May 22, 2002
FAST TRACK TO THE PAST
The New Bracero Program in our Future
By David Bacon
BLYTHE, CA
 "I went as a bracero four times.  Each time we got on the
train in Empalme, went all the way to Mexicali [both cities in
Mexico], and from there on busses to El Centro [in California's
Imperial Valley].  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 masks, with tanks on their backs, and they'd fumigate
us from top to bottom.  Supposedly we were flea-bitten and
germ-ridden.
    "Then they'd send us into a huge bunk house, where the
contractors would come from the growers associations in counties like
San Joaquin, Yolo, Sacramento, and Fresno. The 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.'  They
didn't want old people -- just young, strong ones.  And I was young,
so I never had problems getting chosen."
    Rigoberto Garcia, whose memories of his bracero experience
are still fresh, lives with his wife Amelia in a small trailer in the
Palo Verde Valley, one of the lush agricultural basins carved out of
the remorseless southwest desert by the great water projects flowing
from the Colorado River.  Although he's now 68 years old, he still
works picking lemons and grapefruit.  A few of the bracero camps he
remembers still stand on the town's outskirts, but no one has lived
in them for at least twenty years.
    Relics and memories of a long-gone exploitative past?  Not
necessarily.
    The United States still has a program for guest workers in
agriculture, called the H2-A program, much like the bracero program
Garcia remembers.  Although not widely used in California, every day
immigrant farm workers in North Carolina pass through the kind of
mass shapeup he describes.  While the delousing (probably with DDT,
given the era), is no longer a feature, Bruce Goldstein, co-director
of the Farmworker Justice Fund in Washington DC, says 10,000 workers
pass through the state's centers every year.  "It's a similar
process," he says, "where workers are parceled out among growers in a
huge barn." And while the H2-A program only brings in about 40,000 people
a year, out of an estimated 2,500,000 workers in US agriculture, it
may become the centerpiece of a vastly expanded scheme, involving not
just farm labor, but other industries as well.
In the period before the September 11 attacks led to vastly
increased anti-immigrant hysteria, a new program for temporary,
contract workers from Mexico was one element of immigration reform
being negotiated by the governments on both sides of the US/Mexico
border.  The administrations of US President George Bush and Mexican
President Vicente Fox, trying to find a compromise that could pass
through the legislatures of both countries, were contemplating a
tradeoff in which undocumented workers in the US would get some means.              [  Continue..  ]