 There's history here! And here. There's history there! History is everywhere! Thank you so much for coming to come and see this presentation today and thank you very much Larry, that was very kind. Hopefully this is up to the standard that he's set this up to be and hopefully you guys enjoy this topic as much as I do. I have spent a couple years now researching the Bracero program specifically in Southern Oregon and there's just, there's so much to know, so much to learn that I still don't know at all. But just my disclaimer at the beginning is in an hour I can't go over all of the things that I think are the most interesting or the most important about this program. So what I need to ask afterward to seek out more information. So migrant labor, especially foreign migrant labor, is an especially contentious topic in today's political and diplomatic environment. Hence this topic's timeliness. Or I could say timelessness because this is a topic, the idea of foreign labor in the United States that has been going on since the beginning of our nation. So what I'm here to talk to you about today is a brief period. It's only 22 years but it is neither the first nor the last such program where broad issues involving international diplomacy came into play to manipulate labor markets and agricultural economies in the United States. The Bracero program brings complicated themes such as race, ethnicity, nationality and associations of foreigners, especially Mexicans with criminality based on unfounded yet pervasive stereotypes. In Jackson County, our community and the basis for this case study of the program itself, I will show you all of these identifiers and how them in addition to class played a role in creating an environment distinct from other agricultural regions that utilized Mexican or other foreign labor in the mid-20th century. Specifically Mexican Braceros, which literally means arm men or those who work with their arms. They served as pawns in a power struggle that developed over time between Rogue Valley pair growers incorporated in the Fruit Growers League Association and ordinary working class residents. So the class split here is represented by the growers as the elites and the working class as just that. Growers time and again protected or even advocated for the Braceros to continue working in the Rogue Valley harvesting pairs even against the organized efforts of many residents to put an end to the program based on their belief that foreign labor took jobs away from locals. Doesn't that sound like a familiar theme? So first I want to back up just a little bit. You guys have a brief introduction of me and I've kind of told you about how long I've been researching this program. But the vast majority of my research also came locally with the Southern Oregon Historical Society. What I was able to find are boxes and boxes and boxes of previously untapped resources specifically from the Fruit Growers League that documented the program here and in essence revised the existing scholarship on the program in history because previously other scholars believed that this program ended after 1947. The documents I found here as well as in Corvallis at the archives located with OSU's campus and among other sources show that this program was actually run through the end of the official program in 1964. So in Jackson County the Bracero program can be broken up into six distinct eras and that's kind of how I will format this discussion today. They're characterized by broad trends. The beginning era which is the first I'll discuss is the World War II era and its main theme was sort of propaganda that perpetuated the idea of Mexico as good neighbors with the United States. We were allies in the war and that was able to allow people to overlook a lot of the racial implications and cultural implications associated with Mexico and the United States teaming up together. Over time however the system degenerated into one of exploitation and racialized discrimination against Mexicans and those perceived to be outside of the U.S. national culture. So here are the legal foundations for this program. It's pretty complicated. It wasn't just something called the Bracero program that was used from 1942 to 1964. It actually went through many different and complicated legal manifestations. So the first agreement was just a bi-national agreement between the U.S. and Mexico and it was called the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement, Farm Labor Program Agreement, excuse me. And that was passed on August 4th, 1942. After that a law called Public Law 45 was a more formalized law that detailed specifics for growers in the United States that they needed to provide basic essential commodities for their Mexican laborers such as housing, transportation, food, even workers' compensation insurance and some form of minimum wage. Now these laws, even the ones that followed, weren't necessarily honored to the letter of the law but they did exist as something that growers always had to keep in mind when they were dealing with foreign labor from Mexico. This final law, Public Law 78, which was passed in 1951 was the longest running law as the legal standard for the Bracero program. And that's the one that we start to see as we go through the program that increased a lot of anti-Mexican sentiment in the United States based around this program. And there were other larger themes that were in play as well. So we'll kind of get to that as we go. I wanted to show you that