The Bracero Program: Hired by Treaty, Forgotten by Design

Between nineteen forty-two and nineteen sixty-four, the United States government and the government of Mexico jointly administered a labor program that issued approximately four point six million individual contracts to Mexican men, authorizing them to work in American agriculture. The program was called the Emergency Farm Labor Program. It is known to history as the Bracero Program, from the Spanish word for a man who works with his arms. The Central Valley received a disproportionate share of those workers. They picked cotton, cut grapes, harvested tomatoes and lettuce and asparagus on the same fields you are passing through right now.

The contracts guaranteed a minimum wage of thirty cents an hour. The Bracero History Archive, which holds oral histories collected from Bracero workers and their families, documents that the guaranteed minimum was frequently withheld, reduced on pretextual grounds, or simply not paid. Workers were housed in labor camps on employer property. They were prohibited from organizing. They were subject to deportation at any time, which meant the legal standing of a worker with a grievance was effectively zero. The program that began as wartime necessity was renewed nineteen times after the Second World War ended, because agricultural employers in California and Texas found the structure of it useful: a workforce admitted by the United States government under bilateral treaty, with no legal standing to negotiate and no recourse if the conditions were lethal.

The program also included a mandatory savings component. Ten percent of each worker's wages was deposited into a Mexican savings account that workers were supposed to collect on return. A class action lawsuit filed in two thousand one documented that many of those deposits were never disbursed. What the lawsuit ultimately recovered, if anything, has not been fully established in the sources available to this production.

When the program ended in nineteen sixty-four, the Delano Grape Strike began almost immediately, in part because Filipino and Mexican workers who had been deliberately kept separate by the program's structure began organizing together. The Bracero Program is a foundational fact of the valley you are driving through. There is no major public monument to the men it employed in any county of the San Joaquin Valley. How the public history of this valley has chosen to represent its own labor force is, itself, a document.