Mexican Labor and World War II: Braceros in the Pacific Northwest, 1942-1947

Columbia Northwest Classics

Chris Friday, Editor

Columbia Northwest Classics

Columbia Northwest Classics are reprints of important studies about the peoples and places that make up the Pacific Northwest. The series focuses especially on that vast area drained by the Columbia River and its tributaries. Like the plants, animals, and people that have crossed over the watersheds to the east, west, south, and north, Columbia Classics embrace a Pacific Northwest that includes not only Oregon, Washington, and Idaho but also British Columbia, the Yukon, Alaska, and portions of Montana, California, Nevada, and Utah.

Mountain Fever: Historic Conquests of Rainier

by Aubrey Haines

To Fish in Common: The Ethnohistory of

Lummi Indian Salmon Fishing

by Daniel L. Boxberger

Mexican Labor and World War II: Braceros

in the Pacific Northwest, 1942–1947

by Erasmo Gamboa

Mexican Labor & World War II

Braceros in the Pacific Northwest, 1942–1947

ERASMO GAMBOA

With a Foreword by Kevin Allen Leonard

and a New Preface by the Author

For Paula, Gumecindo, and Armando Gamboa

Copyright © 1990 by the University of Texas Press

University of Washington Press paperback edition published in 2000

Foreword by Kevin Allen Leonard and new Preface by the author

copyright © 2000 by the University of Washington Press

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any form or any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gamboa, Erasmo.

Mexican labor and World War II : braceros in the Pacific Northwest, 1942-1947 / by Erasmo Gamboa ; with a foreword by Kevin Allen Leonard and a new preface by the author.

p. cm. – (Columbia Northwest classics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-295-97849-X (alk. paper)

1. Migrant agricultural laborers—Northwest, Pacific—History—20th century. 2. Alien labor, Mexican—Northwest, Pacific—History—20th century.

3. World War, 1939-1945—Manpower—Northwest, Pacific.   I. Title. II.   Series. HD1527.A19G36     1999      99-42805

331.5’44’0896872079—dc21       CIP

The paper in this book is acid-free and recycled from 10 percent post-consumer and at least 50 percent pre-consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Contents

Map: The Pacific Northwest

Photographs follow page 47

Foreword by Kevin Allen Leonard

Preface to the 2000 Paperback Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Agribusiness and Mexican Migration

2. World War II and the Farm Labor Crisis

3. The Bracero Worker

4. Huelgas: Bracero Strikes

5. Bracero Social Life

6. From Braceros to Chicano Farm Migrant Workers

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Foreword to the 2000 Paperback Edition

More than 600,000 people of Hispanic origin—three-quarters of them of Mexican ancestry—lived in the Pacific Northwest states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington in 1997, according to U.S. Bureau of the Census estimates. Although this group accounted for only 6 percent of the region’s population, for several decades the number of Hispanics in the region has increased more rapidly than other segments of the population. According to the 1980 census, about 200,000 Hispanics lived in the Northwest; in 1990 more than 380,000 Hispanics lived in these three states. Hispanics constitute the region’s largest minority group.

The recent and dramatic growth of the Hispanic population in the Pacific Northwest has attracted the attention of many of the region’s residents at the same time that it has obscured the fact that Mexicans and Mexican Americans have lived and worked in the Northwest since the nineteenth century. The dearth of publications about Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in the Northwest also contributes to the continued ignorance of this history. A search of regional university library catalogs yields only a small number of scholarly studies of Mexicans in the Northwest, especially when compared to the voluminous literature on American Indians and, to a lesser extent, Asian Americans in the region.¹

Although both the experiences of Mexicans and their importance to the region’s economy have generally been ignored by historians, Erasmo Gamboa stands out as a notable exception. In addition to Mexican Labor and World War II, since 1973 Gamboa has published articles and anthologies in an effort to make all of the region’s residents aware of the history of Mexicans in the Northwest. For Gamboa, this history has great personal significance. Born in Edinburg, Texas, in 1941, Gamboa came to the Pacific Northwest with his family shortly after World War II. Attracted by opportunities unavailable to many Mexican Americans in Texas, Gamboa’s father brought his family to Independence, Oregon, where he and other family members found work at the Golden Gate Hop Ranch. Gamboa’s family, like thousands of others, moved around the Northwest, following ripening crops through California, Oregon, and Washington. Many of these Mexican American families ended up establishing permanent homes in the Northwest; Gamboa’s family settled in the Yakima Valley of central Washington. Gamboa pursued higher education at the University of Washington, where he earned a B.A. in Spanish literature in 1970, an M.A. in history in 1973, and a Ph.D. in history in 1984.² Mexican Labor and World War II represents Gamboa’s most substantial achievement, in terms of its length and depth. It remains the only published book-length study of the people who came to the region from Mexico under a federally sponsored wartime guest worker initiative known as the bracero program.

