Braceros

Providing agricultural labor, the braceros were Mexican workers (literally “arms” in Spanish) imported by the U. S. government during the mid-20th century.

As early as 1942, as the United States plunged into World War II, critical labor shortages threatened farm production. In response to this dilemma, the U. S. government arranged for braceros to work in the fields. Between 1942 and 1947, these workers made the difference between lost production and harvested crops first in the Southwest and then in other parts of the nation. With immense pressure on an already labor-starved agricultural economy due to the war, the program became institutionalized among many farms across the nation.

In these early years of the program, braceros signed contracts in Mexico and then migrated to American farms to assist in crop cultivation and harvesting. During the period between 1942 and 1947, more than 20,000 braceros entered the United States, working on farms in 24 states, with the most employed in California. Other Mexicans, however, pejoratively called “wetbacks,” a name given to those who swam the Rio Grande, entered the United States illegally. The initial group consisted of both legal and illegal workers at the mercy of an oppressive labor system and unable to look out for themselves.

Between 1948 and 1951, the original bracero agreement devolved into the Mexican Labor Program. With government interference declining, the primary contractor was no longer the U. S. government, but rather the individual American farmer who now had more responsibility than before. The employer alone bore the cost of transporting the worker from his Mexican home into the United States, and then back again to Mexico at the end of the contracted time. Between 1948 and 1950, farmers imported more than 200,000 legally contracted braceros into the United States.

On July 12, 1951, however, the program changed again. Congress established a precedent by granting specific legislative authority for contracting this foreign labor on a government-to-government basis. President Harry S. Truman signed a joint resolution on August 16, 1951, to fund the bracero program, yet he hoped that “Congress would comply with his recommendations for strengthening the program’s penalty provisions,” thereby complying with the Mexican government’s position stating that “either punitive legislation aimed at halting the wetback flow would be enacted by Congress, or there would be no bracero program.” The Mexican government feared losing its own laborers. The “wetback bill,” signed by Truman on March 20, 1952, made it “a felony punishable by fine not exceeding two thousand dollars or by imprisonment for not more than five years, or both, to aid anyone entering the country illegally or harboring or concealing [an] illegal entrant.”

The period from 1952 to 1959 helped stabilize the bra-cero program. While continually negotiating compromises and amendments that improved arrangements for both the workers and the farmers, the two governments repeatedly extended the program. In a compromise document signed in 1954, the program was extended to December 31, 1955, under specific conditions that declared that the American secretary of labor determined wages, although the Mexican government retained the right to request a review. Furthermore, the bracero had the benefit of both nonoccupational and occupational insurance. Both the U. S. and Mexican governments determined places of unacceptable employment, and the Mexican government set up a new recruitment depot. Finally, employers were not required to pay full transportation and subsistence cost if the contract was not completed by their hired bracero; only payment in proportion to services rendered by the bracero was required. During this time a push for unionization of migrant farm workers began. Drives to unionize the braceros started in the 1960s, due in part to the efforts of Cesar Chavez, a migrant farmworker and organizer of the National Farm Workers Association.

Following a period of congressional hearings and rising Senate opposition, the bracero program was terminated on December 31, 1964. The acceleration of agriculture mechanization, increasing uneasiness about the morality of the bracero program, and mounting burdens associated with bracero contracting, coupled with growing frustration among farm groups with the administration of the program, contributed to the end of the 22-year-long Mexican labor program.

Further reading: Richard Craig, The Bracero Program (London: University of Texas Press, 1971); Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story; An Account of the Managed Migration of Mexican Farmworkers in California, 1942-1960 (Santa Barbara, Calif.: McNally & Loftin, 1964).

—Susan F. Yates

Bridges, Harry See Volume VIII.

Brown Berets See Young Chicanos eor Community Action.