Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

9/26/99 News Report -- San Diego Union-Tribune

During World War II, Jose Mendoza left Mexico City and headed north to join
the U.S. Army. But U.S. officials told him they didn't need another
soldier, they needed a janitor -- someone to clean streetcars and trains
transporting wounded soldiers from ports in Los Angeles.

"There was so much blood," Mendoza recalled.

Mendoza was a bracero, one of several hundred thousand workers recruited
from Mexico to ease a labor shortage in America when men went off to
battle. His contract promised that 10 percent of his wages would be placed
in a savings account in Mexico that he could claim when he returned home.

But Mendoza never received his money. Neither did 98 percent of the other
braceros, say the leaders of a movement to reclaim the lost funds.

Now, some 50 years after the money disappeared, former braceros have banded
together to get it back. They believe the Mexican government owes them as
much as $300 million, money that was deducted from their paychecks and
should have been earning interest ever since.

"I'm old," said Mendoza, a 79-year-old Lemon Grove resident. "I don't have
any use for the money now. I just don't want the government to steal from
the people. They should give it to the poor people who need it."

Thousands of former braceros and the widows of others have attended public
meetings in Mexico and Los Angeles, prompting the Mexican government to
investigate the claims.

The government admits the fund existed, but says the deductions were only
made during the first few years of the program, which lasted from 1942-64.
Finding the missing money may be impossible because the bank that held it
no longer exists, said Leonardo Ortiz, deputy press secretary for Mexico's
Foreign Affairs Ministry.

"It's really a strange case," Ortiz said. "Nobody was aware of the
existence of the fund. Nobody knows why the former braceros are raising it
50 years later."

In part, it's because the bracero movement's organizers have an ulterior
motive: undermining attempts by some U.S. politicians and the agricultural
industry to revive a bracero program.

Such a program, its opponents say, would weaken unions and drive down wages
by providing agribusiness with a vast pool of cheap, unorganized labor.

"We hope to first retrieve the monies that belong to the braceros and
secondly let the public know in Mexico and the United States that there is
a better way than a new bracero program to meet the demand for labor here,"
said Ventura Gutierrez, a union activist from the Coachella Valley who is
leading the organizing effort.

'The fine print'

On a recent Sunday morning, about 80 former braceros leaned on canes and
sat on park benches in Tijuana's Teniente Miguel Guerrero Park. In their
wrinkled hands they held yellowed documents and black-and-white photos of
their younger selves on old bracero identification cards.

Gutierrez, general coordinator for Union Sin Fronteras, started the
"bracero redress movement" earlier this year when he came across a copy of
an original contract on the Internet.

Periodically, former braceros had asked him about the possibility of
benefits. Gutierrez thought they were talking about U.S. Social Security --
which some are eligible for -- until he read about the 10 percent deduction
in the fine print.

"I couldn't believe it," Gutierrez said. "I felt so bad that I was sending
them away for all those years."

Since January, he has signed up more than 20,000 former braceros, their
widows and children at meetings in nine Mexican states and the western
United States.

"I told them: 'Thanks to you, the men were able to go off to war in Europe
and Asia. Thanks to you, Hitler was defeated,' " Gutierrez said. "They
jumped up and started crying. They were so happy to tell their stories and
happy someone finally understood what they were talking about."

He has gathered thousands of copies of original documents. Other
organizations of peasant farmers in Mexico and migrant laborer advocacy
groups in the United States have joined the cause.

"The government has an obligation to put that money back in the kitty and
distribute what they owe," Gutierrez said. "When you put money in a savings
account, you can come back in 10 or 20 or 50 years and take that money out."

'Soldiers of the fields'

When the bracero program began in 1942, it was a job to be proud of, said
Salvador Ruiz, 80.

"Braceros," the Spanish word for field hands, were billed as the "food
production front" and "soldiers of the fields," making Mexico's
contribution to the U.S. war effort.

