The Bracero Program was a series of laws that allowed the United States to recruit temporary guest workers (braceros, lit. “individuals who work with their arms”) from Mexico. As the United States entered World War II, its agriculture and railroad industries witnessed a shortage of laborers due to the U.S. military draft and the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast of the United States. The United States and Mexico entered into legal agreements that would ultimately be known as the Bracero Program, which operated from 1942 to 1964. Braceros worked throughout the United States, but the largest concentration of braceros was employed in California. There were an estimated 4.5 million contracts signed by braceros over the 22-year period. Today a large proportion of the Mexican-American population can trace its heritage to former braceros.

—By Ignacio Ornelas Rodriguez

My Childhood

I have a personal connection to braceros. The forced removal of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast in 1942 contributed to the labor shortage in states like California. My family was interned in Poston, Arizona, in what was called the Poston War Relocation Center from 1942 until the end of World War II in 1945. The “relocation center” was built on a Colorado River Indian Tribes reservation and was surrounded by barbed wire. My family returned to California after the end of the war. As a child of farm laborers in the 1950s and 1960s, I worked side-by-side with braceros. My neighbors in San Jose were braceros. I thought that I was a hard worker until I met them. I was compensated by the amount of crops I harvested, known as piecework. The braceros’ punch cards usually had at least double the punches that mine had.

Some years ago, I asked my mother if she had a photo of the bracero home that stood next to my home. She did have a photo, and to my surprise, I was in it. One of the fondest memories of my childhood was occasionally telling my mother that I didn’t want rice and tofu and instead going to the bracero home to enjoy homemade tortillas and beans. The tortillas were made from flour and manteca or lard. As a child, I felt more Mexican than Japanese.

In my work as a teacher (from 1977 to 1988) and at SPICE (since 1988), I have always known that there were legacies from my life growing up with braceros that have profoundly impacted me. I used to be ashamed of being the son of farm laborers, but through the years, I have come to appreciate the importance of farm labor, and I could not have had greater role models than the braceros when it came to hard work and discipline.  

Thus, it was particularly meaningful for me to facilitate an event called “Legacies of the Bracero Program, 1942–1964,” during which ten former braceros were recognized by SPICE, FSI, and the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS). The event was meticulously organized by SPICE Event Coordinator Sabrina Ishimatsu and took place at Stanford University on February 27, 2014. 

The Speakers

Rodolfo Dirzo, CLAS Director, whose father was a bracero, spoke about the transmission of the richness and diversity of Mexican culture to generations of Mexican Americans. His message of “pride in one’s identity” prompted multiple generations of Mexican Americans in the audience to consider the pioneers of their community. Francis Dominguez, the granddaughter of former bracero José Guadalupe Rodriguez Fonseca, reflected, “I felt that the speeches were educational for those not familiar with the history, but also connected with the families of braceros on an emotional level.” 

“Three things are interesting to me about what happened during the bracero years that have made what the country is today,” noted Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, FSI Director. “Number one, the United States realized that it could not function without immigration…; number two, immigration was considered vital to our national security…; number three, we came to realize that sometimes what looks temporary is actually permanent.”

These three points resonated with Ignacio Ornelas Rodriguez, whose grandfather is Fonseca. Rodriguez, a former high school teacher in Salinas and now with the Special Collections and University Archives Department of Stanford University Libraries, noted that, “Tino’s historical analysis and considerations about immigration and the Bracero Program have implications that polarizing opposite left/right political views have failed to consider. Tino’s perspective was quite fascinating.” 

Several high school teachers were in the audience, and Rodriguez spoke about ways that teachers can interactively engage students in the study of the Bracero Program. “This event is a great example of how SPICE reaches out to the larger community and bridges the gap between academia and communities,” said Rodriguez. Rodriguez and the other teachers in the audience have used SPICE curricular materials to underscore the importance of understanding and appreciating diverse perspectives on U.S. history. SPICE curricular materials on topics like the history of U.S.–Mexico relations serve as a bridge between FSI/Stanford University and schools nationally.

Recognition

Each former bracero was presented with three certificates from Stanford University, the California State Assembly (signed by Luis A. Alejo, 30th Assembly District), and Monterey County (signed by Supervisor Simón Salinas). The former braceros proudly posed in Stanford sweatshirts, and tears could be seen among their families’ photographers, making even clear photographs seem blurry.  

 

Reflecting upon the event, Fonseca humbly stated, “I felt very honored to be recognized for my work and proud to be reunited with fellow braceros.” He was particularly touched that the honorable Carlos Ponce Martinez, Consul General of Mexico in San Jose, and Simón Salinas, Monterey County Supervisor, were in attendance. “I would like to thank the organizers of the event and Stanford University.”

Adios

Toward the end of the evening, Supervisor Salinas, whose father was a bracero, approached me and asked if I was related to the Mukai family that once farmed in Salinas before and after World War II. I was, I told him. To my astonishment, he informed me that his family used to sharecrop with my family and that he was particularly close to one of my uncles and two of my cousins who once worked for Driscoll’s, growers of berries. Though the Bracero Program ended 50 years ago, I continue to discover new connections and ways in which it has affected my life and my family. 

