Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

9/26/99 News Report -- Associated Press

CARRAZALITO, Mexico (AP) -- Felipe Lopez's clothing hasn't changed much in
50 years.

As a youthful "bracero" in the 1940s, he wore a straw hat to ward off the
sun and a pair of overalls for long days of fruit-picking and
cotton-pulling in Texas, Arizona and California.

Now 79, the slightly stooped Lopez gets up each morning, slips on his
overalls, plucks his hat from a chair and heads out to work in the peanut
and corn fields of a small farming village outside Irapuato, 170 miles
northwest of Mexico City.

"I do it because I have to," Lopez says, jerking his sunbaked face toward
the five acres he rents in the small community of simple brick-and-cement
houses, along a winding dirt path with potholes almost as big as the pickup
trucks.

More than 2 million braceros like Lopez, who spent years performing
back-breaking labor for U.S. agricultural companies from 1942 to 1964, now
find themselves well past retirement age and back where they started before
crossing the border: no pension plan, no social security, no money.

"I wanted to make a fortune for my old age, but it wasn't to be," said
Sabino Munoz Montesino, 64, sitting on a metal folding chair in the middle
of a spacious but nearly bare living room of cement walls and floors. "Some
were able to save money, but I spent all mine."

Munoz is among the former braceros campaigning to recoup the 10 percent of
their pay that was withheld and put in a now-vanished savings fund by the
Mexican government.

"I can only work for about five more years. Then I'll be too old," he said.

Simon Moyo Vazquez, a 63-year-old grandfather of eight who signed his first
bracero contract in 1957 at age 21, was one of the lucky ones. He not only
supported his sister with the money he earned as a farm laborer =96 80 cents
an hour vs. a dollar a day in Mexico =96 but also saved $3,000, enough to
help pay for his wedding and a new house when he returned. Moyo is now
retired and lives comfortably in Mexico City.

Still, he says, "If there is the chance to return what they took from me,
it would be good for my family to be able to take advantage of it, no?"