Cultural isolation also meant that the prejudices and fears that may have driven someone to this country could persist unchallenged. Mexico’s violent Cristero Rebellion that raged between 1926 and 1929 was the prism through which many Mexicans who fled during the late 1920s would see each other. They arrived with stories of abuse and atrocities committed by and against devout Catholics. The Catholics believed that the vicious atheism and anti-Catholicism of the Calles era was manipulated by the Jews and the Protestants; these were still among us, and had to be watched. The Protestants, on the other hand, thought the Cristeros were murderous fanatics hiding among the seemingly civilized Catholic congregation, and they had to be watched. And as far as I could tell there were no clandestine Jewish conversos at all, except in the imagination of my grandmother and her devout, aging friends.
El Divino Salvador, the Spanish-language Presbyterian church, was dedicated in 1921. Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament was built in 1917. By the time I was a kid the Mexican Protestants had multiplied and built Methodist, Baptist, and Pentecostal churches. Every month or so, traveling tents full of preachers and healers would make their way up the hill. The Protestants were the minority, and though they seemed not to have a secret handshake they did put on a knowing look when they encountered each other, and they often met in each other’s homes to spread the Gospel along with rumors about Catholics. My mother was a costurera, a seamstress who sewed the dresses for quinceañeras and weddings, especially for the Protestant girls. The Christian ladies would gather in our tiny house, drink coffee, and talk darkly about the guns in the basement of the Catholic church. They all had Catholic friends, but they were sure that hidden amongst them were the ringleaders of the next rebellion. But who were they? That was the subject of much speculation. Theological issues were also passionately debated. The eternal fate of Jerry Lopez was the theological subject for months.
Jerry and Noni Lopez and their beautiful children were faithful members of the Presbyterian Church. Noni was a wonderful piano player, conversant with all the Spanish hymns, who would often be asked to play in the Methodist and Baptist churches as well. She was loved and admired. Jerry drove the beer truck that replenished the supply after payday’s drunken debauchery had left every bar and whorehouse short. Though Jerry did not drink himself, wasn’t he doing the devil’s work by driving that truck? One Saturday morning as he was making his usual deliveries he was slammed into by a mining ore truck and killed. Was he struck down by divine intervention, or was he a good Christian man who tithed each week and worshipped with his family? Would the Lord forgive him? Had he, at least a moment before death, asked for forgiveness? Did he need to be forgiven? Was he eternally damned, or did he sit on God’s right hand? In their Christian zeal, Protestants had thrown Purgatory overboard, so there was no easy answer for the ladies.
Noni had the good sense to pack up the kids and move to Phoenix.
By 1954 most Hispanics in the United States were citizens by virtue of birth. Again, using Hayes-Bautista’s study of California Hispanics as a guide, in 1950 there were 189,800 immigrant Latinos in California and an astounding 819,000 US-born Hispanics. The trend would continue for at least another decade; by 1960 the number of immigrant Hispanics was 282,400, but the number of children born in the US was nearly 1,750,000. The term “Hispanic” had not yet come into use. The term most whites used for Latinos was simply “Mexicans.” The Mexicans, on the other hand, invented hyphens and phrases to describe themselves. “Mexican-American” and “Americans of Mexican descent” were the favorite two. The pressure to “be white,” as assimilation or Americanization were commonly called, was relentless. Perhaps that is why the announcement in 1954 of Operation Wetback and the extension of the Bracero Program so electrified the immigrant community and caused such soul-searching, turmoil, and ultimately deep divisions.
The dual, conflicting programs came at a time when the proportion of foreign-born and thus “illegal” immigration was at a low point, while the goal of Americanization seemed achievable to national organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens and the GI Forum. It was another betrayal. To the generation of immigrants it meant they were coming back—the soldiers, the border patrol, the vigilantes, all riding on the wave of hate that was sure to follow the announcements. The Americanizers, the national Latino organizations, supported Operation Wetback and massive deportations, but they bitterly opposed the Bracero Program. They understood that the continuation of the Bracero Program meant that Mexican culture, from language and music to food, would be replenished by the hundreds of thousands of contract laborers who would stay in the country and the thousands more to be invited each year. George I. Sánchez is often referred to as the dean of Mexican-American scholars and a respected intellectual who reached national prominence with the publication of his history of Mexican Americans, Forgotten People, in 1940. Sánchez, an active member and former director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, captured the fears of the Americanizers in this anguished quote in the New York Times:
No careful distinctions are made between illegal aliens and local citizens of Mexican descent. They are lumped together as ‘‘Mexicans’’ and the characteristics that are observed among the wetbacks are by extension assigned to the local people…. From a cultural standpoint, the influx of a million or more wetbacks a year transforms the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest from an ethnic group which might be assimilated with reasonable facility into what I call a culturally indigestible peninsula of Mexico. The ‘‘wet’’ migration … has set the whole assimilation process back at least twenty years.5
To be fair, most prominent Latino labor leaders opposed the Bracero Program as well. Examples are Ernesto Galarza, a leader in the National Farmworkers Union, an author and a respected social scientist, and Maclovio Barraza, a leading organizer with the Mine Mill; but their opposition was specific to the issue of wages and abuse. The Americanizers, on the other hand, saw a threat to their coveted but elusive welcoming into the white world.
The Bracero Program formally began with an agreement between Mexico and the United States signed on July 23, 1942. The agreement was highly controversial in Mexico. An earlier contract-labor program entered into during World War I had gone badly. When the Great War broke out, growers claimed that the conflict had removed thousands of their workers, and they successfully pressed the US government into adopting a guest-worker program. Assurances that the workers would be given decent accommodation and other guarantees were widely ignored. There were also (apparently unfounded) reports that the contract workers were being pressed into military service against their will. The World War I program was terminated by the Mexican government less than two years after it was launched.6
The Arizona Cotton Growers Association became the cause of the worst scandal in the program’s short history. The Cotton Growers hired a recruiting firm, Nogales Labor Association, to induce workers to come to the Salt River Valley with promises of good wages, steady work, and money to return to Mexico when the war ended. The Growers routinely violated their contractual obligations. They also recruited more workers than were needed for the harvest, forcing wages downward. Some even set up company stores and forced workers to purchase from them. When the war ended and recession ensued, the growers claimed poverty and simply abandoned the workers. Ten thousand Mexican workers were left penniless and near starvation surrounding Phoenix, a city whose official population in 1920 was only 29,053. Under pressure from the Mexican and American governments, the Growers reached a new accord promising to pay the workers their overdue wages and train fares to Mexico. The Growers then refused to comply with the contract. They were, after all, only Mexicans. The Mexican government was forced to launch a welfare program for the workers and pay their train fares.7
The Bracero Program began with another act of gall and shameless greed by Arizona growers. In July of 1941, the Farm Bureau Federation of Arizona made a formal request of the United States Employment Service to import 18,000 Mexican contract workers. Though the request was denied, it initiated a discussion within the Farm Security Administration on the shortage of harvest labor. As a consequence of Arizona’s petition, a formal request was made to the Mexican government by the Roosevelt Administration for a major guest-worker program to meet wartime shortages. Mexico’s initial resistance was overcome by appropriate