The Bracero Road: Who Works These Fields

The fields you are looking at right now, flat to the horizon in every direction, have been farmed continuously for over a century. They have never been farmed by people who owned them. In nineteen forty-two, the United States and Mexican governments established the Bracero Program, a temporary guest-worker arrangement that brought Mexican men to California under contracts that gave them no permanent rights in the country where they worked, no path to residence, and no recourse if their employers violated the contract's terms.

The program ran for twenty-two years. The research behind this program indicates that more than four million bracero contracts were issued over the program's lifetime, though that figure has not been independently verified against two primary sources in the materials available for this production, so hear it as a working estimate. The California fields you are passing were farmed primarily by this workforce throughout the nineteen forties, fifties, and into the early sixties.

The program ended in nineteen sixty-four, under pressure from labor organizers. The most significant of those organizers was Cesar Chavez, who grew up in a family of agricultural workers in this valley and who spent years recruiting from the same population of Mexican farmworkers that the bracero program had brought and then abandoned. The United Farm Workers union, which Chavez and Dolores Huerta built, drew its membership from this community.

The labor model has continued in other forms after the bracero program's end. The workforce has continued to be predominantly Mexican and Central American, predominantly undocumented, predominantly without the legal standing that would allow them to enforce the basic rights that American labor law nominally provides. The fields are as flat and productive as they appear.

The people who make them productive are as invisible from Interstate Five as they have always been from the records of the economy they sustain.