Читать книгу To Sin Against Hope - Alfredo Gutierrez - Страница 5
ОглавлениеI was born in 1945 in a wooden house that sat at the very edge of a hill half ripped apart to make room for the railroad line that carried the copper to market and had only a decade earlier carried the Mexicans into exile. World War II created a shortage of both copper and the laborers who excavate it. Recruiters began roaming northern Mexico seeking men to work the mines, especially among those who had been deported. These were experienced at piercing deep into the earth, needed no training, and, equally importantly, most of them spoke English.
Each time I meet with students of Mexican extraction, I implore them to go home and ask their parents about the crossing. The stories of our parents’ and grandparents’ sacrifice should never be forgotten. Unfortunately, I was never able to persuade my father to talk much about it. He was, I think, ashamed to have come back to the town that had feted his exile only a few years before. But when he made the decision to return he was older, and responsible for four children: two were my mother’s from her earlier marriage, and two more were born in Los Mochis, Mexico. The wages at Ferrocarriles de México, the nationalized Mexican railroad where he was a freight agent in their Culiacán, Sinaloa depot, could never compare to what the Miami Copper Company promised him. My mother begged him to go back. The future for the children in Mexico was bleak at best. So he accepted the offer. They went by train to the border and took a bus from Nogales to Miami. They entered the country illegally. The two youngest children were citizens by virtue of their father’s status … but he had been expelled without regard to his citizenship.
All he told me was that he just didn’t trust the government any longer, so they walked across, following a well-beaten path that skirted the port of entry and the requirement for papers. They were shown the way by a fellow miner who had taken the path many times. His name was Alfredo Horcasitas. That’s how I came to be named Alfredo. My mother, probably at my father’s request, would also talk little about the trip. In answer to my inquiries she would only say, “Sí, sí, era muy duro pero era un sacrificio que tuvimos que hacer.” Yes, it was very hard, but it was a sacrifice we had to make. And when I questioned further, “Why?” her answer was always the same: “Por tí, tontito.” For you, little dummy.
My mother and father have passed away. My two sisters have as well; my brother who was born in Los Mochis was only two when he crossed and has few memories of the trip. My oldest brother is very ill, and frankly, he too resists discussing the experience. I will never know, and I will never share with my children those sacrifices in the rich detail they deserve, explaining exactly what it cost so that they might enjoy lives of middle-class comfort, extraordinary educations, and a future.
My birth certificate says that I was born in the company hospital. Family lore says I was born in that house on top of Depot Hill with the help of a partera, a midwife. The Union had yet to wrest health care from the company in 1945, so the likelihood is that I was taken to the hospital afterwards for the birth certificate. Health care was a decade away, but the Union had already accomplished significant victories. The International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers was sometimes called the Mexican Union, because unlike other unions it actively recruited Mexicans and fought vigorously against the practice of paying Mexican workers less for a day’s work than white workers would earn. It did not matter to the company if a person was just off the boat from Italy, Serbia, Hungary, or Finland: they still got paid $1.15 more per shift than a Mexican. And it did not matter to the company if the Mexican worker was recently arrived from Mexico or a citizen for generations. White was white and Mexican was Mexican. The practice was ordered halted by the federal government in 1944 in response to a grievance filed by the Union, along with the threats of slowdowns and strikes. War and the Mine Mill, as the Union was known, convinced the National Non-Ferrous Metals Commission to find “a consistent pattern of discriminatory rates” at Miami Copper Company and Inspiration Consolidated Copper Company, also in Miami. The Commission ordered equal pay for equal work.1 The company’s entrenched racism was not so easily extinguished, however. They equalized the workforce during the war, but shortly afterwards furtively returned to their old habits. As late as 1963 the Union was in federal court alleging wage discrimination. The federal district judge entered a decision in September of 1973 ordering back pay. In November 1978, Inspiration Consolidated Copper Company finally sent a memo to all Mexican-American and Indian employees, notifying them that they were eligible for back pay.
The Mine Mill was the successor to the Western Mining Federation that initiated the strikes in the Clifton-Morenci mining district of Arizona in 1915, and also the strike in Bisbee. It was the Bisbee strike that led to the infamous deportations of at least 1,200 miners, mostly Mexicans. The striking miners were forced at gunpoint into cattle cars owned by the mining company’s private railroad, transported to the desert near Columbus, New Mexico, and abandoned there. As word of the mass kidnapping spread throughout the country a national scandal ensued. President Wilson sent the Army to build a shelter and to feed and care for the men and ultimately to assure their safe return to Bisbee. The Mine Mill was born in controversy, embraced Mexican workers, and from the beginning was depicted by the mining companies and by the rival “white” unions as radical, leftist, and communist. The Mine Mill was indeed the most militant union, and it was also the leading advocate for the rights of local Mexican families, continually subject to discrimination and segregation.
The entry into the town from the big city of Phoenix some seventy miles away was through west Live Oak Street. West Live Oak had been populated by Mexicans and the few “colored” families in town since its founding by Cleve Van Dyke. Van Dyke died as the war ended. His son-in-law Watson Fitz assumed control of the Miami Townsite Company, and Fitz, unlike Van Dyke, wanted money fast. With the war over, the town anticipated that the sinewy, dangerous mountain road that connected Phoenix to Miami would finally be improved and visitors would soon be arriving. When they did arrive, they would unfortunately have to pass through a gauntlet of Mexican and colored families that lived along west Live Oak before arriving at the bustle of bars, gambling salons, whorehouses, and businesses that lined downtown Miami. Thus Mexicans, colored folk, and the fast money they were in the way of became the motivations for Miami’s major urban renewal and racial cleansing project. Fitz announced the commercial and residential development in 1947, promising “large restricted home sites”: the fact that Mexican and colored families were renting those home sites and had been doing so for years made little difference. They would have to move.