when I'm talking about the Bracero program, it's generally termed this but it is a series of different laws and agreements that regulated this binational cooperation. So the war years at the beginning of the program were characterized by overall positive experiences here in Jackson County. Braceros arrived here for the first time in 1943, so it was the second year of the program. And multicultural consciousness and celebration was a hallmark of this era, especially in celebrations that were community-wide that celebrated Mexican Independence Day, which is September 16th. With chronic labor shortages all across the nation due to the mass exodus of men into the military as well as men and women into war industry, mostly centered in urban areas, the Braceros were in essence a welcome addition to rural and suburban farming communities like Medford. So this is a table for you that I've kind of laid out by state. This shows how many Braceros were used nationwide between 1942 and 47 as well as in 1952. The statistics for the entire program are difficult to get together in one place. But you can see that in the Pacific Northwest, almost 57,000 Braceros came and worked. And in Oregon alone, almost 14,000 in the war years primarily. So it's not an insubstantial number of people coming into the area to work. Most of them came from these regions in Mexico. These are the regions where the processing centers or the recruitment centers existed. So in this agreement, this binational agreement, Mexican prospective Braceros called aspirantes or aspirants would travel to these centers. First, the only one was in Mexico City where the largest, actually the bottom circle is there below the largest one. And after that there was such a, it was so popular and the center was so overrun with aspirantes that they had to open more centers to get more workers to come into the United States. The bureaucratic powers to process all of these people just wasn't there. So if you're wondering why this many people would leave their homes and their families and run off to distant recruitment centers to come and work in the United States, the typical farm wages in Mexico at this time were between six and eight cents an hour. In the United States, the wages were still quite low but they were about 30 cents an hour. So that represents a major possibility for earning income to remit home to families who were struggling otherwise. The other factor that was a major motivator was that housing, food and healthcare were not guaranteed at home for these men. But here, coming to work with the Bracero program, at least on paper, all of these things were provided and guaranteed. So here we have a letter. I don't expect you to be able to read it, especially not in the back. But this is a letter that is addressed to Camp Prescott, which is current Roxyanne Peak. That was at the old CCC or the Civilian Conservation Corps camp. That's where the first batches of Braceros were housed while they were here. And so this letter is just detailing that the first group of Braceros had arrived. Note that all that was known about them when they arrived was their name and a number that they had been assigned to work. And as I mentioned, this era was characterized by positive propaganda. So United States media as well as governmental officials were sort of selling the program to the American people, selling it to make it more enticing and more acceptable to people who might not otherwise accept a large influx of foreign workers to come and harvest crops in agriculture. So this first attribute, this first one, characterizes what we might recognize as a stereotype of a Mexican field worker. He's smiling, he's got his overalls on, he's very excited to be in the United States. And this is the image that they wanted to portray. This next one is a contingent of Mexican laborers that had arrived in California and they were being taught how to harvest sugar beets by the Anglo man in the center. What the article says in the caption is that they were singing and laughing and talking while they went about their labor. So again, the whole idea was to portray this as a good neighbor. Mexico was helping out the Americans who were in need once we had entered the war. The comparison between soldiers and Braceros even went a little bit further. So this article had, this was another article published October 3rd, 1944. And one of the most poignant quotes that I could pull out of here for you says that mail call for several hundred thousand Mexicans who are helping harvest Oregon's food crops this year is one of the highlights of the day. Just as it is for American soldiers who are far from home. So making it very clear to the American public that these men were also doing the same type of job as soldiers. They weren't fighting, but they were providing the food that fed the soldiers and the other allies in the war. They were working hard far from home just as soldiers did. It again illustrates this idea of positive propaganda. And here's the last one I'll show you of this. This is another example where we're linking iconic features of what we associate with our Americanness to Mexico and with Mexican people during the war years. So this article says that the Mexican national is one of the thousands of neighborly agricultural workers who have toiled in orchards, fields and warehouses helping to harvest huge wartime food crops in the United States. More than 600 nationals assisting with the fruit harvest in this district will celebrate