front cover of Dangerous Migration
Dangerous Migration
Mexican Labor and the Fight for Immigrant Rights
Eladio B. Bobadilla
University of Illinois Press, 2026
In the post-WWII 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 that formed around the issue of undocumented workers. Bobadilla reveals how internationalist and human rights discourse influenced the rise of the Chicano movement and its defense of Mexican undocumented immigrants. As time passed, anti-Mexican social, political, and legislative forces produced a nativist backlash that put immigration at the center of the United States’ culture wars and created the fantasy of undocumented workers as an existential threat.

Engaging and vivid, Dangerous Migration illuminates the history of debates over Mexican labor, the emergence of the immigrant rights activism, and the nativist movements that united Latinos with right-wing white Americans.
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front cover of Of Forests and Fields
Of Forests and Fields
Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest
Mario Jimenez Sifuentez
Rutgers University Press, 2016
2016 Choice Oustanding Academic Title

Just looking at the Pacific Northwest’s many verdant forests and fields, it may be hard to imagine the intense work it took to transform the region into the agricultural powerhouse it is today. Much of this labor was provided by Mexican guest workers, Tejano migrants, and undocumented immigrants, who converged on the region beginning in the mid-1940s. Of Forests and Fields tells the story of these workers, who toiled in the fields, canneries, packing sheds, and forests, turning the Pacific Northwest into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country. 
 
Employing an innovative approach that traces the intersections between Chicana/o labor and environmental history, Mario Sifuentez shows how ethnic Mexican workers responded to white communities that only welcomed them when they were economically useful, then quickly shunned them. He vividly renders the feelings of isolation and desperation that led to the formation of ethnic Mexican labor organizations like the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos Noroeste (PCUN) farm workers union, which fought back against discrimination and exploitation. Of Forests and Fields not only extends the scope of Mexican labor history beyond the Southwest, it offers valuable historical precedents for understanding the struggles of immigrant and migrant laborers in our own era.  
 
Sifuentez supplements his extensive archival research with a unique set of first-hand interviews, offering new perspectives on events covered in the printed historical record. A descendent of ethnic Mexican immigrant laborers in Oregon, Sifuentez also poignantly demonstrates the links between the personal and political, as his research leads him to amazing discoveries about his own family history...
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