Bonnie Lilienfeld (Collections, Public Relations and Dissemination Coordinator) has been a member of nmAH since 1987 and is currently Vice-President of the Ministry of House and Community Habitat. She has researched, written, lectured, and curated exhibits on the life and labor of slaves, the everyday material culture of the home, consumerism, the American ceramics industry, and the history of the collection at the Smithsonian. As co-curator of NMAH`s recent exhibition, America on the Move, Lilienfeld explored in detail the relationships between politics, communities, and transportation in Chicago. Recent research shows that the program has been controversial in Mexico from the beginning. Mexican employers and local officials feared labor shortages, especially in Mexico`s west-central states, which traditionally sent the majority of migrants north (Jalisco, Guanajuato, Michoacan, Zacatecas). The Catholic Church warned that emigration would break up families and expose braceros to Protestant missionaries and labor camps where drinking, gambling and prostitution flourished. Others regretted the negative image that the departure of the Braceros created for the Mexican nation. The political opposition even used the Braceros exodus as evidence of the failure of government policies, particularly the land reform program implemented by the post-revolutionary government in the 1930s. [56] On the other hand, historians such as Michael Snodgrass and Deborah Cohen show why the program proved popular with so many migrants for whom seasonal work in the United States offered great opportunities. despite the poor conditions to which they were often exposed in the fields and in the camps. They saved money, bought new tools or used trucks, and returned home with new perspectives and a greater sense of dignity.
Social scientists who were doing fieldwork in rural Mexico at the time observed these positive economic and cultural effects of the Bracero migration. [57] The Bracero program was different from the perspective of the participants than from the perspective of its many critics in the United States and Mexico. In the first year, more than one million Mexicans were returned to Mexico; 3.8 million were repatriated after the end of the operation. Criticism of unions and churches found its way to the U.S. Department of Labor when they lamented that the Braceros had a negative impact on American farm workers in the 1950s. In 1955, AFL and IOC spokesmen testified against the program before a congressional committee, pointing to the Labor Department`s lack of enforcement of wage standards. [11] The Department of Labor eventually responded to this criticism and began closing many bracero camps in 1957-1958, they also introduced new minimum wage standards, and in 1959 demanded that American workers recruited by the employment service be entitled to the same wages and benefits as braceros. [12] The end of the Bracero program in 1964 was followed by the rise of the United Agricultural Workers and the subsequent transformation of American migrant workers under the leadership of César Chávez, Gilbert Padilla, and Dolores Huerta. According to Manuel Garcia y Griego, a political scientist and author of The Importation of Mexican Contract Laborers to the United States 1942–1964,[55] the contract work program left “an important legacy for the economy, migration patterns, and politics of the United States and Mexico.” Griego`s article discusses the negotiating positions of both countries, claiming that the Mexican government lost all real bargaining power after 1950.
After the completion of the Bracero program in 1964, with Team A or athletes in temporary employment as an agricultural workforce, the 1965 program aimed to simultaneously address the resulting shortage of agricultural workers and the shortage of summer jobs for youth. [50] More than 18,000 17-year-old high school students have been recruited to work on farms in Texas and California. Only 3,300 of them worked in the fields, and many of them quickly resigned or staged strikes due to poor working conditions, including extreme heat and decrepit housing. [50] The program was cancelled after the first summer. Another difference is the proximity of the Mexican border or not. In the Southwest, employers could easily threaten Braceros with deportation if they knew how easily new Braceros could replace them. In the northwest, however, it has become more difficult to bear the threat of eviction due to the distance and the much higher costs associated with travel. The Braceros of the Northwest could not easily skip their treaties because there was no significant Mexican-American community that would allow them to integrate and not have to return to Mexico, as many of their colleagues in the Southwest did, and also the lack of proximity to the border. [43] The outcome of this meeting was that the United States could ultimately decide how workers would enter the country through reception centers established in various Mexican states and at the U.S. border. In these reception centres, potential braceros had to pass a number of examinations.
The first step in this process required workers to pass a selection at the local level before moving to a regional migrant post where workers had to undergo a series of physical examinations; == References ===== External links ===At the reception centres, workers were inspected by health authorities, sprayed with DDT and then sent to contractors looking for workers. [9] Not only was the payment extremely low, but braceros were often not paid on time. A letter from Howard A. Preston describes the pay problems that many braceros faced: “The difficulty lay mainly in the usual method of calculating piecemeal income after completing a job. As a result, full payment was delayed long after the end of regular payment periods. It was also calculated that the actual working time was not recorded on the daily timesheets and that the payment was sometimes less than 30 cents per hour. On April 9, 1943, the Mexican labor agreement was sanctioned by Congress through Public Law 45, which led to the agreement of a guaranteed minimum wage of 30 cents per hour and “humane treatment” for workers involved in the program. [39] James Halabuk (project leader) is a PhD student at GMU`s Institute of History and Art History. He has completed a teaching area in latin American and Chicano history and is therefore interested in both the digital humanities and the preservation of the Bracero experience. He teaches courses in American history and Latin American history, as well as seminars on imperialism and revolutionary movements. James has received a number of research grants, including a Gilder Lehrman Fellowship in American History.
The agreement was extended by the Migrant Labor Agreement of 1951, which was enacted by Congress as an amendment to the Agricultural Act of 1949 (Public Law 78)[3], which established the official parameters of the Bracero program until its end in 1964. [4] Sharon Leon (co-principal investigator) is Director of Public Projects at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Art History. She received her bachelor`s degree from Georgetown University and her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. His dissertation focused on the reactions of American Catholics to the eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century. His research interests include the study of race and gender in the history of religion and science. His work has been published in Church History and the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. Leon currently directs several online history projects at CHNM, including The Object of History, Historical Thinking Matters, and is co-director of the National History Education Clearinghouse and the Omeka Web Publishing Software project. A major difference between the Northwest and Braceros in the Southwest or other parts of the United States has been the lack of Mexican government labor inspectors. Galarza said: “In 1943, ten Mexican labor inspectors were hired to ensure compliance with treaties across the United States; most were assigned to the southwest and two were responsible for the northwest region. [40] The lack of inspectors made it extremely difficult to monitor wages and working conditions in the Northwest [...].