The campaign against the Mexican and colored families moved quickly. A prominent Mexican American, A. J. Flores, was recruited to lead the charge and “get rid of the shacks.” As a kid I never heard anyone say a kind word about A. J. Flores. He was considered a pariah, a quisling, a sell-out, and worse. I was surprised to discover, when I read a transcript of a conversation with him recorded in 2001, fifty years after the demolition of those homes, that A. J. was still trying to defend himself:
The Mexicans had no aspirations. They liked living in shacks or else they would have done something about it. They didn’t want anything better. They didn’t care enough to take care of their own homes. If the Town did nothing, Mexicans and Negroes would continue to live that way. It was time to bring in someone to take care of that area. The Town had to raise the quality of life there and they had to control the town’s growth to make it livable.2
I hope A. J. was paid a lot of money. He was held in contempt by the miners and constantly ridiculed behind his back. That should be expensive. In the late 1990s, after years of economic decline, on the verge of becoming a ghost town and with few folks remaining who remembered the relocations, Miami elected a very bitter A. J. as town mayor. Most folks in Miami had forgotten why the cloud of suspicion hovers about A. J., but obviously he never will.
The Union mounted a major effort to stop the relocation, but it had no influence with the town fathers, and they were unable to curb Watson Fitz’s lust for quick money. After the relocation, the Union committed itself to gaining control of city hall. It would take them over a decade to do it. There was one, not so small, secondary consequence of the relocation for us: we moved from Depot Hill into a “shack” in Davis Canyon, one of those colored and Mexican canyons that families from west Live Oak were forced into. Many of the black families left altogether after the wave of hate that spread through the town. The small two-room house was nestled against a hillside abutting a natural cave. The cave, once plastered and ventilated, became the third room of the house. I lived in that house until I left for the Army years later.
The highway entering Miami from Phoenix, even before it reached the renewal project of west Live Oak, would edge next to a dry wash for perhaps a half-mile. If you were to peer down into the wash you would see a teeming camp of shacks, beat-up trailers, tents, outhouses, campfires, and half-clothed kids running amuck. That was Mackey’s Camp. The “okies” of the camp were all white. There were perhaps a hundred or more transient families in the camp, kept there—the Union men said—so that the company would have a ready supply of strike-breakers should the Mine Mill decide to call a Bolshevik strike. Some of the “okie” families moved into the Mexican canyons when the west Live Oak renewal project made homes available. Most just drifted away to destinations unknown. Watson Fitz and the town fathers apparently never thought to forcibly remove the white squatters, and A. J. never publicly demanded that the town get rid of their shacks.
When I was just a kid I remember the great joy when my older brothers would take me to the YMCA swimming pool on Saturday. It was only years later that I realized my father refused to join my mother’s Christian activities because the Christians who ran the Y would only let the Mexicans swim for a few hours on Saturday night. That was the night they drained the pool. He refused to join his mother at Catholic mass as well. The mass was in Latin in those days, so language was no excuse to segregate, but segregate they did. The Mexicans sat on the left side and the whites on the right. The practice apparently began in the 1920s when Thomas O’Brien, superintendent of Inspiration Mine and president of the Valley National Bank, complained that the Mexicans were dirty, stank, and were stealing women’s purses. He threatened the priest with withholding his offering unless something was done. Segregation under God and separate lines for communion, whites on the right and Mexicans on the left, was the result.3
The school system was integrated after my second year at Bullion Plaza Elementary, the Mexican school. The summer before the integrated school year was to begin there was much debate at the union hall and at El Divino Salvador, the Spanish-language Presbyterian Church, about the plan. My mother was vehemently opposed to her children going to school with “gringos patas saladas.” The phrase translates literally as salty-legged gringos. It meant that gringos were unwashed, filthy, and full of fleas. They were also, according to the church ladies, rude, uncivilized, lazy, and not bright enough to get out of a dry creek when it rained. The Union had demanded that schools be integrated, and a court in Phoenix had finally ordered it, but my mother wanted that judge to come and see how the gringos who lived in filth at Mackey’s Camp allowed their children to dress and act. The judge never came, integration proceeded without incident, fleas never infested her children, and Mackey’s Camp soon disappeared.
The noted demographer and historian David Hayes-Bautista graphs the dramatic changes in the population of Latinos between 1930 and 1940. In California there were nearly 200,000 Latino immigrants in 1930 and only 168,848 US-born Latinos, according to the Census. By 1940, immigrant Latinos had dropped significantly to slightly over 100,000, but the number of children born in the US had zoomed upwards to 262,100.4 The decade of deportations had indeed taken its toll, and one measure was the absolute drop in number of immigrants who remained in the country. But those who did were fruitful and multiplied. The California experience can be generalized to the less populated Arizona of the 1930s and ’40s. The immigrants who stayed lived in fear of deportation, and those that returned lived with the constant dread of being rediscovered. And in a place like Miami they were culturally isolated as well. The only newspaper in Spanish was a Phoenix-based weekly paper, and the English dailies cared little about the Mexicans. There was no Spanish-language television, just a weekly hour-long radio program on KIKO hosted by an American-born Mexican who played records donated or lent to the station. There was the “Mexican” movie theater, the Lyric, that changed movies every week and sometimes showed news trailers as well. Folks brought with them a memory of Mexico that would remain fixed for a very long time. On occasion one of the immigrant families would make a trip to Mexico. The family would be inundated with requests for food and goods that were unattainable in Miami—and always for newspapers, books, and records. When we returned from a trip to Culiacán we were greeted by half the town flocking to hear gossip and news, and some people even got a handwritten note from a friend or relative del otro lado, from the other side. North of the border, mangos were magic, papayas unheard of, dulce de membrillo, cajeta, machaca de burro (dried donkey meat has very little fat or gristle and makes the best machaca, my father would assure us), and pitayas, or cactus fruit, all had to be smuggled in. But that was easily done, and of course it made them all the more exotic and valuable.
