Why braceros

Farm workers already living in the United States worried that braceros would compete for jobs and lower wages. In theory, the Bracero Program had safeguards to protect both Mexican and domestic workers for example, guaranteed payment of at least the prevailing area wage received by native workers; employment for three-fourths of the contract period; adequate, sanitary, and free housing; decent meals at reasonable prices; occupational insurance at employer's expense; and free transportation back to Mexico at the end of the contract.

Employers were supposed to hire braceros only in areas of certified domestic labor shortage, and were not to use them as strikebreakers. In practice, they ignored many of these rules and Mexican and native workers suffered while growers benefited from plentiful, cheap, labor. Between the s and mid s, farm wages dropped sharply as a percentage of manufacturing wages, a result in part of the use of braceros and undocumented laborers who lacked full rights in American society.

She received her bachelor's degree from Georgetown University and her doctorate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation examined the responses of U. Catholics to the eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Her research interests include the study of race and gender in the history of religion and the history of science.

He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard and his master's and doctoral degrees from Oxford, where his doctoral thesis examined the public role of science history and science museums in the inter-war period. Scheinfeldt has lectured and written extensively on the history of popular science, the history of museums, history and new media, and the changing role of history in society, and has worked on traditional exhibitions and digital projects at the Colorado Historical Society, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, the National Museum of American History, and the Library of Congress.

He completed a teaching field in Latin American and Chicano History, and thus has interests both in digital humanities and in preserving the bracero experience. He teaches classes in American history and Latin American history, as well as seminars in imperialism and revolutionary movements. James has received a number of research grants, including a Gilder Lehrman Fellowship in American History.

She directs and conducts the oral history collection, field interview strategies, post-interview processing methods and preservation techniques consistent with the professional principles, standards, and guidelines of the field. And so appealed to Steve and said, you know, do you have anybody at Brown that actually writes about Latino history?

And because I had Steve put us in touch, so Peter shows up in Providence. Her name is Mirella Losa. And that was the first meeting where we sat with Peter and he showed us the photos. Lindsey: These were at border crossings where individuals were coming into the country specifically for this?

Matt: Yeah. He wanted to ask historians. And we said, well, if you look at the dates for the Bracero program, these men are in their seventies, eighties, and some may even be in their nineties. Matt: The one that we immediately encountered in Coachella, southern California. But what was interesting, one of the things that we uncovered and since the diversity of the Braceros we met indigenous Braceros who are Mixtec Indians coming in from Oaxaca, had actually a kind of a nominal grasp of Spanish and English and more proficient in their native language.

And they experienced discrimination from their fellow Braceros who were, they were Mestizos. But, quickly it was, it was revealed to us that indigenous Mexican people were sort of absent in the history and the memory of the Bracero program. And here they were telling their stories of discrimination before they even crossed the border. And then once they cross the border they talked about the special skills that they had.

This one guy who was a, what they call a Palmetto, he walked on the tree tops of Palms picking dates. Very, very dangerous work. But, but he talked very wistfully about his adventures.

Like a lot of the Braceros, despite the popular perception of it being exploitative, the new knowledge of experiencing discrimination as Indian in this mostly Mestizo program. They also talked about the adventure of they, they loved being in the United States. They loved being honored and appreciated for the work that they could give. And so there was a mix of both sorrow but also pride in the things that they achieved. How did the, I mean, this was an agreement between the U. Matt: Well, so Mexico stood to benefit from this in a couple of ways.

They encouraged people to come to these receiving stations in urban Mexico. And then they were put on trains up to northwest Mexico and then bused up to the border. But they encouraged an abundance of workers to come to these places. So this was a way of getting people off the land, out of those communities and into a system that would sort of channel that revolutionary spirit out, literally out of the country.

