Tag: time

One May morning in 1961, 21-year-old Manuel Alvarado strapped on his huaraches, stuffed three changes of clothes and a thin blanket into a nylon tote bag and bid his parents farewell. He was leaving their rancho of La Cañada, Zacatecas for el Norte.

The United States had been kind and cruel to his farming family. His uncles had regaled him with tales of the easy money available for legal seasonal workers — known as braceros — which allowed them to buy land and livestock back home.

His father, however, was one of a million-plus Mexican men deported in 1955 during Operation Wetback, an Eisenhower administration policy of mass removal in the name of national security and taking back jobs for Americans.

“They sent my father to the border with only the clothes on his back,” Alvarado, now 85, told me in Spanish while sinking into a comfy couch at his daughter’s well-kept Anaheim home.

His father’s mistreatment didn’t scare Alvarado back then. 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 ahead. The Alvarados then crossed into a processing center near El Paso. There, American health inspectors typically forced aspiring braceros to strip naked before subjecting them to blood tests, X-rays, rectal exams and a final dusting of their bodies and clothes with DDT.

Next came an overnight bus ride to their final destination: tiny Swink, Colo., where Japanese American farmers had previously employed Alvarado’s wealthier uncles, writing a letter of recommendation this time to make crossing over easier. 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 standard Mexican grandpa attire: long flannel shirt, blue hat, jeans and sneakers along with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a leather cellphone case hanging from his belt. A nice Stetson was nearby for when it was time to take his portrait. Photos of his grandchildren decorated the living room, along with a Mickey Mouse statue in a skeleton costume and a glass cabinet filled with commemorative tumblers.

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

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

My dad suggested I speak to Alvarado after I asked him and my uncles about my Pepe’s experience and they admitted to not knowing anything. I especially wanted to hear Alvarado’s insights at a time when farmers are pleading with Donald Trump to stop his deportation tsunami because crops are rotting in the fields — something the president acknowledges is a problem.

“We can’t let our farmers not have anybody,” Trump told CNBC in August, musing in the same interview that he wanted to figure out a way to allow agricultural workers to work legally because “these people do it naturally,” while “people that live in the inner city are not doing 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 that it exploited migrant workers — “created new opportunities for millions and provided critical support for Texas agriculture.”

When I told Alvarado about a possible revival, he sat up and shook his head.

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

October 1963 photo of Mexican workers in the bracero program working in pepper fields in Fresno County.

(Bill Murphy/Los Angeles Times)

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

Fourteen hours a day, seven days a week was the norm. Saturday evenings were spent going into the nearest town to buy provisions and a few hours of entertainment — movies, dancing, drinking. Sometimes, the farmers gave the braceros free food, which was required per the agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments. Most of the time, they didn’t.

“At night, you couldn’t even stand up straight anymore,” said Alvarado, flinching at the memory. His uncles ribbed him — “They’d tell me, ‘Now you know what el Norte is, so you know how to win money. Learn to love it.’”

But not everything went terribly.

In Swink, the Japanese American bosses gave Alvarado and his relatives a private cottage, although baths were limited to wading into irrigation canals or boiling water for themselves, “al estilo rancho.” The Hiraki family talked to the Mexican workers about their incarceration by the U.S. government during World War II, to show that racism could be overcome. In Texas, a white foreman stopped Alvarado and his group from picking in cotton fields just before a plane covered the crop with DDT.

“The Americans were very kind,” Alvarado continued. That included the Border Patrol. “They’d go up to us in the field. ‘Good morning, everyone. Please let us see your papers.’ They were always very respectful.”

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

Alvarado smiled at my dad. “Sí, Lorenzo. Not like today.

“What I didn’t like were the Mexican bosses in California,” he continued. They were the ones who treated us like slaves. They’d yell all the time — ‘¡Dóblense [Get to it], wetbacks!’ — and then they used even worse words.”

As the years passed, it became harder to get papers to work legally in the U.S. Since La Cañada was so small, the Mexican government only allowed three of its residents to become braceros each year via a lottery. The Japanese Americans in Colorado never sponsored Alvarado again, after he declined an offer to enlist in the military. He won the lottery in 1962, then bought someone else’s number the following two years.

In 1965, La Cañada’s men waited for the annual arrival of Mexican government officials to allot the bracero slots. But no one came.

Alvarado laughed. “That’s when people started to come to el Norte 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 its large jerezano diaspora. His wife and eight children eventually followed. They became citizens after the 1986 amnesty, and Alvarado frequently spoke of his bracero past to his family — “so they know how people came here to sacrifice so their children could study and prepare for better things.”

All of his children bought homes with their blue-collar incomes. His grandchildren earned college degrees; two of them served in the military.

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

“It wouldn’t be good, and it makes no sense,” Alvarado said. “Why not let the people here stay? They’re already working. Deporting them is horrible. And then to bring people to replace them? The people who’ll come will have no rights other than to come and get kicked out at the will of the government.“

In the 2000s, braceros brought a class-action lawsuit after discovering that the U.S. had withheld 10% of their earnings each year and handed the money to Mexico. The Mexican government agreed to pay up to $3,800 to each surviving bracero who lived in the U.S., but Alvarado never applied.

“One’s ignorant about those things or just gets too busy to bother,” he said. “Besides, I found my good life my own way. But it reminded me that when you signed that contract, you had no opportunities besides whatever mercy farmers gave you.”

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

“They wouldn’t hire people from here. They don’t want it. I never saw white people work alongside us Mexicans. White people have another mentality, different expectations. They think different from someone from the rancho.”

“They want easy jobs,” my dad joked.

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

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