to the Salt River Valley with promises of good wages, steady work, and money to return to Mexico when the war ended. The Growers routinely violated their contractual obligations. They also recruited more workers than were needed for the harvest, forcing wages downward. Some even set up company stores and forced workers to purchase from them. When the war ended and recession ensued, the growers claimed poverty and simply abandoned the workers. Ten thousand Mexican workers were left penniless and near starvation surrounding Phoenix, a city whose official population in 1920 was only 29,053. Under pressure from the Mexican and American governments, the Growers reached a new accord promising to pay the workers their overdue wages and train fares to Mexico. The Growers then refused to comply with the contract. They were, after all, only Mexicans. The Mexican government was forced to launch a welfare program for the workers and pay their train fares.7
The Bracero Program began with another act of gall and shameless greed by Arizona growers. In July of 1941, the Farm Bureau Federation of Arizona made a formal request of the United States Employment Service to import 18,000 Mexican contract workers. Though the request was denied, it initiated a discussion within the Farm Security Administration on the shortage of harvest labor. As a consequence of Arizona’s petition, a formal request was made to the Mexican government by the Roosevelt Administration for a major guest-worker program to meet wartime shortages. Mexico’s initial resistance was overcome by appropriate assurances. The opposition of organized labor in the US was ignored, and the bloody flag of war was waved to ensure approval in both countries. The wartime emergency program would outlast World War II and the Korean War and be on hand to greet the Vietnam War.8 Though it was the circumstance of war that supplied growers with the Mexican contract labor they desired, these employers had their own reasoning for wanting Mexicans in the field. Americans, they claimed, lacked the Mexicans’ skill, stamina, dependability, and natural proclivity for stoop labor. Mexicans were built by the Lord to be perfect beasts of burden, their stature was close to the ground and they could remain stooped for hours without ill effect. They were accustomed to the hot, arid climate of Arizona and California, they were honest, and they were cheap. By the way, according to the farm industry, Americans are still fat-fingered, incompetent weaklings, too clumsy to pick fruit, and Mexicans are still hardworking, stooped, honest, and cheap.
The response by Mexican workers eager to apply astonished the Mexican government. Initially it opened a single recruitment center in Mexico City. It became a Mecca for thousands upon thousands of workers seeking work in the United States. Mexico City estimated that its population increased by 50,000 because of the center. Lacking the abi9lity to feed clothe or house the human wave that confronted it the government quickly changed course and opened centers throughout the country and far from the seat of government.9
Allegations that the international agreement was being violated came quickly. One stipulation was that braceros be paid the prevailing wage. But flooding a farming area with desperate contract laborers willing to work at poverty wages and in inhumane conditions was bound to push the prevailing wage down, so that the guarantee insisted upon by the Mexican government proved useless. The record of abuse of braceros was dismal by the mid-1950s. Yet the only aggressive response on the part of the Mexican government was to cancel all agreements to place contract workers in the state of Texas immediately after World War II. Stories of inhumane treatment and blatant racism became a fixture in the Mexican press. One newspaper, Mañana, referred to Texans as “Nazis,” who if they weren’t “political partners of the Führer of Germany were nevertheless slaves to the same prejudices.”10 By 1954 there was an unmistakable bracero presence in almost every barrio in the southwest. Anyone recently arrived from Mexico, with or without papers, was suspected of being a bracero or a wetback, and often the terms were interchangeable. By the time I was nine and ten years old the discussion of what to do about braceros was the principal conversation in church socials, the union hall, and my mother’s sewing, gossip, and coffee sessions. The pressure to “Americanize” was strong and constant, and unquestionably the presence of recently arrived Mexicans reinforced the racism that permeated the white world. On the other hand, the examples of wanton abuse of Mexican workers outraged the union men.
Congressional hearings to reconsider the Bracero Program began as early as 1951, but it was clear from the beginning that the Truman Administration and the Congress were simply doing the bidding of the growers.10 The negotiations between Mexico and the United States came to an impasse in the fall of 1953 over Mexico’s insistence that the extension include upward wage adjustments. On January 15, 1954, the United States unilaterally broke the impasse by simply announcing that “illegal entrants” into the US would be provided with emergency agricultural guest-worker status. Emergency status rules required that undocumented workers in the US touch Mexican soil before their adjustment could be complete. At San Ysidro and San Diego, approximately 3,200 men stormed across the border to Mexico and were immediately granted emergency status by the Border Patrol. At Calexico there were wild scenes of Mexican workers being held by one arm by Mexican police and pulled by the other into the United States by the Border Patrol. In the days that followed, growers delivered thousands of undocumented workers to Calexico to be “dried out,” or given special status, and 14,000 braceros whose permits had expired were given extended status. On January 28, Mexico relented and the Bracero Program survived.11 The United States government would remain the chief recruiter and defender of worker abuse for the agricultural industry for the next thirteen years. Historian Juan Ramón García quotes a grower as saying: “We used to buy our slaves, now we rent them from the Government.”12
What did happen in Congress was the successful blending of anti-communist hysteria and national immigration policy. The Internal Security Act of 1950 authorized the prosecution of anyone affiliated with a socialist or communist organization or deemed subversive in any way. The Act would be used to destroy progressive unions like the Mine Mill that championed human rights in the southwest, and to label the few outspoken Latino leaders that rejected Americanization as communists. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 (passed over President Harry Truman’s veto) was an omnibus immigration bill that authorized the denaturalization of immigrants and decreed that any “unnaturalized” alien who had entered the US since 1924 could be summarily deported regardless of family, employment, character, or contribution to the country.
Apparently to counter criticism that the US government was complicit in the mongrelization of America, President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration declared war against the same “wetbacks” they were actively recruiting. Eisenhower chose a former general, Joseph Swing, to lead the task of removing millions of those “wetbacks.” General Swing had been the president’s roommate at West Point, had accompanied General Pershing in the failed “punitive expedition” against Pancho Villa, was a former commander of the 101st Airborne, and had performed distinguished service in the Pacific. Most importantly, he remained a close friend and confidant of the president. General Swing designed a secret military plan code-named “Operation Cloudburst,” calling for 4,000 soldiers to be deployed from Yuma, Arizona. The State Department and the ambassador to Mexico were adamantly opposed to the military solution. Swing himself would later testify that a military solution was “perfectly horrible.”13 Upon retirement from the Army in 1954, Swing was appointed Commissioner of Immigration and quickly named two retired generals as his assistants. “Operation Wetback” would be as close to a military response to the “illegal invasion” as politics and good diplomatic manners permitted.
Operation Wetback was planned with the knowledge and approval of the Mexican government. The State Department worked closely with the Mexicans to make sure that there were adequate facilities for the detention and transportation of the deportees deep into Mexico. There was little coverage by the Mexican press of the mass roundups. I assume that the Mexican government, still fully capable of controlling the press, made sure that the citizenry was not outraged by the coverage.
General Swing, on the other hand, adopted the public relations technique used so effectively in the repatriations of the 1930s, “scare-heading.” The most important scholar of the program, Juan Ramón García, writes,
The
