Thread by @ErikLoomis

This Day in Labor History: August 4, 1942. The United States and Mexico made an agreement to deliver contract Mexican labor to American farmers during World War II. Let's talk about the Bracero Program and why guestworker programs inherently exploit labor.

Mexican-Americans made up an important part of the agricultural labor force in the Southwest long before World War II.

While most of the land the U.S. stole during the Mexican War was not densely inhabited, Mexicans in California, Texas, and especially New Mexico found themselves all of a sudden second-class citizens in their new nation.

Agricultural labor was all many could find within the white supremacist economy of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution sent waves of Mexicans across the U.S. border for the first time in the 1910s.

That was great for American farmers who wanted to pay their labor as little as possible. It also gave them an alternative to the white labor that tended to join the IWW and demand decent pay and living conditions.

But during the 1930s, as whites needed jobs, any job held by a non-white was seen as a betrayal of white supremacy.

John Steinbeck may have movingly told the story of white migrants to the California fields in The Grapes of Wrath, but he almost totally leaves out the history of Mexican labor in those same fields.

During the Great Depression, that labor was forcibly expelled from the Southwest. During the 1930s, over 500,000 Mexicans returned to Mexico, many deported in another American orgy of ethnic cleansing, others by social pressures. Whites took their jobs.

But during World War II, what seemed like good social policy to many whites turned into a disaster because all of a sudden white people could make a lot more money than they could in the fields.

So U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and Mexican President Manuel Avila Camacho agreed to the Bracero Program. Essentially, this provided Mexican labor to American employers through short-term contracts.

When the contract ended, the worker returned to Mexico. Crops are picked, America stays white. By 1945, about 125,000 Mexicans worked under Bracero contracts, not only in agriculture, but for the railroads and in other industries.

Originally the program was to end in 1947 and the railroad program concluded upon the return of soldiers in 1945.

But southwestern farmers, who, due to their power within their relevant states and long distances from the centers of national power, managed yet again to convince the otherwise pro-labor federal government of the New Deal era to facilitate their exploitation of workers.

By 1956, 456,000 Mexicans labored in the fields under Bracero contracts.

Under these contracts, workers effectively had no rights at all. Because they could be employed legally nowhere besides the fields, they worked in near slave conditions. Contracts were only in English and the Mexicans had no idea what they were signing.

Wages were stolen, housing was substandard if even provided (living in chicken coops was common), food was terrible, and complaints resolved by sending workers back to Mexico. It was so bad in Texas that Mexico stopped allowing Braceros to go there.

Allow me to quote the memory of a Bracero over the next few tweets. Rigoberto Garcia Perez: "I went as a bracero four times, but I didn’t like it. We got on the train in Empalme, and went all the way to Mexicali, where we got on busses to the border....

....From there, they took us to El Centro. Thousands of men came every day. Once we got there, they’d send us in groups of two hundred, as naked as we came into the world, into a big room, about sixty feet square.....

.....Then men would come in in masks, with tanks on their backs, and they’d fumigate us from top to bottom. Supposedly we were flea-ridden, germ-ridden. No matter, they just did it.....

....Then quickly, they took a pint of blood from every man. Anyone who was sick wouldn’t pass. Then they’d send us into a huge bunk house, where the contractors would come from the growers associations in counties like San Joaquin County, Yolo , Sacramento, Fresno and so on...

....he heads of the associations would line us up. When they saw someone they didn’t like, they’d say, “You, no.” Others, they’d say, “You, stay.”....

....Usually, they didn’t want people who were old — just young people. Strong ones, right? And I was young, so I never had problems getting chosen. We were hired in El Centro and given our contracts, usually for 45 days.....

.....In Tracy I was with a crew from Juajuapa de Leon, in Oaxaca, and one of those boys died. Something he ate at dinner in the camp wasn’t any good. The kid got food poisoning, but what could we do?....

......We were all worried because he’d died, and what happened to him could happen to any of us. They said they’d left soap on the plates, or something had happened with the dinner, because lots of others got diarrhea. I got diarrhea too. But this boy died."

Nothing about this remembrance is unusual. It was just sheer exploitation of impoverished labor.

It was these sorts of conditions, the everyday exploitation of Mexican labor, that helped motivate the Chicano rights movement in the United States. I

The United Farm Workers built off the treatment of Mexican and Mexican-American labor like that Garcia Perez experienced to create its movement to improve working conditions in the fields.

The Bracero Program ended in 1964. Two things replaced it. First, the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 that provided a legal pathway for immigrants from most of the world to enter the U.S. for the first time since 1924, though Mexicans were exempt from that law.

Second, the establishment of the Border Industrialization Program in 1965. BIP was intended to keep Mexican labor south of the Rio Grande by giving incentives to American companies to cross the river and use cheap Mexican labor.

While capital fled to Mexico, neither increased legal immigration nor BIP came close to filling the employment needs of Mexicans driven from their traditional lands by a complex cluster of factors.

Undocumented migration to the United States grew rapidly in coming decades. This new phase of immigration continued the history of exploitation of Mexican workers by American employers.

Guestworker programs still exist today. And they still exploit workers from poor nations. Many are from Jamaica. Yet, hardly anyone even know these people exist. Check out Cindy Hahamovitch's excellent book on this:

press.princeton.edu/titles/9574.ht…

Put simply, there can be no space for guestworker programs as a "solution" to immigration issues. If you bring in workers and they don't have the right to stay in the United States, you are creating an inherently exploitative situation. And employers love exploitation!

Whatever safeguards are included in such a program, employers will find a way around--especially in agriculture, long perhaps the worst employers in the country. Workers HAVE to have a right to stay in the United States permanently or this is no future for them.

Now, the fact that the Bracero Program thread went up the day after the El Paso white supremacist murders is a coincidence, but it's fitting. White Americans have long freaked out about brown people entering the nation.

The United States stole the northern half of Mexico in an unjust war to expand slavery and then didn't know what to do with the actual people living there. People coming north are entering what is properly Mexico, not the U.S. But they are the ones "invading, not whites.....

The Bracero Program was part and parcel of this white supremacy along the border. The only point of Mexicans was as cheap, exploitable labor. Deport them whenever, let them die of heat exposure, don't house them, make them eat garbage. All of this served white supremacy.

This opinion about people from south of the (current) border has not changed, as our president and his gun-toting white supremacist supporters show us every day and especially yesterday.

Back tomorrow to discuss the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Also, I wrote about the Bracero Program some in my first book, which places it in the context of migratory capital and humans that exist to exploit us wherever companies want to move. Check it out if you like my labor history stuff!

amazon.com/gp/product/162…