As sons and grandsons of former braceros, Dirzo, Rodriguez, and Salinas are prime examples of proud legacies of the Bracero Program. As the former braceros were departing the Bechtel Conference Center at Encina Hall, I had a flashback to 1964 at the Bracero Program’s end, when I said “adios” to my bracero co-workers from childhood. A faded memory of my childhood suddenly became clear and poignant once again, as I wondered if I would ever see them again. 

"The Stanford Report" covered the recently launched Stanford Human Rights Education Initiative, which brings human rights curriculum into the classrooms of California community colleges to transform students into globally-conscious citizens. Piloted in partnership with the Program on Human Rights, the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), and the Division of International Comparative and Area Studies, the Initiative appoints human rights fellows to develop new curriculum for broader application in California and beyond.

Stanford helps bring human rights to community college classrooms

Globalization has meant that the whole world is connected to the whole world's problems. Yet most of today's students live in a world no bigger than a cell phone keypad.

So how do you explain to them that the clothes on their backs may be sewn by slave labor in Asia, or how international human trafficking may be behind an Internet porn site?

Tim Maxwell, an award-winning poet who teaches at the College of San Mateo, said the basic task of reading is becoming harder each year for the Facebook generation. "To bring unpleasant and challenging ideas into their world is really difficult," he said. He described "young people's increasing use of social media and other technologies that, rather [than] widening their worlds, effectively narrows them" to what is pleasurably entertaining.

The remedy? In an unusual move, Stanford is linking arms with educators in California community colleges for a four-year project called Stanford Human Rights Education Initiative.  Following a conference last June on "Teaching Human Rights in an International Context," which launched the project, Stanford has named eight new "Human Rights Fellows" from California's community colleges. Maxwell is one of them.

For more than 12.4 million young Americans, teaching takes place in one of the nearly 1,200 community colleges across the nation – and about a quarter of those community colleges are in California. But few major universities have engaged these institutions.

The new initiative will train students to be engaged as global citizens, said William Hanson, another fellow, who holds a law degree from Columbia and teaches at Chabot College. "We have to find a way to wriggle in."

With a stipend and "visiting scholar" status, the human rights fellows will work with the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) and the Division of International Comparative and Area Studies (ICA) to develop human rights curricula, plan human rights conferences and develop the initiative's website. The human rights curriculum they design could, they hope, seed similar programs across the country and the world.

My hope is that human rights will form a central part of every college curriculum – not only as a topic, but as a lens through which to see all topics. Helen Stacy

"My hope is that human rights will form a central part of every college curriculum" – not only as a topic, but as a lens through which to see all topics, said Helen Stacy, director of the program on human rights at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

She said that human rights is typically pigeonholed as a "soft subject" in the social sciences or humanities, but such funneling "misses engineering students and IT students and math students."

For example, she said, students of computer science or statistics could be engaged in mapping human trafficking or drug smuggling. Young economists could study the supply-and-demand dynamics of crime.

The effort "to speak a language that speaks to all of the disciplines" could result in a human rights curriculum that extends into the high school and even the elementary school level, Stacy said. Moreover, the planned website with an online curriculum could help educators the world over – even an isolated educator sitting in Uzbekistan, she said.

For the Stanford faculty and staff who created the course, the beginnings go back a long way and are the fruition of years of experience, research and thought.

Gary Mukai's experience of human rights violations was firsthand: the director of SPICE recalls a childhood as a farm worker whose Japanese-American parents, also farm workers, had been detained by their country during World War II. "I grew up puzzled about many of their stories, and their stories certainly influenced my interest in developing educational materials about civil and human rights for young students," he said.

For instance, he recalled uncles and other relatives who volunteered or were drafted by the U.S. Army from behind barbed wire. Or stories about his relatives who received posthumous medals for their sons' service while they still lived behind barbed wire.

Richard Roberts, a Stanford professor of history, remembered reading William Hinton's Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, years ago. The questions it raised fascinated him: "Who will teach the teacher? Where do we learn? Who do we learn from? Who has the power to teach?"

He said universities typically teach an "isolated, really small segment" of the general population. Roberts, who studies domestic violence and human trafficking in Africa, said that when it comes to human rights, "That's not enough. We have to go beyond the rarefied segment."

One of the people on this frontline of teaching is Enrique Luna, a history instructor at Gilroy's Gavilan College. For him, Stanford represents something of a return: his father had been a cook at the university's dorms. Now Luna is an educator who looks for opportunities for students to participate with direct aid in their local communities and also with groups such as the Zapatistas of Chiapas and the Tarahumara of northern Mexico.

To reach his students, he said, he creates loops "back and forth between reading and doing." When students are doing, they have a reason to read, and when they read, they are able to fix their understandings through application. "They do their best work when they're doing something. That's where the other disciplines pour in," he said.

A lunchtime session last summer was popping with ideas: Hanson was enthusiastic about possibly broadcasting Stanford lectures on human rights on his college's television station.

Another human rights fellow, Sadie Reynolds from Cabrillo College in Aptos, was just happy for the time to think and reflect. "It's hard to articulate hopes this early in the planning. I have a selfish hope of learning about this model so I can apply it in the classroom." She said she will present what she's learned at Stanford to a workshop at Cabrillo.

Those on the frontline of teaching don't get such opportunities very often:  "It's difficult to find time to develop this at community colleges," she said.