This volume examines the operation of the bracero program in the Northwest. As Gamboa points out, more than 20 percent of all Mexican workers (46,954 of 220,640) who came to the United States between 1943 and 1947 were contracted for work in the Pacific Northwest. All other studies of the bracero program, however, have focused exclusively on the southwestern United States. Gamboa’s examination of the program in the Northwest is especially important because he concludes that the experiences of braceros in the region differed significantly from the experiences of Mexican temporary workers in other parts of the United States.

This book is also useful because Gamboa devotes much of his attention to the experiences and actions of braceros themselves. Although Ernesto Galarza’s classic study of the bracero program, Merchants of Labor, included a chapter that explored the discontents of braceros, most of the book examined policy decisions and the operation of the program. Other studies, too, such as Richard Craig’s Bracero Program, have concentrated on policy questions and avoided detailed discussions of the experiences of the Mexican workers.³ Gamboa, however, was clearly influenced by social historians who recognized that even the most oppressed workers have found ways to claim power over their lives and their work. In examining government records and newspapers, Gamboa found that many braceros not only complained about their treatment but also took action to change working and living conditions on Northwest farms. Braceros in the region went on strike on numerous occasions in efforts to increase wages, to eliminate discriminatory wage differentials, and to improve the quality of the food served in the camps.

Gamboa also shows that braceros did not spend all their time working and protesting. They celebrated Mexican holidays such as Independence Day and Cinco de Mayo. These celebrations sometimes offered braceros the opportunity to educate the residents of local communities about the braceros and about Mexican history and culture. Braceros also attended mass, watched Mexican films, took classes, and participated in sports. Some went to nearby towns to socialize. Braceros were men with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and interests. In its examination of the social lives of braceros, this study reflects a growing interest in the leisure-time activities of workers.

Mexican Labor and World War II was well received by other scholars when it was first published in 1990. All of the book’s reviewers recognized Gamboa’s contribution to a topic that had been almost completely ignored.⁴ Nearly a decade later, the book remains valuable in part because it has been joined by so few other book-length studies of braceros, other Mexicans, or Mexican Americans in the Northwest. Readers today, however, may more fully appreciate aspects of Gamboa’s research that received little comment from reviewers. Since the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, for example, there has been increased scholarly attention to resentment of and open hostility toward the federal government in the West. Some scholars have also begun to look more critically at U.S. nationalism during World War II. Although Gamboa did not emphasize these themes as much as he might have if he were writing the book today, they are clearly addressed in Mexican Labor and World War II. As I recently reread the book, I was struck by the degree to which farmers in the Northwest seem to have been much more committed to their profits than to helping the United States to win the war. As Gamboa writes, growers wanted the federal government to provide . . . relief from the labor crisis, but they wanted it on their own terms (43). These farmers emphasized their contribution to the war effort in every public statement, but they adamantly refused to raise wages in order to attract workers. Instead, they used their political power to wring concessions from local, state, and federal officials. The officials agreed to close schools or limit schooling so that children might be enticed to work in the fields, attempted to recruit women workers into a Women’s Land Army, and, finally, imported workers from Mexico so that farmers’ profits would be preserved at the same time as food was produced for both military personnel and civilians. The growers also exerted their considerable political power to ensure that wartime farm labor programs, including the bracero program, would be administered in part by the conservative Extension Service rather than the Farm Security Administration, which growers believed was radical, meaning that it was too sympathetic to the needs and interests of farm workers.

Mexican Labor and World War II also contains provocative information about the importance and meanings of race in a multicultural region.⁵ Gamboa’s thorough discussion of Mexican braceros and his brief treatment of Jamaican workers in the Northwest raise intriguing questions for other students of race and ethnicity in the region to pursue: How did the Mexican braceros perceive themselves? Did they see themselves as white? How did they view other people they encountered in the Northwest? What did they think of the Jamaican workers? How did the Jamaican workers perceive themselves? How did they view the people they encountered in the Northwest? What did they think of Mexican workers?

