Bracero Workers and the Invisible Road Crew

The federal highway that Route Sixty-Six tourists drove, the graded shoulders, the patched asphalt, the maintained culverts and bridges, required constant labor to remain drivable. That labor came from somewhere. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, a significant portion of it came from men recruited under the Bracero Program.

The Bracero Program ran from nineteen forty-two to nineteen sixty-four. It was a federal agreement between the United States and Mexican governments that brought approximately four and a half million Mexican workers to the United States under agricultural and infrastructure labor contracts. Workers in the Southwest, including New Mexico and Arizona, maintained railroad lines and highway infrastructure along and adjacent to the Route Sixty-Six corridor. The conditions they worked under were documented by labor inspectors as frequently substandard. The wages were below prevailing rates. Housing was often labor camp barracks. The contracts were drafted in favor of the contractors.

There was also a savings provision. The Mexican government held ten percent of bracero wages in an escrow account, to be returned to workers when they left the program. The Bracero Program ended in nineteen sixty-four. Most workers never received those savings. Historians working from Mexican government records and University of New Mexico Press scholarship have documented that an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars in bracero savings were never distributed; the precise total remains a contested figure, not a settled one.

The Route Sixty-Six tourism narrative, the Dust Bowl family driving west, the postwar family on vacation, the nostalgia economy of the preservation era, does not name the men who maintained the road they drove. The labor history of this corridor is almost entirely invisible in the attraction guides.

Their names are not in any roadside exhibit here.