by Ray Suarez
In the late 1940s, Antonio Nunez had the dream. He thought he would work five or six years in the United States and build a house back home in Jalisco state for his mother. He signed on as a bracero to work in Brawley, California, in the hot, dry, irrigated farmland east of San Diego. Nunez remembers the physicals. “We undressed; we took off all of our clothes. And later, there was a doctor.
“Here he put his fingers like so”—he motions to his genitals—“to see that we didn’t have hernias.” Even more intrusive inspections were made, said Nunez, “to see that it wasn’t bad, that I didn’t bring infections.”
Like cattle, braceros were fumigated in clouds of DDT to make sure they didn’t bring insect pests from Mexico. The workers demonstrated that they really were laborers by showing the calluses on their hands. “We were obligated to work every day. Sunday didn’t exist.” Nunez remembered the hard work in the cotton fields, ten hours a day: “It is tough because the sack, the bag, is long. Cotton is very light and to fill a bag to a hundred kilos [220 pounds] you need a great deal of strength.”
If the searing heat of the Southern California deserts didn’t get them, and if they didn’t collapse under the weight of an enormous bag of cotton bolls, picking was hell on the workers’ hands. “The cotton buds have like five corners. One has to grab the boll and pull it out. But when holding the cotton, the pricks cut you. You bleed from the spikes. Oh, it was terrible!”
The work was hard. The conditions were awful. The pay was lousy. For Nunez and so many other braceros, the work offered opportunities unavailable back home. “When we began to come to America, it changed our lives. We completely changed, because I could buy things, like corn. I would go and buy a money order to send money to Mexico to my mother. I sent almost all of it.”
Multiply Nunez’s story and the effect his remittances had on his family by tens of thousands. In the early 1950s, two hundred thousand braceros came to the United States each year. More and more Mexican families knew firsthand, or from a close relative, that crossing the border changed lives. At the same time Latinos already in the United States wondered about the changes so many new arrivals would bring to the fields.
That GI Forum publication, “What Price Wetbacks?” is a clue. Wetback was, and still is, a derisive term for undocumented border crossers, with the implication being that they had waded or swum across the Rio Grande. Published by a group of World War II veterans, led by a Mexican immigrant, “What Price Wetbacks?” threatened a future America inundated with illiterate, desperate, even criminal foreigners.
Faced with a choice, as Garcia saw it, between the quality of life and economic well-being of Mexicans in Texas and those back in Mexico, he chose Mexican-Americans. The Bracero Program would continue for another decade, to the relief of Antonio Nunez. “The Bracero Program was initiated for the sake of America and for the good of Mexico—because it was very good for Mexico. If I had never had it, I could not buy pants down in Mexico!”
Through the wartime labor shortages and into the postwar boom, agricultural workers came north from Mexico under the Bracero Program. Dr. Garcia and the American GI Forum came to oppose the widespread use of imported labor, even publishing a book called, “What Price Wetbacks?” to oppose the extension of the Bracero Program. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Mexican workers arrive by train in Stockton, California. What began as a stopgap program to supply the U.S. war effort with both draftees and low-cost food, the Bracero Program did not stop when the soldiers came home. Reliance on Mexican labor only deepened on American farms in the postwar years. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Nunez’s employers sponsored his permanent residency—one of the estimated 350,000 people who eventually shifted from bracero to immigrant. Nunez eventually became a citizen as well, not an outcome publicly contemplated when the first workers came in 1942. All in all, Nunez sounds like a guy who thinks he’s done all right by America, and is sure America has done well by him. “There are many people who feel bad to say they were a bracero. No! That is something to be proud of, and I am very proud. Just as I am proud to have been able to become a citizen.
“Yes, I love this country very much. Right now I tell myself, ‘I begin to live when I came to America.’”