the 134th anniversary of the signing of the Mexican Declaration of Independence Saturday night. And that's one of those celebrations that I mentioned at the very beginning where not only the Braceros that were here but also many members of the community in Medford specifically got together, planned and celebrated el 16 de Septiembre or Mexican Independence Day. So here's just one sample to show you kind of what Medford looked like. This is really the hub of where the Braceros were working. Many of the orchards had their fields located in or around Medford, some in talent and toward Ashland but for the most part in Jackson County the Braceros were going to Medford. And up here if I can step away from the microphone for a moment I'm going to show you what is the Medford Airport or what was the Medford Airport. That is the camp that actually became used by the Braceros each year after 1946. So it's right here. So here's the Medford Airport. Here is where the camp sat right about there. And so this had a good reason for happening. They didn't move the camp for no reason. One evening or I believe it was in the evening but one day in 1946 the cook stove, the kitchen and the mess hall at Camp Prescott burned down. The fire began with the stove in the kitchen and it had oil. And of course we all know what happens when oil lights on fire. It just spirals out of control. So what happened is the rest of the camp was fine except without facilities to cook food. They were no longer in compliance with those standards that had been set with public law 45 at this point in time. So they had to move the Braceros. So after this point in time the Braceros were isolated from the rest of the public with they were living in primarily an industrial area. It was not residential as we recognize it today off of Table Rock Road in between the modern airport and the road as it still stands. So without the war as justification for the use of foreign labor, tensions among migrants, labor unions and seasonal agricultural laborers arose in the valley. Braceros however were not used in this transitional era at least for most of it. Local growers thought the program would end after 1947. And so the valley was not totally insulated from the national debate that was ongoing at a broader level. And so this trend sort of established itself where the whole idea of good neighbors started to disappear. After the war industries that had been in a boom cycle during the war no longer needed those extra workers. And many of the newly unemployed people wandered back home. Women and children also joined the pre-war spheres of influence that they had inhabited. And they weren't wartime icons like the women's land army which some of you may have heard of. And troops of children that had gone around the state harvesting crops were no longer necessary as well. So the disappearance of this need for this chronic labor shortage that was the impetus and the justification for the Braceros program in the first place disappeared. So here is an example. This is a job description for a fruit picker. What growers began to do after the war and after this good neighbor propaganda disappeared was they began to sort of shift the way that they were defining labor in the orchards in order to get the laborers that they wanted. So in this description it talks about how the fruit picking bucket that goes around the neck and shoulders weighed about 45 pounds when full and that they needed to also climb onto ladders and move them. They were 12 to 16 feet tall and they themselves also weighed between 40 and 60 pounds. And so what they're starting to do here is to remove any sort of, what's the word I'm looking for? I guess remove the ability for women and teenagers to work in the pair orchards. They define here in all caps that this is arduous work and that it requires care because if any of you have been around pairs, which I assume many of you have, they are susceptible to stem punctures. They are fragile fruit. They have a very, you have to finesse them in essence. So the growers began to sort of frame labor in orchards as very difficult, very arduous, somewhat dangerous with the use of ladders and lots of weight around the body as well as something that required skill rather than just any old person off the street. So here we have in 1949 the Teamsters Local 962A beginning to oppose the Bracero program. And this is interesting for a couple of reasons. Braceros hadn't come to Jackson County since 1947 so it seems a bit late as well as the 962A branch were not fruit pickers. They worked in the canneries and in the packing houses. And so they didn't work in this area where they were opposing labor from Braceros. The reason for that links to their recent affiliation with the Teamsters International. And so the Teamsters International in a broader sense were in competition for agricultural jobs in different parts of the country. And so it's kind of towing the party line in essence. Unions also weren't alone in their opposition to the use of Braceros. Newspaper accounts from the Rogue Valley demonstrate a market increase from after the war years in explicit racism. In the Rogue Valley, it's a relatively homogenous demographic area. And it especially was then. So at that time racial separation remained significant. Here's one report in particular that I have found that demonstrates this well. On May 29th, 1949, the same year that the Union started to explicitly oppose the Bracero program, a judge in Jackson County