>> we are towards the end of the semester. i decided to talk about this. the braceros. bracero history. we will talk about it more in depth. we will talk about the article. i'm going to tell you a little bit about how i started being interested in braceros. my teacher, my mentor said to me

find your oldest family member and collect an oral history. i thought it was a basic interview. a little challenging. when you come from immigrant families where your family is somewhere else. my oldest family member was not really that old. i grew up with my uncle. he would talk about his work in california and texas. he would tell my whole family stories about what it was like to work picking cotton in texas. picking cabin in california. i have heard the story.

i took it back to the class. my teacher said this is extraordinary. and i said how is my uncle extraordinary? sometimes the people you see the most don't seem that extraordinary. i said this is pretty interesting. i was really excited about doing oral history more than anything. i will show you a picture of my uncle. he was born in a little village in mexico. it is one of the large sending states and contributes to gigantic waves of immigrants here in the u.s. my teacher asked me to explore the bracero program. what do we know about it?

>> workers from mexico would come to the united states. i think it was a wartime thing. workers were needed. >> you are exactly right. it started in 1942. what does guestworker mean? >> temporary workers. >> yes. guestworker means temporary labor contracts which means they come in and they are recruited to work maybe a couple of months and then they return.

some of them have the option to renew the contract and stay in the united states for multiple years. guestworker means just that. when you think that guestworker programs would be important now? >> because of the influx of immigrants that come to work? >> the u.s. has constantly thought about and enacted agreements for bringing in guest workers. we have seen guestworkers. it brought an the largest guestworker program. guestworker models are popular globally. guestworker models are used across europe, across the middle east, and what we know about the bracero program? it was the largest guestworker

program in the americas and became a model for programs elsewhere. you can think about the ways in which they shaped other policies around guestworkers. how many of you actually have family members that came in through the bracero program? one? usually it is more. it's a couple. the guestworker program really affected migration history. what is this program? it was a binational agreement between mexico and the united states that allowed mexicans to enter the u.s. on temporary work permits. that means they entered the u.s. legally. they had a legal permit.

they have the status. gabby was correct to say it was started during the proceeds labor shortage of world war ii. a lot of people have argued that after the work was terminated after the war ended guestworkers continued to come in. why did they continue to come in after the war ended? >> the growers took advantage of the program. >> yes. it became a cheaper mode of labor. we know for a fact that there were two components, railroad and agriculture. why did the railroad component end? >> railroad unions were very strong and railroad drivers were very good jobs. >> the other thing we know is

that 4.5 million contracts were issued. that is a lot. 4.5 million contracts. a gigantic wave of workers coming in. just give you an idea, the workers came from almost every state in mexico. what you see in dark blue is every state that received mexican guestworkers. those are a lot of states. there are only a couple that didn't. why do you think a couple did not? guesses.

>> they had enough labor in the states already? >> we're getting closer. >> the cheap labor with african americans in that area because it is the south. after slavery was abolished, quote unquote, they were still there. that would've been the cheap labor. >> you are all getting very close.

these other states also brought in guestworkers, from jamaica and the british west indies. there was another guestworker program that existed alongside the bracero program. puerto rican agricultural workers were also recruited. states like michigan. braceros could find themselves workers alongside puerto ricans. because of their status, puerto ricans could come in freely and in some ways work some areas and avoid some of the red tape that

the bracero program brought about. but also endured heavy exploitation. how do we imagine that the bracero program affected mexican migration? >> they migrated to certain areas in the u.s. and were undocumented immigrants. >> yes. you see a rise of undocumented labor alongside documented labor. the bracero program will literally create another wave. when people start to talk about temporary guestworker programs, and they are used as a potential

solution to immigration policy, you need to remember that this didn't solve undocumented immigration. it actually augmented it. that is one reality. what do we know about the. just before this, the 1930's? >> repatriation. a lot of them were mexican-americans. >> there is a moment where there is deportation and what 1942 does is it brings back mexican migration to areas like michigan, illinois, the midwest.

these populations were hit so hard by repatriation. it reinvigorated mexican migration to states that had been hit hard by repatriation. it also increased mexican migration to traditional areas in the southwest like texas, california, mexico were once again reinvigorated because of this labor migration. it also transformed the gender dynamic. it is all men coming into these areas. some men were able to stay, not every man. some were. they married women and found avenues to stay in the united states. other men simply went back to

their communities. how do i connect this to my own work? i will tell you about the stuff i do. during graduate school i spent five years working on bracero history projects. after i collected my uncle's oral history, i waited years and found myself back in graduate school. my advisor said you were once very interested in this history. i am interested in some of these topics. what i didn't know is that the national museum of american history had a huge collection of photographs. they decided they were going to pursue an exhibit project and a digital archive.