The reality was less than glorious. Some traveled from the interior of
Mexico in packed cattle cars and paid bribes to Mexican authorities to be
chosen for the limited spots, Gutierrez said.

In the United States, they were sprayed with water and chemical cleaners to
sanitize them in a room with hundreds of other men, former braceros said.

Still, the money was better than in Mexico, Ruiz said. From 1942-45, Ruiz
picked lettuce and broccoli, worked in a fish cannery and pruned pear trees
for about 50 cents an hour.

He knows he was bracero No. 43-11, even though his card was stolen long
ago. "I'll never forget that number," he said. "It was the first thing I
ever learned in English."

Ruiz has diabetes, skin cancer and a stomach tumor, which he believes
resulted from being sprayed with pesticides.

"All the time, I felt bad," he said. "My face was covered with it. My eyes
burned. But what was I to do? I preferred to work than to tell the boss."

Ruiz knows how he'll spend his money, if he's able to retrieve it. He'll
finish paying for his burial plot near his National City home. "That's
where I'm going to rest."

Contract disputes

Even after World War II ended, U.S. growers lobbied to continue and even
expand the guest-worker program.

While at the outset, the program was small -- about 256,000 contracts
between 1942 and 1950 -- there were nearly half a million contracts issued
in a single year at its height in 1956.

The program was ended in 1964 when the U.S. government yielded to an outcry
against the workers' dismal working and living conditions and complaints
that they were undermining wages in this country.

By then, 4.6 million bracero contracts had been issued to as many as 2
million men.

Gutierrez estimates less than 2 percent received the money deducted from
their paychecks.

Many farm workers were illiterate and didn't understand the contracts.
Traveling from rural areas to claim the money was difficult.

Ruiz never knew the 10 percent was taken from his check. He said he was
eager to get to work and didn't bother to read the contract.

Mendoza tried to claim his money. "It hasn't arrived yet," he remembered
bank officials saying. He also was in a hurry to get back to the United
States to work, and never pursued it.

Hidden in time

Inundated with phone calls and letters from former braceros and their
supporters, Mexico's Foreign Relations Ministry -- the agency responsible
for workers abroad -- began investigating the disappearance of the money.

"It is a very difficult investigation because we are talking about
something that no one has tried to claim in 50 years," said Miguel Angel
Gonzalez Felix, the ministry's legal adviser.

The bracero program was actually a series of agreements between the United
States and Mexico. The 10 percent was deducted from the paychecks, but only
between 1942 and 1950, Felix said.

That money was placed in the Banco de Credito Agricola, one of several
state-owned banks for rural residents. In the early 1970s, those agencies
were consolidated into one rural development bank, Banrural.

Any records of braceros' savings accounts were transferred to Banrural,
Felix said. Bank officials are scheduled to meet with Gutierrez tomorrow to
discuss their findings.

While Gutierrez remains unconvinced that the deductions stopped in 1950,
U.S. State Department archives support the government's conclusion, said
Manuel Garcia y Griega, a professor of political science at the University
of Texas at Austin and an expert on the bracero program.

The saving accounts were supposed to ensure that the braceros had something
to show for their work abroad. The 10 percent deduction wasn't included in
subsequent agreements precisely because of difficulties in claiming it,
Garcia said.

Whether or not the former braceros get back their money, their movement
could have other political implications, Garcia said.

Exposing past injustices and exploitation of braceros could erode public
and governmental support in Mexico for recent U.S. proposals for new
guest-worker programs.

Last year, a new guest-worker bill was overwhelmingly passed in the Senate,
but President Clinton threatened a veto and it was never voted on in the
House. Some politicians are still pushing for a new proposal.

Without Mexico's cooperation, Garcia said, a new bracero program almost
certainly would fail.

"From the Mexican point of view, support for a guest-worker program is
based on being able to better protect the rights of migrant workers than is
currently the case with undocumented workers," Garcia said. "This calls
that into question."