Cultural isolation also meant that the prejudices and fears that may have driven someone to this country could persist unchallenged. Mexico’s violent Cristero Rebellion that raged between 1926 and 1929 was the prism through which many Mexicans who fled during the late 1920s would see each other. They arrived with stories of abuse and atrocities committed by and against devout Catholics. The Catholics believed that the vicious atheism and anti-Catholicism of the Calles era was manipulated by the Jews and the Protestants; these were still among us, and had to be watched. The Protestants, on the other hand, thought the Cristeros were murderous fanatics hiding among the seemingly civilized Catholic congregation, and they had to be watched. And as far as I could tell there were no clandestine Jewish conversos at all, except in the imagination of my grandmother and her devout, aging friends.
El Divino Salvador, the Spanish-language Presbyterian church, was dedicated in 1921. Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament was built in 1917. By the time I was a kid the Mexican Protestants had multiplied and built Methodist, Baptist, and Pentecostal churches. Every month or so, traveling tents full of preachers and healers would make their way up the hill. The Protestants were the minority, and though they seemed not to have a secret handshake they did put on a knowing look when they encountered each other, and they often met in each other’s homes to spread the Gospel along with rumors about Catholics. My mother was a costurera, a seamstress who sewed the dresses for quinceañeras and weddings, especially for the Protestant girls. The Christian ladies would gather in our tiny house, drink coffee, and talk darkly about the guns in the basement of the Catholic church. They all had Catholic friends, but they were sure that hidden amongst them were the ringleaders of the next rebellion. But who were they? That was the subject of much speculation. Theological issues were also passionately debated. The eternal fate of Jerry Lopez was the theological subject for months.
Jerry and Noni Lopez and their beautiful children were faithful members of the Presbyterian Church. Noni was a wonderful piano player, conversant with all the Spanish hymns, who would often be asked to play in the Methodist and Baptist churches as well. She was loved and admired. Jerry drove the beer truck that replenished the supply after payday’s drunken debauchery had left every bar and whorehouse short. Though Jerry did not drink himself, wasn’t he doing the devil’s work by driving that truck? One Saturday morning as he was making his usual deliveries he was slammed into by a mining ore truck and killed. Was he struck down by divine intervention, or was he a good Christian man who tithed each week and worshipped with his family? Would the Lord forgive him? Had he, at least a moment before death, asked for forgiveness? Did he need to be forgiven? Was he eternally damned, or did he sit on God’s right hand? In their Christian zeal, Protestants had thrown Purgatory overboard, so there was no easy answer for the ladies.
Noni had the good sense to pack up the kids and move to Phoenix.
By 1954 most Hispanics in the United States were citizens by virtue of birth. Again, using Hayes-Bautista’s study of California Hispanics as a guide, in 1950 there were 189,800 immigrant Latinos in California and an astounding 819,000 US-born Hispanics. The trend would continue for at least another decade; by 1960 the number of immigrant Hispanics was 282,400, but the number of children born in the US was nearly 1,750,000. The term “Hispanic” had not yet come into use. The term most whites used for Latinos was simply “Mexicans.” The Mexicans, on the other hand, invented hyphens and phrases to describe themselves. “Mexican-American” and “Americans of Mexican descent” were the favorite two. The pressure to “be white,” as assimilation or Americanization were commonly called, was relentless. Perhaps that is why the announcement in 1954 of Operation Wetback and the extension of the Bracero Program so electrified the immigrant community and caused such soul-searching, turmoil, and ultimately deep divisions.
The dual, conflicting programs came at a time when the proportion of foreign-born and thus “illegal” immigration was at a low point, while the goal of Americanization seemed achievable to national organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens and the GI Forum. It was another betrayal. To the generation of immigrants it meant they were coming back—the soldiers, the border patrol, the vigilantes, all riding on the wave of hate that was sure to follow the announcements. The Americanizers, the national Latino organizations, supported Operation Wetback and massive deportations, but they bitterly opposed the Bracero Program. They understood that the continuation of the Bracero Program meant that Mexican culture, from language and music to food, would be replenished by the hundreds of thousands of contract laborers who would stay in the country and the thousands more to be invited each year. George I. Sánchez is often referred to as the dean of Mexican-American scholars and a respected intellectual who reached national prominence with the publication of his history of Mexican Americans, Forgotten People, in 1940. Sánchez, an active member and former director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, captured the fears of the Americanizers in this anguished quote in the New York Times:
No careful distinctions are made between illegal aliens and local citizens of Mexican descent. They are lumped together as ‘‘Mexicans’’ and the characteristics that are observed among the wetbacks are by extension assigned to the local people…. From a cultural standpoint, the influx of a million or more wetbacks a year transforms the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest from an ethnic group which might be assimilated with reasonable facility into what I call a culturally indigestible peninsula of Mexico. The ‘‘wet’’ migration … has set the whole assimilation process back at least twenty years.5
To be fair, most prominent Latino labor leaders opposed the Bracero Program as well. Examples are Ernesto Galarza, a leader in the National Farmworkers Union, an author and a respected social scientist, and Maclovio Barraza, a leading organizer with the Mine Mill; but their opposition was specific to the issue of wages and abuse. The Americanizers, on the other hand, saw a threat to their coveted but elusive welcoming into the white world.
