The Bracero Savings That Disappeared

Between nineteen forty-two and nineteen sixty-four, the Bracero Program moved more than four million Mexican contract workers through American agriculture. The ranching economy of West Texas was among the industries that relied on them, with bracero workers maintaining irrigation, managing livestock, and working the land that would eventually become Big Bend Ranch State Park.

The program came with a guarantee, at least on paper. Ten percent of each worker's wages was to be withheld and deposited into a binational savings fund, administered jointly by the United States Farm Security Administration and the Mexican Banco Nacional de Credito Agricola. The money was presented to the workers as a form of forced savings, accumulating during their time in the United States and available to them when they returned to Mexico.

When the Bracero Program ended in nineteen sixty-four, the fund was not distributed. Mexican government investigations in the nineteen nineties and two thousands found that much of the money had been absorbed into general government accounts, commingled with other funds, or simply could not be traced through the administrative record. Estimates of the total value withheld from workers and never returned run into the tens of millions of dollars.

Class action lawsuits brought by Bracero workers and their descendants in American and Mexican courts were largely unsuccessful in recovering the funds. The men who planted, weeded, and harvested this corner of Texas under a federal program that explicitly promised them a savings account at the end of their work did not receive that savings account. The West Texas landscape that became public parkland was partly built by their labor. The wages owed for that labor remain, for most of them, unrecovered.