What these two primary sources reveal about the Braceros system is this: the system was one that was not designed to benefit the Mexican worker, even though that’s how it was marketed to people like Juan Loza. Loza claims that he was convinced to become a Bracero by his godfather, who had been one himself, and that he was under the impression that he would be able to make enough money to support his family back home. Instead he found himself subject to a system that took advantage of it’s labor force, often being made to work “24 hours a day, 7 days a week” for less than a dollar (Loza).

Similarly, this system also used the United States legal system against the Braceros. In a chapter from Mae Ngai’s book Impossible Subjects the author discusses a man named Clemente Martinez. Martinez, an American citizen of Mexican descent, was born in the U.S. and lived there until he was roughly 10 years old, when his family moved back to Mexico. During World War Two he lied about his citizenship status to avoid being drafted. Instead he worked as a part of the Bracero system. However, later, in the 1950s, he was deported to Mexico, despite his status as an American citizen. According to Ngai,  “a federal court rejected Martinez’s claim that he could not be deported” regardless of his claim of American citizenship (Ngai). The courts used his participation in the Bracero system against him, showing how little the legal system cared about the workers that were being exploited.

Pablo Navarro-Rivera, “The Imperial Enterprise and Educational Policies in Colonial Puerto Rico,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, accessed February 10, 2020, https://laus2020.voices.wooster.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/260/2020/01/Navarro-Rivera-The-Imperial-Enterprise-and-Educational-Politices-in-Coloinal-PR-from-The-Colonial-Crucible-163-174.pdf.

Author Pablo Navarro-Rivera writes about the educational policies in the United States territory of Puerto Rico and how those policies were designed to benefit the imperialist desires of the US. In order to make this argument he uses evidence such as the Foraker Act (passed in 1900) to demonstrate the United States’ desire to assimilate and “civilize” the people of their new territory. This article is useful because it helps build the idea of the lack of respect that the United States held towards indigenous culture and how willing the white man was to crush different cultures in order to benefit himself. This is an idea that is applicable to all United States territories, as well as those territories belong to the other European world powers during the age of imperialism.

Stuart McCook, “‘The World Was My Garden’ Tropical Botany and Cosmopolitanism in American Science, 1898-1935,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, accessed February 10, 2020, https://laus2020.voices.wooster.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/260/2020/01/McCook-The-World-Was-My-Garden-Tropical-Botany-and-Cosmopolitanism-in-American-Science-from-The-Colonial-Crucible-499-507.pdf.

History Professor Stuart McCook examines the rise of United States study of tropical plants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He argues that this sudden increase in interest in tropical botany is based on the fact that the United States suddenly acquired a lot of overseas territory around this time.  McCook discusses the effects of this new interest in tropical botany on the sudden availability of economic plants from the tropics, as well as the transplanting of those plants to the United States for agricultural purposes. This article is useful in the study of US and Latin American relations because it highlights a way in which the US tried to take advantage of the territories they gained possession of, and allows for a further in depth exploration of the exploitation and destruction of tropical natural resources than might be found in other texts.

John M. Thurston’s speech, titled “We Must Act!” is a heart-wrenching cry for humanitarianism. Calling upon the spirit of his dead wife, who, one can only assume, died after interacting with the conditions of the internment camps in Cuba, Thurston pleads for the US to interfere in the Spanish-Cuban War. This document is interesting because, whereas others calling for action in Cuba inevitably make some mention of the economic gain that the US would benefit from, Thurston seems intent upon only relying on the narrative of human suffering that he has crafted. I say crafted – recounted, is perhaps a better word. He talks of men, women, and children who “stand silent, famishing with hunger… [who’s] only appeal comes from their sad eyes, through which one looks as through an open window into their agonizing souls”(Hoganson 64). Thurston’s call to action plays upon human morality in order to help those oppressed under Spanish rule.

However, Thurston’s argument in and of itself is not unique. Although he has the added advantage of being able to invoke his dead wife as a reminder of just how bad conditions in Cuba are, he is hardly the first white man to advocate for US interference in a “lesser” or “underdeveloped” country. The idea of humanitarians as a force to a) build a United States Empire and b) save “heathens” from their Godless ways is one that is explored at length, both in documents in this section and documents in other sections of Kristin L. Hoganson’s  book, American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.

Although they lived nearly 100 years apart from each other, José Enrique Rodó and Simón Bolívar had similar ideas about the threat that the United States posed to Latin America. The two men agree on the idea that “the United States… [is] destined by province to plague America with miseries in the name of Freedom,” and that the slightest provocation will unleash the United States’ power (Bolívar 2).  Both writers seem very thouroughly convicned that the United States is almost like a ticking time bomb, just waiting to explode on the peoples and countries of Latin America.

However, the differences in the two men’s ideas comes from their difference in positions. Bolívar is a government official in Venezuela; Rodó is a poet from Uruguay. Because of this Bolívar makes an argument about how to protect his country from a “general conspiracy [of] envy”(Bolívar 2). The idea of envy implies that Bolívar ruled a rich land, one that was incredibly desireable to other countries, one that others would want to take over for selfish reasons. Rodó, on the other hand, talks about how the threat of the United States against Latin America is fueled by fear of “an America de-Latinized of it’s own will, without threat of conquest, and reconstituted in the image and likeness of the North”(Rodó 32). In this, they show the differences of their times; Bolívar existed when the threat of the United States was only that – a threat. In contrast, Rodó grew up during the era of United States Imperialism, and had to deal with all it’s consequences.

The main argument of Frederick Pike’s article “Wild People in Wild Lands” is that the use of stereotypes, whether by the opressed or the opressor, leads to a cycle of demonization that becomes normalized in society. Using this idea, Josiah Strong’s piece, “The Anglo-Saxon and the World’s Future” can be seen in a different light. Although the colonial themes of the piece are evident right off the bat, the stereotype of the “nobelest races [the Germans and the Anglo-Saxons, specifically the English, the British Colonists, and the people of the United States]… always [being] lovers of liberty.” Analyzing it through Pike’s idea of stereotypes allows for a fresch glance at old ideas; specifically, the idea of “civilzation” versus “primitiveness” that pervades the history of colonization.

Although the articles at first seem unlinked beyond the idea of sterotypes – Pike’s is about Latin America and Strong’s is about the Anglo-Saxons – they are really just approaching the same problem from different viewpoints, from different times. Pike writes about the issues of stereotyping Latin American peoples after the fact, as someone who sees this practice as wrong. Strong, on the other hand, is writing in the moment, as someone who has fallen prey to these ideas of stereotyping that have put the white man above the Latinx.