Next on lectures in history, we take you to the university of illinois where professor mireya loza teaches a class on latino labor movements in the 20th century. She discusses the Bracero Program which brought workers mostly in the ago ricultural industry. Were almost towards the end of the semester, and because we are i decided to really talk to you guys today about what i research. So you guys had my piece on the alien braceros. I want us to think about the class today in two parts, one in which were going to cover bracero history. I know we covered bracero history in sort of broad sketches, but this time we will talk about it a little bit more in depth. My gift to you, i cant let you walk out of a class with me without you guys knowing bracero history really well. Second thing were going to do is were actually going to talk about the article. Good . Okay. So im going to tell you guys a little bit about how i started being interested in bracero history. I always tell you guys i was a student like you guys in a class, mexicanAmerican History, and my advisor, my thenmentor well, he was first my teacher. Matt garcia said to me and the rest of the class, find your oldest Family Member and collect an oral history. I thought an oral history was a basic interview and i thought, okay, thats fine. It is a little challenging when you come from immigrant families in which your grandparents are somewhere else, so i looked for my oldest Family Member, and my oldest Family Member was not really that old, right . He was my uncle who had come in as a bracero. I grew up with my uncle. I grew up seeing my uncle every single day and he would talk every once in a while about his work in california, in texas. He would tell me stories and tell my whole family stories about what it was like to work picking cotton in texas, what it was like to pick cabbage in california, and i thought to myself, well, i kind of sort of know this story because i know my uncle. Ive heard this story. I took it back to the class, and my teacher, matt garcia, said, this is extraordinary. I thought, how is my uncle who i see every day extraordinary . Because, sometimes, you know, the people you see the most are not that extraordinary to you. And so i thought, this is pretty interesting. I was really excited about doing oral history more than anything. So i will show you a picture of my uncle. Thats my uncle. He actually was born in a little village. How many of you have Family Members there. It is one of the large sending states and contributes to large wave also of immigrants here in the u. S. So my teacher basically asked me to explore the Bracero Program. What do we know about the Bracero Program . What do you guys know about the Bracero Program . You read a little and we talked about it. Gabbie . I guess it is most traditionally understood as like a Guest Worker Program, where workers from mexico would come to the u. S. Due to like and i think it was like a wartime kind of thing where workers were needed and like a lot of s citizens were at war. So they got a lot of guest workers from mexico. You are exactly right. It started in the war time. It started in 1942. What does guest worker mean . Anybody . Guest worker . Yes, maria. Temporary, so it was just for the moment that that worker was needed, and once the work is done then they will be probably sent back. Yes, thats exactly it. Guest worker means temporary. Theyre on temporary labor contracts, which means they come in and theyre recruited to work maybe a couple of months and then they return. Some of them have options to renew contracts and could stay in the u. S. For multiple years, but guest worker means just that. Why do you guys think that Guest Worker Programs, and in specific the Bracero Program, would be important now . Just a question. Yes, molly . Because of the influx of the immigrants who come to work. Yes. The u. S. Is constantly sort of thought about and enacted agreements for bringing in guest workers, and weve seen guest workers. The Bracero Program didnt bring an end to Guest Worker Programs. It brought an end to the Largest Guest Worker Program. What we also see is that guest worker models are popular globally. So guest worker models are used across europe, across the middle east, and what do we know about the Bracero Program . I will tell you what we know. We know that it is it was the Largest Guest Worker Program in the americas, and it became a model for other places. So when you think about guest workers and mexican guest workers coming in, you can think about the ways in which they shaped other policies around guest workers, right . Okay. Another question. How many of you actually have Family Members that came in through the Bracero Program . One . Really . Usually it is more. I dont i dont know. You see. A couple. So the other thing that we know is that the Guest Worker Program really, really impacted migration histories, right . So if we go back to what is the Bracero Program, the Bracero Program was a bi National Agreement between the u. S. And mexico that allowed mexican male workers to enter the u. S. On temporary work permits. They had a legal permit, they had status, right . Gabbie was very correct with saying it was started due to a perceived labor shortage brought on by world war ii. I use the word perceived because a lot of people argued after the war was terminated, after the war ended guest workers continued to come in. Why did guest workers continue to come in after the war ended . Uhhuh . Because growers took advantage of braceros and they continued that labor because it was cheaper. Yes. Yeah, exactly, marquise. It became a cheaper mode of labor. We know for a fact that there were two components to the first Bracero Program, railroad and agriculture. Why did the railroad component end . Yes. Isnt it because Railroad Unions were really strong and they protected their workers, and like they didnt want to deal with that . And wasnt it also in the agreement that the braceros couldnt have a union . Yes, and Railroad Unions were very strong and railroad jobs were very good jobs. So, yes, exactly. Okay. So the other thing we know is that 4. 