Braceros help again, retracing U.S. history

Nicolas Saldana Sandoval covered his eyes with one hand and sobbed gently. The 70-year-old man with the bushy brows and thinning hair took a sip of water and quickly regained his composure, but a big tear clung to the skin beneath his left eye -- a bittersweet bubble of memory that had welled up from nearly 50 years in the past.

Saldana and his wife, Refugio, were the first of los viejos to arrive in downtown Los Angeles on Friday morning with a personal yet historic tale to tell. He was a bracero, and like the World War II veterans whose places in the fields the first of these Mexican guest workers were hired to take, starting in 1942, their numbers are dwindling. Saldana entered the program in the late 1950s, toward the end of the 22-year run that brought an estimated 1 million to 2 million Mexican laborers north to work American fields and food-processing plants -- first as substitutes for farm boys who were off carrying M1 carbines or manning battle stations, and later to assure growers of a steady supply of cheap but fully legal labor.

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History is determined to secure the braceros’ stories before they go -- for scholars, for a traveling museum exhibition that’s planned several years down the road, and for the sake of the children and grandchildren in the United States and Mexico, who often have gotten the story piecemeal, if at all. Last July, the Bracero History Project began an ongoing cross-country, cross-border effort to record the voices of the men who worked in the program, of the family members they left behind for hitches that could last up to 18 months, and of Americans who interacted with them along the way.

“Most [bracero] studies are on policy. Our goal is to give it a little more dimension, to focus on the social and cultural aspect, how it affected the families, the towns in Mexico, their children and their communities,” said L. Stephen Velasquez, an associate curator at the Smithsonian who was overseeing the project’s testament-taking swing through Southern California -- over the weekend in Los Angeles, and Friday to May 26 in Coachella, Blythe, Heber and San Bernardino. (For information: [202] 633-3905)

The bracero past may be prelude if President Bush is able to push through a plan to curb illegal immigration by creating a new guest-worker program. Congress will consider proposals as it attempts to pass a new immigration bill this month. Velasquez said that the National Museum of American History is not trying to influence the debate over immigration, which has brought hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets. Instead, the Smithsonian is gathering stories for the long haul, so that whatever policies are adopted now, those wanting to draw parallels and conclusions will at least have a solid narrative of what it meant to work as a bracero -- and to have one’s future and family life shaped by the experience.

It’s a largely grass-roots effort. Even though led by a huge federal institution, the Bracero History Project is moving forward mainly on the volunteer labor of graduate students across the country, among them the dozen or so from USC who, in one of those only-in-L.A. moments, gathered in Little Tokyo with clipboards and tape machines, preparing to record Mexican stories.

The initial impetus for the project, Velasquez said, was the Smithsonian’s 1998 purchase of 1,700 never-published photographs from the widow of Leonard Nadel, a California photographer who spent two weeks in 1956 documenting the bracero experience. Nadel began at recruiting stations in Mexico and followed the workers across the border, taking black-and-white pictures of them at work, in their barracks and in the amusements their free time allowed. Ana Rosas, who is about to complete her doctorate at USC, sought out the photo archive several years ago. Velasquez said her study of the everyday lives of braceros and their families -- she hopes to turn her dissertation into a comprehensive book on the subject -- helped steer the theme of the research project and planned exhibition.

The project so far has proceeded on a shoestring -- a $48,000 grant from the Smithsonian Latino Center is funding the first year of research. The study has gained speed and momentum by teaming with a parallel oral history project on the braceros that was launched in 2002 at the University of Texas at El Paso.

More than 300 individuals’ recollections had been recorded going into the weekend in L.A., and researchers also have begun to collect photographs, tools and clothing they’ll need to flesh out the planned museum exhibition.

Gathering material and turning it into a traveling show will require $1 million or more, estimated Melinda Machado, spokeswoman for the American History museum -- and the speed with which it can be accomplished will depend on fundraising. La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, a start-up institution devoted to the Mexican American experience in L.A., plans to host the eventual traveling show at a headquarters scheduled to open next year. Along with other community groups, La Plaza helped get out the word that, no matter how seemingly mundane, the life stories of former braceros and their families are now invaluable to historians who cherish the chance to just sit and talk.

Early Friday, Mireya Loza, a Brown University graduate student working with the Smithsonian project, addressed the L.A. volunteers in a community room at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo. Former braceros and their families would report there for orientation, refreshments and chat -- all to set them at ease and allow memories to flow when they walked across the street to tell their stories in private, one-on-one interviews in classrooms at the Japanese American National Museum. Loza told the interviewers to expect tears and sobs: Braceros’ lives were hard, given the separation from family, the long, miserable rides in freight and cattle cars to agricultural destinations, and field work that often required furrowing the ground with despised short-handled hoes.

Comfort them with words or pat their shoulders, Loza counseled, but don’t get bogged down and risk losing the bigger story. “If you see them getting choked up, you can move them past it onto something else. It’s delicate.”

From past sessions in Texas, Mexico, Chicago and San Jose and the Central Valley of California, Loza said, researchers have learned that the hardest thing, for many, is to remember their humiliating last stop before entering the United States: delousing stations where every Bracero was required to strip, get in line and step forward for a spray bath of DDT.

Memories of family can clench the heart most tightly, and that’s what squeezed a tear from Nicolas Saldana, who moved to Santa Ana with his wife within a year of his bracero experience. There he made a career selling and buying houses and raised six kids. It wasn’t just the money that made him sign on, in 1958 and 1959, to pick pears in Oregon and cotton in Arkansas, where the work ribboned his hands with cuts. It was the chance to pass through Tijuana, more than 1,000 miles northwest of his hometown of Tlaltenango in Zacatecas state. There he was able to visit the mother and sister he hadn’t seen for three years. Pushing down the swell of feeling, Saldana moved on to safer conversational terrain.

Ernesto Saldana and Angela Camacho, the youngest of the semi-retired real estate agent’s children, said they’d only heard “bits and pieces” of the story of his bracero years. Ernesto’s wife heard about the Bracero History Project through her graduate studies at UCLA. To Ernesto’s and Angela’s surprise, their parents agreed this was a story that at last needed to be told.

The taped voices of Nicolas and Refugio Saldana will be housed at the Smithsonian, transcribed into print, translated into English and possibly posted on the Internet. They and their family will receive copies of the transcripts, and that matters a great deal to their children.

Now, said Angela, who lives in Mission Viejo and works as a manager at a loan company, her three kids “will know what their grandparents went through.”

And because these aren’t just isolated stories but part of a larger museum project, “They’ll see its relevance,” added Ernesto, a South Pasadena resident who is executive director of Public Allies, a community-building group that trains people to work for nonprofit agencies. “They’ll see how their grandparents’ experiences played in history.”