Imagine a country in frantic motion. Millions of servicemen and -women had come home. Hundreds of thousands of couples forced to postpone weddings and childbirths got busy setting up households. Servicemen leaving active duty far from their hometowns decided to stay where they were released from active duty—in San Francisco or New York, for instance—rather than heading home to a small town in the South or the Great Plains. Populations of new people in new places swelled.
The Census Bureau captured this movement beautifully with a population snapshot in 1949. The bureau found twenty-eight million people, or about one out of every five residents of the United States, were living in a different house from the one they had lived in a year earlier. Of the twenty-eight million, nineteen million had moved within a county, four million had changed county residence within a state, another four million had moved from one state to another, and half a million had been living abroad a year earlier. Even with this striking evidence of mobility, census tabulators found the country was slowing down! Even more movement had been observed in the years just after the victory over Japan in 1945.
During the postwar years ever larger numbers of Mexicans crossed the border and went to work without the oversight of the Bracero Program. Estimates by the U.S. Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service ran as high as three million. Walt Edwards, who worked as a Border Patrol agent starting in 1951, told the Christian Science Monitor that if he and other agents made arrests, farmers would call the agency’s regional office in El Paso to complain. “And depending on how politically connected they were, there would be political intervention,” said Edwards. “That is how we got into this mess we are in now.”
Farming families came from rural Mexico and followed the crops and the seasons as migrants in the United States. While urbanizing Mexican-American descendants of earlier migrations struggled to enter the American mainstream, the new arrivals filled shanty towns, got scant education, and often worked themselves into early graves. CREDIT: THE DOLPH BRISCOE CENTER FOR AMERICAN HISTORY, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
Joseph White, a retired twenty-one-year veteran of the Border Patrol, told the Monitor that in the early 1950s, some senior U.S. officials overseeing immigration enforcement “had friends among the ranchers,” and agents “did not dare” arrest their illegal workers.
The Eisenhower administration, struggling to deal with a recession, decided to break up the cozy arrangements that saw increasing numbers of border crossers head to work in the United States. In the summer of 1954, Attorney General Herbert Brownell and INS commissioner Joseph Swing launched “Operation Wetback.” More than a thousand Border Patrol agents, working with state and local police departments, conducted sweeps, raids, and house-to-house searches through factories, farms, and neighborhoods in California and Arizona. In those two states, more than fifty thousand undocumented workers were arrested, and almost half a million more were estimated to have left on their own.
When the operation spread to Texas, more than eighty thousand were arrested, and five to seven hundred thousand were estimated to have headed back to Mexico on their own. To make return to the United States more difficult, trains and buses took deportees deep into Mexico before setting them free. Thousands more were deported on two ships that sailed from the Texas Gulf Coast to Veracruz, five hundred miles to the south.
The last time problems in the labor market and suspicion of foreigners had taken hold this way, the United States deported almost half a million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans back to Mexico. American citizens who had never laid eyes on Mexico were rounded up and suddenly deported, without so much as a hearing. Twenty years later there were employment problems a
gain, and again Mexicans became the scapegoats. Operation Wetback deported more than a million people, among them many American citizens. And this time police and courts ignored the civil liberties of Mexican nationals and U.S. citizens alike.
But the Latinos themselves had changed. This time they had help. This time there were community-based organizations to push back, and a growing sense that the war had earned a voice for the community. And maybe . . . the country had changed a bit too.
Living in the same states, often in the same towns as the newest arrivals, aspiring, Americanizing veterans, like those at the American GI Forum Annual Convention in 1959, exposed a tension that runs through Latino history in the United States. More than any other immigrant group, Latinos have had the experience of long-settled families living in community with brand-new immigrants. CREDIT: TEXAS A&MU-CC
In 1957, Guy Gabaldon, the Pied Piper of Saipan, was profiled on the popular network TV show This Is Your Life. The announcer got the studio audience ready with a breathless and provocative opening. “In a few moments our principal subject will walk through that door and into a This Is Your Life story of violence, of strange gentleness, of killing and compassion, of material poverty and spiritual growth. A story of heroism with such impact you’ll never forget it. Now we’ve arranged for our principal subject to take a unique tour of our NBC studios and he should be coming through that door right now.”