When Gamboa wrote this monograph, few scholars had begun to explore the ways in which men’s lives have been affected by ideas about gender or the complex relations between gender and race.⁶ Still fewer considered the ways in which mobile male workers might remain connected to families in their emigrant districts or might rely on kith and kin networks in their migrations.⁷ It is a testament to Gamboa’s careful research that the book provides its readers with information that may answer some questions and lead them to ask others. What conclusions might be drawn from the fact that only men were recruited for the bracero program when men, women, and children had all worked in the fields prior to the war? Did the braceros think of their jobs as men’s work? Did the growers think of farm labor as men’s work? Why were women not allowed in the bracero camps? All of these questions could lead to valuable research projects for students of Mexican American and Northwest history.

Finally, although this volume is mostly about the wartime bracero program in the Pacific Northwest, it also helps to explain the growth of the Mexican American population in the region before and after World War II. Gamboa points out that some Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans worked in the Northwest before the war. The book’s final chapter briefly describes the conditions and events that led northwestern growers to abandon the bracero program and look to Mexican Americans as a source of labor. In these years after the war, the families of people such as Erasmo Gamboa planted the roots of contemporary Hispanic communities in the Northwest. Mexican Labor and World War II explains in part why Hispanics have come to play important roles in the Northwest’s economy and society.

Mexican Labor and World War II has become a classic study. It was the first (and at this point in time still is) the only monograph on this important topic. It has introduced its readers to a group of unsung workers who contributed in many ways to the development of the modern Pacific Northwest. With this book, Erasmo Gamboa has also laid a strong foundation upon which other students can build historical interpretations of Mexican Americans’ experiences in the Northwest.

Kevin Allen Leonard

April 2000

Of the handful of books about Mexicans or Mexican Americans in the Northwest, three are collections of essays or documents: The Chicano Experience in the Northwest, ed. Carlos S. Maldonado and Gilberto García (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1995); Voces Hispanas: Hispanic Voices of Idaho, ed. Erasmo Gamboa (Boise: Idaho Commission on Hispanic Affairs and Idaho Humanities Council, 1992); and Nosotros: The Hispanic People of Oregon, ed. Erasmo Gamboa and Carolyn M. Buan (Portland: Oregon Council for the Humanities, 1995). In addition, two case studies of Mexican American migrant farm workers stand out: Richard Baker, Los Dos Mundos: Rural Mexican Americans, Another America (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1995); and Isabel Valle, Fields of Toil: A Migrant Family’s Journey (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1994).

Erasmo Gamboa, A Personal Search for Oregon’s Hispanic History, in Nosotros, 11–13, and vita included in Gamboa, Under the Thumb of Agriculture: Bracero and Mexican American Workers in the Pacific Northwest, 1940-1950 (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1984).

Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Program (Santa Barbara: McNally Loftin, 1964); Richard Craig, The Bracero Program: Interest Groups and Foreign Policy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971).

See the reviews of Mexican Labor and World War II by Camille L. Guerin-Gonzales, Pacific Historical Review 60 (November 1991): 564–65; David G. Gutiérrez, Agricultural History 65 (Fall 1991): 126–128; Dorothy Pierson Kerig, Western Historical Quarterly 22 (November 1991): 491; Hugh T. Lovin, Journal of the West 30 (October 1991): 113–114; and Mary Romero, Oregon Historical Quarterly 92 (Fall 1991): 317–319.

As early as 1986, Richard White glimpsed the possibility that historians who had written about Chicanos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans in the West had begun to sketch the outlines of a new synthesis that might once and for all displace Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier hypothesis. See White, Race Relations in the American West, American Quarterly 38 (1986): 396–416. Although a fully developed version of such a synthesis has yet to appear, historians are increasingly exploring the complexity of racial meanings in this region. See, for example, Sarah Deutsch, Landscape of Enclaves: Race Relations in the West, 1865–1990, in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: Norton, 1992), 110–131; Sarah Deutsch, George J. Sanchez, and Gary Y. Okihiro, Contemporary Peoples/Contested Places, in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 639–669; A. Yvette Huginnie, Containment and Emancipation: Race, Class, and Gender in the Cold War West, in The Cold War American West, ed. Kevin J. Fernlund (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 51–70; and Chris Friday, ‘In Due Time’: Narratives of Race and Place in the Western United States, in Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the United States: Toward the Twenty-First Century, ed. Paul Wong (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), 102–152.

Joan Wallach Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), arguably one of the most influential statements on gender for the field of history, was unavailable at the time of Gamboa’s research and writing.

Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), and Gunther Peck’s two essays, Reinventing Free Labor: Immigrant Padrones and Contract Laborers in North America, 1885–1925, Journal of American History 83, no. 3 (1996): 848–871, and Padrones and Protest: Old Radicals and New Immigrants in Bingham, Utah, 1905–1912, Western Historical Quarterly 24, no. 2 (1993): 157–178, are excellent examples.

