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This chapter examines the bracero tragedy of 1963 in the Salinas Valley, the communities involved in and affected by it, and its impact on the Bracero Program and California's Chicano Movement. The tragedy happened on September 17, 1963, when a bus carrying the bracero crew that lived at the Earl Meyers Company labor camp in Salinas collided with a Southern Pacific Railroad freight train in the town of Chualar. Twenty-three died instantly. After the accident, urban and agricultural Mexican American leaders came together to protest the Bracero Program's exploitation and safety hazards. The protests led Congress to discontinue the Bracero Program in 1964. This chapter also considers the trial of bus driver Francisco (Pancho) Espinosa before concluding with an assessment of the implications of the Chualar tragedy for California's embryonic Chicano civil rights movement.

This chapter argues that the Bracero Program, begun as an international agreement between the US and Mexico to fill agricultural labor shortages during World War II, served as a way for agricultural interests in the rest of the nation to recreate the labor supply conditions enjoyed by the growers of South Texas. As a result, the Bracero Program mobilized large numbers of foreign workers, stripped of their basic rights of choice and mobility, for use all over the country. The Bracero Program ended in 1964, but its importance and effects have lasted much longer. This chapter also deals with the overwhelming importance of Texas as both a model and an obstacle to the smooth running of the system throughout its existence. From its inauguration in 1942 as a temporary wartime emergency measure until its quiet demise in 1964, the Bracero Program took the spirit of the deeply unequal labor relations of South Texas and spread them to the rest of the nation as a supposedly rational, necessary response to the exigencies of the agricultural labor market.

This chapter explores Mexico's evolution into the world's premier emigrant-sending nation through an analysis of state migration policies, especially the Bracero Program (1942–64). The bilateral accord sent more than two million men to labor in American agriculture as seasonal migrants. At the time, it generated widespread opposition in both the United States and Mexico. The chapter illustrates why the Mexican government promoted migration to the United States as a means of achieving human and material progress at home. Focusing on the state of Jalisco, it explains how a guest worker program that undermined conditions for farmworkers in the United States produced beneficial returns for Mexican sending communities, where the Bracero Program fostered a culture of migration that persists to this day.

This chapter examines the conflict between Mexican Americans and a white mainstream that denied them equal treatment, and between Mexican Americans and braceros in a militarized, masculinized agricultural context, in the Salinas Valley during the World War II years (1941–1947). It considers the ways that Latinos negotiated their relationships with other racial groups—and with each other—during wartime as well as the impact of the Bracero Program on the region's labor and power landscapes and race relations. It also explains why the activism of Mexican Americans living in agricultural California appeared weaker, or progressed at a slower pace, than that of urban Mexican Americans. It argues that the intraethnic conflict between four groups of Mexican-origin men—military servicemen, braceros, U.S.-born farmworkers, and “zoot suiters”—created tension in the larger Latino community which, along with the Bracero Program, slowed the evolution of a postwar Latino civil rights movement in the Salinas Valley.

This chapter examines the attitudes of Mexican Americans toward braceros and “wetbacks” in the Salinas Valley during the period 1947–1960, with particular emphasis on how the tension between them hindered the formation of a larger transnational Mexican-origin community in the region. It considers the concerns of some Mexican American middle-class civil rights leaders about the threat posed by undocumented immigrants on their economic stability and social respectability. It also discusses two particular flashpoints that brought the intraethnic conflict between Mexican Americans, braceros, and undocumented migrants into greater relief: the Immigration and Naturalization Service's “Operation Wetback” of 1954 and the peak of the Bracero Program in 1956. The chapter shows that the Mexican American agricultural working class felt betrayed by the state for creating a Bracero Program and immigration system that served at the pleasure of agribusiness instead of protecting them as worker-citizens.

