One Man’s Working Arms
by Alyssa Marquez
The sun is shining on a vast field. Acres up acres of open land spreading into the horizon from every direction are strewn with little white clouds. A man carrying a large sack off his shoulder stands hunched over amidst bushes of threatening branches and carefully removes the white clouds of cotton from their thorny home. Closely behind hidden by the density of the bushes, shuffles a miniature version of the man. Carrying a small bag formed from a flour sack the boy mimics his father by collecting small clusters of cotton that have conveniently fallen upon earth marked by the man’s footsteps. In the next lane between the bushes, a women donning a sombrero also hunches over the thorny bushes picking cotton. Upon the edge of her cotton sack dragged along the dirt, sits a baby girl not yet old enough to walk happily pulling apart cotton balls and singing like a bee, “bzz, bzz, bzz.” From this field the cotton will leave the thorny branch at the hands of these hard working people and will continue to its processed fate as it is shipped in large bales to various vendors across America’s manufacturing belt in order to be converted into the fabric of America. When the Industrial Revolution traveled across the Atlantic from Great Britain to America, it brought with it the innovative structure of industrial manufacturing and thrust America in to an age of productivity. Wrought with Capitalist fevor, the growing industry turned America into the land of prosperity. Immigrants from all over the world traveled to America seeking better opportunity and the change to begin new prosperous life. No group of immigrants, however, was so easily accessible and so prone to exploitation then America’s neighbors to the south. My grandfather, Alfonso Olivas, came into America from Mexico during the 1950’s with the same hopes of million of immigrants before him. However, the Mexican immigrant story is unlike that of most foreign immigrants due to the Mexican-American borders long history of regulation policy beginning in 1868 with the territorial distribution after the Mexican-American war.
The Mexican border has always provided a convenient labor source whenever America needed it; consequently, America’s border regulation policy has continually resembled a revolving door. During the twentieth century the United States would open its border to Mexico when manpower shortages occurred during World War I and World War II then subsequently deport mass numbers of Mexicans during times of Recession. The complex relationship between America and Mexico and its regulatory border policy remains an issue that had increasingly become a crisis due to the influx of “illegal” border crossings. To adequately understand this complex crisis I believe it is necessary to understand the people who risk everything by leaving their home country to come to America. Alfonso’s experience not only resembles thousands of other experiences but it also serves as a paradigm of America’s partial policy in its regulation of the Mexican-American border.
Alfonso’s story begins in Chihuahua, Mexico were he grew up on a cattle ranch farm. A modern day entrepreneur, his father Jose Olivas, owned and leased hundreds of acres in the Sierra Madres Mountains to graze the cattle. He also owned a “bodega” or small store in the nearby village, Chuichupa, which provided groceries and other basic necessities including homemade Dulce de Leche, a traditional caramel like candy. The candy was packaged in sealed plastic wrapping much like the packaging of today. During that time and in that small village with minimal resources it was considered quite an accomplishment. My Uncle Luis recollects how, “one year, he [Jose] showed me the secret. He took plastic sheeting and cut it to fit and he would seal the edges by pressing it against a file or serrated edge and running it over a candle.”(“Jose Olivas”). Inventive and resourceful Jose Olivas ingrained important values into his family and bestowed Alfonso with an industrious work ethic.
Being one of the youngest boys, Alfonso sought out other opportunity when his older siblings took responsibility over the farm and the shop. Having worked as a young boy in the orchards of Colonia Juarez, a small town established by American born Mormon pioneers, picking fruit Alfonso had always aspired to attend the boarding school, which resided there Academia Juarez (see figure 1. appendix). By working his way through the school as a custodian, Alfonso became the only one out of ten children in the Olivas family to receive a High School education. At Academia Juarez Alfonso was introduced to American culture. He played basketball on the schools team (see figure 3.) and learned English as a part of his bilingual education. His education at Academia Juarez would prove to be a vital characteristic resulting in a successful immigration to America. While attending the school, Alfonso also met his future wife and my grandmother, Martha Hernandez. Her family worked for the Mormon’s in the orchard field and often housed boarders who attended the school; Alfonso was one of those boarders. It was love at first sight and after Alfonso graduated from Academia Juarez they were married and began a family.
On August 14, 1942, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mexican President Manuel Avila Camacho arranged to a bilateral agreement called the Bracero Program which provided the legal immigration of Mexican Workers according to the U.S. agriculture needs for the duration of the war. The program provided exactly what its title suggested; in Spanish the term bracero means “helping arms”. Mexican Americans played a key role in western agriculture and as irrigation systems in the 1950’s brought more acreage into cultivation in the dry west, the demand for seasonal agricultural workers increased (Boyer, 156). News of the Bracero program was broadcast through the radio reaching across Mexico and the young male population responded enthusiastically rushing to contact stations for the opportunity to come to America. Alfonso traveled by train to Juarez, Chihuahua on the border to EL Paso, TX to get to the contact station. There he stood in long lines and wait long hours with hundreds of other young men to go through the selection process. Eventually he was accepted and assigned to Brownsville Texas to work at the Johnson cotton farm during the 1958 harvest season.
