Bring back bracelets? “These people will be treated like slaves”

One morning in May 1961, Manuel Alvarado, 21, put on his huaraches, put three changes of clothes and a thin blanket into a nylon tote bag, and said goodbye to his parents. He left their rancho in La Cañada, Zacatecas, to the North.

The United States had been kind and cruel to his farming family. His uncles had regaled him with stories of the easy money available to legal seasonal workers – known as braceros – that allowed them to buy land and livestock from them.

His father, however, was among the million Mexican men deported in 1955 during Operation Wetback, an Eisenhower administration policy of mass deportations in the name of national security and takeover of American jobs.

“They sent my father to the border with only the clothes he was wearing,” Alvarado, now 85, told me in Spanish as he sunk into a comfortable couch in his daughter’s well-kept Anaheim home.

The mistreatment of his father did not frighten Alvarado at the time. He boarded a train with his uncles and cousins ​​bound for Chihuahua, where a Mexican health official checked everyone’s hands at a recruiting office to make sure they were calloused enough for the hard work that awaited them. The Alvarados then entered a treatment center near El Paso. There, American health inspectors typically made would-be braceros 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, Colorado, where Japanese American farmers previously employed Alvarado’s wealthier uncles, this time writing a letter of recommendation to facilitate the crossing. Alvarado stayed there until November before returning home. For the next three summers he worked as a bracero.

“No regrets,” Alvarado said of those years.

He was dressed in the standard outfit of a Mexican grandfather: a long flannel shirt, blue hat, jeans and sneakers, along with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a leather cell phone case clipped to his belt. A friendly Stetson was nearby when it was time for his portrait. Photos of his grandchildren decorated the living room, along with a statue of Mickey Mouse in a skeleton costume and a display case filled with commemorative tumblers.

“We were very poor at the rancho,” Alvarado said, recounting how he had to collect and sell firewood as a child to help his parents. “If it didn’t rain, there would be no harvest and there would be no real misery. The Bracero program has helped a lot of people.”

Alvarado is a family friend. He knew my paternal grandfather, José Arellano, who grew up on a rancho and worked as a bracero in the orange groves of Anaheim in the 1950s, across the street from the elementary school my sister and I would later attend. My Pepe was one of 2 million Mexican men who took advantage of a program that fundamentally changed the economy of their native and adopted country.

My father suggested I talk to Alvarado after I asked him and my uncles about my Pepe’s experience and they admitted to knowing nothing. I especially wanted to hear Alvarado’s perspective at a time when farmers are begging Donald Trump to end his tsunami of deportations because crops are rotting in the fields — which the president acknowledges is a problem.

“We can’t leave our farmers without people,” Trump told CNBC in August, musing in the same interview that he wanted to find a way to allow farmworkers to work legally because “those people do it naturally,” while “people who live in the inner city don’t do that work.”

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 civil rights activists complained it exploited migrant workers — “created new opportunities for millions and provided critical support to Texas agriculture.”

When I told Alvarado about a possible resurrection, he sat back and shook his head.

“If that happens, these people will be treated like slaves,” replied the ex-bracero. “Just like what happened to us.”

October 1963 photo of Mexican Bracero Program workers working in Fresno County pepper fields.

(Bill Murphy/Los Angeles Times)

Although two months shy of 86, Alvarado remembers those bracero days as if they happened last week. The amount he was paid: 45 cents an hour in Colorado to harvest onions and melons. Fifty cents for each can of tomatoes in Stockton the following year. $2.25 per pound of cotton in Dell City, Texas, where the farmer’s son was frantically riding his bike into the fields shouting that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. The farmer then gathered everyone around his truck to hear the drama on the radio.

Fourteen hours a day, seven days a week was the norm. On Saturday evening we would go to the nearest town to buy groceries and a few hours of entertainment – ​​movies, dancing, drinking. Sometimes farmers gave free food to the braceros, as required by the agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments. Most of the time, this wasn’t the case.

“At night, we couldn’t even stand up straight,” Alvarado said, shuddering at the memory. His uncles teased him: “They said to me, ‘Now you know what.’ the North this is so you know how to make money. Learn to love it.

But everything didn’t go very well.

At Swink, Japanese American patrons gave Alvarado and his relatives a private cottage, although bathing was limited to wading in irrigation canals or boiling water for themselves,”ranch style.” The Hiraki family spoke to Mexican workers about their incarceration by the U.S. government during World War II, to show that racism could be defeated. In Texas, a white foreman stopped Alvarado and his group from harvesting cotton fields just before a plane covered the crop with DDT.

“The Americans have been very kind,” Alvarado continued. This included the Border Patrol. “They were joining us on the field. ‘Hello everyone. Please show us your papers.’ They have always been very respectful.

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

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

“What I didn’t like was the Mexican bosses in California,” he continued. “They were the ones who treated us like slaves. They were shouting all the time – ‘¡bend [Get to it]wet backs!’ – and then they used even worse words.

Over the years, it has become more difficult to obtain valid documentation in the United States. Because La Cañada was so small, the Mexican government only allowed three of its residents to become braceros each year via a lottery. Japanese Americans in Colorado never sponsored Alvarado again, after he refused an offer to enlist in the army. He won the lottery in 1962, then bought someone else’s number for the next two years.

In 1965, the men of La Cañada awaited the annual arrival of Mexican government officials to assign bracero slots. But no one came.

Alvarado laughs. “That’s when people started coming the North another way. »

A monument dedicated to braceros in downtown Los Angeles.

(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)

And that’s what he did, too, entering the country illegally a few years later to work in Pasadena restaurants before moving to Anaheim for his big sherry diaspora. His wife and eight children eventually followed him. They became citizens after the 1986 amnesty, and Alvarado frequently spoke to his family about his past as a bracero – “so they would know how people came here to sacrifice so their children could study and prepare for better things.”

All his children bought a house with their working income. His grandchildren earned college degrees; two of them served in the army.

I asked him if a guest worker program could succeed today.

“It wouldn’t be right and it doesn’t make sense,” Alvarado said. “Why not let the people here stay? They are already working. To evict them is horrible. And then bring in people to replace them? The people who come will have no other right than to come and be evicted according to the government’s wishes.”

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

“We either ignore these things or are just too busy to care,” he said. “Besides, I found my good life in my own way. But it reminded me that when you signed that contract, you had no opportunities apart from the pity the farmers gave you.”

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

“They wouldn’t hire people from here. They don’t want them. I’ve never seen white people working alongside us Mexicans. White people have a different mentality, different expectations. They think differently than someone from the rancho.”

“They want easy jobs,” my father joked.

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

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