The Bracero Program formally began with an agreement between Mexico and the United States signed on July 23, 1942. The agreement was highly controversial in Mexico. An earlier contract-labor program entered into during World War I had gone badly. When the Great War broke out, growers claimed that the conflict had removed thousands of their workers, and they successfully pressed the US government into adopting a guest-worker program. Assurances that the workers would be given decent accommodation and other guarantees were widely ignored. There were also (apparently unfounded) reports that the contract workers were being pressed into military service against their will. The World War I program was terminated by the Mexican government less than two years after it was launched.6
The Arizona Cotton Growers Association became the cause of the worst scandal in the program’s short history. The Cotton Growers hired a recruiting firm, Nogales Labor Association, to induce workers to come to the Salt River Valley with promises of good wages, steady work, and money to return to Mexico when the war ended. The Growers routinely violated their contractual obligations. They also recruited more workers than were needed for the harvest, forcing wages downward. Some even set up company stores and forced workers to purchase from them. When the war ended and recession ensued, the growers claimed poverty and simply abandoned the workers. Ten thousand Mexican workers were left penniless and near starvation surrounding Phoenix, a city whose official population in 1920 was only 29,053. Under pressure from the Mexican and American governments, the Growers reached a new accord promising to pay the workers their overdue wages and train fares to Mexico. The Growers then refused to comply with the contract. They were, after all, only Mexicans. The Mexican government was forced to launch a welfare program for the workers and pay their train fares.7
The Bracero Program began with another act of gall and shameless greed by Arizona growers. In July of 1941, the Farm Bureau Federation of Arizona made a formal request of the United States Employment Service to import 18,000 Mexican contract workers. Though the request was denied, it initiated a discussion within the Farm Security Administration on the shortage of harvest labor. As a consequence of Arizona’s petition, a formal request was made to the Mexican government by the Roosevelt Administration for a major guest-worker program to meet wartime shortages. Mexico’s initial resistance was overcome by appropriate assurances. The opposition of organized labor in the US was ignored, and the bloody flag of war was waved to ensure approval in both countries. The wartime emergency program would outlast World War II and the Korean War and be on hand to greet the Vietnam War.8 Though it was the circumstance of war that supplied growers with the Mexican contract labor they desired, these employers had their own reasoning for wanting Mexicans in the field. Americans, they claimed, lacked the Mexicans’ skill, stamina, dependability, and natural proclivity for stoop labor. Mexicans were built by the Lord to be perfect beasts of burden, their stature was close to the ground and they could remain stooped for hours without ill effect. They were accustomed to the hot, arid climate of Arizona and California, they were honest, and they were cheap. By the way, according to the farm industry, Americans are still fat-fingered, incompetent weaklings, too clumsy to pick fruit, and Mexicans are still hardworking, stooped, honest, and cheap.
The response by Mexican workers eager to apply astonished the Mexican government. Initially it opened a single recruitment center in Mexico City. It became a Mecca for thousands upon thousands of workers seeking work in the United States. Mexico City estimated that its population increased by 50,000 because of the center. Lacking the abi9lity to feed clothe or house the human wave that confronted it the government quickly changed course and opened centers throughout the country and far from the seat of government.9
Allegations that the international agreement was being violated came quickly. One stipulation was that braceros be paid the prevailing wage. But flooding a farming area with desperate contract laborers willing to work at poverty wages and in inhumane conditions was bound to push the prevailing wage down, so that the guarantee insisted upon by the Mexican government proved useless. The record of abuse of braceros was dismal by the mid-1950s. Yet the only aggressive response on the part of the Mexican government was to cancel all agreements to place contract workers in the state of Texas immediately after World War II. Stories of inhumane treatment and blatant racism became a fixture in the Mexican press. One newspaper, Mañana, referred to Texans as “Nazis,” who if they weren’t “political partners of the Führer of Germany were nevertheless slaves to the same prejudices.”10 By 1954 there was an unmistakable bracero presence in almost every barrio in the southwest. Anyone recently arrived from Mexico, with or without papers, was suspected of being a bracero or a wetback, and often the terms were interchangeable. By the time I was nine and ten years old the discussion of what to do about braceros was the principal conversation in church socials, the union hall, and my mother’s sewing, gossip, and coffee sessions. The pressure to “Americanize” was strong and constant, and unquestionably the presence of recently arrived Mexicans reinforced the racism that permeated the white world. On the other hand, the examples of wanton abuse of Mexican workers outraged the union men.
Congressional hearings to reconsider the Bracero Program began as early as 1951, but it was clear from the beginning that the Truman Administration and the Congress were simply doing the bidding of the growers.10 The negotiations between Mexico and the United States came to an impasse in the fall of 1953 over Mexico’s insistence that the extension include upward wage adjustments. On January 15, 1954, the United States unilaterally broke the impasse by simply announcing that “illegal entrants” into the US would be provided with emergency agricultural guest-worker status. Emergency status rules required that undocumented workers in the US touch Mexican soil before their adjustment could be complete. At San Ysidro and San Diego, approximately 3,200 men stormed across the border to Mexico and were immediately granted emergency status by the Border Patrol. At Calexico there were wild scenes of Mexican workers being held by one arm by Mexican police and pulled by the other into the United States by the Border Patrol. In the days that followed, growers delivered thousands of undocumented workers to Calexico to be “dried out,” or given special status, and 14,000 braceros whose permits had expired were given extended status. On January 28, Mexico relented and the Bracero Program survived.11 The United States government would remain the chief recruiter and defender of worker abuse for the agricultural industry for the next thirteen years. Historian Juan Ramón García quotes a grower as saying: “We used to buy our slaves, now we rent them from the Government.”12
What did happen in Congress was the successful blending of anti-communist hysteria and national immigration policy. The Internal Security Act of 1950 authorized the prosecution of anyone affiliated with a socialist or communist organization or deemed subversive in any way. The Act would be used to destroy progressive unions like the Mine Mill that championed human rights in the southwest, and to label the few outspoken Latino leaders that rejected Americanization as communists. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 (passed over President Harry Truman’s veto) was an omnibus immigration bill that authorized the denaturalization of immigrants and decreed that any “unnaturalized” alien who had entered the US since 1924 could be summarily deported regardless of family, employment, character, or contribution to the country.
