Creating foreign policy locally: Migratory labor and the Texas border, 1943--1952

Texas participated in the bracero program until 1943, when the Mexican government instituted a labor embargo against the state because of numerous reports of racial discrimination there. For the next several years, Texas officials worked to convince Mexican leaders to rescind the embargo through a wide variety of policies including investigating cases of discrimination, reforming aspects of the state education system, negotiating directly with Mexican officials, enlisting the cooperation of the U.S. federal government, and working to improve the image of Texas among the Mexican public. Texas created new government bureaucracies to coordinate these efforts, including the Inter-Agency Committee, the Council on Human Relations, and most importantly, the Good Neighbor Commission. Collectively, these efforts represent a striking effort by Texas leaders and private citizens to influence the foreign policy between their state, and sometimes their individual community, and the Mexican government. Despite these efforts, the embargo dragged on for years.;This dissertation argues that the slow resolution of the labor embargo was due less to the intransigence of the Mexican government than to the inability of Texas leaders to effect the kinds of changes within Texas society, such as passing legislation to punish acts of discrimination, which would have convinced the Mexican government that their embargo was no longer necessary. First, the existence of the Jim Crow system in Texas was a constant brake on the nature of programs that could be considered by Texas. Texans were also quite conservative. Their view of government's appropriate role in society left them with the feeling that educating, investigating, and persuading marked the extent of their reach.;Other key lessons to be drawn from this study include the intractable nature of illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexican border. This study also reveals something about how the Truman administration approached foreign relations with those nations on the periphery of the Cold War struggle. Truman hoped to protect vulnerable groups of laborers, both U.S. and Mexican. His approach to the issue revealed the part of himself that supported the Fair Deal, rather than the part that enunciated the Truman Doctrine.