‘Bittersweet Harvest’ traces bracero labor program
The Holocaust Museum of Houston is opening its first bilingual English-Spanish exhibition, showcasing the history of a guestworkers program that allowed the United States to maintain its agricultural production during World War II but at high human costs for the Mexican labor, particularly in Texas.
The exhibition, entitled “Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program 19421964,” continues through May 14.
Bracero, which means arms or labor force in Spanish, is the popular name given to the Emergency Farm Labor Program between the countries, signed in 1942.
It allowed U.S. employers to contract Mexican labor for agriculture and railroad jobs through the program to replace American workers moving to other, better-paid industries that were booming during World War II.
The exhibit was originally organized and presented by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and has been presented in several cities across the country.
It features 15 freestanding banners highlighting photographs by Leonard Nadel, a photographer who documented the harsh conditions of bracero workers in 1956 to expose employers’ violations and improve their living conditions, the museum indicated.
With the exhibit, “We wanted the public to know more about this program, the men that worked in agriculture during those times and how it shaped the policy and the social landscape in the United States,” said Steve Velasquez, an associate curator at the Museum of American History.
The Holocaust Museum added local elements to the exhibit, including short documentaries about braceros and their descendants from Houston.
Connecting to present
“This story is not taught in our schools,” said Michelle Tovar, who’s in charge of the museum’s Spanish outreach and Latin American initiatives.
She added that the exhibit “allows people to understand and make connections between our current and past histories as it shows the discrimination and the prejudices that these men went through during that period.”
Although Mexico and the U.S. signed an agreement establishing decent payment and working and living conditions, they were violated by employers nationwide, particularly in Texas.
Initially, Mexico decided its nationals were not going to be sent as braceros to Texas; the state had a bad reputation for its treatment of Mexicans already working there as undocumented laborers. So Texas didn’t participate in the program until 1948, six years after it started in California and the rest of the country.
Jesús Jessy Esparza, a professor of history at Texas Southern University, says bracero workers were “overworked, underpaid and were viewed as threats to the society.”
These workers were frequently accused of being a burden on the economy, Esparza said, and were even viewed as potential spies during wartime. At the end of the program, in 1964, a U.S. initiative called Operation Wetback deported millions of braceros who were still under contract or had overstayed their work periods.
The Holocaust Museum is particularly relevant, Esparza said, “when we see this kind of trend happening today in the country.”
Esparza, along with three students from the TSU DigitalStory program, has produced short documentaries about local braceros and their families for the museum’s oral history program.