handed down a 30-day jail sentence to both Juan Vega Godinez, a Mexican man, and an unnamed white woman for lewd cohabitation. After his release, deportation proceedings ensued for Godinez. This morals charge and the way that the newspaper handled it illustrates an interesting component of race relations in the Rogue Valley at the time. In this and in other cases, authors explicitly outed racial minorities, leading readers to the implicit conclusion that all names lacking and accompanying racial categorization fit within the white racial category. So the author of this article suggested that the woman charged for lewd cohabitation was white by omitting any other sort of definition, and this author characterized her as a formerly respectable mother of two who had breached unspoken racial boundaries. Godinez was simply described as a Mexican laborer. His only real crime then was his nationality or his race. In the article, the woman's status as a mother, paired with the lewd cohabitation charges for living with a Mexican man, suggested that this woman fell from a place of high social status within the community for her actions. And this type of commingling, unlike the multicultural celebrations during the war era that incorporated many members of the community, this type was not tolerated. So even though it may seem like a lot, the number of Bracetos was actually never overwhelming. They never made up the majority of the pickers in the orchards in Jackson County at any one time. This table shows 1943 to 46, and the dark green at the top represents Bracetos. During the war, POWs also had the opportunity to work in orchards, and they did so primarily in 1944 and 45. But the vast majority of people actually harvesting the crops were domestic laborers. This included women and teenagers that lived locally, as well as local residents that were men. It also included domestic migrant workers that traveled the country, much like we associate with different regions, such as Florida and California. Oregon, Washington, Idaho, we also have sort of a yearly cycle of seasonal domestic migrant workers that come for various orchard harvests. So there were really no more than a few hundred of Bracetos here at any one time. Yet they made this major impact in the community while they were here, especially in the discourse that their presence sparked among residents about race, labor, and class. So here's another reason that growers were able to begin justifying the presence of Bracetos to the community at large. For insurance claims in the 50s and 40s, just to make it clear, acts of God were anything that caused a harvest to fail, such as weather, frost, anything of that nature. What is depicted here is a heavy pear drop, resulting from a lack of laborers to pick them in time. So this was an excellent way for growers with their eye on profit to continue to justify the use of Bracetos after that wartime justification had long disappeared. This occurred on August 30th, 1959, at the beginning of the harvest. So this had a severe economic impact for growers, which in turn had an economic impact for Jackson County as a whole. The Bracetos that had actually come for the season had arrived just before the article was published. And so I jumped ahead in years just to show you that this is something that also occurred throughout the entire Braceto program in Jackson County. Periodically, years were afflicted with various issues that caused harvest to be small or to be lost in some way, shape or form. So here we move into an era that I think is the most significant because it is one that contradicts itself in many ways. I mentioned the hostility locally that increased after the war here in the valley, and this reflected a national trend that peaked with what I would consider anti-Mexican hysteria. This is where we begin to see a paradigm shift in the way that Mexicans were treated in the Rogue Valley. This is an excerpt from the Medford male Tribune again from February 26, 1952. And this was from a congressional quiz that was published nationally under the Associated Press or the United Press International. And what it asks among other very innocuous questions is what are wetbacks? So it defines what we know today as a very severe racial slur. So it says that Mexican laborers illegally entering the United States in quest of jobs. The term wetback comes from the fact that many of the border jumpers gain entry by swimming the Rio Grande, which actually is not a fact. That's based on stereotype. But then it discusses a bill to give the immigration service more authority to arrest illegally entered aliens and how it passed in the Senate on February 5. So this article, just the fact that it was published, demonstrates an increase in racialized tension nationwide. And here in the Valley, it was linked to class and labor specifically because really the only population of foreign laborers that was here were the Braceros. And it was only for a short part of the year for the picking season, which runs typically late August to October. So each of these is an excerpt from this era. I had to really be discriminating in my choice of them because there are so many that exist in the early 50s that explicitly use this derogatory term wetback to describe Mexicans in general, not just undocumented Mexican immigrants or migrants, but also Braceros that were here under contract legally, legal immigrants, as well as people of Mexican descent born in the United States. So the culmination of all of this