The Bracero Program: The Valley That Grew on Contract Labor

Two numbers define what happened to this valley over twenty-two years. In nineteen forty-two, Monterey County's total agricultural production was valued at seventeen million dollars. When the same program ended on December thirty-first, nineteen sixty-four, that figure had reached one hundred fifty-two million dollars. Nine times the output in two decades. The fields you are looking at built that.

The Bracero Program, which brought Mexican agricultural workers to the United States under government contract from nineteen forty-two through nineteen sixty-four, was not conceived as a humanitarian program. It was conceived as a labor supply solution. The Japanese American farmworkers who had been working the Salinas Valley were interned in April of nineteen forty-two, removed from the fields under armed escort to the Salinas Rodeo Grounds and then to camps further inland. The Bracero Program was authorized in August of the same year, partly to replace the workers who had just been taken.

The contracts guaranteed Mexican workers wages, housing, and food. The wages were meager; housing and food were deducted from them. Workers had no right to strike, no path to permanent residence, and no legal recourse against unsafe conditions. Four and a half million contracts were signed nationally over the twenty-two years of the program's operation.

The contract structure deserves attention. A Bracero worker arrived under an agreement between two governments: the United States and Mexico. The contract specified minimum wages, adequate housing, and protection from discrimination. In practice, enforcement was weak. Food and housing costs were deducted from wages, sometimes leaving workers with little net pay after a week's work. Workers who complained about conditions could be terminated and returned to Mexico. There was no independent labor organization to advocate for them, because the contracts specifically excluded the right to strike.

What the Bracero Program built, over twenty-two years, was an agricultural industry scaled to cheap, controllable labor. When the program ended in December nineteen sixty-four, Cesar Chavez was eight months away from co-founding the National Farm Workers Association in Delano. The workers who had been picking grapes and lettuce without the legal right to organize for twenty-two years were about to be organized by a man who had grown up in the same system.

The valley grew nine times over. The people who grew it remained, for most of that period, outside the law's protection. The harvest was not distributed equally.