Lastly, however, in the book’s epilogue, Cohen concludes that the racial discrimination that braceros faced is still alive in 21st century nativism, yet the evidence she presents differs circumstantially from the braceros’ economic needs in the 20th century. Although many Latinos who arrive in this country still face hate speech from Anglo-Americans, Cohen’s opening example in her epilogue depicts their settlement throughout urban areas far from the sweaty fields of southern California. When she opens the chapter with the spiteful commentary of white southern woman Mary Barder, who stated that Central American immigrant men did not deserve shelter in a Washington D.C. suburb because they “‘just want[ed] to gather to hang out,’” and hadn’t learned “‘to speak…show more content… civilization narrative that Cohen developed regarding bracero interactions with growers, the immigrants in this specific example might not have been able to work on farms in the suburbs. Later on, Cohen’s indirectly-worded attempt to compare the economic dimensions of 21st-century immigration with those of former braceros suing the government for financial abuses, claiming that “local communities debat[ing] the merits of building a labor center for people accused of being lawbreakers, despite a tacit understanding that the center, by helping immigrants find work, would put them further outside the law” is rambling and fails to link historical precedent to the current economic landscape for Latino immigrant communities around the country. I don’t think that this wrap-up chapter fulfills a role of relevant summarization when Cohen tries to compare bracero work with current opportunities because the unofficial housekeeping positions that undocumented immigrants tend to fill today are distinct from the legalized agricultural jobs in rural settings that Mexican immigrants performed earlier in the last
