. It also acknowledges that Mexicans have lived in some parts of Wyoming, like Torrington, “for more than one hundred years.”

  The latter half of the documentary, which focuses on Jackson, explores migration from Tlaxcala in central Mexico. Through interviews with family members in Tlaxcala and Jackson, the film situates Mexican migrants as people with roots rather than just as recent arrivals. Indeed, the inclusion of a visit by a Tlaxcalan priest to Jackson nods to the connections forged between US and Mexican cities because of migration flows.²⁵ The problems and institutional responses in these Wyoming communities revolve around access to health care, benefits for agricultural workers, public education, domestic violence, literacy, and deportation. Familiar sights and sounds emerge: migrant workers—“good, conscientious, reliable employees”—are credited with filling sizable gaps in the labor market, as is the case with a hospital in Jackson; the Catholic church advocates for the welfare of the migrant community; and doubts are raised about the local population’s ability to handle the influx of immigrants. As the documentary notes, more pressing than the migrants’ trouble with English “may be that Wyoming residents lack the skills to relate to people who are different.”

  The conclusion repeats the refrain of the documentaries mentioned previously: the US is the “land of hope.” The Mexican cumbia that closes out the program is notable because it amplifies an internal conflict that the Mexican interview subjects express about their identities. The lyrics are translated as “From here, I’ll never go, I’ll never leave this place.” The program presents the situation as more complex than that, however. The subjects of the documentary represent a spectrum of regional, national, and cultural identities regardless of their legal designations as Mexicans or newly naturalized Americans. Their sentiments indicate different levels of attachment to the US. The documentary’s discussion of whether immigrants will stay considers economics and factors such as changing immigration law and the citizenship of children. A scene in San Simeón, Tlaxcala, shows the construction underway that is funded by the Tlaxcalans living and working in Wyoming (see Figure 3). If they are building, they will likely return. Significantly, this documentary, unlike the others, shows a fluid situation that hinges on personal and governmental decisions.
  
  

  Reflections on Immigration Narratives after 9/11

  La familia

  Una Vida Mejor, Postville, and Resettling the West preceded the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; they were contextualized by the restrictive immigration policies of the 1990s but free of the fallout from the War on Terror. These pre-9/11 texts raise two primary sets of questions for us. The first pertains to one major feature of the documentaries: the family unit. The freedom of movement suggested by the “Mexicans in” documentaries—an exaggerated freedom, to be sure—contracted after 9/11. In the last decade, parents' inability to return to their places of origin has increased family resettlement, leading children to travel north—often unaccompanied—to reunite with them. Although the four texts we analyzed devoted more time to adults than children, the theme of children’s education and acculturation appeared consistently in the latter three. The documentaries generally situated the family as a wholesome and legitimating unit, particularly when contrasted with the earlier arrival of single men. Located within a distinct set of immigration policies, the programs trumpeted the resilience of family, community institutions, and hard work. The family separation policies of the late 2010s, which ultimately saw migrant children from multiple countries held in cages at the border, demonstrate the instability of previous narratives in the face of political transformations.

  If the Bracero era documentaries first showed children in dirty and cramped California labor camps and the “Mexicans in” documentaries showed them in schools in small western and midwestern towns, how does contemporary local television grapple with these latest developments? Has the legitimating image of the Mexican nuclear family shifted as children have become a more prominent part of migration narratives in the twenty-first century? And how has the expansion of Spanish-language broadcasting treated these narratives? 

  Homeland Security

  Our second set of questions centers on a topic the documentaries avoid: perilous journeys across the border. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 (HSA) further militarized and hardened the border. Predictably, crossing the border became more expensive to migrants, offering criminal organizations a boost in their income and increasing violence along the border, especially on the Mexican side. HSA marked an escalation of the pattern of criminalization and repression against people coming from Mexico. How has local television portrayed the militarization of the border and increase in violence? How have immigration narratives on local television changed with the War on Terror and the expansion and entrenchment of drug wars? How have these narratives interacted with the growing political polarization since the 2010s?

  Assessing the Archive

  Having located these documentaries within the history of Mexican migration to the United States, we wish to weigh their strengths and weaknesses as primary sources. The documentaries provide evidence of real people reacting to immigration trends. They highlight threats to immigrants, such as nativist attitudes, aggressive policing, and deficient educational services. Further, the documentaries’ focus on the mobilization of individuals and community institutions to educate and organize immigrants underscores power in small numbers. However, the programs’ attention to local attitudes, problems, and solutions understandably results in a view of immigration tilted toward the personal rather than the systemic. Issues like violence at the border, restricted movement, and federal targeting of immigrants do not figure into how these documentaries portray demographic change at a local level. The vastness of immigration is beyond the scope of any of these documentaries, to be sure, but they remain invaluable snapshots of interrelated nation-building processes, such as evolving notions of race, class, gender, and citizenship.

  In this time of border walls and resurgent, vocal nativism, this sample of documentaries can help students understand how xenophobic attitudes have shaped other generations and how local media can respond when a community is going through a transitional period. The most important strength we see is the archive itself. Taken individually, each documentary offers a record of Mexicans at various stages of immigration history. Taken together, the group of texts offers evidence of change and continuity. The six programs discussed in this paper demonstrate a shift in attention from labor rights to culture clash and individual achievement. The four “Mexicans in” programs show patterns of immigration and local responses, even though each represents a particular community’s personality and perspective. Significantly, responses are not limited to interview subjects and townspeople; the documentaries themselves adopt perspectives perceptible in their narrative strategies. Furthermore, when contrasted with contemporaneous immigration narratives in national media, these local artifacts can steer researchers and students to divergent interpretations of immigrants and immigration trends. And if the documentaries allow immigrants to speak, they can steer researchers and students to immigrants’ interpretations of their own experiences before the country turns another page in its border policy.
  
  A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.²⁶
  
  Rodolfo Fernández is a historian and Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut’s El Instituto (Institute for the Study of Latino/a, Caribbean and Latin American Studies). His research interests include the history of Mexican capitalisms and the US-Mexico borderlands. He is currently working on a book manuscript that analyzes the converging histories of Mexican urban-industrial capitalism and the breakdown of politics during the Mexican Revolution. His recent publication, “Desastre, crisis política, y capitalismo: la inundación de Monterrey de 1909 y los orígenes de la revolución maderista,” appears in México Revolucionario: La crisis del orden porfiriano y el ascenso maderista, a volume on the origins of the Mexican Revolution.
  
  Deborah L. Jaramillo is associate professor of Film and Television Studies at Boston University. Her research areas include contemporary cable television and early broadcast television. She has written about the televised representation and coverage of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Ethnic and Racial Studies and Television History, The Peabody Archive, and Cultural Memory (University of Georgia Press 2019). Together with Dr. Rodolfo Fernández, she has also co-authored an article on farm radio and the U.S.-Mexico border in Journal of Radio & Audio Media. Dr. Jaramillo’s first book, Ugly War Pretty Package: How CNN and Fox News made the Invasion of Iraq High Concept (Indiana University Press 2009), analyzes how cable news covered the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Her second book, The Television Code: Regulating the Screen to Safeguard the Industry (University of Texas Press 2018), analyzes the U.S. television industry’s attempts to censor its programs in the early 1950s.
  
  Title Image: Una Vida Mejor (Arkansas Educational TV Network 1997)
  
  Mexicans in Your Town: Histories of Mexican Migration to the United States in Local Television Documentaries © 2025 by Rodolfo Fernández and Deborah L. Jaramillo is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  
  The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.