The Bracero Program was the largest foreign worker program in United States history, importing 4.6 million Mexican farm workers from 1942–1964 through a series of bilateral agreements between the U.S. and Mexico.¹ In 1941 Arizona cotton growers requested a suspension of the ban on foreign contract workers, claiming that war manufacturing was creating a critical labor shortage.² The AFL and CIO opposed the program from the start because of fears that it would lower the wages of American workers.³ Historians have generally focused analysis of the Bracero Program on its advantages for American growers, the adverse impact on the American labor movement, or the institutional forces that drove the U.S. government to first promote, then abandon the program.⁴ Representations of the braceros themselves are heavily dependent on research done by American labor activists such as Ernesto Galarza, without considering that these reports were produced for American political consumption. The complex motivations of the bracero workers are consequently reduced to an insatiable hunger for American jobs, while their capacity to resist exploitation is minimized.

This essay will focus on braceros in the Arizona cotton fields, making special use of a series of forty-three interviews of Arizona cotton workers who participated in the bracero program.⁵ While this will not allow for a full analysis, it will highlight some of the traditional biases in depictions of the bracero workers. Although many braceros were indeed driven by financial need to work in the United States, many more were motivated by wartime patriotism and feelings of international solidarity. Once in the fields, workers were certainly exploited, but their failure to respond in ways that are familiar to labor historians must be understood in the context of their differing priorities and unique legal status. Braceros are not properly understood as historical agents if they are reduced to passive victimhood.

While the United States government cited a critical wartime labor shortage, the Mexican government sold the Bracero Program to domestic audiences with its own propaganda campaign. Newsreels and editorials suggested that picking crops in the U.S. was as noble and vital to the preservation of democracy as fighting in the trenches.⁶ Decades later, this is still how some former braceros saw their role.

We came to America to fight, to fight hunger. We fought, not with weapons, but with our arms. That’s why we came, to feed these people and send food to those who were fighting. How can you fight with weapons but no materiel? They had no money. We came to lift up this country, five million people. Do you realize how many people came here to support the United States? And we were also a part of the wars that were happening, because with our work they didn’t have to worry that their wives and children had enough to eat.⁷

As the press in both Mexico and the United States became more concerned with the abuses of the system, this heroism was forgotten. The bracero became transformed into a perpetual victim who would do anything for money.⁸ But a popular Mexican corrido, or folk song, preserved the “fighting bracero”: “I am a Mexican bracero / I have come to work / For this sister country / That has called me. / They ask for arms / To substitute / Those who are fighting / Without fear of dying.⁹”

If not all braceros were answering their nation’s call to war, most were of military age. Of the 43 interviewees studied, the median age was twenty and only one was over thirty. Miguel Jáquez López recalled, “A man of fifty was rare at that time, it was only young people like myself.¹⁰” Some, like Elías Espino, had just gotten out of the military and wanted to see new things before settling down.¹¹ Several went with brothers or close friends. José Solano’s parents objected to his going, but eventually agreed to give him the money he needed. He was frustrated because he had never left his small village and wanted to see other places.¹² Gregorio Flores felt like a child living in his parents’ home and wanted a chance to “eat at the table.”¹³ José Hernández enlisted on a dare.¹⁴ For many young men it was a chance to challenge themselves and experience freedom not available at home. One man reminisced, “it was beautiful because we were working and we were young. We were going to the movies, to church, to eat at a restaurant—little things like that.¹⁵”

In contrast to the press accounts that decried low wages, poor housing, and long hours, the single greatest source of complaint from the braceros themselves was the food.¹⁶ This baffled government inspectors, one of whom suggested that perhaps “complaints about food were not actually basic complaints, but that the food question was brought up as a front for some other issue, such as lack of employment, differences with employers and supervisors, dislike of the type of work, and so on.¹⁷” While this may have some validity, food continued to be the top concern among interviewees over four decades later, according to the interviews analyzed for this paper. Studies found that workers were satisfied with the quantity of food, but resented getting up at 4 AM for breakfast, bag lunches, and especially cold sandwiches.¹⁸ Workers staged protests ranging from scattering their food across the field to marching to the road and stopping cars.¹⁹ This created a minor diplomatic crisis. The U.S. government requested that Mexico permit some braceros to work as cooks, to alleviate the shortage of kitchen workers who were familiar with Mexican food.²⁰ It was a welcome opportunity for some workers, such as José Guadalupe, who discovered many new recipes and eventually became a cook at a restaurant in Austin, Texas after returning to the United States.²¹ Failure to appreciate the significance that food held for the braceros is symptomatic of a general tendency to ignore the expressed preferences of the braceros themselves in favor of an American normative framework that excluded their experience.

The influence that Mexican peasants exerted on their government, which represented them in negotiations, is also neglected. Richard Craig claims that “the sociopsychological milieu in which the average Mexican peasant was reared prepared him ideally for his role as the servile, hard-working, seldom complaining, perpetually polite bracero.”²² Yet three pages later he commends the wisdom of Mexican officials in using the program as a “safety valve,” since “seizures of haciendas, mass squatter movements, riots, and occasional premeditated murders characterized Mexico’s sporadically violent rural populace.”²³ The workers are portrayed as naturally subservient, except that sometimes they are violently revolutionary. In Mexico as in the U.S., Mexican workers are interpreted as docile victims of persecution, despite ample and obvious evidence of effective resistance.

Popular discourse devalued the skill and cultural perspective of Mexican workers and presented the bracero as the helpless victim of extreme poverty, left with work that nobody else wanted. Opponents of the program chastised growers for exploiting misery, complaining that “because there is not enough misfortune at home, we rely on misfortune abroad to replenish the supply.”²⁴ In Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State, Linda and Theo Majka dismiss the braceros as having “few of the characteristics of a free agricultural proletariat.”²⁵ Growers responded by insisting that braceros took work that nobody else would do: “Cotton is a slave crop, nobody is going to pick it that doesn’t have to… the Mexican is about the only reservoir of labor that we know of that really wants to pick cotton, because he gets more money than he ever saw in his life before, or ever expected to see.²⁶”

But to fully understand braceros as workers in their own right, the historian must consider the knowledge and experience that they brought to their work and the goals that they sought to achieve. Laureano Martínez, for example, was proud to be a bracero and would gladly do it over again. He learned new styles of dress and broadened his horizons. But ultimately, like most braceros, he was more comfortable living in Mexico, where he lives now with his wife and children.²⁷ This is not to suggest that his is “the” typical experience, but neither can the bracero experience as a whole be reduced to one of helpless oppression doing work that nobody else wanted. The bracero cannot be defined in relation to the work that Americans were willing to do, the pay that they expected to receive, or the resistance strategies that they employed; as a worker, he must be evaluated on his own terms.