Preface to the 2000 Paperback Edition

Nine years have elapsed since I undertook the challenge to interpret the history of Mexican labor in the Pacific Northwest during World War II. Since that time, the region’s agricultural industry has become increasingly dependent on Mexican American and Mexican immigrant labor. National attention on the complexity of historical and contemporary issues surrounding international labor migration has also intensified in the public arena, the media, and among policy makers. It seems fitting, therefore, for the University of Washington Press to republish this study.

I have taken into account and appreciate the generous comments of many readers, but this edition stands as originally published. Although there have been far-reaching changes in interpretation of the war years in the West and new publications have appeared on many aspects of farm labor, I hope that Mexican Labor and World War II remains valuable.

As history, the book tells the vital story of how the United States government recruited an army of Mexican workers who served on the domestic front during the war. Their story reveals how a particular ethnic group entered into what historian Richard White calls the peculiar pattern of race relations in the West. While a detailed understanding of race relations in the American West has yet to be attained, it is clear that the presence of Mexican immigrants alongside Mexican American populations only adds to the historical and contemporary complexities. But the book is much more than a regional story. It contains partial answers to current questions about transnational worker communities, the treatment and protection of temporary foreign laborers, and the institutionalization of Mexicans in the American labor market.

Nonhistorians can appreciate the fact that the bracero program helped initiate the present-day migratory labor flows from Mexico into the Pacific Northwest. More important and over the long run, agribusiness has repeatedly cited ongoing labor shortages to plead for a modern bracero-type labor agreement between Mexico and the U.S. In other words, the bracero program was not an aberration—the idea has never gone away. This point illustrates the importance of sustained international labor flows to restructured economies, including the agricultural industry. During 1998, for instance, northwestern agriculture, through its congressional representatives and organizations such as the Washington Growers League, sponsored legislation to sanction the hiring of Mexican contract guest laborers. This type of legislative lobbying is reminiscent of what happened during World War II and is paradoxically counter to the prevailing national policy, such as Operation Gatekeeper and Hold-the-Line, which are aimed to discourage Mexicans from seeking employment or social services in this country.

Also important, the historical lessons derived from the bracero program of World War II are indispensable for Mexican and U.S. policy makers as they contemplate European and Canadian guest worker programs. At the very least, it is abundantly clear that the legacy of contract-labor programs, such as are described here, will continue to influence the future direction of U.S. immigration policy and Mexican American communities in the Pacific Northwest.

Erasmo Gamboa

Seattle

April 2000

Acknowledgments

IN THE COURSE of writing this book, I have profited from the advice and generous assistance of colleagues, librarians, archivists, and friends. But I am especially indebted to Professors Robert E. Burke, Joan C. Ullman, and the late Carl E. Solberg from the History Department at the University of Washington. They provided warm encouragement and from them I learned the discipline. As best they could, they also tried to teach me how to avoid the pitfalls that come with the task of interpreting the past. I value their counsel, challenges, and the opportunity to benefit from their vast experience.

Historians Rodolfo Acuña, Albert Camarillo, and Mario T. García kindly read the manuscript in its early stages. I am particularly grateful to Mario T. García, who unselfishly offered written, detailed critiques and sound judgment with respect to publishing this book. My good and dear friend Angélica Hernández typed first through final drafts of the typescript. Peter Bacho gave of his time.

I appreciate the assistance of Theresa J. May and the editorial staff at the University of Texas Press in helping to prepare this book for publication. The Graduate School Research Fund at the University of Washington provided a generous grant so that I could travel to the National Archives.

The persons who told their life story to me, and the braceros themselves, are a very special part of this book. As I attempted to learn about their experiences in the Pacific Northwest, their perseverance inspired me. They have my utmost respect and are heroes in their own way.

My family, Carole, Andrea, and Adriana, provided constant warm and enduring support. They deserve more thanks than I give them here.

E.G.

MAY 30, 1989

One of my poor countrymen had spent three months in a place where the climate made him ill. Once he was better, the rain and snow prevented him from working. In consideration of his poor health, his board, which he had not paid, was forgotten. At his request and so he would not go further in debt, the officials agreed to return him to Mexico.

He told me that during all the time he was in the United States, he only managed to send home a ten dollar money order. He was wearing all the clothes he owned. His pockets contained ten dollars.

What saddened him the most was the thought that his family had written several times telling him that they expected him to return with many of the things they wanted.

—JESÚS TOPETE, AVENTURAS DE UN BRACERO

Despite the occasional abuses which the Mexican workers suffer at the hands of United States farmers, one of the happiest aspects of the bracero program is the personal relationship