YOLANDA CHAVEZ LEYVA
  • Home
  • Fierce Fronteriza Blog
  • Callegrafias Fronterizas
  • What I do
  • Publications
  • Comunidad
  • Connecting
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • South Central - Alameda Street
  • Untitled
  • Callegrafia
Fierce Fronteriza
Picture

Memories of the Bracero Program

2/24/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
Rio Vista Farm, Socorro, Texas 2016

Years ago, I studied with Mariano Leyva, un gran maestro and co-founder of  Universidad Nahuatl in Morelos. I remember one visit to Mexico City where we attended a ceremony at the Zócalo. He introduced me as his prima from the United States and concocted a story that I was the daughter of his long-lost uncle who had come to the United States as a bracero and never returned. No one questioned it. I grew to like the fictionalized details of our connection. No one questioned the story that a man could leave his village to work in the U.S. and never return. In Mexico, the people know about the migration of men from villages to U.S. fields. In Mexico, people still remember the decades that men left with hopes of earning money and returning to their families.

Last summer, while teaching my Mexican American history class, I talked about the Bracero program and asked who had relatives who had participated in the program. Surprisingly no one raised a hand. After lecturing about the program, we watched the heart-breaking documentary, Harvest of Loneliness. (Click below to see the entire documentary.) When I turned the lights on after we watched the video, the students sat there in complete silence. They looked shocked at the conditions that braceros survived. I told them to take a break.




 

After our class break, one student told us tearfully that she had called her mom during the break to ask if she knew anything about the Braceros and she learned that her abuelito had come here as a bracero. He never talked about it, nor did his family, because it was too traumatic and he was ashamed. She asked, "How could I not know?"

It is a question that my students have asked me for almost thirty years as they learn the history of the border, of Mexican Americans, of their community. "How could I not know?" Sometimes they ask in tears, sometimes in anger or disbelief. I never let the question go unanswered. Why are some histories told and others not? Why are some histories silenced in the classroom, in the textbooks? Why are some histories hidden within our own families? And, as importantly, how can we learn to listen and to gently prod those memories from their hiding places?

In El Paso, the memories reside in century-old buildings like Rio Vista, in the forty-year old class assignments of students, and in the rooms of a south side farm workers center.

In the summer of 2016, I walked the grounds of Rio Vista Farm, a complex of buildings that served as a Bracero processing center from 1951 to 1964. Sehila Mota Casper, field officer with the National Trust for Historic Preservation had invited me. The Trust was going to name Rio Vista Farm a national treasure a couple of months later. The wooden buildings' shadows and the adobe peaking through the plastered walls told of a history that many don't know anymore, even the people who live around Rio Vista. The announcement of Rio Vista as a treasure brought together community members, former braceros, and their families. For many, it was the first time this part of their history had been acknowledged.

Picture
Rio Vista Farm, 2016.
For over forty years, the Institute of Oral History at UTEP has gathered oral histories that tell us the stories of  braceros and the people associated with the program. In 1976, UTEP student Olivia Roman interviewed Dr. Jose Roman who had worked as a physician with the Trans-Pecos Cotton Association. Dr. Roman remembered that some braceros arrived to Texas speaking Indigenous languages. It was only working among other Mexicans in the cotton fields that they eventually learned some Spanish. He recalled that they were given instruction through simple signs since the work was a "mechanic sort of thing." (Interview with Jose Roman, MD, by Olivia Roman, Interview 219, Institute of Oral History, UTEP.)
Picture
Men waiting in line at Rio Vista Farm. Photo courtesy of the USCIS.















For several years, my students have worked with the Center for Border Farmworkers, helping to organize thousands of documents left with the centro by former braceros and their families. They receive as much as they give, reading letters and bracero contracts, scanning micas and looking into the faces of young men unsure of their futures. It has humanized and complicated the history of braceros in a way that far exceeds what I could ever do in the classroom. The director of the Centro de Trabajadores Agricolas Carlos Marentes says that this is a history that belongs to the community. I want my students to know what he means. History belongs to the community.

Soon, I plan to return to Rio Vista to walk among the buildings that hold this rich, transnational history. Next time, though, I'm going to take my students and ask them to tell me what they see..




0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    September 2019
    August 2019
    November 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017

    Categories

    All

Picture
My father used to tell me about sneaking into this theater to watch movies as a kid in the 1910s. It showed Spanish language films. In the 1940s, it was transformed into a "whites only" theater but that didn't last long. By the 1950s, it was headquarters to the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union, a radical labor organization. Before it closed, it housed the Mine and Mill Bar.
Picture
Picture
This message is painted on the east side of the old Mission movie theater.
Picture
The bell tower of Guardian Angel Catholic Church, built in the 1910s to serve the growing Mexican immigrant community in what was then the "east side" of El Paso.
Picture
This pinata shop caught my attention as I was driving west on Alameda Street on my way to work.
Picture
Hawaiian dancer, Alameda Street.
Picture
Unicorn pinata on Alameda Street.
Picture
Proud graduate pinata.
Picture
Love message on the east side exterior wall of the old Mission Theater.

Segundo Barrio
Father Rahm Street
​July 2022

Picture
Looking into Padre Pinto Plaza, Sagrado Corazon Catholic Church.
Picture
Treasures on the window sill.
Picture
La bici
Picture
Tres vatos.
Picture
Esperando el bus.
Picture
Two generations.

 La Virgensita en la frontera
Picture
Woman reflected on la Virgencita, Segundo Barrio, 2021.
Picture
La Virgen de Guadalupe, 12 de diciembre 2017, Centro de Trabajadores Agricolas, El Paso
Picture
Protecting Barrio Duranguito 2019

 Cd Juarez downtown
​December 2017
Picture
Raramuri father and son musicians, downtown Juarez, 2017.
Picture
The smell of copal, downtown Juarez, December 2017.
Picture
Ciudad Juarez limpia, downtown, December 2017.
Picture
Selling at the mercado, downtown Juarez, December 2017
Picture
Telcel payaso, downtown Juarez, December 2017


 La Mariscal, Ciudad Juarez, 2017

Picture
Dos perros, La Mariscal, December 2017
Picture
Mujer con cabello verde, La Mariscal, Juarez, December 2017.
Picture
Beautiful death, La Mariscal, Ciudad Juarez, December 2017.
Picture
Tin Tan, La Mariscal, Ciudad Juarez, December 2017.
 
Montana Vista 2019
Picture
Red high heels in the desert 2019
 El Centro July 2022
Picture
A tree reaches out to Oscar Zeta Acosta (mural by Lxs Dos), El Paso, Texas July 2022
  • Home
  • Fierce Fronteriza Blog
  • Callegrafias Fronterizas
  • What I do
  • Publications
  • Comunidad
  • Connecting
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • South Central - Alameda Street
  • Untitled
  • Callegrafia