Apparently to counter criticism that the US government was complicit in the mongrelization of America, President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration declared war against the same “wetbacks” they were actively recruiting. Eisenhower chose a former general, Joseph Swing, to lead the task of removing millions of those “wetbacks.” General Swing had been the president’s roommate at West Point, had accompanied General Pershing in the failed “punitive expedition” against Pancho Villa, was a former commander of the 101st Airborne, and had performed distinguished service in the Pacific. Most importantly, he remained a close friend and confidant of the president. General Swing designed a secret military plan code-named “Operation Cloudburst,” calling for 4,000 soldiers to be deployed from Yuma, Arizona. The State Department and the ambassador to Mexico were adamantly opposed to the military solution. Swing himself would later testify that a military solution was “perfectly horrible.”13 Upon retirement from the Army in 1954, Swing was appointed Commissioner of Immigration and quickly named two retired generals as his assistants. “Operation Wetback” would be as close to a military response to the “illegal invasion” as politics and good diplomatic manners permitted.
Operation Wetback was planned with the knowledge and approval of the Mexican government. The State Department worked closely with the Mexicans to make sure that there were adequate facilities for the detention and transportation of the deportees deep into Mexico. There was little coverage by the Mexican press of the mass roundups. I assume that the Mexican government, still fully capable of controlling the press, made sure that the citizenry was not outraged by the coverage.
General Swing, on the other hand, adopted the public relations technique used so effectively in the repatriations of the 1930s, “scare-heading.” The most important scholar of the program, Juan Ramón García, writes,
The carefully planned media blitz accomplished its purposes. First of all, by sensationalizing the activities and deployment of the Border Patrol it created the impression that a veritable army was being assembled. In order to maintain that impression, “maximum security prevailed throughout the operation … Information concerning exact officer strength and the organization of the units was kept strictly within the ranks of the officers assigned to the operation. Cleverly worded press releases plus an ostentatious display of men created an impression of greater strength than actually existed.” The press was misled into overestimating the size of the actual force. Even those papers hostile to the drive inadvertently helped contribute to the illusion by constantly using such superlatives as “hordes” and “battalions” when writing about small groups of officers.14
And according to General Swing, scare-heading worked. The Border Patrol Management Report claimed that in Texas, 63,000 “illegal aliens” returned to Mexico voluntarily, and in California the number was so great that “it was impossible to count them.”15 And that was before the operation officially began.
On June 9, 1954, Attorney General Herbert Brownell announced that the first deployment of Operation Wetback would launch on June 17 in California and Arizona. The day after the announcement, the Border Patrol set up roadblocks in the two states and began stopping trains and demanding papers of anyone who looked Mexican. That same day, June 10, the governors of both states received letters requesting the cooperation of local law enforcement agencies to assist in the “mass roundups.”16 The locals responded enthusiastically. Get the wets was the order of the day.
In my little town the news spread quickly, and quiet, organized panic reigned among the undocumented and those who remembered earlier deportations. The men gathered in our front yard under a chinaberry tree, sitting on chairs, boxes, and on the ground. The house was too small, it was obvious they didn’t want the kids to overhear, and my mother would have taken a frying pan to the first one who lit a cigarette indoors. The gathered kids knew it was important by their whispering and dour, sometimes angry faces. I remember that this climate of secrecy and fear lasted weeks.
At that first meeting under the chinaberry tree, the group included the few men who had been deported, plus a handful of others who were undocumented or whose wives were undocumented. The deported believed that they had been betrayed in the 1930s by their own compatriots—fingered by Mexicans who wanted their jobs or their house or were repaying insults perceived or real. They could never forget that the Gila County Welfare Board hired Mexicans to bring the news that they had been identified as illegal and warn that the family had best accept “voluntary departure” or else suffer the consequences. It was important, especially to the undocumented, that their status remained a secret lest it all begin again; but they needed help. They turned to the Mine Mill. In 1950 the Congress of Industrial Organizations, better known as the CIO, had expelled the Mine Mill in the heat of postwar anti-communist hysteria. The national leadership of the Mine Mill had been declared communists under the authority of the Internal Security Act, and even some presidents of union locals and regional organizers were subpoenaed and forced to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. When Mine Mill’s leadership and rank and file refused to cooperate, it became clear that the Union’s days were numbered. Roberto Barcon, the president of Local 589 in Miami, and Maclovio Barraza, the regional organizer for the copper strip that spanned southeastern Arizona and western New Mexico, had both been hauled before congressional committees and declared communists. Perhaps that made them pariahs to some, but to my father and to the undocumented that made them trustworthy. A chapter of the League of Latin American Citizens, LULAC, had been active in Miami since 1941, and many of its members and founders were also members of the Mine Mill, but it was LULAC that enthusiastically supported Operation Wetback. The delicate discussion with Barcon and Barraza was how to get the Union’s help without triggering LULAC’s hysterical self-loathing. The answer lay in the Asociación Nacional México-Americana. ANMA was a national organization chartered in a founding convention in Phoenix in 1949 to defend the rights and culture of Mexican working men and women. Its membership was drawn from the progressive unions under attack as leftist and communist, including the Longshoremen, the Furniture Workers Union, the Cannery Workers, the Electrical Workers Union, and of course the Mine Mill. Throughout its short history, ANMA would champion the rights of braceros (though adamantly opposing the Bracero Program) and the rights of the undocumented. Two of the organizers who had attended that founding convention in Phoenix were Barcon and Barraza.
