the activities and deployment of the Border Patrol it created the impression that a veritable army was being assembled. In order to maintain that impression, “maximum security prevailed throughout the operation … Information concerning exact officer strength and the organization of the units was kept strictly within the ranks of the officers assigned to the operation. Cleverly worded press releases plus an ostentatious display of men created an impression of greater strength than actually existed.” The press was misled into overestimating the size of the actual force. Even those papers hostile to the drive inadvertently helped contribute to the illusion by constantly using such superlatives as “hordes” and “battalions” when writing about small groups of officers.14
And according to General Swing, scare-heading worked. The Border Patrol Management Report claimed that in Texas, 63,000 “illegal aliens” returned to Mexico voluntarily, and in California the number was so great that “it was impossible to count them.”15 And that was before the operation officially began.
On June 9, 1954, Attorney General Herbert Brownell announced that the first deployment of Operation Wetback would launch on June 17 in California and Arizona. The day after the announcement, the Border Patrol set up roadblocks in the two states and began stopping trains and demanding papers of anyone who looked Mexican. That same day, June 10, the governors of both states received letters requesting the cooperation of local law enforcement agencies to assist in the “mass roundups.”16 The locals responded enthusiastically. Get the wets was the order of the day.
In my little town the news spread quickly, and quiet, organized panic reigned among the undocumented and those who remembered earlier deportations. The men gathered in our front yard under a chinaberry tree, sitting on chairs, boxes, and on the ground. The house was too small, it was obvious they didn’t want the kids to overhear, and my mother would have taken a frying pan to the first one who lit a cigarette indoors. The gathered kids knew it was important by their whispering and dour, sometimes angry faces. I remember that this climate of secrecy and fear lasted weeks.
At that first meeting under the chinaberry tree, the group included the few men who had been deported, plus a handful of others who were undocumented or whose wives were undocumented. The deported believed that they had been betrayed in the 1930s by their own compatriots—fingered by Mexicans who wanted their jobs or their house or were repaying insults perceived or real. They could never forget that the Gila County Welfare Board hired Mexicans to bring the news that they had been identified as illegal and warn that the family had best accept “voluntary departure” or else suffer the consequences. It was important, especially to the undocumented, that their status remained a secret lest it all begin again; but they needed help. They turned to the Mine Mill. In 1950 the Congress of Industrial Organizations, better known as the CIO, had expelled the Mine Mill in the heat of postwar anti-communist hysteria. The national leadership of the Mine Mill had been declared communists under the authority of the Internal Security Act, and even some presidents of union locals and regional organizers were subpoenaed and forced to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. When Mine Mill’s leadership and rank and file refused to cooperate, it became clear that the Union’s days were numbered. Roberto Barcon, the president of Local 589 in Miami, and Maclovio Barraza, the regional organizer for the copper strip that spanned southeastern Arizona and western New Mexico, had both been hauled before congressional committees and declared communists. Perhaps that made them pariahs to some, but to my father and to the undocumented that made them trustworthy. A chapter of the League of Latin American Citizens, LULAC, had been active in Miami since 1941, and many of its members and founders were also members of the Mine Mill, but it was LULAC that enthusiastically supported Operation Wetback. The delicate discussion with Barcon and Barraza was how to get the Union’s help without triggering LULAC’s hysterical self-loathing. The answer lay in the Asociación Nacional México-Americana. ANMA was a national organization chartered in a founding convention in Phoenix in 1949 to defend the rights and culture of Mexican working men and women. Its membership was drawn from the progressive unions under attack as leftist and communist, including the Longshoremen, the Furniture Workers Union, the Cannery Workers, the Electrical Workers Union, and of course the Mine Mill. Throughout its short history, ANMA would champion the rights of braceros (though adamantly opposing the Bracero Program) and the rights of the undocumented. Two of the organizers who had attended that founding convention in Phoenix were Barcon and Barraza.
The Union and ANMA set up a network of observers from their locals in Phoenix, Tucson Superior, and Hayden. There were only two roads up the hill. If the Border Patrol or the military were on their way, calls would come directly to the Union office, and the men and their families would have time to disappear into the hills. During this entire period my mother and father imposed strict rules on us: school, church, and home. My friend Fred Barcon, son of Roberto, lived at the very bottom of Davis Canyon where it met Miami’s main thoroughfare, Sullivan Street. He remembers soldiers and patrols on the streets of Miami. My father recalled that there were only a few times they hid the undocumented. Everyone with “papeles,” papers, or temporary residence was required to present themselves at the county courthouse for review. ANMA members and the Union representatives, often one and the same, were vigilant so that no one was unjustly deported.
No one recalls a single deportation or scare-headed departure from Miami during Operation Wetback.
Operation Wetback soon came to an ignoble end. The Border Patrol commissioned Mexican and US ships to transport Texas deportees from Port Isabel, Texas, to Veracruz, Mexico. In September of 1956, during a shipment of human cargo to Veracruz, a riot protesting conditions on board broke out, a mutiny followed, and in the course of events seven men drowned. Not even Mexico’s institutionalized dictatorship could restrain the press. The incident became a major embarrassment to the ruling PRI party, and the international accord was promptly suspended by the Mexican government.
Operation Wetback, the very phrase, still has a certain allure for nativists. The anti-immigrant movement cherishes nostalgically the image of generals in jeeps ordering millions of Mexicans at gunpoint into trucks, buses, rail cars, and naval vessels and pushed deep into Mexico from where they would never return. Evidence of abuse is dismissed with the sophomoric notion that if they hadn’t entered the country illegally they wouldn’t have been abused.
The reality of course was that Operation Wetback was the public relations ploy that kept the country distracted while the Bracero Program was being extended and enlarged. According to Ramos, General Swing’s troops knew “they lacked the manpower to conduct such a widespread operation. What they planned to do was to deluge the southwestern region with advance publicity about the upcoming campaign against ‘illegals.’ … it was hoped that the threat of mass deportation and their increasingly unwelcomed status as ‘invaders’ would serve to pressure many of them into leaving the country voluntarily.”17 The general, confronting what he called the “wetback invasion,”18 swaggered across the southwest, commanding a PR machine that provided a constant onslaught of movie theater newsreels and photos showing thousands of Mexicans lined up listlessly while armed, clean-shaven, light-skinned, uniformed Americans directed them out of the country. The general himself claimed that Operation Wetback had resulted in the departure of 1,300,000 illegal aliens, but some estimates reckon figures of up to 3 million.19
The Bracero Program collapsed from the cumulative weight of abuse on both sides of the border. The Mexican recruiting stations were replete with corruption. The poorest of Mexico’s poor were forced to pay bribes for the privilege of being half-starved in Mexican recruiting centers, paraded naked for perverse “medical examinations,” sprayed with DDT, herded like animals into rail cars, and transported to border towns where the nightmare continued … and that was only on the Mexican side. Ill treatment by farmers and complicit rural sheriffs was the daily bread of braceros. These problems were covered widely, both in the Mexican and US press. Churches and labor unions maintained campaigns of constant criticism, calling for the halt of the program, but no one in officialdom seemingly cared either in Mexico City or Washington.
Organized