anti-Mexican fervor was something, and this is the official name that the government gave it. It was called Operation Wetback, and it occurred in 1954. During this operation, which was a massive deportation program, approximately 1.3 million Mexicans were quote-unquote repatriated. Among them that included people here with legal contracts, people that were naturalized U.S. citizens and people that were born here. This program, this operation functioned simultaneously with the Bracero program. So as INS agents were going around the country in raids and just catching as many people that appeared to be Mexican in their net, there were also huge numbers of Braceros with their contracts in hand being transported north into the United States. So the official purpose of the program was to curtail undocumented immigration. But in practice, race and racial stereotyping was really a driving force. What we see occurring in the Bracero program at this time is an increase in the bureaucratization of the program. Really a lot of letters, telegrams and other paperwork starts appearing that's going back and forth where people are trying to keep a lot closer eye on the Braceros that were here and that were being transported from region to region. So this letter, while small, is from Earl R. Lovell of the Oregon State Employment Service to William H. Byers of the Oregon Agricultural Association, of which the Fruit Growers League were by now a part. And it says that one of the eight workers whose contracts have been voluntarily terminated has reported to the reception center at Alcentro. Alcentro was the primary reception center used. It's in California, so most Pacific Northwest growers either got their Braceros from the center and then sent them back afterward or they recontracted within the region and eventually passed back through Alcentro. So it also says that our records show that the following worker has not yet been reported as being received at the reception center. Note again that the only information they have on this person is a number that he has been defined by and his name. So there's no photograph, there's no identifying information that might help people actually find this person. And all of these forms, this form ES350 accompanied all of the Braceros back and forth everywhere they went now, these were the manifest lists of workers' contracts that had been terminated or that had expired. And so it also includes their names and it has remarks. So if a person, for example, this didn't happen so much here but it happened a lot in other regions like California, if a Braceros had complained about not receiving the pay he believed he had earned, many times that Braceros would be terminated and sent back immediately and then blacklisted from joining again. So the remarks here, what I noticed in Jackson County is that this, if ever, very rarely happened. At the time it was either a voluntary termination where the Braceros himself said I would like to go home or the contract just expired after about 90 days. So here we have the beginning of debate in the Valley. This debate occurred primarily in the Mail Tribune, in the newspaper as a public forum for residents and sometimes growers to discuss the Braceros program, the presence of Mexican laborers and what that meant. So in the 1950s the Rogue Valley's top three industries, the Braceros program, the presence of Mexican laborers and what that meant. So in the 1950s the Rogue Valley's top three industries, which are still pretty similar today, number one was timber, second was agriculture, bringing in about $14 million annually and a very distant third at about $5 million was tourism. So agriculture really did have a major impact on the local economy here and that illustrates how growers could represent an elite as far as the class system here in the Valley went. So an editorial in the August 10th, 1955 Mail Tribune was significantly longer than this small passage and again I don't expect you to be able to read it but I just wanted to include it to illustrate how much discourse was going on. This represents about a quarter of the actual article. So in a newspaper that is a lot of time and space dedicated to the discussion of why Mexican workers. And so this author who was working for the Mail Tribune and publishing a lot in the 50s, EA, was asking why and starting to come out about what other residents had been saying about how they felt like the growers were hiding something from them, like they were manipulating them in some way and they just didn't understand why. And this excerpt specifically is a response that one grower wrote to a local teacher who had sent him a letter. But what EA was commenting on is that wherever you go in the Valley it is possible to detect an undercurrent of resentment, sometimes half humorous against the fruit growers when the labor problem comes to the fore. So the fruit growers were sort of this faceless group of people who manipulated things in the region. And again, regular residents weren't really sure why or how or what the purpose of all of this was, especially related to braceros coming in each season and working. So what EA advocated was informing the public and not hiding. And that didn't necessarily happen. Thank you. I have to write that down when I get done here. It's really hard in old newspapers to find the actual names for people. Thank you so much. So after the peak of anti-Mexican hysteria after operation went back, which by the way was only about six months