There is a reliable ritual in U.S.-Mexico relations. Mexico demonstrates its commitment—cracking down on migrants, extraditing traffickers, deploying soldiers to its own borders—and Washington responds by demanding more.
Last month, Mexican forces killed Jalisco New Generation cartel boss Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” with U.S. intelligence support. Subsequently, the Trump administration announced a continental anti-cartel coalition and did not invite Mexico. As ever, Trump declared the cartels are running the country.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, for her part, continued to insist on one word: “collaboration.” She is precise about what it means. Operations in Mexico, she says, are carried out by Mexican forces. So, while intelligence flows both ways, sovereignty, on paper, remains intact. Unfortunately for Sheinbaum, the line she is drawing—collaboration yes, unilateral American action no—has never held when Washington decided it needed to cross it.
What Mexico learned across those two decades—that leverage exists inside subordination, but only when exercised quietly and without illusion—is the same reckoning Sheinbaum faces today.
One instinct, whenever U.S.-Mexico relations deteriorate, is to reach for the mid-century as a model. Especially compared to the present, it can seem a bilateral golden age of managed migration and mutual respect. To the unversed, the Bracero Program (1942–1964) seems like proof of concept: a negotiated treaty, providing labor for the U.S. and wages and protections for Mexican workers. A win-win.
That reading, however, understates how deeply the arrangement chafed against Mexican interests from the start. Mexican officials saw the Bracero Program as promising but perilous—a migration they could theoretically shape but never fully control, a relationship they hoped would prove reciprocal but feared would prove extractive. What they found, over the program’s two decades of operation, was that Washington’s version of collaboration was closer to vassalage. Discourse aside, the hegemon’s handcuffs were always there. They just took time to feel.
While the Bracero Program was no bilateral success story, Mexico was not simply a victim of it either. It negotiated, maneuvered, occasionally defied, and sometimes turned a relationship it could not escape to its advantage. It also capitulated when Washington made clear that defiance had limits. What Mexico learned across those two decades—that leverage exists inside subordination, but only when exercised quietly and without illusion—is the same reckoning Sheinbaum faces today. Understanding how that worked, and where it broke down, sheds light on what latitude Mexico has when Washington turns hostile.
A Future without Mass Emigration?
The Mexican government was not a naive exporter of people. It entered the Bracero Program with specific demands, chief among them the ability to protect migrant workers from abuse abroad. Yet it would find itself perpetually beholden to U.S. consent to do so. Under the established system, if a grower abused a bracero: compelled him to work past agreed-upon hours, offered him dog chow as food, or housed him in a squalid shack, Mexico had to submit a complaint to a joint U.S.-Mexico commission. If the American side disagreed, the grower kept receiving workers. Mexico technically supervised the program. But without the power to act unilaterally, it supervised little.
Mexico’s pursuit of unilateral blacklisting authority would increasingly define the relationship. Its fate in 1954 tells us everything we need to know about the meaning of “collaboration.” By late 1953, negotiations on reextending the Bracero Program had collapsed. Mexico wanted the right to bar abusive employers without proving wrongdoing through joint deliberations first. The U.S. Department of Labor’s response was essentially condescending: once Mexican laborers crossed the border, Mexico had “limited say” over them and whom they worked for.
President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, politically vulnerable and dogged by accusations of past collaboration with U.S. forces during the 1914 Veracruz invasion, saw the impasse as potentially advantageous: a chance to stoke nationalist sentiment. He chose not to renew the Bracero Program when it expired on January 15, 1954. In the weeks that followed, he launched a nationalist initiative called “The Braceros of Mexico for the Fields of Mexico,” deployed troops along a thirty-eight-kilometer stretch of the border at Mexicali, and instructed officials up and down the country to make patriotic appeals to would-be migrants: staying in Mexico was an act of loyalty, leaving was an act of abandonment.
Beyond these measures, his administration explored long-term countermigratory policies. His advisers drafted legislation to establish a new federal agency devoted exclusively to eliminating Mexicans’ underlying need to emigrate, supporting state-sponsored agrarian colonies to absorb displaced workers, and augmenting credits to communal landholdings to tie peasants to the soil. A small contingent of migrants was relocated to settlements in southern Baja California. Mexico was, however fitfully, exploring what a future without mass emigration might look like.
The U.S. Backlash
The U.S. response was swift and structural. The Department of Labor—consulting with the Department of Justice—decided it would recruit Mexican workers without Mexico’s consent. The lettuce crop in the Imperial Valley of southern California was rapidly rotting, and the U.S. was not disposed to indulge Mexico’s assertiveness. Able-bodied Mexican males were declared welcome to enter the United States; customary border inspections were waived; the border became, by American decree, porous. The message Washington sent, stripped of diplomatic dressing, was unambiguous. Mexican workers belonged to the U.S. labor market, and Mexico’s objections were an inconvenience, not a veto. The decision graced the front pages of Mexican newspapers. Articles expressed alarm at the open-border policy and openly wondered whether Mexico might be demographically disemboweled, as untold numbers answered the U.S.’s siren call.
