The Bracero Program: Hands That Built the Valley

In the summer of nineteen forty-two, the United States and Mexico signed an agreement that would reshape the lower Rio Grande Valley more quietly and more durably than any legislation or development project of the era. The Bracero Program, as it became known, was a guest-worker arrangement designed to address wartime agricultural labor shortages. American farms needed hands. Mexico had men who needed work. The program formalized a movement of people that had already been happening informally for decades.

Between nineteen forty-two and nineteen sixty-four, when the program formally ended, approximately four and a half million Mexican workers came to the United States under its terms. They were promised a minimum wage of thirty cents an hour, adequate food, shelter, and sanitation. What they received varied enormously by employer and region.

Mexico actually banned Texas from the Bracero Program for several years during the mid-nineteen forties. The Mexican government documented cases of discrimination and violence against Mexican workers in Texas, including lynchings along the border, and refused to send more workers to a state that would not protect them. Governor Coke Stevenson lobbied repeatedly to have the ban lifted. It took years.

The workers who came, and who stayed, built the agricultural economy that the Valley ran on for generations. Many braceros brought their families to communities near the border after the program ended and the Hart-Celler Act of nineteen sixty-five imposed the first Western Hemisphere visa caps, fundamentally changing the legal landscape. Some scholars connect the family settlements that followed to the growth of the colonias. The men who came to pick crops planted roots. Their children and grandchildren make up much of the Valley's population today.