long officially, and that was a 1.3 million people moved during that time, the tensions calmed considerably moving into the latter half of the decade, both locally and nationwide. So to place that fervor into context we can kind of look at what else was going on in the country and in the world at the time. The Cold War was ramping up, and McCarthyism was becoming sort of a major component of national discourse and debate. So anybody suspected of being, quote unquote, other was immediately suspect in the eyes of many in the American public, especially those under the sway of the anti-communist crusade. So the McCarran Act, otherwise known as the Internal Security Act of 1950, had sought to protect the United States from un-American or subversive activity by suspected communist agents, sympathizers, or, and here's the key part, aliens that may be susceptible to their influence or control. Hence, undocumented Mexican workers became targets under the act as a catch-all for rounding up and deporting without much public accountability. And this in turn became generalized to all of those who appeared Mexican, based on broad stereotypes, and went hand-in-hand with the Operation Wetback program. Thankfully, that was a short-lived era in this program and in our national history, although it also had a precedent, but that's beyond the scope of today. What began happening in 1956, so just two short years after this major fervor had taken the nation is a few people in the community started to kind of want to work with the Braceros again, and they again sort of realized that, wow, these men are very far from home and their families aren't here, and they don't speak the language, they don't really have the same culture as us, maybe they could use some friends. And so a student minister named William Walker with Medford's First Methodist Church pioneered a civic organization called Amigos Internacional, and it really was a breath of fresh air. So his purpose was to aid and assist Braceros while in the valley. These photos are a group that had volunteered their tools, supplies such as wood, and their time to build benches for the Braceros to sit in the camp, which was pretty spartan in its arrangement. We also start to see Mexicans showing up in photographs in the male Tribune again. So this one called Adios Vamos a México is featuring Braceros on their way home from the Rogue Valley, and that was in 1956 as well on October 9th. One thing to note is that these men are wearing new clothes. The man in the center has a brand new white shirt. It looks very nice. The man on the left, or I guess, yeah, the left for you, is wearing shiny new shoes, and the one on the right looks like he has a nice suitcase and possibly a new hat. This was Carmen for Braceros while they were in the United States, not just locally but nationally. Most of their wages, they were remitting home. So anywhere from 90 to 95% of their wages went straight home, and the rest were spent on items that they could bring home to kind of show off their status while they were here in the United States. So clothes and radios were the top two items purchased by Braceros to bring home with them to show off. Oops. Can you hit the back arrow, please? This doesn't work all the way. Thank you. Okay, so here's another Braceros. His name was Criofuentes Carrillo. He was from Comala. They said Colombia, but it's Colima, Mexico. And this was an early August, or I guess mid-August, 1956. So here we sort of see, it's almost like the nation experienced a temporary amnesia after what had just occurred a couple years previously, because this, as well as the previous photos, sort of mimic what we were seeing in the 1940s with the Braceros while they were here. Yet still, you can read between the lines to see how these photos were framed in order to support and justify the Braceros being here, which suggests some sort of influence from growers in general. He's shown with the packing bag around his neck and shoulders, loading pairs. He's also seen at the top of a ladder topping a tree. So again, this is the work that growers had continued to illustrate as being very arduous labor, heavy work, and also requiring care. And here's another one, Nicola Saldana Sandoval, who I had to include because he is our number one source from the Braceros perspective that we can look at from Jackson County to figure out what conditions were actually like here for them. He provided, thankfully, his oral history to the Braceros History Archive Project. There's only a handful that actually contracted in parts of Oregon, but Sandoval was here in Jackson County and he spoke of his time here very well. He also went into the Willamette Valley and picked cherries, and then he was in Arkansas dealing with corn and other more row crops while he was there. So he really got a broad perspective in his time in the United States working in these very different areas. And so really, when many Braceros by 1956 in California were speaking up about poor living conditions, theft of wages, abuse by foremen and growers, his only major complaint from his time in Jackson County was that every day for lunch it was sandwiches and it was, so that suggests something positive about the Braceros being here as far as the relations that they had with residents in the late 50s. But still, growers continued to every single year talk about this chronic labor shortage. So now World War II was long gone. The Korean War was a brief justification for increased labor again, but