ARCHIVAL (REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION, ABC, 7-18-24):
DONALD TRUMP: Today, our cities are flooded with illegal aliens. Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken. . . The Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.

MIREYA LOZA (ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY): I do think a lot of folks are unaware of immigration history.

ARCHIVAL (STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS, 2-2-53):
PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER: It is a manifest right of our government to limit the number of immigrants our nation can absorb.

MIREYA LOZA: How complicated it is.

ARCHIVAL (“WHY BRACEROS?” BY THE COUNCIL OF CALIFORNIA GROWERS, 1959):
NARRATOR: The big question in many minds: Why Braceros?

MIREYA LOZA: Their scope of knowledge is what they themselves experience.

ARCHIVAL (PARADE, 8-12-24):
CROWD CHANTING: Trump, Trump! 

MIREYA LOZA: There’s a reason folks don’t want to talk about these stories, and I think it foments these kinds of divisions.

MATT GARCIA (PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, DARTMOUTH COLLEGE): The United States tells itself frequently that it’s a nation of immigrants, usually immigrants from Europe, building those East Coast industries. The border region is seen as peripheral to the primary story of the great cities of the East.

MIREYA LOZA: The first immigration laws in 1790 were predicated on whiteness. That sets up a racial project for the U.S. To belong, to have a path to citizenship, is to be white.

ARCHIVAL (“THE TRUCK FARMER,” 1954)
NARRATOR: Texas. While winter holds the North in icy grasp, these fertile fields of the warm Rio Grande valley yield a wide variety of fresh vegetables.

MIREYA LOZA: In places like Texas, people go from being subjects of the Spanish crown, to being Mexican, to being Texan, to being U.S. citizens. Folks on the U.S. side and Mexican side are trying to figure out where the line is going to be placed.

The Rio Grande becomes an odd dividing border between these two countries. By the 1920s, we have this vernacular: “Wetbacks” becomes derogatory shorthand for any Mexican. Including Mexican Americans. This causes a lot of tension between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. It collapses everyone into being brown.

ARCHIVAL (“OUR CHANGING FAMILY LIFE,” 1957):
NARRATOR: The stock market crash in 1929 ushered in the greatest economic depression in the nation’s history.

MATT GARCIA: During the Great Depression, Mexicans were often scapegoated for the ills of a declining economy. Mexicans look unlike the Europeans that are defining the American story of immigration and they can be easily deported to a neighboring country. Government officials rounded up Mexican people, regardless of whether they were Mexican citizens or not, and forced them to Mexico.

MIREYA LOZA: It doesn’t matter if you were Mexican American, multi-generation, if the border essentially crossed your family instead of you crossing the border. It becomes terribly ironic for those who have lived their entire lives in the U.S. Some who never really spoke Spanish tried to rebuild entire lives in a country that, for them, is foreign.

MATT GARCIA: But when World War II happened, there was fewer and fewer people actually to work in the fields to feed the nation. And so what was arranged was for Mexican agricultural workers to come back and harvest those crops. It was known as the Bracero program.

MIREYA LOZA: Imagine if you were someone who had just been deported in the 1930s, and all of a sudden it’s 1942 and they’re trying to recruit you into a U.S. workforce.

ARCHIVAL (“THE LADY FROM ARVIN,” BY U.S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS PICTORIAL SERVICE, 1945):
NARRATOR: Down at the camp where the Mexican nationals come in to help the Americans harvest the crops, there’s quite a bit of mail addressed to Americans overseas.

MATT GARCIA: World War II was the impetus for the Bracero program. But when we look at how many contracts were filled, the majority of the contracts were filled afterwards.

ARCHIVAL (“WHY BRACEROS?” BY THE COUNCIL OF CALIFORNIA GROWERS, 1959):
NARRATOR: The farmer brings his certification for braceros to his labor recruiting association.

MATT GARCIA: What that demonstrated is the owners of these agricultural enterprises really wanted a tractable labor, a labor they could expel, they could deport, if those workers organized unions, for example, or questioned the conditions of their labor.

JUAN LOZA (FORMER BRACERO, TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH): In my town, there was a lot of talk of an agreement the Mexican Government had with the United States. They examined the mouth, the eyes, the anus. The most humiliating was when they bathed you first with a liquid, and afterward with a powder, to rid you of infection. But the only thing that mattered to me was achieving the objective of coming to work in the United States.

MIREYA LOZA: My uncle came to the U.S. through the Bracero program. Someone asked them to come in. But guess what? During the Bracero program, we saw a spike in undocumented labor because these employers learn how to use the sanctioned system and the unsanctioned system. And the reality is if undocumented workers heard of better jobs they could leave. They basically were in more control of their movement than braceros.

