Teaching Braceros in History and Song

2010 February 8
by Leah Nahmias
Mexicans and Mexican Americans contributed in many ways to the United States’ war effort during World War II. About 19% of all Mexican Americans signed up for the armed forces; nearly 17,000 Mexican Americans in Los Angeles worked in the area’s shipyards, airfields, and armaments factories. So many Mexican American women helped build ships that people coined the local nickname “Rosita the Riveter.” The bracero program arranged for thousands of agricultural workers to come to the United States. To encourage participation and cooperation, the Office of War Information issued this poster in 1943.  Despite the government’s message of unity, this was around the time of the infamous zoot suit riots, when white workers and sailors in Los Angeles roamed the city attacking Mexican American and African American youths wearing distinctive pachuco clothing.

Mexicans and Mexican Americans contributed in many ways to the United States’ war effort during World War II. About 19% of all Mexican Americans signed up for the armed forces; nearly 17,000 Mexican Americans in Los Angeles worked in the area’s shipyards, airfields, and armaments factories. So many Mexican American women helped build ships that people coined the local nickname “Rosita the Riveter.” The bracero program arranged for thousands of agricultural workers to come to the United States. To encourage participation and cooperation, the Office of War Information issued this poster in 1943. Despite the government’s message of unity, this was around the time of the infamous zoot suit riots, when white workers and sailors in Los Angeles roamed the city attacking Mexican American and African American youths wearing distinctive pachuco clothing.

Alvaro Hernández, the son of an agricultural laborer and teacher from Chihuahua, Mexico, first came to the United States as an undocumented worker at age 14.  His first job was picking cotton in New Mexico.  Though the work was hard, he loved earning dollars to bring back to Mexico.  After several turns as an undocumented worker, he decided to enter the bracero program in 1946.

Mr. Hernández’s story was recorded in an oral history interview for the Bracero Archive in 2003.  He recalls reporting to the central Trocadero in Chihuahua where his and other potential braceros’ hands were checked for callouses to ensure that they were familiar with manual labor.  Before entering the United States, he was stripped naked and doused with powder to prevent the spread of lice.

We recently used Mr. Hernández’s and other bracero oral histories to teach a group of ESL/ELL teachers the history of bracero labor on the United States homefront during World War II.  Though the bracero program lasted until 1964, the day focused on the causes and effects of new groups of workers entering the labor force in the war years.  As with all of our Teaching American History seminars, we presented background information and primary documents, then modeled a classroom activity that engages learners with the sources and content.  On this day teachers worked in groups to write a corrido based on oral histories from the Bracero Archive.  Teachers used one of six translated and excerpted oral histories and followed the basic formulas and rhyme schemes outlined in María Herrera-Sobek’s Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993).  We challenged our teachers to write their corridos in English and at least one other language.

The results were impressive!  Our teachers wrote five different corridos in English, Spanish, Italian, Hindi, and Cantonese.  Here is the same corrido in four languages:

Spanish corridoEnglish corrido

Hindi corridoItalian corrido

Corridos are a rich source for understanding the lives of braceros, as they describe different facets of the bracero experience: border crossing, labor, protest, longing for home, camaraderie with other Mexican laborers.  Corridos are by turns evocative, playful, angry, and mournful.  We presented the “Corrido of the Uprooted Ones” as a primary source to our teachers:

Contractors and truckers/ To me they were all the same./ They were only waiting/ for nationals to cross./ They resembled hungry wolves/ outside their thicket. / We believe they are honorable/ But we don’t know them…/ If someone doesn’t like what I say/ It’s because he wasn’t there./ Let him go as a bracero/ to the United States

Contratistas y troqueros/ Pa’ mi todos son igualies./ Nos más ‘taban esperando/ Que pasaran nacionales./ Parecían lobos hambrientos/ fuera de los matrorrales./ Los creemos con honor/ pero no lo(s) conocemos…/ Si alguno lo toma a mal/ es que no la ha conocido./ Que se vaya a contratar/ A los Estados Unidos

Corridos also offer a different type of source for understanding braceros’ experiences through their own eyes.  Many of the documents that we have from the 1940s were produced by the United States government (photographs, statistics and written reports, ID cards) or by the English-speaking growers who employed them (Spanish-English phrasebooks, newspaper reports).  The rich oral histories we used were not collected until many years later.  These folk songs thus allow us to hear braceros who left us few other contemporary accounts of their experiences.

If you would like to know more about the sources we presented to teachers, the use of corridos, or the other aspects of our seminar of labor on the homefront, do not hesitate to contact me.

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2010 February 9

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