they decided this would be a great project to start thinking about digital media and how we interact with history. we started collecting oral histories and objects. we sent them to places like san bernardino and salinas. to train communities to collect their own oral histories. i carried my heavy backpack with the scanner and the recorder to collect oral histories myself. when the opportunity came to collect oral histories in mexico, i lobbied to collect oral histories in states that were more traditional sending states.

i thought what about the other states. one of the stories in these other places? i collected oral histories in the yucatan and other places in mexico. all these fantastic places. i took them back along with every other community that have been trained to deposit their all histories in this gigantic archive. kids from cal state long beach decided to collect their own oral histories. a gigantic wave of collection all over the united states. we collected a little over 800 oral histories.

making it one of the larger repositories of latino history. we digitized people documents. we scanned ids and photographs, anything people would bring in. what you find is that the archive has oral histories and is digitized documents. the other fantastic thing that came out of it is that the museum created a traveling exhibit bittersweet harvest. a small and modest exhibit that got a lot of attention. because many people came from these communities are were affected by them want to host this exhibit. i will show you what the page looks like.

you can't see it that well. in 2010 we won a prize because we were one of the best public history projects out there. you can type in a name and you can listen to my uncle. you can type in my name and you can listen to my or histories. i learned how to do my job much better. you can see other students that like yourselves were 19 or 20 years old and really committed to collecting these histories. they went out with their backpacks all of these communities. that's what they did.

i will tell you the first ones were a bumpy ride. you learn by doing. there were times when i didn't have the best interview style and i got better. that is all you can do. trust me. i feel for you. i would have given you an a on assignment just for him during that. bittersweet harvest, this is a photograph. it opened up at the national museum. it was composed of these panels so that they could travel all over the united states. most of the objects state of the national museum. what they asked was that local organizations actually display their own history.

they decided to caught their own objects. and display them alongside the created panels about their own oral history. which was fantastic. we were also fortunate enough. we had bunkbeds. an old site where braceros actually lives. i thought this was fantastic. a man really wanted to honor his father. he wanted to tell his father's story. he wanted his hat to be preserved. it is right there. how can i ask other people to donate their objects?

what is actual process of becoming a bracero. you are in one of the classic sending states. how do you hear about the program? through family members. >> the united states could send recruiters. >> actually there was some recruitment that went through.

the actual city officials of these towns. it crushed recruitment. the first years of the program you will see photos from the national museum. you will see the 1950's. the contracting through the perspective of the 1950's. in the 1940's, it was a completely different era. you might walk out in 1942. they didn't know what they were going to get into.

we have beautiful stories of men who got on a train because they were told this would be a fantastic program, it was all propaganda, they had no idea what they were in for. men who told me i was very scared when i jumped on that train. i didn't know what to expect. what they found in the early 1940's was this era of the economic program. the country is at war. people are telling them that they are helping the country and a time of war. they take on this patriotic discourse. tied to the good neighbor policy. very excited to do their part. some of them would get off in places like stockton california. they would be greeted by bands.

people are excited that they got there. it was a moment of patriotism. after the war, that sense of patriotism quickly evaporated. by the 1950's, we see a different phase of the bracero program. the recruitment is larger. being augmented in agricultural communities all over the southwest. growers become dependent on this labor. a very different phase of the program. the process is similar but the actual discourse about their arrival is very different.

this is where contracting center looked like. you have left your town. you are on your way to the border. these centers left the central states and moved to the northern states. why do you think that happened? they are able to pull from undocumented labor closer to the border.

what is also true is that growers are paying for their transportation. what does it mean when they moved the centers to the border? the actual transportation costs are cheaper. the braceros are subsidizing through their own travel the growers profits. they are making sure the growers are able to profit to a greater degree because now they have to take out loans and borrow money

from friends so they can make it to the contracting stations. the contracting centers are chaotic. some people slept on the floor for two weeks. other people tell stories that they were waiting for months. indigenous communities often found it hard and difficult to enter the contracting process. imagine what it must feel like if you don't speak the language. the contracting center is chaotic and it becomes a site in which you would see folks just surviving and waiting their turn.

