the first years of the bracero program, you'll see pictures from the leonard nadel collection at the national museum. but from these pictures, you will see the 1950s sort of, you'll see the contracting through the perspective of leonard and nadel in the 1950s. but in the 1940s, the 1940s was a completely different period. in the 1940s, you might walk out, 1942, first braceros who came out didn't know necessarily what they were getting into. and we have the beautiful stories of men who got on a train because they were recruited, because they were told that this would be a fantastic program through propaganda. and had no idea what they were in for. men who told me, you know, i was very, very scared when i jumped on that train. when i got on that train, because i didn't know what to expect. i didn't know at all what to expect. kind of patriotic at war. people are telling the braceros that are there, they take on this patriotic discourse to do their part in this time of war. some of them would get off in places like stockton and be greeted by bands. and i have a wonderful oral history of

didn't know is that the national museum of american history had acquired a huge collection of leonard nadel frafls and they decided they would pursue an actual exhibit project and a digital archive. they partnered up with this fancy university, george mason, and they have a center for history and new media. and they decided that this would be a great project to start thinking about digital media, new history and thinking about the way in which we interact with history. so the bracero history project began as i started graduate school at brown, and what did we do? we started collecting oral histories and objects. so i was sent out to places like san bernardino. i was sent out to selenas, i was sent out to cocella to train communities to correct their own oral histories and i carried a heavy backpack with a scanner and a recorder to collect oral histories myself. when the opportunity came to collect oral histories in mexico, i lobbied and decided i really wanted to collect oral histories in states that weren't traditional sending states. so that when you think about bracero history, the tradi