The other ways in which they spun it was that they would go to the presumptively modernized America and learn the latest technologies and modern agriculture. And then because they were temporary, they come back to Mexico and bring all of that know-how back to Mexico and help Mexico modernize its agriculture. Little did they respect or know that they were just going to be exploited as field laborers.

They were going to be given implements like the short handed hoe that forced them to bend over and really destroy their backs that later was outlawed as part of the United Farm Workers push for justice in the fields. Lindsey: To ensure that the laborers would come back to Mexico, some of their wage was withheld in the United States.

Is that correct? And then the Mexican government was supposed to pay the workers? Matt: Yes. Wells Fargo was one. And this became a huge scandal and the origins of the modern Bracero justice movement.

So there were mass rebellions and demonstrations. Years later after the Bracero program had finished we actually started collecting amidst that social justice movement.

I remember going to San Bernadino and one of the primary leaders of an organization called Bracero pro a, his name is Ventura Gutierrez who helped facilitate some of our interviews. And ultimately it forced the state to acknowledge, the Mexican state to acknowledge that they did abscond the money. Those that were living who could prove that they had served in the program.

Matt: Totally, totally. It was sometime after we started collecting and some accepted because of the, their age, they were very old. They might as well take something.

Some took it because they were dubious of the government ever improving on their offer, but many actually resisted. You know, the other thing that I found so fascinating, so initially, right, Roosevelt talked about, you know, the, the Mexican labor coming to United States as kind of part of the war effort, right? Like an act of support for the United States. And really speaking in such positive terms about this labor force, really what he was talking about was ultimately a very, you know, in , a really small part of the program overall because it was tens of thousands of workers, but then became hundreds of thousands of workers after the war.

And then there was this Operation Wetback I suppose, which was this, you know, also agreement between the U. Instead of providing jobs for ex-Braceros, maquiladoras drew even more Mexicans toward the US border. In the US, the availability of Braceros encouraged labor-intensive agriculture to expand in the western states far from US consumers who were demanding more fruits and vegetables amidst a baby boom and an interstate highway system that facilitated the long-distance trucking of produce.

California displaced New Jersey as the US garden state. Farmers who had been accustomed to Braceros accelerated efforts to mechanize hand tasks. In some commodities and areas, personnel managers developed smaller and more professional crews of farm workers who had higher earnings and were employed longer, as with the Coastal Growers Association in Ventura county.

However, the networks created by two decades of legal and unauthorized Mexico-US migration were well positioned to fuel more migration in the s, as US farm wages rose and the Mexican peso was devalued. Under the Bracero programs, between 1.

In the s, these green-card commuters who maintained homes in Mexico and worked seasonally in the US were well positioned to recruit friends and relatives to fill US farm jobs. Some 65 years later, the Bracero program remains controversial.

There are over 20, scholarly books and articles that examine how the Bracero program operated and its effects. Most emphasize the gaps between program promises and realities that allowed US employers to take advantage of Mexican Braceros.

Many proposals for new farm guest worker programs in the s and s began with the announcement that a particular proposal was not a new Bracero program. Economic studies of Bracero program effects often reflect author beliefs about the effects of low-skilled migration generally. Most s and s studies concluded that Braceros depressed the wages of US farm workers, and these conclusions helped to persuade Congress to end the program.

More recent studies conclude that ending the Bracero program did more to accelerate labor-saving mechanization than to draw US workers into the fields, which could happen again if the unauthorized workers who are up to half of US farm workers in are removed and not replaced by legal guest workers. Assembly Legislative Reference Service. Mexican national labor in California agriculture. House Committee on Agriculture.

Mexican Farm Labor Program. Subcommittee on Equipment, Supplies, and Manpower. Eighty-eighth Congress, first session, on H. March 27, 28, and 29, Senate Committee on Education and Labor. Violations of free speech and rights of labor. Seventy-fourth Congress, second session pursuant to S. Part III. Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. Report Vialet, Joyce. Temporary worker programs, background and issues :a report.

Congressional Research Service. Prepared for the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.