The Union and ANMA set up a network of observers from their locals in Phoenix, Tucson Superior, and Hayden. There were only two roads up the hill. If the Border Patrol or the military were on their way, calls would come directly to the Union office, and the men and their families would have time to disappear into the hills. During this entire period my mother and father imposed strict rules on us: school, church, and home. My friend Fred Barcon, son of Roberto, lived at the very bottom of Davis Canyon where it met Miami’s main thoroughfare, Sullivan Street. He remembers soldiers and patrols on the streets of Miami. My father recalled that there were only a few times they hid the undocumented. Everyone with “papeles,” papers, or temporary residence was required to present themselves at the county courthouse for review. ANMA members and the Union representatives, often one and the same, were vigilant so that no one was unjustly deported.
No one recalls a single deportation or scare-headed departure from Miami during Operation Wetback.
Operation Wetback soon came to an ignoble end. The Border Patrol commissioned Mexican and US ships to transport Texas deportees from Port Isabel, Texas, to Veracruz, Mexico. In September of 1956, during a shipment of human cargo to Veracruz, a riot protesting conditions on board broke out, a mutiny followed, and in the course of events seven men drowned. Not even Mexico’s institutionalized dictatorship could restrain the press. The incident became a major embarrassment to the ruling PRI party, and the international accord was promptly suspended by the Mexican government.
Operation Wetback, the very phrase, still has a certain allure for nativists. The anti-immigrant movement cherishes nostalgically the image of generals in jeeps ordering millions of Mexicans at gunpoint into trucks, buses, rail cars, and naval vessels and pushed deep into Mexico from where they would never return. Evidence of abuse is dismissed with the sophomoric notion that if they hadn’t entered the country illegally they wouldn’t have been abused.
The reality of course was that Operation Wetback was the public relations ploy that kept the country distracted while the Bracero Program was being extended and enlarged. According to Ramos, General Swing’s troops knew “they lacked the manpower to conduct such a widespread operation. What they planned to do was to deluge the southwestern region with advance publicity about the upcoming campaign against ‘illegals.’ … it was hoped that the threat of mass deportation and their increasingly unwelcomed status as ‘invaders’ would serve to pressure many of them into leaving the country voluntarily.”17 The general, confronting what he called the “wetback invasion,”18 swaggered across the southwest, commanding a PR machine that provided a constant onslaught of movie theater newsreels and photos showing thousands of Mexicans lined up listlessly while armed, clean-shaven, light-skinned, uniformed Americans directed them out of the country. The general himself claimed that Operation Wetback had resulted in the departure of 1,300,000 illegal aliens, but some estimates reckon figures of up to 3 million.19
The Bracero Program collapsed from the cumulative weight of abuse on both sides of the border. The Mexican recruiting stations were replete with corruption. The poorest of Mexico’s poor were forced to pay bribes for the privilege of being half-starved in Mexican recruiting centers, paraded naked for perverse “medical examinations,” sprayed with DDT, herded like animals into rail cars, and transported to border towns where the nightmare continued … and that was only on the Mexican side. Ill treatment by farmers and complicit rural sheriffs was the daily bread of braceros. These problems were covered widely, both in the Mexican and US press. Churches and labor unions maintained campaigns of constant criticism, calling for the halt of the program, but no one in officialdom seemingly cared either in Mexico City or Washington.
Organized labor’s attempts at organizing braceros or forcing them from the country failed, though occasionally violent confrontations between braceros and union men flared in the fields.20 CBS News’ now classic television special “Harvest of Shame,” presented by Edward R. Murrow, was broadcast the weekend after Thanksgiving in 1960. It showed how the feast everyone had just enjoyed came to be on their table. It shocked the nation. The publication of Ernesto Galarza’s Strangers in Our Fields caused an uproar in 1956. Then the DiGiorgio Corporation, the giant farming business that was the focus of Galarza’s contempt, had the rashness to sue Galarza, and the controversy expanded. After twenty-two years, the mounting evidence of abuse could no longer be denied.
Four million, three hundred ninety-five thousand, six hundred twenty-two: that is the undisputed number of braceros that were contracted. Though they represented every region of Mexico, they came inordinately from the central and southern states. Northern Mexicans had been crossing the border since the Mexican-American War: they knew the paths of the “migra,” the rhythms of the agricultural migratory stream, the ways of the urban Mexican Americans, they had developed the skills to survive and in many cases remain permanently in the United States. Braceros from the southern and central states, on the other hand, had little experience en el otro lado. They would be given a subsidized crash course by the American government, complete with prejudice, discrimination, and abuse. There is simply no data on how many braceros stayed, married, had children; how many sent for their families, invited friends, adopted this country as their own, and joined their northern paisanos in the thriving communities they had built throughout America. Of one thing we can be sure, there were millions of them, and their children were millions more and now add their grandchildren—and they were all invited in by the United States of America.
And throughout this time the pressure on children to “be white” was extreme. Being white would prevent you from being seen as a Mexican. Having the right accent, which meant no accent, dressing snazzy, being clean-cut, never but never speaking Spanish within earshot of white people, always saying loudly you were an American, but, if confronted about your surname or your skin color, conceding you were Mexican-American or better yet an American of Mexican descent … Those were the constant instructions on how to pass for white. In segregated Bullion Plaza Elementary, the Mexican school, the teachers would tape your mouth shut if you spoke Spanish. Your name was “Americanized”: Alfredo became Alfred, Guillermo became William, Federico was Fred, all names ending with an “o” were just shortened, so Ernesto became Ernest. Pánfilo was screwed, they changed his to Perry. Girls were not exempt, María was Mary and Rosa became Rose. Yahaira was a challenge. Her white name became Joann.
