The vulnerability of the sojourner Mexican workers was not diminished by the fact that many labor contractors themselves were Mexicans. Italian, Greek, Filipino, and labor contractors of other nationalities also held enormous power in the system of sojourner labor recruitment. But in the Southwest, where so many workers were smuggled in illegally, the possibilities for corruption and abuse by contractors probably were greater than in other parts of the country. In his autobiography, Barrio Boy, Ernesto Galarza, a leader of the Chicano movement in the 1960s, told of going to work for a rancher near Sacramento after being hired by a contractor who never discussed working conditions or wages or even how much Galarza would be charged for his meals. The contractor “could fire a man and his family on the spot and make them wait days for their wages.… the worst thing one could do was to ask for fresh water on the job, regardless of the heat of the day; instead of ice water, given freely, the crews were expected to buy sodas at twice the price in town, sold by the contractor himself.”44
The political control of Mexicans was easiest at the border, where the movement back and forth was constant. Even Mexican-American citizens who lived near the border seldom felt enfranchised. In Hidalgo, Starr, Cameron, and Duvall counties, local Anglo political machines that developed in the late nineteenth century effectively controlled the votes of Mexican-Americans. Although political boss rule of European immigrants was developing in the big cities of the Northeast and Midwest, too, with machines usually run not by Anglos but by ethnics themselves who asserted group interests in the name of American rights, Mexican-American politicians on the Texas border tended to follow an older Mexican pattern of exchanging their votes for favors, this time from Anglos.
The most influential of all Anglo-American bosses in south Texas, James Wells, explained that Mexican-Americans asked ranch managers who they should vote for because they were totally dependent on them; ranchers protected their servants and workers with jobs, help with the law, loans, and other favors, and, therefore, expected the peons to vote at their direction as a form of compensation.45 Since most of the Mexican-Americans worked as ranch hands, farm laborers or sharecroppers or small farmers with little expectation of advancement, and most expected to go home someday, it is not surprising that they did not develop an independent ethnic-American political stance.46
The Big Bracero Program
At the beginning of the Second World War, the system of sojourner pluralism in the Southwest seemed about to come to an end. The American Dust Bowl migrants—Okies and others—who contributed about half of all migratory workers in western agriculture in the 1930s, were now entering the armed services or working in expanding defense industries in West Coast cities. Also, unemployment and underemployment in Mexico were relatively low in 1941 and early 1942, and the supply of migratory workers was reduced. Growers asked the federal government to help them procure Mexican workers as was done during the First World War. Mexico, unhappy with the way Americans had handled repatriation in the 1930s, was at first reluctant to supply workers.
After Mexico declared war on the Axis powers, Mexico and the U.S. worked out a new bracero program; an executive agreement signed in July 1942 pledged that workers would not be used to displace American workers or to lower wages and that Mexican workers would receive minimum guarantees on wages and working conditions. Nevertheless, employers found it easy to evade these commitments without much interference. In fact, the bracero program was evidence of the willingness of the U.S. government to subsidize Southwest and California agriculture with cheap labor. Braceros, essentially limited to the agricultural sector, free from the draft, and unable to join unions, cost less than an average of $500 a year each in wartime wages.47 Many employers, especially in Texas, which did not participate in the bracero program, continued to hire Mexican illegal aliens, partly because sophisticated irrigation systems added 7,500,000 acres to the agricultural lands of seventeen western states between 1945 and 1955, stimulating a substantial increase in demand for Mexican workers.
Smuggling aliens became a highly profitable business. Between 1947 and 1955, more than 4,300,000 Mexican nationals were apprehended.48 But the Border Patrol’s enforcement practices varied to meet employer needs. The Immigration Service began a practice known as “drying out,” which involved giving undocumented workers employed by American farmers identification slips, then deporting them, and allowing them to reenter the U.S. legally. The technique was used extensively in 1949, when 87,000 of the 280,000 aliens deported were “dried out,” and in 1950, when 96,000 of 459,000 were allowed to reenter this way.
To employers, the drying-out system was not as reliable as the bracero program, and therefore, at the beginning of the Korean War in 1951, Public Law 78 established a third bracero program in which the Department of Labor became the labor contractor. The new bracero program did not stanch the accelerating flow of illegal aliens. Returning braceros became recruiting agents for growers by recounting the opportunities to earn good money in the U.S. Many illegal aliens were ex-braceros or relatives of braceros. The program, it turned out, was not just a replacement for illegal migration but a stimulus to it.49 The Border Patrol could now vigorously apprehend aliens (875,000 were caught in 1953), while employers could continue to count on large numbers getting across.
The number of illegal aliens alarmed organized labor, which saw illegal aliens increasingly employed in industrial occupations, and also those who saw illegal crossings as a threat to U.S. sovereignty. But labor did not have enough political muscle to gain a law to penalize employers of illegal aliens. When the liberal Senator Paul Douglas (D-Illinois) offered an amendment to the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act to provide such penalties, it was defeated overwhelmingly by a vote of sixty-nine to twelve.50 Congress did make it illegal to harbor an undocumented alien, but specifically provided that employment was not harboring, a provision that became known as the “Texas proviso” in recognition of the benefit it brought to employers in Texas and the Southwest.
The Eisenhower administration launched “Operation Wetback” in June 1954. Special mobile forces of the Immigration and Naturalization Service began sweep operations in California and Texas. Light planes were used to find illegal aliens and to direct ground teams, and transport planes airlifted aliens to staging areas for prompt return to Mexico. Some 1,075,000 undocumented aliens were rounded up, but Operation Wetback was more symbolic than real in dealing with illegal migration. Periodic roundups did not constitute a long-term enforcement strategy. Roundups also led to violations of the civil rights of Mexican-Americans. Thousands of Mexican-American citizens as well as resident aliens were arrested and detained, and some even were deported illegally. Raids took place not just in factories and restaurants, but in apartments and homes, and some Mexicans eligible for naturalization did not apply, afraid they might be deported. Mexican-Americans were stopped on the streets or searched at highway checkpoints and asked to prove their legal right to be in the U.S. Some families were separated when fathers and husbands were deported, many of them American citizens.51
Because of the Texas proviso and the bracero program, employers themselves could tolerate the roundups and summary deportations. (Of the 3,075,000 mojados deported between 1950 and 1955, only 63,000 went through formal deportation proceedings.) Between 1955 and 1959, when an average 430,000 braceros entered annually, braceros were about one-quarter of all the farm workers hired in Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and in 1960 they accounted for 26 percent of the nation’s seasonal agricultural labor force.52 Bracero wages tended to become the norm. Farmers discouraged employment of domestic labor as in the San Joaquin Valley in 1960, where the tomato harvest employed 1,530 braceros for the harvest and only 860 citizens