Event Description
Join us to celebrate the opening of the exhibition The Braceros and the Rubber Soldiers: A History of Labor and Power in the Americas with a panel discussion and documentary screening followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker.
Braceros and the Rubber Soldiers is an exhibition of historical photographs that juxtaposes the histories of two of the most important joint governmental programs between the U.S., Brazil, and Mexico during the Second World War. The WWII Emergency Farm Labor Program, popularly known as the Bracero Program, operated between 1942 and 1964, bringing Mexican guest workers to the U.S., who were then assigned as agricultural laborers. Concurrently in South America, in 1943, the Special Service Mobilizing Workers to the Amazon (SEMTA) enlisted a cheap labor force from the impoverished Brazilian Northeast region, transforming them into “rubber soldiers.” These individuals journeyed north to extract latex from seringueira trees in the Amazon rainforest, contributing significantly to the production of rubber exported to the Allies during the war. The exhibition, comprising 15 pairs of historical images, provides a visual narrative depicting daily life within recruitment centers and lodging facilities in Mexico, the U.S., and Brazil. The show uses the lens of the built environment to untangle complex themes such as race and racialization and its connections to labor and migration patterns, and the power and influence of international politics in the construct of modern — and contemporary — planning in Latin America.
Exhibition curated by Laura Belik, doctoral candidate in architecture.
Speakers
Ignacio Ornelas Rodriguez is a historian who conducts research on civil rights, social justice movements, and electoral politics. He is a lecturer at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford (CCSRE). He previously worked in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford conducting research and led projects procuring archival research collections surrounding literature, ethnic history, civil rights history, and social justice history. At Stanford, he founded the Bracero Legacy Project, a public history and educational outreach venture that incorporates archival material from the Ernesto Galarza Collection and oral history interviews Ornelas Rodriguez conducted with former braceros. On September 14, 2013, Ornelas Rodriguez was recognized by the California Assembly for his work as an organizer of the Bracero Memorial Highway Project.
Wolney Oliveira is a Brazilian filmmaker from Ceará. He currently serves as the director of Casa Amarela Eusélio Oliveira at the Federal University of Ceará, Brazil, and holds the position of executive director at the Cine Ceará Ibero-American Film Festival. Oliveira earned a degree in cinema from the International School of Film and Television in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba. Oliveira has directed nine short films and six feature-length films, receiving recognition at various film festivals in Brazil, Italy, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay, Portugal and Spain. Notable accolades include include Best Short Film at the 30th International Documentary Film Festival in Bilbao, Spain, for The Martian Invader (1988); Best Documentary award at the 33rd International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana for the feature-length documentary The Last Cangaceiros(2011); and more than 15 awards for his latest feature film, Rubber Soldiers, which premiered at the It’s All True Documentary Film Festival in São Paulo in 2019.
Lorena Oropeza is a professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, who arrived on campus two years ago to co-lead the Latinx and Democracy cluster hire of seven professors charged with invigorating Latinx research across campus. Trained in the history of American foreign relations, she has been on the Chicano movement channel for nearly 30 years looking at social protest through the dual lens of race and empire. Her first book, ¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No! Chicano Protest And Patriotism During The Viet Nam War Era (2005), focuses on the Chicano Movement’s protest to the Vietnam War. Her second book, The King Of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of The Chicano Movement (2019), is an award-winning biography of a Chicano Movement leader who rose to fame by decrying the legacy of the U.S. takeover of northern Mexico in 1848. She is currently working on A Mexican History of the United States for Beacon Press. It is aimed at sharing the sweep of Chicanx history to a non-academic audience, including the contours of the Bracero Program and ongoing immigration debates.
Cosponsors
Presented by the Department of Architecture, and cosponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Joan E. Draper Architectural History Research Endowment, the Chicanx Latinx Studies Program, the Global Metropolitan Studies, Center for Race and Gender, Latin American Cities Working Group, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Department of Ethnic Studies, and the Latinx Research Center.
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