The Bracero Program: Was It a Failure?

Consulted Oct 3, 2010

By Philip Martin

History News Network

Mr. Martin is Professor of Agricultural Economics at the University of California, Davis and a member of the Commission on Agricultural Workers established by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. He is the author of numerous studies and reports on immigration, including Trade and Migration: NAFTA and Agriculture (1993). This article is drawn from his book, Promise Unfulfilled: Unions, Immigration, and Farm Workers. Ithaca (Cornell University Press, 2003).

The US and Mexico shared a 2,000 border throughout the 20th century, but most Mexico-US migration occurred since 1980. Almost 6 million Mexicans were issued immigrant visas in the 20th century, and almost 4 million of these green cards were issued between 1980 and 2000. Similarly, over 40 million Mexicans illegally in the US were apprehended, and 26 million or two-thirds of these apprehensions occurred between 1980 and 2000...

JOAN BAEZ ~ Plane Wreck At Los Gatos Canyon ~

Correct lyrics
lyrics to Plane Wreck At Los Gatos (Deportee) / Joan Baez

Joan Baez
Plane Wreck at los Gatos (Deportee)

DEPORTEES
(Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)
words by Woody Guthrie, music by Martin Hoffman
The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting
The oranges are packed in the creosote dumps
They're flying you back to the Mexico border
To pay all your money to wade back again
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees
My father's own father, he waded that river
They took all the money he made in his life
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees
They rode the big trucks till they lay down and die
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees
The skyplane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon
A fireball of lightning, and it shook all the hills
Who are these comrades that died like the dry leaves
The radio tells me they're just deportees
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees
We died in your hills and we died in your deserts
We died in your valleys we died on your plains
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes
Both sides of the river we died just the same
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees
Some of us are illegal, and others not wanted
Our work contract's out and we have to move on
But it's six hundred miles to that Mexican border
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit
To fall like dry leaves and rot on the top soil
and be called by no name except "deportee"
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees

Ex braceros de la ANAM demandarán por fraude al abogado que los defendía

8/3/2010

Amagan con cerrar todos los días la calle de Independencia

Integrantes de la Asamblea Nacional de Adultos Mayores pretendieron reunirse con Porfirio Martínez, su ex abogado, en la calle de Independencia. Amagan con demandarlo penalmenteFoto María Luisa Severiano Ariane Díaz

Periódico La Jornada

Martes 3 de agosto de 2010, p. 10

Ventura Gutiérrez, miembro del comité ejecutivo nacional de la Asamblea Nacional de Adultos Mayores AC (ANAM), informó que interpondrán una demanda por fraude y abuso de confianza en contra de Porfirio Martínez González, su representante legal desde 2006 en el litigio para obtener el reintegro de su fondo de ahorro cuando laboraron en Estados Unidos, ya que no ha cumplido con los compromisos que celebró con la agrupación...

Niega fraude contra ex braceros

6 de Agosto, 2010

La Jornada: El Correo Ilustrado. Es totalmente falso lo que afirmó el C. Ventura Gutiérrez; ni he defraudado, ni he abusado de la confianza de los compañeros ex braceros que en diferentes partes del país y en Estados Unidos han solicitado mi apoyo legal.

Desde 2006, hemos llevado a cabo nuestro trabajo profesional en favor de varios miles de ex braceros. Con ellos celebramos contratos de prestación de servicios profesionales, comprometiéndonos a realizar todas las acciones legales necesarias para que se les devuelva la cantidad correspondiente al fondo de ahorro, consistente en 10 por ciento de los salarios que percibieron en Estados Unidos, bajo los términos del Programa Bracero de empleo temporal, a partir de 1942, dinero que indebidamente se apropió el gobierno federal...

Operation Wetback--Handbook of Texas Online

Accessed: Jul 28, 2010

OPERATION WETBACK. Operation Wetback was a repatriation project of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service to remove illegal Mexican immigrants ("wetbacks") from the Southwest. During the first decades of the twentieth century, the majority of migrant workers who crossed the border illegally did not have adequate protection against exploitation by American farmers. As a result of the Good Neighbor Policy, Mexico and the United States began negotiating an accord to protect the rights of Mexican agricultural workers. Continuing discussions and modifications of the agreement were so successful that the Congress chose to formalize the "temporary" program into the Bracero program, authorized by Public Law 78...

History of the Southern Border

December 9, 2007

By Bill Ong Hing

Professor of Law

University of California, Davis

bhing@ucdavis.edu

I was asked to give an historical presentation in El Paso on November 29, 2007 at the conference: “Building a New Vision of the Border: a Conference on Border Policy." Here are my remarks:

History of the Border and Immigration Policy

[Note: These comments were adapted from the book, Defining America Through Immigration Policy (Temple Univ. Press 2004).]

On a different September 11—the one in 1998—the body of a man was found floating in the All-American Canal in the Imperial Valley of southern California. The next day, Saturday, September 12, another man, who had been in a coma since August, when he was found in the valley’s desert with a core body temperature of 108 degrees, died. On Sunday, the Border Patrol discovered the body of Asuncion Hernandez Uriel in the same desert. Some of her group stayed with her, but she died of heat stress. The same day, the decomposed body of Oscar Cardoso Varon was pulled out of the canal. In all, the bodies of four migrants attempting to cross to the United States from Mexico were found that weekend.

Unlike the reaction of the American public to the horrors of September 11, 2001, no outrage or sympathy was expressed after the weekend border deaths beginning September 11, 1998. One could point to a difference in scale—some 3,000 on September 11, 2001—but try more than 3,000 in the border situation; 3,000 deaths at the border that were avoidable. When deaths resulting from these strategies—with names like Operation Gatekeeper, Operation Safeguard, Operation Blockade—started being reported, the Border Patrol was not surprised. Its 1994 strategic plan recognized that pushing migrants to cross through remove, uninhabited expanses would place them in “mortal danger.” When the strategy to move the undocumented foot traffic to the east of San Diego as part of Operation got underway, a Border Patrol supervisor said, “Eventually we’d like to see them all out in the desert.”

How did we get to this shameful place in the name of immigration enforcement? The sordid history of the southern border and immigration policies is not something of which Americans can point to with much pride. Consider this chronological scan:

1821. Mexico declares independence from Spain, taking control of what we now regard as the entire southwest: California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, Utah, and Nevada...