Bracero exhibit at Smithsonian unearths history

Congress will tackle immigration reform when it gets back to work in January. The bill could include a guest worker program to provide American agriculture with a steady supply of farm workers.

Congressional members may want to drop by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History to learn about the largest guest worker program in US history: the Bracero program.

The word Bracero refers to someone who works with their arms.

But in 1942, it also meant someone who lent their arms to the war effort. During World War II, the US agriculture lobby worried crops would rot in the fields for lack of workers.

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Steve Velasquez of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History says the US Labor Department looked south for help.

"You know, Mexico at the time was in an economic downturn," he says. "And so this provided opportunities for them to earn real hard money. And on the US side, it offered an opportunity for US labor to get short term, cheap, effective labor, especially during the war years."

Velasquez is Associate Curator for a new Smithsonian exhibit: “Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program 1942-1964.” It’s built around the museum’s 17 hundred black and white images of Braceros by California photographer Leonard Nadel.

Velasquez says to get Braceros, farmers had to show they needed workers. But the workers themselves also had to demonstrate they were farm laborers by showing their calloused hands.

Saturnino Gonzalez Diaz was a city boy who desperately wanted to become a Bracero.

"My hands were smooth since I didn’t do farm work or any of that," Gonzalez Diaz says. "My friends gave me a corncob, a shaft of corn. You would work with it in your hands for two or three days, rubbing it between your hands so the cob would roughen up the skin of your hand. It hurts, but like I said, we were capable of doing anything."

Velasquez says most Braceros came for the money. But some people actually left for the adventure of it and some left to start new lives.

Some even found romance.

A woman by the name of Antonia was working in Corona in a lemon packing plant. She met a Bracero named Jesus Duran. He was bringing in the shipment of lemons for that day. The two fell in love.

But Antonia was Mexican-American and her father didn’t trust the Bracero from Mexico who had eyes for his daughter.

Antonia says her father thought he was married over there in Mexico "and he had a family and he was going to make a fool out of me and all that stuff. But I had already investigated. I wrote to the church and I told them to check on this person because I wanted to make sure he didn’t have a family over there. But I couldn’t convince my father that I had done that."

Antonia and Jesus Duran eventually married, moved to Los Angeles and opened a restaurant. They recently retired.

But not all the Bracero stories were happy ones. Almost from the beginning, there were problems with the program.

Workers were supposed to be paid the prevailing wage, but Velasquez says that didn’t always happen. Housing could be awful. There were a lot of reports of people being housed in chicken coops or in tents in the middle of the desert.

And there was the human cost back in Mexico. Families were left behind. Communities were cleared of men for months at a time.

And there was money that never arrived.

When the Braceros were getting paid, 10 percent of their pay was to be withheld. "Sort of like a Social Security equivalent," says Velasquez. They were supposed to get that money back when they returned to Mexico.

"But it turns out most of the Braceros – mainly the ones after ‘48 – didn’t get the money back."

A class action lawsuit filed on behalf of the Braceros was settled last year. The Mexican government agreed to give each one – or a surviving heir – 35 hundred dollars in back pay.

The Braceros are getting older now and the Smithsonian wants to collect their stories. More than a thousand interviews have been collected in an online archive.

Next summer, the exhibition “Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program 1942–1964” goes on display at Cal State Channel Islands in Camarillo.