5 million contracts were issued. 4. 5 million. Thats a whole lot, right . It is not five, it is not ten, it is not 20, it is not 1,000 or 2,000. 4. 5 million. So were talking about a gigantic wave of workers coming in. Just to give you an idea of where the workers came from, the workers came from almost everywhere state in mexico. What you see in dark blue is every state that received mexican guest workers in the u. S. Those are a lot of states, right . There are only a couple that didnt. Why do you guys think that there are a couple on this side that did not receive mexican guest workers . Any guesses . You guys didnt have it in your reading. Guesses . Why wouldnt they . Is it possibly because they had enough labor in their in the states already that they didnt need to hire braceros . Thats a good guess. Yes . They had enough cheap labor . Thats a good guess. Next guess. Is it like the kind of industry like they werent so previous ah le prevalent in those states. Another good guess. Were getting closer. Gabbie. I dont know yeah, i dont know. Kind of going off what marquise has been saying, but also just like i feel like the cheap labor would have been africanamericans in that area because it is like the south. So like after, like, slavery was abolished, quote, unquote, they were still like there. So i feel like that would have been the cheap labor so they wouldnt have needed braceros in those areas because they already had a cheap labor force. You are all getting very, very close. The other thing that you guys have not read, which is why i ask you these questions while you havent read it, these other states also brought in guest workers. Some of the guest workers that were brought in in those states were from jamaica and the british west indys. So there was another Guest Worker Program that existed alongside the Bracero Program. The other thing that happened during the same period is that puerto rican Agricultural Workers were also recruited. Some of them went to those states, and some of them went to the states that braceros also went into. States lying michigan, braceros could find themselves working alongside puerto rican temporary workers. Now, would Puerto Ricans be considered guest workers . No, no. They were specifically recruited to come in and work temporary contracts as well, but because of their status, the colonial status, they could come in freely, and in some ways, you know, work some areas and avoid some of the red tape that the Bracero Program brought about, but also endured heavy exploitation. Okay. So how do we imagine that the Bracero Program impacted mexican migration . What are your guesses as to why . How does it impact mexican migration . I recall from the reading it said they also brought contracts from Bracero Programs and they migrated to certain areas in the u. S. It also brought like an influx of undocumented immigrants. I believe it said for every like two million that came in, it would double that for undocumented and thats why there was such a competition between them. Yes. What happens with the Bracero Program is that you see a rise of undocumented labor alongside documented labor of the Bracero Program. The Bracero Program literally creates another wave. So when people start to talk about temporary Guest Worker Programs and talk about the reality of guest workers right now, and when guest workers are used as a potential solution to immigration policy and immigration reform, you all need to remember that the Bracero Program didnt solve undocumented immigration. It actually augmented undocumented immigration. So that is one reese aality. What do we know about the period right before the Bracero Program, the 1930s . That was the period mexican repatriation. Yes, repatriation. Which is when the u. S. Government deported a bunch of mexicans, and a lot were mexicanamericans with citizen status and it is because they were seen as an economic burden. Very good. What it does and what youre pointing out is there is a moment where theres deportation. What 1942 does, in the 1940s is it brings back mexican migration to areas like maybe michigan, illinois, in the midwest where the sort of populations were hit so hard by repatriation. So it reinvigorated mexican migration to states hit hard by repatriation. It also increased mexican migration to traditional areas. So traditional areas in the southwest like texas, california, new mexico were once again reinvigorated because of this wave of migration. What else do we know . What else do we know about those shifts . What else can you guess . It also transform the gender dynamic, right . Because theyre all men coming into these areas. So some men were able to stay, not every man so this is not for you to say every man was able to stay. Some men were able to stay because they actually married mexicanamerican women, they also married american you know, White American women, and they found avenues to stay in the u. S. You know, other men simply went back to their communities. So how do i connect this to my own work, right . Im going to tell you guys a little bit about the stuff i do. During graduate school i spent five years working on bracero history project. So right after i collected my uncles, you know, oral history, i waited years, years, years, years, years. Found myself back in graduate school and my adviser said, you were once very interested in this history, are you still interested . I said, sure, im interested in guest worker history, im interested in some of these topics. What i didnt know is that the National Museum of American History had acquired a huge collection of Leonard Nadel frafls and they decided they would pursue an actual exhibit project and a digital archive. They partnered up with this fancy university, george mason, and they have a center for history and new media. And they decided that this would be a great project to start thinking about digital media, new history and thinking about the way in which we interact with history. So the bracero history project began as i started graduate school at brown, and what did we do . We started collecting oral histories and objects. So i was sent out to places like san bernardino. I was sent out to selenas, i was sent out to cocella to train communities to correct their own oral histories and i carried a heavy backpack with a scanner and a recorder to collect oral histories myself. When the opportunity came to collect oral histories in mexico, i lobbied and decided i really wanted to collect oral histories in states that werent traditional sending states. So that when you think about bracero history, the traditional sending states people talk about are three. I thought what about the other states, what are the stories in these other places . How do we think about these other places and how are these other places shaped by the Bracero Program . So i collected oral histories in the yucatan, in where else . Y yucatan, wahaha, all of these fantastic places, and i took them back with the communities that had been trained to deposit their oral histories in this archive. Students like you in other places decided to collect their own oral histories. Kids from cal state long beach decided they would collect their own oral histories and it was a gigantic wave of collection all over the u. S. And people contributing to this project. We collected a little over 800 oral histories, making it one of the larger repositories of latino history. So that was fantastic, but the second thing we did was we digitized peoples documents, people, students, under grads stood there and scanned ids, photographs, anything people would bring in, they scanned to make sure it was preserved and made its way into the archive. So what you find is that the archive has oral histories and it has digitized documents, but the other fantastic thing that came out of it is that the museum, the National Museum of American History created a traveling exhibit. Bittersweet harvest. Bittersweet harvest was a small and modest exhibit that got a lot of attention and got a lot of attention because many people who came from these communities or were impacted by these communities wanted to host this exhibit. I will show you what the page looks like. You cant see it that well, but in 2010 we won National Public history prize because we were one of the best public history projects out there. If you go on there you can actually type in Something Like juan loza and listen to my uncle. You can type in my name and listen to oral histories. I have the good, the bad and the ugly, the oral histories i carried out when i was just learning methods and you will say, wow, this is terrible, and then i have better ones because i learned how to do my job much better. You can see other students like yourself were 19, 20 years old and were really committed to collecting these oral histories and went out with their backpacks all over their communities and collected oral histories. Thats what they did. So i actually listened to some of the oral histories for theory and methods and we had to analyze your interview style. Oh. Who taught the theory and methods . Professor gaucho. Oh i will tell you the first ones were a bumpy ride. You learn by doing. You learn by doing, and theres times where, you know, i didnt have the best interview style and i got better and, you know, thats all you can do. Trust me, i feel for you. I would i would have given you an a on that assignment just foreign during it. So bittersweet harvest, this is a photograph of bittersweet harvest, you cant see it that clearly. It opened at the National Museum and it was composed of lightweight panels so it could travel all over the u. S. , so it was affordable for other museums and Community Organizations to take on this exhibit. Most of the objects stayed at the National Museum. What the museum asked was that local organizations actually display their own, their own bracero history. So students at cal state, Channel Island with their professor jose alamio, decided to collect their own objects and display them along side. They decided to actually create panels about their own local oral history and displayed it alongside the National Museums, which was fantastic. We were also fortunate enough you cant really see it in the back there, theres bunk beds. Theres bunk beds that we collected from a site, an old site where braceros actually lived, a camp. And when i saw it, i thought, this is fantastic. We had a hat donated by a man who really wanted to honor his dad, and he really wanted to tell his fathers story and he really wanted his fathers hat to be preserved, and we happily took it. You cant see