The program host, Ralph Edwards, intercepted the “touring” audience members: “Welcome to the tour. Here’s the tour right here. You are? An ex-marine? And you? And you?
“And what is your name?”
“Guy Gabaldon.”
“Well, Mr. Gabaldon . . . this is your life.”
“Shucks . . .”
Then followed Gabaldon’s story, delivered with the mixture of sentimental schmaltz and patriotic uplift that made This Is Your Life a hit. In detail, wartime comrades described Gabaldon’s capture of fifteen hundred Japanese prisoners. After the ho-hum reaction from the Marine Corps and the Department of the Navy in the hectic final months of the war, Guy Gabaldon was now a national hero.
Yet, in Hollywood’s eyes, not a hero who would be embraced by all Americans. In 1960, Warner Brothers made a movie about Gabaldon, Hell to Eternity. Short and wiry five-foot-four Gabaldon was played by six-foot-one all-American boy Jeffrey Hunter (who would go on to play Jesus in King of Kings). Producers wanted Gabaldon’s heroism. They just weren’t sure they wanted the Mexican-American hero. For that matter, they didn’t want a single Mexican-American actor in the cast, either.
• • •
AFTER A HALF century of massive immigration from Europe from 1870 to 1920, the United States slammed the door shut on immigrants with a rewrite of the immigration laws. Just a few years later came the Great Depression, followed by ten years of devastating worldwide war. By the 1950s, the percentage of Americans born in a foreign country was on the decline. The country had shifted during years of low immigration from a place where immigrants had a big role in the culture—Al Jolson, Irving Berlin, Enrico Caruso—to 1950s America, where the children and grandchildren of immigrants flavored and defined American life—Joe DiMaggio, the actors John Garfield, Kirk Douglas, entertainers like Jimmy Durante, politicians like New York governor Herbert Lehman and Rhode Island’s John Pastore.
As the percentage of foreign-born Americans began to decline, so did many Americans’ intimate, close-in memory of the challenges and struggles in the lives of immigrant people. That only made it easier to look at newcomers from Latin America with no glimmer of familiarity. Threadbare clothing, callused hands, and nutritional diseases provoked no memory of deprivation and hard labor. Latino immigrants, as the mania for assimilation and “Americanism” rose through the 1950s, would get precious little sympathy from people whose own parents and grandparents faced many of the same challenges just a short time ago.
As the Ellis Island generations and their descendants set aside the daily use of German, Italian, Yiddish, and Polish, Spanish speakers came to the United States in greater and greater numbers. As we have seen, since the days before a United States even existed, most Spanish speakers came from Mexico.
The late 1940s saw an enormous number of Latinos arrive from another place. The late 1950s would bring newcomers from yet another place. In the 1960s, they came from a third. The three homelands were Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Each in their own ways would shape Hispanic-American identity and American culture. For this rapidly growing population the term “Mexican” just wouldn’t work. The coming years would create a New World people on American soil that could not have been made back in other hemispheric homelands: Latinos.
Viva Kennedy Clubs represented a convergence of interest perfectly suited to the times. Senator John Kennedy’s (D-MA) campaign saw great possibilities for votes among a heavily immigrant and Roman Catholic ethnic group, and young Latino politicians saw it as a way to begin playing on a national stage. CREDIT: TEXAS A&MU-CC
If standing with a sign was not your style, you could show your support for the Massachusetts senator on your car’s bumper. CREDIT: TEXAS A&MU-CC
West Side Story. On the streets of Manhattan, the recently arrived Puerto Ricans and their street gang, the Sharks, confront the white ethnic, native-born Jets. Shakespeare’s Verona moved to the tenements, with Puerto Ricans and the sons of earlier immigrants the twentieth–century Montagues and Capulets. CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES
I LIKE TO BE
IN AMERICA
BY 1950, Americans were going ahead and doing all the things they had put off for a long time, through Depression and world war:
They got married.