>> people directly went there, they put their life on the line, their whole family. >> they would come in in debt. >> they didn't give them housing resources. didn't have places to live. >> project 500 in 1968 the university recruited black and

latino students to come on campus. they didn't give them resources and housing. what you causes chaos. you cause a lot of human suffering because people don't have what it takes to survive on a day-to-day basis. it can become very chaotic. the infrastructure that was there was in place to exploit these guestworkers. we know that. we know that it is chaotic. what happens when you actually get into the sites. your name is called and somebody says, let's give you a name. manuel sanchez.

he is already in debt. what is a mordida? it was a small bribe that people paid to try to get on the list. they are subsidizing the growers. the u.s. economy based on their cheap labor. a person might say to them, show me your hands. why would they look at the hands? why would the hands be important? when people came back from the

bracero program, although they endured hardship, they had blue jeans or boots. to their village or town. it spread like wildfire. how would you keep a baker from coming to the u.s.? a dentist? they wanted agricultural workers. that was the ideal bracero. they had done this work before. to check their hands was like checking their resume. they wanted to make sure that they were really braceros. some people beat their hands up against rocks so that they can develop calluses.

bakers would rub their hands on the sidewalk so they can develop calluses while they are sitting on the curb. they also understood what people in the contracting stations were looking for. they were going to play the part. they were not going to be dupes. you finally commits the person that you are in agricultural worker. the next step would be exams. this is a processing center in monterey. we see a doctor walking through. looking at their bodies. they had to check their x-rays. to make sure they didn't have tuberculosis.

these might be potential disease carriers. we need to keep u.s. communities safe. they want to make sure these men were not carriers of any illnesses. the last part was probably the hardest part to record. many of them would start to sob when they told this portion of the story. they would have to strip completely and they were sprayed with ddt. this is an image of a guestworker being sprayed with ddt. and he said to me, i was treated like an animal. the saddest one was a man in salinas. he said, señorita, do you know if human rights existed then? i didn't know how to answer.

i said, i am not sure. i wasn't sure what he meant. he said, they treated me like an animal. so when did i have human rights? he began to sob. i didn't know what to tell him. what would you tell somebody if they asked that? as you can tell from the reading, braceros organizers often thought that they were treated like cattle. the organizers said we were treated like cattle. we resent to the slaughterhouse. we sacrificed.

>> this connects to the hard worker narrative. now it exists for people. not necessarily through program but still the same idea. >> often immigrant groups, racialized groups, they have to demonstrate that they are worthy of civil rights. demonstrate that they are hard-working. demonstrate that they are respectable so they can receive rights. civil rights, human rights. we have our own critiques.

this is how they understood the reality as well. >> it is viewed through perspective that human rights is being given as opposed to natural law. >> people have to demonstrate that they are worthy of this. i am glad that you guys are connecting the dots. i will show you another image. a young man getting sprayed with ddt. it showed the entire naked body. the original photo. ddt is a chemical that when sprayed, a toxic chemical.

they were thought to be carrying disease. it was used for all sorts of things. many of them told stories about their eyes burning after the spray. remembering that it was not pleasant. some men thought that he gave them prolonged issues with their eyes. there is nothing that has been conclusively done about how ddt affected them long-term. these men, it was very significant for them.

one man said in san jose, we were naked. i said the picture has been cropped so we can show it to the general public. he said i don't know why you need to crop this photo. the reality is that we were naked. for him it was important that people know that it was much more alienating the picture showed. for him the true testament was the whole naked body. they finally go through this process. they might get sent off to different places.

there a really great scholar who just published a book. it looks at how families dealt with the bracero program. particularly women. some of them had to wait and receive remittances. many of them never got the remittances. money sent back to mexico. these remittances were sent back and some women opted to move closer to the border. some braceros move their families closer so they can visit them.

get them closer to unification. others try to figure out what to do. it really shifted the gender dynamics in the small towns and villages across mexico. some women argued that overnight all the able-bodied men were gone. some women took that as an opportunity to assert leadership roles that they had before. some of them created new leadership roles of themselves. the dynamics in these countryside towns and cities shifted. he finally gets a contract. some places received larger quantities, like california. california got a tremendous amount of braceros.

these are the barracks. some of them would have single beds, some would have bunk beds. they are elbow to elbow. the personal space is minimal. they don't have much room for personal perceptions. some tried to create a separate area. it was quite challenging in these situations. i will show you images of people laboring. they picked lettuce and carried out a tremendous amount of cheap labor. the other thing we know is that they are using a cortito. a little short handle.

it was still problematic. why would mexico even agreed to this program? what did they think? >> they wanted to show that we are helping you. patriotic images. giving respect to her mother country. >> there is a sense of patriotism at the beginning. when worker exploitation rises, why do you think mexico would continue to allow this?