MATT GARCIA: In the 1950s, Mexican immigrants become much more visible in cities across the country. They start to spread out beyond rural spaces.

MIREYA LOZA: These stories leap onto newspapers, into the cinema. We have a sense that undocumented workers are a problem.

MATT GARCIA: There’s also economic waves, moments of recession. Operation Wetback is borne of one of those economic downturns.

ARCHIVAL (STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS, 2-2-53):
PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER: To set reasonable requirements on the character and the numbers of the people who come to share our land.

MIREYA LOZA: The president calls his old Army buddy and appoints him commissioner of the I.N.S. He starts to unleash something that does deport people. But the more palpable reality was it fomented fear.

MATT GARCIA: What the I.N.S. would do is make a show of force, a raid on a place of employment, then have newspapers broadcast this.

ARCHIVAL (HEARST METROTONE NEWS, 2-16-54):
NARRATOR: Here is a dramatic picture of an actual chase as the border guards nab a hitchhiking passenger in his attempt to make an illegal entry into the United States.

MATT GARCIA: That would then lead to fear amongst immigrants and a self-deportation to avoid what they perceived as the coming army of I.N.S. agents.

MIREYA LOZA: During the Bracero program, you have this clamor for recruiting Mexicans at the same moment you have a large-scale deportation system framing them as problematic.

MATT GARCIA: People perceived as being wetbacks would be captured, taken to the border, sent through kind of a revolving door and come back the other side as braceros. They’d sign them up and they’d come back, now legitimate workers on temporary contracts. It was a process known as drying out the wets.

ARCHIVAL (“THE LAND IS RICH,” ESTUARY PRESS, 1966):
NARRATOR: In the heart of rich California farmland, these workers signal a growing protest movement.

MATT GARCIA: There are at least three fissures amongst ethnic Mexicans in the postwar period. There are the Mexican Americans who are advocating for a farmworker union. Braceros that were guest workers here essentially on loan. And then there’s a bunch of undocumented workers who work alongside these two groups. And there’s a lot of tension amongst them.

ARCHIVAL (KQED, 9-25–72):
CESAR CHAVEZ (PRESIDENT, UNITED FARM WORKERS): They brought in 220 wetbacks, these are the illegals. There’s no way to defend against that kind of strikebreaking.

MATT GARCIA: Cesar Chavez and the Mexican Americans are saying, well, I don’t care if you’re a bracero or an undocumented person, you’re bad for our ambitions of creating a union. And so these fissures were always there.

JUAN LOZA (TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH): In ’65, the same people who hired us took us to the border. Whether I wanted to or not, I had to go back to Mexico. To get into the United States, I had to do it between midnight and 1 a.m. When we got to the other side of the river we were picked up by the person who transported us all the way to Chicago, with many of the nerves and hopes from when I was a bracero.

MIREYA LOZA: My uncle makes his way into the cold storage industry in Chicago. He becomes a Teamster, a green-card holder, a U.S. citizen. And his job allows other family members to also become card-carrying members of the union, including my own father.

ARCHIVAL (“WHY BRACEROS?” BY THE COUNCIL OF CALIFORNIA GROWERS, 1959):
NARRATOR: Seasonal labor willing to do this kind of work.

MIREYA LOZA: When the Bracero program comes to a close, we think all guest worker programs come to a close and it is not true. Trump learns much of the work he needs in his hotels and other places can be called, quote-unquote, seasonal work, in which he can bring in guest workers. So all the while, you have a president saying, we need to make America great. We need jobs for Americans. Yet he himself employs guest workers.

ARCHIVAL (REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION, ABC, 7-18-24):
DONALD TRUMP: You know who’s taking the jobs? The jobs that are created? Illegal aliens.

MATT GARCIA: One of the biggest challenges for the Trump administration is what comes after mass deportation, because there’s a disconnect between mass deportation and wages.

ARCHIVAL (CABINET MEETING, 4-10-25):
DONALD TRUMP: We have to take care of our farmers and hotels and, y’know, various places where they need the people.

MATT GARCIA: These are not jobs most Americans who are not immigrants want to have.

MIREYA LOZA: In a lot of ways, disdain for Mexicans is now being extended to Central Americans. And, lo and behold, we have a lot of similar tension that we had within this community during other parts of American history.

ARCHIVAL (CNN, 11-9-24):
NEWS REPORT: Latino voters embraced Donald Trump despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric.

MIREYA LOZA: All the while, we see the way this tracks into our family lives, the way U.S. policy shapes real, everyday people. This stuff doesn’t disappear. As long as we tell these stories, we become stewards of our own histories.

(END)