The Bracero Program: Guest Workers in Hill Country Fields

Between nineteen forty-two and nineteen sixty-four, the United States and Mexico operated a bilateral guest-worker program called the Bracero Program. It brought approximately four and a half million Mexican men to the United States to work in American agriculture. Many of them came to Texas, including to the peach orchards, pecan groves, and truck farms of the Hill Country around Fredericksburg and the surrounding counties.

The arrangement was structured to maximize agricultural labor supply and minimize workers' rights. Braceros were recruited through official Mexican government agencies, transported to specific work sites, and housed in employer-controlled camps. They were bound by contract to specific employers. They had no legal right to change employers if conditions were unsafe, wages were withheld, or housing was substandard. They could be deported at the discretion of their employer.

A significant portion of the wages they earned were withheld by the Mexican government and by a United States bank, ostensibly held in a savings fund to be returned to the workers when they went home. For many workers, that money was never returned. The savings fund was poorly administered. Lawsuits filed by former Braceros decades later were largely unsuccessful.

The oral histories preserved in the Bracero History Archive, a collaboration between George Mason University and the Smithsonian Institution, document both the economic desperation that drove men north and what they encountered when they arrived. Many describe the work as brutal and the pay as less than promised. Some describe kindness from individual employers. Almost none describe the legal protections that American agricultural workers nominally had.

The Hill Country economy that produced the wines and peaches and stone fruits that now draw tourists depended on this labor. That history is not marked in Fredericksburg's town square.