They had kids.
They bought houses.
They moved from center cities, places where many of their families had begun their lives in America, out to just-built places they could now reach easily on the new highways rolling out in every direction.
Latinos were on the move too. They were coming to America in larger numbers, and were moving within the country too, and far beyond the places they had long lived since the Southwest and Florida were parts of the Spanish Empire.
It was a good time to come to America, if you were looking at the country from a cruising altitude of thirty thousand feet. There was strong economic growth and a lot of places hungry for workers. Down on the ground, in Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, in the South Bronx, in Miami, things were a lot more complicated.
In the perennial debates about immigration, legal and illegal, you rarely hear about how hard it is to leave everything you know—family, language, way of life—and jump into a place with almost nothing that is familiar and start to make a new life. Talk to immigrants later on in their lives and you hear the stories they were less anxious to tell, when every day was dominated by the act of getting over, of adapting, of running just to keep up.
Since we revere our immigrant past in ways large and small (our immigrant present is a different matter), we have celebrated the triumphs of immigrant life in our common culture, but only in particular ways. Story after story is canned in a heavy syrup of sweet sentimentality, and built on the foundation of America’s transformative power.
In The Goldbergs, on radio from 1929, and from 1949 to 1956 on television, a Jewish family climbs the American ladder from an apartment building in the Bronx.
In George M. Cohan’s 1922 Broadway hit Little Nellie Kelly, the heroine of the title is pursued by both an Irish laborer and an American millionaire. True love triumphs over the cash, and Nellie, daughter of an Irish-American policeman, stays true to her Irish boyfriend, Jerry Conroy.
In I Remember Mama (1944), the joys and sorrows of the Hanson family from Norway are played out on a street of row houses in San Francisco. The stage play was written by an immigrant from London, John Van Druten, based on a novel by the Norwegian-American Kathryn Forbes.
In Abie’s Irish Rose,
Anne Nichols’s play that opened on Broadway in 1922, which ran for more than five years and spawned two movies and a radio series, tension gives way to harmony as a family of Irish Catholics learns to live with their daughter’s love and marriage to a Jewish boy, and vice versa.
The Jazz Singer (1927) presents the pain and possibility of assimilation, as Al Jolson’s Jakie Rabinowitz, descendant of a long line of Orthodox Jewish cantors, turns away from his father’s insistence that he continue the family tradition and instead “becomes” Jack Robin, vaudeville entertainer.
For more than a half century, wave upon wave of European immigration broke on American shores, and started families up the ladder to assimilation and success in politics, business, and popular culture. The Goldbergs, the Hansons, the Murphys, the Levys, and the Rabinowitzes are all Europeans, or of European stock. Any troubles they might have had after arriving in America were receding in memory. Now they were secure enough in their status as Americans that they could mine it for drama and comedy.
Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III gave America something new to think about.
Desi Arnaz was handsome, talented, and, as time would tell, a smart businessman too. He married the ingenue turned comedienne Lucille Ball, every bit his equal as a performer and businesswoman. The two made television history, and American cultural history as well.
A member of a wealthy and well-connected family, Arnaz grew up in privilege in Cuba, until his family ended up on the wrong side of coup leader Fulgencio Batista and lost everything. Anticipating the loss and turmoil that would come to Cuba’s wealthy in later decades, Arnaz ended up in south Florida. He met Lucille Ball in Southern California during World War II, and the two first became man and wife, then collaborators. Originally, their television show was to feature the couple as the Lopezes, two successful performers who try to balance marriage and career. Later, the premise was rewritten, putting Lucy Ricardo in the home and changing Desi’s Lopez to Enrique “Ricky” Ricardo, bandleader and nightclub owner. The result, in 1951, was I Love Lucy.