Accents were a real problem. Second- and third-generation kids came from households that spoke Spanish at home, so even they would pronounce English with an accent. Television, the great teacher of English and leveler of accents, was only barely becoming affordable to most mining families in the 1950s; movies were affordable perhaps once a week, and kids were in school for only a few hours a day. Thus accents, which we did not know we had, were reinforced constantly. It was the persistence of accents that led to some of the most ridiculous exercises in whiteness. One ludicrous idea was teaching kids to speak in “round sounds.” To this day I don’t know if this was a local invention or whether some lame-brained linguist actually developed this method. Open your mouth slightly, then form an “O” with your lips extended outward, then speak while keeping your mouth in that O shape. Try it. It will indeed reduce your accent, but it will also make you sound like a fastidious and pretentious fool. In elementary school it could make you the object of derision and get you a good whuppin’ from the other Mexican kids as an added benefit.
Enforcing accentless English were kids policing other kids. To mispronounce a word, wash for watch, eschool for school for example, would lead to guffaws and mockery. “¡Qué feo lo mascas!” “You chewed that up ugly” was a favorite phrase. Kids recently arrived or kids who came from homes where only Spanish was spoken were ridiculed to the point that they were afraid to speak.
Going to the Mexican movies at the Lyric would signal to the whole town you were a Mexican, and not really a Mexican American or an American of Mexican descent. Just a Mexican, and it was becoming increasingly clear to the kids that being Mexican was not a good thing. The Lyric closed, because the Mexican families who had enjoyed the movies every week had transmogrified into Mexican Americans or better yet Americans of Mexican descent, and in their new identities wouldn’t be caught dead in a Mexican theater. Taking bean burros or tacos de papa for lunch at school was an open admission that you were a Mexican, as was humming or singing any ranchera or corrido. “Cielito Lindo” was acceptable to the white teachers, and at least once a year they trotted a bunch of Mexican kids to the auditorium to sing it for them. I still hate “Cielito Lindo,” and don’t call me Alfred. My mother spoke little English, and my father worked long shifts and was always volunteering for overtime. I would accompany my mother to pay the bills and do the shopping as the translator and cultural guide. It could get a bit embarrassing when inquiring about feminine products and underclothes. It fell to me because my sister, god bless her, was embarrassed by our mother’s Spanish. There was little doubt my mother was a Mexican.
Girls loved Max Factor. Especially the bleaching cream. It would whiten them up. In the late 1950s Rose Escobedo was the first Mexican-American cheerleader at Miami High School. Years later she told me that at the time she attributed her breakthrough to Max Factor. She used it all week before the tryouts. If girls were lighter-skinned, putting henna in their hair could give it a reddish tone and make them look, well, Italian maybe.
I was a problematic student in high school. My older brother was a record-breaking track star, a varsity football player, and a pretty good student. My sister was every teacher’s pet. Given my behavior, I was ordered to the principal’s office routinely, and given a “good talking-to” before being expelled for a day or so. Principal Nick Ragus, whose preferred method of counseling students was the loud, intimidating rant, would remind me each time: “You know why you’re not like your brother and sister? You don’t have red hair! You don’t have freckles! You look like a Mexican! You better straighten out!” My mother suggested henna.
Mexican restaurants started serving Spanish food, especially if they wanted to attract white clientele and the folks who aspired to be white. Amazingly, Spanish food, it turned out, was exactly the same as the tacos and enchiladas they served the week before. La Casita in Globe, famous for its menudo, red chile, enchiladas con huevos, and, of course, always serving its homemade tortillas with a generous slathering of butter, declared its cuisine Spanish-American. The food is just as wonderful today, and the neon sign on the window has long ago been boxed and taken away, consigned to the trash heap like a bad memory. In Miami, the town’s most popular restaurant, El Rey, where I followed both of my brothers scrubbing floors and washing dishes, proclaimed with its own sign that what it called a “regular burro,” red chili and beef with refried beans and longhorn cheese mixed together in a heavenly concoction, was really Spanish-American. And down in Phoenix, the El Rey on South Central was the final defiant restaurant in Arizona refusing to serve blacks. It became the site of continuous protests by the NAACP until the tiny, family-owned storefront relented at last. It never regained its popularity with the white downtown crowd, but it survived in business for years afterward serving pretty good Mexican food, especially its chile colorado with frijoles de la olla. A big hand-lettered sign painted onto the south-side wall of the homely white building reading “Mexican Dishes” survived until El Rey closed in the early seventies, but the neon sign that announced Spanish-American food on the window under a big colorful poster of a sombrero came down soon after its ignorant last stand against integration. Up the street from the infamous El Rey was the Spanish Kitchen. The chief cook was Sra. Duran, whose daughters Rosie and Esther would become icons of the Latino civil rights movement in Arizona. The menu at the Spanish Kitchen was tacos dorados, chile verde, menudo, gorditas, and many other northern Mexican delicacies. There wasn’t a paella or even a Spaniard in the kitchen. Discomfort with calling someone or even something Mexican lingered for many years. As late as 1970 the city of Scottsdale held a downtown fair featuring “Spanish food.” The menu as listed in the advertising section of the Arizona Republic was tacos, tostadas, burritos, and enchiladas with rice and beans.