It was a difficult decision to make leaving a young wife and a new baby in Mexico, but being able to adequately provide for his family was very important to Alfonso and he was determined to seize the opportunity for a better life while it presented itself. His instincts couldn’t have been more correct, the Bracero Program would end only a few years later. Leaving his new family behind in Mexico, Alfonso traveled to America. Luckily Alfonso did not have to rely on a “Coyoteada” as most workers in the Bracero had in order to enter the United States. The Coyoteada is a system in which Mexican guides help migrants enter the United States for an astounding fee usually between five hundred to a thousand pesos. This was the only option for many workers how had no other means for entering the United States. Alfonso, however, had friends who lived in Brownsville TX that were able to travel over eight hundred miles to the El Paso/Juarez border to pick him up. On the farm Alfonso lived in barracks and shared a room with three other men. The barracks provided the minimal basic requirements, containing two sets of bunk beds and running water. The workers were responsible for providing their own meals and means of cooking. During this time Mr. Johnson helped Alfonso apply for a green card, the United States permanent residency card. Mr. Johnson spent his own money to allow Alfonso to apply in hopes that he would return from Mexico to Brownsville each harvesting season.
For his second season working for the Johnson farm, Alfonso was able to bring his wife Martha with four year old boy, Luis, and one year old baby girl, Socorro from Mexico on visitor’s passes. The family lived together in a shabby one room home that contained a kitchenette. It was adjacent to the men’s barracks. Dedicated to her husband Martha would get up at dawn every morning to prepare breakfast and pack the lunch for Alfonso to take with him to the fields for a long days work. A part of the bilateral agreement that characterized the Bracero program was an employer defined “prevailing wage”, which often times permitted employers to drive wages down. Fortunately Mr. Johnson was a fair man and as part of the Alfonso’ pay, he allowed Alfonso to pick and keep the profits from few acres of land in a corner section of cotton field. As illustrated in to opening image Martha would assist the picking of this land and because there was no where to leave the children except with them the fields became the children’s playground.
In 1960 after the second season the family returned to Colonia Juarez, Mexico and Alfonso choose not to return to the Johnson farm for a third season. Alfonso’s brother, Rodolfo Olivas (see figure 2.), who had been sent to Yuma, Arizona through the Bracero program to work in the citrus orchards, insured Alfonso of better wages and the wonderful weather without tornados. Although Alfonso felt indebted to Mr. Johnson for his assistance and efforts in helping him immigrate, Alfonso put his family above all else and still sought to provide them with a better life. Alfonso moved with his family in 1960 to Yuma, Arizona. That year Martha, Luis, and Socorro were able to apply for United States Permanent Resident Cards, popularly known as Green Cards, and remain as legal residents. Alfonso worked for Mr. Willey’s citrus farms irrigating the citrus orchards and working conditions were better. The work was not as strenuous as the back-breaking work picking cotton. After the Bracero program ended in 1964 due to mounting evidence of the exploitation of workers, Alfonso continued to work and was promoted to foreman in the field. The condition of being the foreman required that Alfonso be on call twenty-four hours a day and would sometimes have to work nights checking on the workers that irrigated the crops, still the position supplied a home for his family and that was worthy enough for Alfonse, whose consistent ambition was to provide for his family.
Yuma, Arizona is a town which exists directly on the border to Mexico and like other border towns represents a paradigm for national conflict. The flow of migrant workers and immigrants from Mexico stimulated rapid growth in Yuma consequently creating tension between the two cultures. During the 1960’s at the height of the segregation issue across the country the Olivas family experienced it for themselves in Yuma, Arizona. At this time Alfonso and his family lived in deserted government housing constructed during World War II. Originally government housing for military families, this development was located just outside the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma. The neighborhood was called “Kaji” Homes and served as home to many low income families including field worker and farm workers, and even some military families who could not be housed on base. Living conditions were less that adequate; the ceilings leaked and there was a cockroach problem. Surrounding the apartments were even condemned and abandoned buildings. Recollecting the stigma of living in these apartments my mother, Socorro Marquez remembers how “the kids at school would make fun of where we lived. They thought only Mexicans and white trash lived there. We used to get off the bus one stop earlier to avoid being seen where we lived” (Personal Interview).
