Dangerous Migration: Mexican Labor and the Fight for Immigrant Rights

In the post-World War II years, many Mexican Americans viewed undocumented immigration as a threat to their communities. Yet the interplay among Mexican migrants, Mexican Americans, and white Americans eventually produced a vibrant immigrant-oriented activist movement inspired by larger struggles for civil and human rights. Beginning with Mexican American opposition to the Bracero Program, Eladio Bobadilla traces the movement’s fault lines around undocumented workers, the influence of internationalist and human-rights discourse on the Chicano movement, and the nativist backlash that placed immigration at the center of U.S. culture wars.