A clip from the 1959 documentary "Factory Farms" describing unfair labor practices for braceros in the US. Runtime: 6:15
The bracero program was an agreement between the governments of the United States and Mexico designed to fill agriculture and railroad maintenance labor shortage in the US created by the Great Depression and World War II. The program, which saw approximately 4.6 million Mexican laborers, or braceros, admitted to the US on a temporary basis, ran from 1942-1964.
According to the Bracero History Project (https://braceroarchive.org/), "the Bracero Program was controversial in its time. Mexican nationals, desperate for work, were willing to take arduous jobs at wages scorned by most Americans. 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 1940s and mid 1950s, 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."
The bracero program had long-ranging effects on US immigration policy, race relations, and wage growth, and the conditions endured by braceros gave rise to many labor organization efforts. As the program ended, many labor unions emerged including the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), which merged in 1966 to become the United Farm Workers (UFW).
Migrant Daughter by
Taking us from the open spaces of rural New Mexico and the fields of California's Great Central Valley to the intellectual milieu of student life in Berkeley during the 1950s, this memoir, based on an oral history by Mario T. Garcia, is the powerful and moving testimonio of a young Mexican American woman's struggle to rise out of poverty.
Braceros by
At the beginning of World War II, the United States and Mexico launched the bracero program, a series of labor agreements that brought Mexican men to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural fields. In "Braceros", historian Deborah Cohen asks why these migrants provoked so much concern and anxiety in the United States and what the Mexican government expected to gain in participating in the program. Cohen creatively links the often unconnected themes of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, and gendered class and race formation to show why those with connections beyond the nation have historically provoked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory political policies.
Labor's Outcasts by
In the mid-twentieth century, corporations consolidated control over agriculture on the backs of Mexican migrant laborers through a guestworker system called the Bracero Program. The National Agricultural Workers Union (NAWU) attempted to organize these workers but met with utter indifference from the AFL-CIO. Andrew J. Hazelton examines the NAWU's opposition to the Bracero Program against the backdrop of Mexican migration and the transformation of North American agriculture. His analysis details growers' abuse of the program to undercut organizing efforts, the NAWU's subsequent mobilization of reformers concerned by those abuses, and grower opposition to any restrictions on worker control. Though the union's organizing efforts failed, it nonetheless created effective strategies for pressuring growers and defending workers' rights. These strategies contributed to the abandonment of the Bracero Program in 1964 and set the stage for victories by the United Farm Workers and other movements in the years to come.
Grounds for Dreaming by
Known as "The Salad Bowl of the World," California's Salinas Valley became an agricultural empire due to the toil of diverse farmworkers, including Latinos. A sweeping critical history of how Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants organized for their rights in the decades leading up to the seminal strikes led by Cesar Chavez, this important work also looks closely at how different groups of Mexicans--U.S. born, bracero, and undocumented--confronted and interacted with one another during this period. An incisive study of labor, migration, race, gender, citizenship, and class, Lori Flores's first book offers crucial insights for today's ever-growing U.S. Latino demographic, the farmworker rights movement, and future immigration policy.
The invisible workers of the U.S.-Mexico Bracero program by
As the first and largest guestworker program, the U.S.-Mexico Bracero Program (1942-1964) codified the unequal relations of labor migration between the two nations. This book interrogates the articulations of race and class in the making of the Bracero Program by introducing new syntheses of sociological theories and methods to center the experiences and recollections of former Braceros and their families.