Due to Alfonso strong ideal of family solidarity, he never allowed his family to forget their Mexican heritage. His children were only allowed to speak Spanish in the home, despite the fact that they went to English speaking schools. My mother and her siblings grew up in a very particular circumstance pressures to assimilate while simultaneously attempting to withhold old traditions. As Oscar j. Martinez notes in his book Border People, “Mexican Americans brought up in a predominately Anglo environment face personal situation fraught with ambivalence because of their cultural distance from their Hispanic heritage” (Martinez, 260). Alfonso attempted to hinder that distance by taking the family on trip every summer back to Mexico. Only one generation from life in Mexico, the Olivas children had already become so accustomed to American living that the trips back always proved to be quite a culture shock. It was difficult for the children to go from indoor plumbing in America to outhouses and bathing in a tub filled with water hauled in on buckets from the family well. It seemed that at least one of the children mostly my mother, Socorro, would get sick from either the water or dehydrated from not drinking water. The trip took twelve hours long driving in a car, but entering back into the United States always provided to be the most problematic part of the trip. The wait at the border would be long due to inspections of cars being done by the Mexican “Federales” as well as American Immigration. However, it was not the American Immigration that made it difficult, it was the Mexican “Federales”. Alfonso would have to provide a "mordida" or bribe to the Mexican inspectors so that the family could pass to and from Mexico and not have their belongings confiscated. The family was not smuggling anything illegal, it was simply another opportunity just as the Coyoteada to be exploited by their own countrymen.
In the end Alfonso achieved much more the better wages, he became an American citizen was able to establish a successful life for him and his family in America. Alfonso was successful in the Bracero program due to a combination of: sheer good fortune that he was never subjected to mistreatment at the hand of the inhumane employers and that his own skill with the English language, which allowed him to communicate well and not be subjected to exploitation. The Bracero program did not simply issue successful stories like my grandfathers. The program itself was terminated in 1964 because it had overall reached a level of exploitation that neither America nor Mexico could permit. James D. Cockcroft notes in his book Outlaws in the Promised Land how a presidential commissioned study found that the Bracero program in fact, “contributed to a growing coordination of government and corporate action to increase the profits of US corporations at home and abroad.” The Bracero program allowed exploitation on a mass governmentally supported scale.
The American agriculture and other processes of American manufacturing are built upon the exploitation of cheap labor from Mexico. The mass majority of the individuals who pick crops from every facet of American agriculture come from south of the American border. American corporate industry has become comfortably reliant on this cheap labor; however, the Mexican labor pool is still looked on with disdain from many Americans. Some of these Mexican labor workers will work hard to become Mexican-American citizens, as my grandfather did, but the stigma will wears on unwarranted. Not until America can fill the demand for workers in the agricultural and industrial industry, should we not expect hard working Mexicans to seek better opportunities “El Norte”. Since the end of the Bracero Program America’s border policy has only increased the influx of “illegal” border crossings resulting in thousands of deaths in the sweltering Arizona desert. In Peter Laufer’s provocative book Wetback Nation: The Case for Opening the Mexican-American Border, he states that the University of Houston center for Immigration research reported that there was “well over a thousand undocumented immigrants died trying to cross the border from 1993 to 1996” (18) and those were claimed to be conservative estimates. In this crisis we must find a solution that recognizes our reliance on these individuals and their helpful “brazos”, by providing them with a safer means for entering the United States.
Appendix
Figure 1.
Academia Juarez where Alfonso attended High School.
<"Academia Juárez." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 1 Nov 2006, 02:46 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 5 Nov 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Academia_Ju%C3%A1rez&oldid=84963607>.
Figure 2.
Picture taken around 1960.
From left to right: Rodolfo, Luis (age 4), Socorro (age 2), Alfonso.
“Rodolfo and Alfonso with their 50’s cars”. OlivasAz.com. webmaster: Luis Olivas. <http://www.olivasaz.com/FamilyTree/frameRod%26Al60.html>.
Figure 3.
Alfonso pictured in Basketball uniform
from Academia Juarez
“Alfonso Olivas” OlivasAz.com. webmaster: Luis Olivas.
<http://www.olivasaz.com/FamilyTree/frameAlfonso.html>.
Works Cited Page
Primary Source Material
Marquez, Socorro. Personal Interview. 15 October 2006.
Olivas, Luis. “Jose Olivas” OlivasAZ.com. Webmaster: Luis Olivas. 15 October 2006. <http://www.olivasaz.com/FamilyTree/frameJose.html>.
Olivas, Martha. Personal Interview. 25 September 2006.
Secondary Source Material
Boyer, Paul S. Promises to Keep: the United States Since World War II. 3rd ed. Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
Cockcroft, James D. Outlaws in the Promised Land. New York: Grove Press, 1986.
Laufer, Peter. Wetback Nation: The Case for Opening the Mexican-American Border. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004.
Martinez, Oscar J. The Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1994.