In February of 1988, Arizona’s Secretary of State Rose Mofford assumed the governorship upon the impeachment of Evan Mecham (who had a habit of calling African Americans “pickaninnies”21). I became part of a hastily assembled team who would lead her transition. Governor Mofford was a native of Globe, six miles from Miami, born in 1922 and clearly a woman of her generation. From time to time, facing a controversial issue that could have an impact on her future electoral plans, she would turn to me and ask, “What do the Spanish think of this, Alfredo?” The appropriate response would have been “How the hell should I know?” but instead I would gently ask in response, “You mean the Mexicans, don’t you?” and she would grumble her agreement.
Nationally, LULAC and the GI Forum preached patriotism and whiteness and embraced Operation Wetback. They were at the forefront of the campaign to Americanize us. LULAC was then, and is still today, the oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization in the country. LULAC’s record of struggle is impressive. The GI Forum was formed after World War II in response to blatant discrimination against Latino veterans. In fairness to both organizations, their obsession with whiteness was only to help young people survive and succeed in an exceedingly hostile climate. The concern for “being white,” however, dates back to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty that ended the Mexican and American War guaranteed that Mexicans who lived in the territories that would become the United States would do so “with the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens.”22 The assumption of the Mexican negotiators was that those residing in their former territories would simply become US citizens. They were snookered. US citizenship at the time was primarily limited to white persons, and Mexicans, as anyone can plainly see, are a marvelous mess of African, Indian, Spanish, and whatever else happened to land on that shore. They were closer to uniformly mestizo. An international treaty notwithstanding, prior to the adoption of the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution, each individual state determined the citizenship status of Mexicans. Mexicans deemed mestizo or Indian in appearance were categorized as Indians, and in most states were denied citizenship, property rights, the right to testify in court or ever to become a naturalized citizen. Those declared black were subject to applicable laws during a period when slavery was still legal in most states.23 For the next century, Latinos would be challenging state laws in court and pleading with the US Census to be categorized as white. LULAC, formed in 1929, waged a heroic battle to establish and maintain that Mexican Americans in the US have the full rights of citizens, regardless of their mestizohood, and that meant “being white.”
The goal of being white may have had roots in the struggle for civil rights, but by the 1950s it had become an obsession to be accepted as American albeit of Mexican descent, and to be distinguished—as George Sánchez reminded us—from “illegal aliens” and wetbacks. The historian David Gutiérrez quotes as follows a LULAC delegate to their 1946 convention:
The American citizen of Mexican ancestry is weak because he is a minority citizen. Discrimination will pursue him until he blends with the majority group of this country enough to lose his present identity. This is a discouragingly slow process … [but] if we fail to do it we shall continue to be discriminated against, insulted and abused; and complaining of injustice in the name of democracy will not help us. We shall simply be begging for things that must be paid for.24
Being white was not about assimilation and acculturation. That was taking place, and would have taken place even without the punitive campaign by LULAC and the GI Forum. No, from the point of view of these organizations, “being white” meant losing our identity. Melting away. The blatant discrimination and prejudice of the time did not discourage them. The pachucos were perhaps the most extreme manifestation of resistance to the enforced dogma. Pachucos were a Mexican youth subculture that burst upon the scene in Los Angeles. Though few in number, their impact was powerful. They dressed in a distinctive, flamboyant fashion, especially the men: exaggerated “zoot suits” with a coat reaching almost to the knee and baggy pleated pants that rode high above the waist, spectacularly colorful satin shirts with ties to match and, topping it off, a jauntily slanted wide-brimmed hat, with a feather that curved beautifully over it. They spoke in a special patois they called caló, primarily Spanglish with a decidedly urban black influence. The patois included the term “chicano” when referring to themselves. In 1942 twenty-two pachucos were charged with murder in a case, the Sleepy Lagoon trial, that became a national scandal. In 1943, confrontations between US marines and sailors and pachucos in Los Angeles sparked a week of riots in L.A. and other cities in the country. Soldiers and sailors were ordered to stand down only after Mexico had lodged a formal diplomatic complaint, and President Roosevelt intervened.25 The Los Angeles Police Department released “A Report on the Mexicans” in 1943 that described Mexicans as naturally given to violence, with “biological urges to kill, or at least let blood.” That tendency arose from the “Asiatic nomads” from which we were descended and from the “Indian blood” running through us. The Mexican’s “utter disregard for the value of life” was, the report asserted, “well known to everyone.”26 Once the asiatic connection was established and the violent stereotype reaffirmed, it was inevitable that the pachucos would be identified as part of an elaborate communist plot. The citizens’ committee formed to defend the accused in the Sleepy Lagoon case included prominent Mexican-American Angelenos like Josefina Fierro de Bright, and major celebrities Rita Hayworth and Anthony Quinn; it was promptly declared a “Communist front organization” by the Los Angeles police chief, C. B. Horrall.27 All of this attention served to spread the fashion and the patois to every barrio in America and, in the eyes of many young Latinos, to transform pachucos into outlaw heroes.
Pachuco influence was still strongly felt in the 1950s. Dressing like a pachuco in that decade meant wearing high-riding khaki pants, thick-soled work shoes with steel-tipped heels, white T-shirts, and a little tandita on top. A tandita was a cockily placed, fancy fedora. The style and the slang had the pleasant effect of driving Americanizers insane, but frankly, the pachuco threat had dissipated by the 1950s and was by then but an irritating side show. The Americanizers were single-mindedly dedicated to extinguishing the Mexican identity in America, and they seemed poised to succeed.
I finished high school in 1963 and, like my two older brothers before me, promptly enlisted in the Army. By the time I came back, the Americanizers were on the run, and the rumble of change and the talk of revolution were everywhere.