The migrants, exercising their own mobile power, finished the job. By January 27, with fourteen thousand people at the Mexicali gate and troops overwhelmed by a series of clashes, Ruiz Cortines ordered his forces to stop regulating emigration. By February 6, an estimated ten thousand had crossed. On February 11, the Bracero Program was reestablished on American terms. Mexico did not get unilateral blacklisting. The final agreement confirmed Mexico as a mere conduit. Ruiz Cortines backed away from sharp criticism of U.S. policy for the remainder of his presidency. U.S. Ambassador Francis White reported to President Eisenhower that Mexico had abandoned its hardball tactics.
This is what agency looked like inside the handcuffs. Not sovereignty, but maneuver.
The lesson was clear. Washington perceived itself as the master of mobility. When Mexico threatened to usurp that role, the U.S. simply opened the shared border and absorbed Mexican labor, rendering Mexican sovereignty negligible.
Defeat, however, did not mean passivity. Mexico was adaptive. In 1955, quietly and without fanfare, the Mexican government engineered an internal Bracero Program — a scheme as shrewd as it was cynical. Aspiring migrants were offered a prize: priority placement on the waiting list for a coveted U.S. guest-worker contract, in exchange for first picking cotton for growers in the northern Mexican states of Sonora, Baja California, and Tamaulipas. The American border became bait; the bracero contract, dangled like a reward, solved Mexico’s own domestic labor shortage. For nearly a decade, Mexico quietly parasitized American demand for labor to subsidize its own cotton industry, beneath Washington’s radar.
This is what agency looked like inside the handcuffs. Not sovereignty, but maneuver. Mexico could not stop the flow, but it could redirect and exploit it for its own purposes. The migrants, of course, paid the price—squeezed first on the Mexican side of the border, then handed off to be squeezed on the American one. Mexico wielded its latitude against the very people it claimed to protect during the U.S.-Mexican confrontation of 1954.
A Familiar Pattern
Fast-forward seventy years and the hierarchical structure of U.S.-Mexican relations endures, albeit updated with new actors. Since January 2025, Mexico has deployed ten thousand National Guard troops to its borders, extradited ninety-three high-ranking cartel figures, and accepted thousands of non-Mexican deportees it had no legal obligation to take. Migrant encounters at the U.S. border have dropped ninety-three percent from their 2023 peak, partly on the strength of Mexican enforcement. Mexico has become, functionally, the United States’ southern enforcement arm. Again, the collaboration is not between equals, but more akin to that of an architect and a contractor.
And when Mexico tried to draw a line—Sheinbaum’s “proud” refusal to allow U.S. troops on Mexican soil—Washington’s response echoed 1954. Not open borders this time, but a parallel move: Trump declared the cartels are “running Mexico,” building the discursive case for eventual unilateral action regardless of Mexican consent. The message is the same one the Department of Labor delivered to Mexico City seventy years ago. The border does not apply to U.S. power. It can surge past it when it sees fit.
It is not just on issues related to migration that the U.S. jettisons any pretense of cooperation. When Washington threatened tariffs on any country supplying Cuba with oil, Mexico faced a stark choice. Pemex had been sustaining the island’s power grid, shipping nearly 20,000 barrels a day. It was framed by Sheinbaum as humanitarian aid and a sovereign decision. Under U.S. pressure, the shipments stopped. Mexico was reduced to sending two ships of food and medicine. The substance yielded, though the rhetoric of solidarity and defiance held. The handcuffs, again, were there, even as Mexico wriggled within them.
Learning from the Past
What the historical record suggests is that Mexico’s leverage is real but narrow, and most effective when exercised quietly rather than in open confrontation.
The lesson from the mid-century is not that collaboration between the US and Mexico is impossible. It’s that the word has rarely meant what Mexican officials have needed it to mean. Mexico has always had room to maneuver. Ruiz Cortines used the 1954 standoff to build domestic political capital before capitulating. The internal Bracero Program extracted a decade’s worth of domestic labor from migrants who thought they were on their way north. Sheinbaum has used the El Mencho operation to assert a sovereignty claim—operations by Mexican forces only—that may or may not survive sustained US pressure.
What the historical record suggests is that Mexico’s leverage is real but narrow, and most effective when exercised quietly rather than in open confrontation. The 1954 episode showed that defiance invites the U.S. to go around Mexico entirely, eliminating even the limited agency that exists inside the relationship. Sheinbaum appears to understand this. Her insistence on sovereignty is calibrated, not theatrical. She pushes back on U.S. troops on Mexican soil while quietly delivering cartel bosses, deportee flights, and ninety-three-percent border reductions.
Whether the subject is migration, security, or trade, the architecture of the relationship remains unchanged. Mexico has latitude to maneuver. But the handcuffs stay on. Mexican officials, with no illusion of escape, work within those constraints, reaching for what they can. They have learned, across generations, to call that collaboration.
Irvin Ibarguen is an assistant professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Caught in the Current: Mexico’s Struggle to Regulate Emigration, 1940-1980 (UNC Press, 2025).