by 1959, that was no longer a concern either. So still, growers found that way by manipulating the laborers that they would accept in the orchards each year to continue justifying their presence for the season. So on August 31st, 1959, 211 Braceros arrived via train to help harvest the pears. And the newspaper really was siding with the growers here in justifying that need. They're showing the Braceros disembarking from their train and ready to go to work. So this sort of moves us into the second to last era of the program here. And I term it institutionalization because by this point, Braceros from late August to October were a regular feature of life for Jackson County residents. If you were associated with agriculture at all or worked in the fields or knew somebody who did, very likely from what I've talked to residents who are long-term residents, you would have seen or heard of the Braceros in some way, shape or form. The other thing nationally that happened in 1960 was that on Thanksgiving Day, Edward R. Murrow came out with his very damning expose on migrant labor in the United States called Harvest of Shame. And he purposely juxtaposed the abject poverty that American U.S. citizen migrant laborers lived and worked in by premiering this on Thanksgiving Day because he wanted people to watch this while they were full from finishing the biggest feast of their year. So he could demonstrate that all of the people that provided that food did not enjoy such feasts. So this, Edward R. Murrow was a major figure in United States media in 1960 and what it did is it really brought migrant labor, agricultural labor and the plight of these people at the very, very bottom of the labor hierarchy into the fore of the American public's perceptions of what was happening in the country. So after this, we see a couple years of the status quo and then ultimately this, along with a couple of other very iconic nationwide events caused the program to come to its end shortly after. But in the Valley, growers had created a very clearly articulated explanation for why Braceros were preferred above all other laborers. And they exercised their lobbying power not just here but nationwide. The Fruit Growers League and the Oregon Agricultural Association sent representatives to Washington D.C. each year to lobby in front of Congress with other growers to continue this program. The other thing they did is that they described domestic migrant workers, those highlighted by Murrow's program, as unreliable, winos, incompetent, lazy saying that they would never stay for the harvest and they would never do a good day's work. So they really started to degrade domestic migrants in order to continue justifying the presence of Braceros. Because by this point in time, the state was coming back to the growers here and saying, well, we actually do have the numbers. But there are people who are willing to do the job for the wages you're offered and who are available. And the growers had to find a way to make that surplus of labor turn into a shortage. So another person who is a scholar that writes on the Bracero program wrote that Braceros were accessible, deportable, and racialized as working mules. Throughout much of the United States, this was the case. Especially in California and the Southwest, areas very close to the border that had a lot of large agricultural regions where growers really did represent the elite and they exercised wide latitude in controlling and manipulating the labor markets. Yeah. That's a good question. So was there a difference in wages between domestic migrants and the Braceros? On paper, no. In the valley? It depends. In the valley here, they use piecework for much of the Bracero program. So the faster you pick, the more you pick, the more you make. In areas like California, Braceros, or especially undocumented migrants who were also being used, they would have made the most exploitable. They had no legal recourse. They couldn't go to the police and say it was because they were undocumented. Braceros had the language barrier going against them and also cultural differences. They were also scared of being deported for speaking up. So they also had something going against them for fighting against the wages they were being paid. Domestic migrants had a little bit more recourse. They were more familiar with the standards that were in place for wages and they were U.S. citizens, so they didn't have anything to fear with reporting something to the police. But in many areas, not necessarily here, the police were on the side of the growers. So what we see nationwide is that in agriculture, and this is not just in the mid-20th century, but our nation is very sick in the way that it deals with paying people adequate wages for the work that they're doing. So it really varied not only among groups, but among person to person, and how much was being made. The growers here were aware of all of what was happening. So what they were beginning to do is to make sure that all of their eyes were dotted and their T's were crossed. By this point in time, Public Law 78 was the legal foundation of the program and it maintained that growers needed to provide adequate housing and so county health officials had to inspect the housing at this point in time and if they didn't pass, the Braceros could not come. And that resulted in the growers having to put quite a bit of money into modernizing the facilities that they were housing Braceros in at what is called the Midway Labor Camp. So