>> even my own family is involved in the remittances. my cousin is going to college. the government allows explication in the united states because they want the remittances. dollars going into the country. >> remittances become very important to the mexican economy. this. normalizes the transnational family. the idea that they can be away from their family, one year, two years, three years, this becomes very normal.

ordinary. the other thing is that mexico sees this as a way in which they can modernize folks in the countryside. so that they can take the agricultural workers. this might be an avenue into modernity. this is 1951. a critical year because the bracero program is renewed. the magazine prints this on the cover. how middle-class mexican elites feel about the bracero program.

condescended to. they are critiquing it. what are they critiquing? >> a boy with these two men with kind of a lecherous look on their faces. like they are looking down on us and we are not up to their level. trying to bring us up to their level by exploiting the workers. >> you are on the money. this does have a lot to do with this indigenous little boy.

the girl on the right side. that is representative of what middle-class mexican men see as rate. on the other side you see a kind of a texas cowboy. because of the boots. the typical rural mexican is depicted as indigenous. the critique that the publishers of this magazine are making. neither of them are looking out for the interests of the small child. they are all looking to take advantage of the child. looking to exploit the child. perhaps raise him in a vision

that would allow exploitation. with lecherous smiles. does anybody else have ideas about what this image can mean? >> it was a way to modernize the people that were working in agriculture. that is the significance behind having a charro. they portray the braceros like a small innocent kid. and these guys looked very manipulative. it shows the background of what is going on.

sending a double message. >> they chose a child, it's very interesting. children can be smart but they are not on par with adults. it highlights the imbalance of power. >> it reminds me of us as students. you have white america or this western, forget your culture kind of thing. the pressure to forget your culture. the people from your community saying ok we are sending you off to college when you going to do? there is so much pressure.

you have the struggle to choose which side or what you're going to make of yourself. >> you are pointing at again to that power differential. you feel for him in some way. you feel that you are in a similar position in terms of access to power. the irony is that the mexican figure is just as lecherous as the texas cowboy. we also know that the u.s. depicted this program very differently. this image comes from agricultural life magazine. boots and sandals. the idea is that there are some braceros who have been here more than once. can you guess who has been to the united states?

the ones with the boots. the the boots mean modernity. these people have been in the world. they are making enough money to where they can buy boots. they are going to get money, they are going to be modern. very racialized. these sandals almost harken back to indigenous people. it is tied to the figure of the child.

tied to poverty. this lack of progress for mexico. mexico is trying to remake itself. the indigenous aspect is a major problem. what the u.s. gives mexico is an opportunity, not just to send back remittances but to modernize the population. so it could learn how to wear boots. to work with equipment, agricultural equipment from the united states. they could learn to be modern in a different way. do all braceros accept this? how do we think about them resisting this paradigm?

i wanted to show you the figure of the child in the figure of the boots because they are entering it and questioning the process and pushing back. in oral histories they have narratives of these exploitations. also narratives of resistance. i wanted to start off this segment of the class in which we will move to the article by talking about the organization we read about. in southern california, people were coming in and sharing their oral histories. the young man brings in this id. he tells the story of his father. his father was part of this

organization alliance of national workers of mexico in the united states of america. i was struck by this. i had never heard much about this organization. what does this mean? it says afl. it has the stamp of a mexican union. this is not a typical bracero i.d.. i thought, what the heck is this? this is the work of historians. who writes enough about this that they could figure out what this means?

he wrote a book where i find a reference to this organization. who were these people? what we know about them? i didn't know what they did or who they were. a lot of you know about the archive. i started looking for papers and looking for places where this organization might exist. i found the letters that they actually sent to mexico. then i hit the jackpot. in stanford california.

correspondence with this organization. a file full of letters. with the leadership of this organization. who were these men? what did they do? >> they thought that some of the people coming into the country were not doing their jobs and not representing their mother country well. they wanted to say to the braceros that you have to do your job well and not start slacking off.

you have to fulfill your contract. >> they take on that patriotic discourse. ambassadors in overalls. doing this fantastic work for mexico and the united states. in a time of war. when do they change their minds? >> the u.s. is a good neighbor and we are going to do this right. and then it comes to the criminalization of the workers. they want to advocate for the braceros because they realize they are living in these horrible conditions.

i thought it was crazy that both were arresting the people who worked because they were trying to advocate for their rights. always the simplest things. we just want a nice place to live. >> we know that they are resisting all the time. some of them walk out or protest. when they don't have their needs met. they don't have the quality of food. they are not getting paid. this is a unique organization in that they believe they can actually organize across countries. that they can organize mexico and the united states.

do the political work that they want. he comes to work for the national farm labor. he thinks that there is so much in the organizing world that is anti-mexican and anti-immigrant sentiment. he comes to the u.s. as a young boy. during the mexican revolution. he does farm work. he sees himself in the plight of some of these men. he has been a migrant. he thinks of himself that way. really an extra in a person. he gets his doctorate at columbia. it is pretty extraordinary if you think about the 1940's when he is able to accomplish. able to accomplish really extraordinary things. he decides that this organization might be the ticket that will help him access braceros. he thinks he can organize them from their sending countries. why does he lose his commitment?