SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL December 4, 2005 94-year-old bracero still awaits payment from Mexican governmentLAS LOMAS At 94, Francisco Rodriguez wakes up every day inside his bare bulb apartment in Las Lomas and catches the bus to Vicky's Produce in Watsonville, where he works eight to 10 hours a day, seven days a week, earning $150. He cuts cactus inside a lonely back room, a sharp knife in hand, a cowboy hat on his head. He counts the onions, separating the good from the bad. He hefts bags of oranges, his arms weighed down by his side, his back already bent from the years spent in the fields, an indentured servant to the short-handled hoe. At an age when most men are either long dead or are spending the final days of their lives in a retirement home or in the comfort of their own homes, Rodriguez is still chasing the ever elusive American dollar that lured him here as a teenager just three years before the great depression and nine years after the Mexican Revolution. But he's got no beef with the U.S government. It's the Mexican government he's got the grudge against. It still owes him nearly a decade of 10 percent deductions from his monthly checks and Rodriguez and thousands of other Mexican braceros in Central California, a dying breed, are trying to get it back. Although a few months ago the Mexican government agreed to pay each bracero $3,800, according to the Mexican Consulate in San Francisco, Rodriguez and others aren't holding out much hope. Mostly because it requires returning to Mexico and proving that they were indeed braceros, submitting documentation that dates back five decades. "Forget that. I'm an old man and will never be able to get there," says Rodriguez, who only speak Spanish, has no children and was widowed more than four decades ago. "I just don't trust the government. I just wish there were an easier way to prove it all. But I've come this far without money. I can keep going. I'm a Mexican. I've learned to put up with it." So day in and day out, he reports to work on Rodriguez Street, a fitting name. He's happy he's got a job, he says, gesturing with his hands for emphasis, his face long weathered by time, his fingers unusually long and strong from harvesting everything from cotton to prunes, grapes and strawberries. "If I didn't have a job," he adds in Spanish, "I'd be bored out of my wits. And I don't want to be that. I wouldn't know what to do with myself." Although Rodriguez only earns $150 a week, he's the first to recognize his physical limitations. He understands that the owners have given him the job out of the goodness of their hearts and because they consider him family. It's the $600 that Rodriguez gets each month from the U.S. government that has become his saving grace. It's payback for the hard-earned two decades he spent in the fields of California and Arizona as a temporary guest worker under the Bracero Program. But a little extra, say, $10,000 from the Mexican government, would be a windfall. It's a figure that has been bantered about by activists representing the likes of him and serving as a liaison to the Mexican government as time runs out for these elderly braceros. Rodriguez's experience as a guest worker, not to mention the thousands of others like him, serves as a cautionary tale to what can go wrong as the Bush administration proposes a similar guest worker program of its own to stem the tide of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans who cross the border each year, according to the United Farm Workers of America in San Francisco. To the residents of Las Lomas and Watsonville, however, Rodriguez is simply that steadfast old man who sometimes walks 6 miles to work, who's never eaten a pound of meat in his life, never put a cigarette to his lips and rarely indulged in alcohol. He's a salt-of-the-earth guy whose will to work has taken precedent over his religious convictions. He forgoes Catholic Mass so that he can work. He just keeps going and going and going.
The Bracero, 'real heroes' When translated in Spanish, "bracero" means "worker," and it comes from the word "arm." But to most folks, it's the name of a cooperative deal forged between the U.S. and Mexico governments in 1942 to fill a labor shortage in the fields during World War II when many men were working in the defense industry or were off fighting a war. An estimated 2 million Mexicans qualified for the short-term labor contracts that came up for renewal every few years provided they signed on the dotted line and agree that 10 percent of their wages would be deducted, funneled back to Mexico and set aside for their retirement upon their return. "Where did the money go to? That's the million-dollar question, not even the $64,000 question," says Harry Pachon, a public policy professor at USC. "But there's a money trail," he says, "and it leads to Mexico." The trail started at Wells Fargo Bank in the United States, where the deductions were deposited by employers between 1942 and 1949. Eventually, the total, $500 million, was wired back to Banco de Mexico in 1964, where, Pachon says, "it fell into some dark hole" not surprising for a government with a record of corruption. When some of the braceros returned to their country shortly after to claim what was rightfully theirs, it was nowhere to be found, says Jose Sandoval, a coordinator for the San Jose-based Voluntarios de la Comunidad. The organization is trying to convince the Mexican government to up the ante on what it owes the braceros, calculating inflation into the mix, arguing the $3,800 isn't nearly enough for the wages earned at the time roughly 50 cents an hour. Each bracero should get at least $10,000, he says. "Seρor, could you imagine that?" says a Spanish-speaking Sandoval, 48, who's had friends and family who were braceros. "Can you imagine working all those years, and then thinking you're going to get something for it, and you don't? And then when you finally do, if you're lucky enough, it's nowhere near what it was worth back then? We're talking about years and years of work. "It's beyond words." Civil rights attorneys in the United States, as recently as two years ago, tried to hold the U.S. government at least partially responsible, claiming in U.S. District Court in San Francisco that State Department officials were well aware the Mexican government and Mexican banks were stealing the money yet did nothing about it. The lawsuit was eventually thrown out for technical reasons, but that didn't stop the braceros from using their unpaid plight to draw attention to the potential for exploitation with guest-worker programs, including President Bush's proposal nearly two years ago to grant undocumented workers three-to-six year stints provided they return for good to Mexico. "It's a shame what happened to them. They were real heroes. We all looked at them as heroes," says Elia Vazquez, 56, a Pajaro Valley farmer who still remembers the makeshift bracero camps just outside of Chico when she was a young Mexican girl trying to make her mark in Northern California after arriving with her family from Zacatecas, Mexico in 1962. The braceros were indispensable, she said, because the country needed them at the time and they came through in the clutch by harvesting the fields and essentially feeding the people in all four corners of the country. "Without them," she added, "many people would have starved."
Woe to the workers Yet it's not the first time that the Mexican people have struggled with the yin and yang of immigration, whether legal or illegal, notes Pedro Castillo, a UC Santa Cruz history professor. "When there's an economic boom and a demand for cheap labor, we want them to come," says Castillo, who specializes in U.S.-Mexico history. "During times of economic difficulty, we send them back." That was the case during the Great Depression, when as many as 500,000 Mexicans were driven to border towns then deported by Mexican train as part of a repatriation program that sought to make more room for welfare benefits to the unemployed citizens of the United States, Castillo says. "The reason had nothing to do with Mexicans taking jobs," he says. The sad fact, however, is that some of the Mexicans were actually U.S. citizens by virtue of being born here but had the "wrong number of vowels in their last names," notes Pachon, the USC public policy professor. Although Rodriguez was never deported and moved back and forth between Mexico and California on his own accord, eventually becoming a legal resident in the 1960s, the UFW for the last year has been touting an amnesty program that would allow farmworkers living in the United States to become legal working residents under its AgJobs bill, provided they've been here for more than 100 days. Under Bush's bill, the same workers eventually would have to return to Mexico. "And nobody's going to want to become a part of that," says Marc Grossman, spokesman for the UFW. "Some Mexicans here who are illegally already own homes. Nobody who's been here for years is going to volunteer to go back." While the United States tries to come to solve the immigration policy, Rodriguez tries to just live day to day. "Every morning is a blessing," he says. "But right now I don't have time to talk. I've got to work."
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