this is a photo from the mess hall in 1961 and what was expanded and added to the camp over time. And just mind you, think about the 1960s. For the first time, one shower was added. One. They had a bath house, but only one shower. This camp also had a capacity of about 300. It wasn't always full, but Braceros as well as domestic migrants lived there. They also graded and paved the roads going to it and they finally got city sewer hookups in order to have city water rather than something like a well or water brought in. So it took a while, but I must say that compared to other regions, even here the standards were far better than in most other regions. So here's another example of pair pickers I guess working against time. So here is another way to sort of frame the harvest as something that needed to be done with care because it makes very clear here that it's as good pickers like Ariaga are careful in filling their boxes to prevent stem punctures. So again, the whole idea is to present the Braceros as more skilled and as more reliable and better workers overall than anybody else that could be gotten domestically. And this was a calculated effort on the part of growers. But then something happened. On September 17th, 1963 the largest bus train collision in U.S. history occurred near Salinas, California in Chualar. 28 Braceros who were riding in this bus died instantly, 32 total, and many more were injured. Witnesses that were at the scene described it as though a bomb had gone off or like something from war. And the reason that this occurred was, it was stupid, it was completely preventable. Safety standards in transporting Braceros were still very, very low. In 1963 in California humans riding in the backs of trucks were still regarded as less regulated than cattle. So all of these men that were stuffed into the back of a truck were not using seat belts because they were not available. They were not seated. They were standing or sitting with their cutting blades from the day as well as the produce that they had taken out of the fields. And so you can imagine what would happen in this sort of setting if a bus collides, t-boned the truck. So this, while it occurred in one location was not the only such accident. And this, again, just like Harvest of Shame brought to the fore the whole idea that something is going on just where we're not paying attention and something is not right. And so the American public, again, as this made national news, started to kind of stand up and say, why is this happening? Why wasn't this prevented? So here's just another photo while I'm kind of talking because I know it's boring to just look at the green. But what ended up happening was the nationwide discussion about the Bracero program was brought straight into Congress. And so this accident and works from labor union activists such as Ernesto Galarza that had published another damning type work in 1956, Harvest of Shame, and another work that was published just another year later, all of these people started to come to Congress and lobby against the grower's lobbies. This included primarily labor unions and church groups as human rights activists. And so what ended up happening as the program did finally expire on December 31st, 1964. What I've read through the notes with the Fruit Grower's League as this was occurring, and I'll be aware of this accident in California as well, is they were kind of, you would think if the labor was really that necessary they would have been frantic trying to figure out what to do. But then think about the evidence that I've presented you with here where the Braceros were only a couple hundred at a time, yet it requires a couple thousand people to harvest the crops. So they never represented a large number of actual agricultural workers here. And they also, while helpful, were not as necessary or cost-effective as they thought. So the grower's were not as frantic as you would suspect. They kind of just said, well, we had a good run. I guess for 1965 we're going to put out some labor ads and try to get some more domestic workers. And it really had an anticlimactic end in the valley. But still in 1963 there was a related spike in criminal associations with those imagined to be or fitting within the category of Mexican. So in 1963 and in 1962, as the national debate to end the program was again reaching kind of a high point in the male tribune locally, again, people that were of Mexican heritage or that were Mexican workers were sort of outed explicitly in the paper. So a lot of fights occurred at night outside of a bar or fights that were either involving only people that were Mexican workers or they really highlighted the ones that involved Anglos against Mexicans. So again, it's like we go through cycles here where we start with something very good neighborly and then we go into something that's a little bit transitional into a very anti-Mexican era and then it sort of mellows out again. But over time it builds into something else again. So what the program stands for and represents in all is only one part of a very long cycle of agricultural labor, differences in culture, language and nationality between the United States and Mexico and it's something that is not resolved today hence why this topic keeps coming up again and again. So I see that I'm out of time and again I couldn't get into all of the details that I think are particularly interesting with the program but I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you.