This book investigates the history of the Salinas Valley to show how agriculture-centered environments and economies affected the politicization of U.S.-born and immigrant Mexicans in twentieth-century California. Located in Monterey County on California's central coast, the Salinas Valley occupied a central place in debates over agribusiness, labor, and immigration policy during the 1960s. Today, the valley's multibillion-dollar agricultural industry, and U.S. agriculture more generally, remains heavily dependent on Latino (mostly Mexican immigrant) labor. This book argues that the Salinas Valley, as an agricultural empire, was a microcosm of key transitions and moments in America's labor, immigration, and Latino history. It examines how Mexican Americans navigated their social place and political identity in an increasingly corporatized agricultural setting, especially in the face of a large influx of Mexican guestworkers brought by the government-sponsored Bracero Program (1942–1964). It also considers how people “became Mexican American” and articulated that identity in agricultural settings, as well as how these Mexican Americans then became Chicanos. Finally, it traces the Chicano Movement's evolution in California.

Chapter 4 supplies a history of the Bracero Program and its implementation by the INS. Upon its inception in 1942, the United States and Mexico described the program in highly aspirational terms as an expression of the Good Neighbor policy. Yet it presented federal agencies such as the INS with the complex realities of implementing a binational agricultural employment program that led to the hiring of 4.5 million guest workers over the course of twenty-two years. Faced with an enduring shortage of money, manpower, and materiel to implement the Bracero Program, the INS in the 1940s was in a state of disarray. Local agency officials found themselves buffeted by competing pressures to carry out the agricultural employment, as well as immigration, duties surrounding the Bracero Program, and to simultaneously open the line to bracero workers and close it to undocumented immigrants.

This chapter focuses on a local Community Service Organization (CSO) in the Salinas Valley and how it operated in the agriculture-centered environment of the region in the years 1953–1963. It first provides an overview of the beginnings of the CSO chapter in Monterey County, founded by Fred Ross as a platform for Mexican Americans to prove their good citizenship while asserting their right to equal treatment. It then considers the CSO's membership, goals, and trajectory as well as its impact on California's Mexican-origin population and members' attitudes toward braceros and the Bracero Program. It also highlights the CSO's successes and failures, with particular emphasis on its inability to create interracial alliances, involve the larger Mexican-origin community in specific protests, maintain stable leadership, and risk its cultivated image of respectability.

This chapter renders the U.S. and Mexican governments’ investment in using competing conceptualizations of race and racial difference to recruit Mexican immigrant men of varying class backgrounds into the Bracero Program throughout the Mexican countryside. In anticipation of advancing the economic imperatives of local municipal Mexican governments, the Mexican and U.S. governments collaborated with each other to contract braceros who already had or could lend fellow Mexican immigrant men the financial resources to journey and labor in the United States without adequate wages or protections. Using the oral life histories of bracero families, this historical consideration of the influence of race captures the intensity of these families’ disenfranchisement at the hands of these governments and fellow Mexican immigrant men.

Reviewing the history of immigration from Mexico to the United States, this chapter reveals that immigrants are lured by compelling economic opportunities and higher wages in the United States, and that no means of border enforcement ever undertaken will deter immigrants driven to improve their own lives and especially their families’ futures. Debunking myths of welfare-seeking and criminal undocumented immigrants, this chapter describes the virtue of immigrants, undocumented and documented, who have supplied vital labor in U.S. industries for decades. These labor entries include the wartime Bracero Program, and continue in the era of ramped-up U.S.-Mexico border enforcement that imperils the lives of undocumented border crossers.

Using the oral life histories of former repatriates and braceros, this chapter contextualizes the enduring resonance of the trauma of repatriation from the United States to Mexico on Mexican families’ response to the Bracero Program—throughout the program's duration and across the Mexican countryside. By magnifying the successive toll of repatriation and the program on Mexican families as a permanent state of emergency, it elucidates bracero families’ willingness to learn from their shared sense of the past, present, and future together. This chapter's emphasis on the devastating and energizing potential of already being familiar with the hardships that ensue when the U.S. and Mexican governments fail to protect them as families inspired them to act in support of each other.

Steeped in the oral life histories of Mexican women who shouldered the emotional, physical, and financial accountability of raising families separated from their bracero husbands across the U.S.-Mexico border, this chapter illuminates the spaces, conversations, and inroads these women shared to forge awake houses. These houses, over time, provided these women with the solace, inspiration, moral support, and information to persevere in their pursuit of developing productive outlooks, lines of communication with their families, and goals toward facing a most traumatic family situation together. This distinct brand of solidarity increasingly drew young single women to act as the most dedicated and trustworthy of allies for women married to braceros and other Mexican immigrant men.

