Ex-Braceros Back Senate Plan, but With Upgrades

Leaving behind his pueblo in Guanajuato, Mexico, Jose Gasca traveled north across the border in the mid-1950s to pick fruit and vegetables in places he had never heard of -- Arkansas, Michigan, Arizona.

Living and working conditions were grueling. He often slept in cramped barracks with dozens of other men and woke at dawn to toil 12 hours in the fields.

Like his father before him, Gasca, now 70, was a bracero, a Mexican worker brought to the U.S. under a government program to fill labor shortages during and after World War II.

The work was hard, the pay low and the experience at times humiliating, but Gasca credits the bracero program with changing his life. He was able to buy furniture for his parents, send his younger siblings to school and purchase his own home.

“Many of us had an opportunity to prosper,” said Gasca, a naturalized U.S. citizen who now lives in Harbor City.

More than half a century after the first Mexican guest worker program was implemented, the Republican-controlled Congress is sharply divided over whether to approve a new program that would give an estimated 1.5 million undocumented farmworkers a chance to earn permanent legal residency.

Under the Senate proposal, eligible participants would have to prove they worked in agriculture before the law was enacted and work another three to five years before being granted residency. The bill would also allow as many as 200,000 people outside the country to fill vacant jobs during the first year, with the opportunity to gain permanent residency after working four years.

Gasca and other braceros, named for the Spanish word for arm, brazo, said they support the Senate plan. But they hope that the new foreign workers would be paid better wages, receive long-term contracts and be given an opportunity to gain citizenship.

“They deserve it because they are giving a lot to the country,” Gasca said.

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By agreement of the U.S. and Mexican governments, more than 2.5 million braceros crossed the border between 1942 and 1964. Some were contracted to work on the railroads and in other industries, but the majority labored in agriculture. Contracts ranged from one to six months, with many braceros returning several times.

The bracero program was praised for providing a cheap and steady supply of laborers for the nation’s growers. But critics said many of the foreign workers lived in substandard conditions and that the program created unfair competition and depressed farmworkers’ wages.

“The starting point for every guest worker program is, ‘How does my program differ from the bracero program,’ ” said UC Davis professor Philip Martin, an expert in immigration and farm labor.

“The bracero program is universally discredited ... because it had lots of rules that weren’t followed.”

For example, workers were supposed to be paid the prevailing wage, provided with sanitary housing and affordable meals.

They were also not supposed to be used to break strikes. But researchers say employers did not always adhere to these policies.

Martin said the biggest difference in the Senate’s proposed guest worker program is that it would create a path to legal status and eventual citizenship.

Future guest workers also would have more rights, in part because there are far more wage and workers’ compensation laws in place now to protect their interests.

But under the Senate proposal, farmworker housing would not be provided, so workers would incur more work-related expenses, such as rent and transportation.

As a bracero, Gasca first came to the U.S. when he was 19 to work in Chula Vista. The worst part of being a bracero, he said, was being sprayed with DDT as he entered the country. This was standard practice for foreign workers.

Despite the humiliation, Gasca returned five more times. His income as a farmworker in the U.S. -- between $150 to $300 a week -- helped his parents back home pay their bills.

How much he earned usually depended on where he worked. Picking plums and apples in Michigan, for example, was far more lucrative than picking cotton in Texas.

In Michigan, the faster he worked, the more money he made.

“When we finished there, I had $2,000 in my pocket,” he said. “That was in one and a half months. I felt rich.”

After his stint in the bracero program, Gasca obtained a tourist visa and returned to the U.S. He stayed and eventually got a green card.

Over the years, he worked in various jobs, including one with a lighting company, where he helped make chandeliers. In 1998, the father of eight became a naturalized citizen.

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Guadalupe Garcia Gonzalez, 74, another bracero, said he favored a new guest worker program because it would help reduce the deaths of migrants crossing the border.

“Poor people would not die in the deserts anymore,” said Garcia, a retired landscaper who lives in Anaheim.

But Garcia said farmworkers should have contracts for three or five years so they have more stability and regular income. The new guest workers, he said, should also be paid higher wages.

“Not just anyone is going to want to work in agriculture,” Garcia said. Mexicans “do the dirty work that no one wants to do. By dirty work, I mean to say cheap and hard.”

Garcia said he had wanted to become a bracero since he was 10 years old and saw the trains filled with workers pass by his town in Sinaloa. A decade later, he came to the U.S. against his parents’ wishes.

His first contract was in Santa Ana in 1954, picking tomatoes, celery, lettuce, cabbage and cauliflower. When the weather was good, the work was plentiful. “But in the wintertime, there wasn’t much work,” he said. “It rained a lot.... If we didn’t work, they didn’t pay us.”

Later, in Yuma, Ariz., the weather -- and the conditions -- were even worse. Temperatures rose to more than 115 degrees. Garcia said he and others couldn’t sleep because of the heat. He asked the regional bracero office for a job change and threatened to report them to the Mexican Consulate.

“Here we are living like animals,” Garcia said. “The work is good, I said, but the housing -- there wasn’t air-conditioning.... So they took me to another field.”

Most of his bosses over the years were decent, he said. But not all. He remembered one who kicked a young worker who wasn’t doing his job well. Garcia jumped in to protect his colleague and the boss walked away. “He knew I knew my rights,” he said.

After his jobs ended and he returned home, Garcia said he got tired of waiting for a new contract. His girlfriend was living in Santa Ana, so he crossed illegally but was soon discovered by immigration agents and deported.

He returned for good in 1962, with the help of a former employer who wrote a letter to help him get a green card. He married his girlfriend and the couple has two daughters and three grandchildren.

Despite the downside of the program, Garcia praised the American government for giving him the chance to be a bracero. “Thanks to this country, we have lived well,” Garcia said. “It gave us the opportunity to work.”

But he didn’t have kind words about the Mexican government. In a fight that continues today, Garcia and other braceros are battling to get the Mexican government to pay them money that was deducted from their paychecks for pension and savings plans.

“It’s a big lie of the Mexican Congress” and the president, he said. “They are sitting on the money.”

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Nicolas Saldana, 70, who picked fruit in Washington and Oregon, said he wanted to be a bracero because he saw others returning from the U.S. well-dressed, with money to buy houses. After he returned home to his ranch in Zacatecas and got married, Saldana came back on a second contract to Arkansas to earn more money. The separation was difficult, he said, but he knew it was for a short time -- and it was worth it.

“It was my economic starting point, coming here and working,” said Saldana, a real estate agent in Santa Ana who got his green card in 1960 and is now a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Saldana said he would like to see another guest worker program so others can benefit as he did.

“They could prove that they are good people, and then they could work without being afraid of immigration,” Saldana said. “They could have a better way of life.”