Puny amounts and rhetorical dedication: for a critical reading of the numbers around the farm worker conflict in Mexico

Abstract

The existence of this article is inspired by a famous aphorism of the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881): «There are three types of lies: the ordinary lies, the perjuries and statistics». This is intended to build a critical perspective about a so-called «quantitative reason» that would seek to realize the bracero movement in Mexico as objective result of the Bracero Program, through its history, emergence and development. The critical effort presented here consists of a series of reflections on the production and the institutional, political and scientific use of multiple statistical data from mainly Mexican and American authorities (numbers of contracts, estimates on the number of braceros, estimates on savings made throughout the program, social supports, beneficiaries thereof, among others), which, however, do not cease to give rise to problems of interpretation and several polemics. Historians in the United States, above all, and in Mexico, to a lesser extent, were the first to have addressed this challenge. Sociologists come later and focus on the labor movement that is an expression of the bracero issue linked to the fraudulent management of the Fund of peasant savings of the Bracero Program. In this sense, this article seeks to throw light on one aspect of the history of the braceros and make a critical contribution to question the epistemic pertinence of the discursive use of official figures («sacred») or parallel («pagan»).