Chapter 6 is a history of Operation Wetback, a massive deportation drive conducted by the federal government in 1954. While it is remembered as an apex in the history of the INS, a sign of the agency’s strength, and a moment in which it had achieved control over the US–Mexico border, this chapter argues that the campaign bore the hallmarks of a decades-long struggle by the INS to define a strong immigration law enforcement policy. Facing an ongoing shortage of money, manpower, and material, the new INS Commissioner, General Joseph Swing, devised a border enforcement strategy that drew upon old legal innovations devised by local agency officials in the Southwest. Moreover, Swing’s plan ultimately regulated, rather than closed, the line. It specifically opened the border to guest workers through a revamped Bracero Program, and closed it to undocumented immigrants by means of removal operations such as Operation Wetback.

This chapter examines the farmworker movement in the Salinas Valley after the termination of the Bracero Program. It first considers the rise of Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC) and the lawsuits filed by Salinas farmworkers with the help of the California Rural Legal Assistance. It then explores how the continued importation of braceros in what was supposed to be a post-bracero era affected Salinas's farmworkers, the majority of whom were Mexican Americans. It also discusses the legal actions and victories of Salinas farmworkers against growers who sought to continue importing braceros and prevent their employees from joining the UFWOC. These legal actions and victories, the chapter argues, were evidence of the farmworker movement's revival in the Salinas Valley.

This chapter uses bracero family oral life histories and photographs to historicize the urgency with which Mexican women and men documented their romantic love for each other as a way of not becoming completely lost to each other across the U.S.-Mexico border. These women's and men's commitment to each other and the longevity of their romantic relationships motivated them to be cautious in their love for each other, so that they reassured each other of their feelings for each other without jeopardizing their Bracero Program contract or public reputation. Their refusal to draw unwanted attention to their love made being in love and documenting their love a most demanding undertaking and feeling.

This chapter examines the return-migration and labor-market trajectories of ex-braceros who relocated to Tijuana after the termination of the Bracero Program in 1964. Rather than return to their places of origin or remain in the United States, as others did throughout Mexico, the ex-braceros in this study settled in Tijuana because the economy of the borderlands provided them with economic opportunities that were not constrained to one side of the border. It finds that some ex-braceros found their niche in the expanding urban labor market of Tijuana in construction, small business, and transportation. Another group became border commuters and continued to cross the border daily to work in US farms. The chapter shows that each group of ex-braceros had distinct economic and noneconomic reasons for choosing their occupational careers either in Mexico or the United States as the borderlands provided each group with different opportunities for their livelihoods.

This chapter examines the impact of Mexican migration to the United States during the era of the Bracero Program (1942–64). It addresses the question of why migration to border towns increased during the 1940s in spite of U.S. immigration restrictions. Existing oral histories collected by the Bracero History Archive of migrant and local Baja families enriched the author's understanding of the ways in which families migrated and looked for work and performed gender roles in Mexico and in the United States. The memories of braceros provided a window into the daily lives and struggles experienced by millions of Mexican workers who migrated to the United States, stories often suppressed in official records.

Using the correspondence of U.S. government officials and Mexican immigrant children, women, and men of varying legal status, this chapter examines how censorship was used to maintain the separation of bracero families across the U.S.-Mexico border. This historical consideration of how the U.S. government’s censorship and obstruction of these families’ correspondence emerged as an underestimated and, in turn, effective border enforcement measure in support of the Bracero Program’s conditions and terms illustrates this government’s selective acknowledgment of bracero families. It also proves most revealing when striving to understand the deep-seated anxiety, restlessness, and silences of the program.

Using a combination of bracero family oral life histories and songs of love, this chapter traces the romantic love, loss, and longing that inspired Mexican women and men to be most resourceful in their pursuit of personally satisfying romantic relationships in Mexico and the United States. These women’s and men’s dedication to acting out of love—but with their family integrity and reputation intact—moved them to become most resilient when celebrating and mourning their love for each other when alone and in public. In capturing the emotional rigors of the Bracero Program, this historical examination of the expansiveness of the program’s reach is a most humanizing move toward unearthing an almost forgotten history of love and longing.