Bring back braceros? ‘Those people will be treated like slaves’

On a May morning in 1961, 21-year-old Manuel Alvarado tied up his clothes, packed three changes of clothes and a thin blanket into a nylon bag, and said goodbye to his family. He was leaving his La Cañada ranch in Zacatecas. el Norte.

The United States had been kind and cruel to his farming family. His uncles had regaled him with stories about how the easy money available to legal seasonal workers (known as braceros) had allowed them to purchase land and livestock back home.

But his father was one of more than a million Mexican men deported in 1955. Operation WetbackThe Eisenhower administration’s policy of mass removals and taking back Americans’ jobs in the name of national security.

“They sent my father to the border with only the clothes on his back,” Alvarado, now 85, told me in Spanish as we sat on a comfortable couch in his daughter’s well-kept home in Anaheim.

His father’s mistreatment did not scare Alvarado at the time. He took a train to Chihuahua with his uncles and cousins; where a Mexican medic checked everyone’s hands in the recruiting office to make sure they were calloused enough for the tough job ahead. The Alvarados then moved to a processing center near El Paso. There, American health inspectors often forced those who wanted to wear braces to strip naked before subjecting them to blood tests, X-rays, rectal exams, and a final dusting of their bodies and clothing with DDT.

Then came an overnight bus ride to their final destination: tiny Swink, Colo., where Japanese American farmers had previously employed Alvarado’s wealthier uncles and this time wrote a letter of recommendation to ease the transition. Alvarado remained there until November before returning home. For the next three summers she worked as a corsetter.

“There are no regrets,” Alvarado said of those years.

He was dressed in standard Mexican grandpa attire: long flannel shirt, blue hat, jeans, and sneakers, along with a dark mustache and a leather cell phone case hanging from his belt. When it was time to take his portrait, there was a beautiful Stetson nearby. Photos of his grandchildren, a Mickey Mouse statue in a skeleton costume and a glass cabinet filled with souvenir glasses adorn the living room.

“We were very poor on the farm,” Alvarado said, describing how, as a child, he had to collect and sell firewood to help his family. “If it hadn’t rained, there would have been no harvest and pure misery. The Bracero Program has helped a lot of people.”

Alvarado is a family friend. My father’s grandfather knew José Arellano; He grew up a farmhouse away and in the 1950s was an apprentice in the orange groves of Anaheim, across the street from the elementary school my sister and I would later attend. My Pepe was one of the estimated 2 million Mexican men who benefited from a program that fundamentally changed the economy of both their home country and their adopted country.

When I asked my father, Alvarado, and my uncles about what Pepe was going through, and they admitted they didn’t know anything, he suggested I talk to him. I wanted to hear Alvarado’s insights, especially at a time when farmers are begging Donald Trump to stop the tsunami of deportations because crops are rotting in the fields; This is something the president has acknowledged is a problem.

“We can’t have our farmers without anybody,” Trump told CNBC in August, adding in the same interview that he wanted to find a way to allow farm workers to work legally because “those people naturally do it,” while “the people who live downtown don’t do it.”

That’s why Texas Rep. Monica De La Cruz introduced the Bracero 2.0 Act this summer, arguing that the original program, which ended in 1964 after complaints from civil rights activists that it exploited immigrant workers, “created new opportunities for millions and provided critical support for Texas agriculture.”

When I mentioned a possible revival to Alvarado, he sat up and nodded.

“If this happens, these people will be treated as slaves,” replied the former Bracero. “Just like what happened to us.”

Photo of Mexican workers in the Bracero program working in pepper fields in Fresno County in October 1963.

(Bill Murphy/Los Angeles Times)

Even though Alvarado is just two months away from turning 86, he remembers those Bracero days as if they were last week. What he pays: 45 cents an hour to harvest onions and melons in Colorado. The following year, 50 cents for every can of tomatoes in Stockton. Cotton costs $2.25 a pound in Dell City, Texas, where the farmer’s son bikes wildly into the fields to shout that John F. Kennedy has been assassinated. The farmer then gathered everyone around his truck to hear the tragedy on the radio.

Fourteen hours a day, seven days a week was normal. Saturday evenings were spent traveling to the nearest town to buy supplies and get a few hours of entertainment (cinema, dancing, drinking). Sometimes farmers gave free food to Braceros, which was required under the agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments. Most of the time they didn’t.

“You couldn’t even stand upright at night anymore,” Alvarado said with a start, recalling this memory. His uncles scolded him — “They used to tell me, ‘Now you know what happened.’ El Norte So you know how to make money. Learn to love it.’”

But not everything went so bad.

At Swink, Japanese American patrons gave Alvarado and his relatives a private cottage, but bathrooms were limited to tapping irrigation canals or boiling water for themselves.”take stilo rancho.” The Hiraki family talked about Mexican workers being imprisoned by the US government during World War II to show that racism could be overcome. In Texas, a white foreman stopped Alvarado and his group from picking cotton fields just before a plane coated the crop with DDT.

“The Americans were very kind,” Alvarado continued. This included the Border Patrol. “They would come up to us in the field. ‘Good morning everyone. Please let us see your papers.’ “They were always very respectful.”

My father scoffed. “No, I don’t believe that.”

Alvarado smiled at my father. “SiLorenzo. Not like today.

“I didn’t like the Mexican bosses in California,” he continued. Them They were the ones who treated us like slaves. They were always shouting — ‘¡Doblense [Get to it]wetbacks!’ – and then they used even worse words.”

Over the years, it has become harder to obtain paperwork that will work legally in the United States. Because La Cañada was so small, the Mexican government allowed only three of its residents to become brackets each year through a lottery. Japanese Americans in Colorado never sponsored Alvarado again after he rejected an offer to join the military. He won the lottery in 1962, then bought someone else’s number two years later.

In 1965, La Cañada’s men awaited the annual arrival of Mexican government officials to dedicate Bracero nests. But no one came.

Alvarado laughed. “That’s when people started coming El Norte another way.”

A monument dedicated to braces in downtown Los Angeles.

(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

So he did; A few years later, he entered the country illegally to work in Pasadena restaurants, then moved to Anaheim to work at a large restaurant. Jerezano diaspora His wife and eight children eventually followed him. They became citizens after the 1986 amnesty, and Alvarado often told his family about his past; “so they know how people come here to sacrifice so their children can study and prepare for better things.”

All of their children bought houses with their blue-collar income. His grandchildren received college degrees; Two of them served in the military.

I asked him today if the guest worker program could be successful.

“That wouldn’t be good and it doesn’t make any sense,” Alvarado said. “Why don’t we let the people here stay? They’re already working. It’s terrible to deport them. Then replace them with others? The people who will come will have no rights other than to come and be expelled at the will of the government.”

In the 2000s, Braceros filed a class-action lawsuit after discovering that the United States was withholding 10% of their earnings each year and giving the money to Mexico. The Mexican government agreed to pay up to $3,800 to each surviving supporter living in the United States, but Alvarado never applied.

“People are either ignorant about these issues or too busy to deal with them,” he said. “Besides, I found my good life my own way. But it reminded me that you had no opportunities other than the compassion the farmers showed you when you signed that contract.”

Can Trump find American-born workers to do farm work? Alvarado’s face contorted.

“They don’t hire people from here. They don’t want that. I’ve never seen white people working with us Mexicans. White people have a different mentality, different expectations. They think differently than the Rancho.”

“They want easy jobs,” my father joked.

“No, Lorenzo. They don’t want to suffer.”

Alvarado’s soft voice became even more delicate. “They shouldn’t.”