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TUCSON CITIZEN December 31, 2008
Lack of 50-year-old stubs keeps braceros from back pay
Mexico agrees to cough up back pay, but many cannot provide proof
Antonio Olivares Samaniego, 79, worked at U.S farms for almost 50 years, picking lettuce, beets, and taking care of the fields, no matter how much snow was at his feet or how much the sun burned his back.
He came to the U.S. in 1952 as a bracero, under a U.S. guest worker program for farm laborers from Mexico that started in 1942 and ended in 1964.
He remembers those days fondly and said working as a bracero was a great way to earn money he could send to his family, which made him proud.
The Mexican government, to encourage the workers to return to Mexico, deducted 10 percent of their pay. Few ever received the deducted wages.
In 2001, several former braceros brought a lawsuit against the Mexican government, seeking the back pay. This year, Mexico agreed to settle the suit and pay braceros $3,500 each.
But Mexico's requirements for proving someone was a bracero and entitled to the settlement are daunting, many former braceros say. There are an estimated 400,000 former braceros in the United States or Mexico.
Olivares said he has to provide old pay stubs, contracts or the identification card he was given as a bracero, none of which he has.
Like Olivares, about 40 former braceros live in Tucson and did not keep documents that could include them in the settlement.
"We were ignorant back then, and they probably thought we wouldn't ask for the money they kept taking because we weren't educated," Olivares said as he held his hand up to his forehead and shook his head. "It's just not fair.
"All we have are our memories and our experiences to prove we worked in the fields, and that's not enough. So what I wonder now is, where's the list with all our names from when Mexican officials gave us ID cards and brought us here? I know they kept track of us."
Olivares was born in 1929 in Bavispe, a small town in Sonora. His mother stayed home to raise five children while his father worked in agriculture.
The dutiful son left school after the third grade to help his father in the fields. When Antonio Olivares was in his early 20s, he heard he could make money working as a bracero in the U.S and send it back to his family.
Olivares applied in 1952 and waited to be picked out of a group of many men. "Young, old, there was everything there, the pretty ones and the ugly ones, too," who all just wanted to work, he said.
"They put us in a bus to Nogales, then in a plane to the state of Washington. That was the first time I had come here," Olivares said.
In Walla Walla, Olivares picked beets for 85 cents an hour. Although he toiled sunrise to sunset seven days a week, the bracero would be paid for no more than 10 hours of work a day.
"I missed my parents terribly. I was so far away. I missed my family and my brothers," he said. "Oh goodness! I can't even explain how much I missed them." Olivares could communicate only through letters while he was away, "so I wrote as much as I could," he said.
He later got a job in Mesa watering and caring for cotton fields for 65 cents an hour. There he shared a guesthouse with another man.
"We got paid less there, but at least we were closer to our home state, and our boss took care of us," he said.
The boss would take him into town to get haircuts, shop and "hang out." Olivares didn't spend much of the money he earned; the majority of it was sent back to his family in Hermosillo.
"But nobody told us about the (deducted wages) once we got back or even before we got back," Olivares said. "And the reason I'm asking for it now is because that's money I earned on the fields with my own hands. It's not a reward or a gift.
"I never thought my money would disappear and I would have to keep my (pay) checks so I could prove, 50 years later, that I was a bracero," he said.
By the time the bracero program ended in 1964, Olivares had applied for a permanent resident card to continue working in the U.S.
He brought his wife, Amanda, and their six children to Arizona, where he has lived since.
Olivares is retired and lives in his Tucson home with his wife of 49 years, the love of his life.
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