Between 1941 and 1945, over sixteen million Americans served in uniform during World War II. Many were young men leaving behind jobs, creating vacancies in a workforce during a time when the nation most desperately required workers. To fill these roles, many employers began opening positions to new demographics. Examples of this famously include the cultural icon of Rosie the Riveter, a symbol of the millions of American women who entered the workforce or changed careers during these years, taking on jobs in factories, shipyards, and other industries that had once been held nearly exclusively by male workers. This expansion of opportunities in the workforce also transformed the demographics of the nation, as jobs in the newly created munitions industry and elsewhere created the Second Great Migration, which, by 1970, had led more than five million Black Americans out of the South and into the industrial centers of the Northern and Midwestern states.
This transformation of the nation’s labor force also led to some less commonly known arrangements. One of these was the Bracero Program, which was initiated in 1942 by an executive order called the Mexican Farm Labor Program. This program arranged for millions of short-term legal work contracts for Mexican laborers to address labor shortages in America’s agricultural industries. In 1943, an even lesser known expansion of the program was launched.
The United States-Mexico Non-Agricultural Workers Agreement expanded the scope of the program to other industries as well. Most of these new positions were with American railroad companies who needed to replace the approximately 260,000 railroad employees that served in the armed forces during World War II. At its peak in 1945, about 69,000 bracero laborers were working for thirty-five railroads across the United States, mostly as track maintenance workers, who provided manual labor to expand rail yards, lay track, and replace worn rails. By the time of its termination in 1964, approximately 26% of the more than 4.5 million Mexican workers employed by the Bracero Program provided labor for railroads and other non-agricultural industries.
On paper, the Mexican Farm Labor Program and United States-Mexico Non-Agricultural Workers Agreement contained provisions intended to protect bracero workers from abusive workplace practices and guarantee safe living and working conditions. In reality, however, the work was physically difficult (“bracero” translates to “one who works with his arms” or “laborer”) and it was common for these workers to encounter discrimination from employers, difficulties with the bureaucracy of the program, illegal surcharges for their mandated employer-provided room and board, unfair deductions from pay.
Many braceros also faced dangerous working conditions, resulting in illnesses from exposure to toxic agricultural chemicals and unhygienic living conditions, or injuries on the job. And while the terms of the program stipulated that a portion of bracero’s earnings would be held in a savings and retirement fund that would become available following a worker’s return to Mexico, corruption on the part of both employers and Mexican banks often left workers unable to collect what they were due.
In Hagley Library’s collections, historical evidence about the lives of the braceros that maintained America’s rail network during World War II can be found in Record Group 10: Operating Department, Subgroup R: Western Region. Office of General Manager of our Pennsylvania Railroad Company and the Penn Central Transportation Company records (Accession 1807/1810). The Pennsylvania Railroad employed approximately 3,200 bracero workers, and this part of the collection includes about four linear feet of dossiers on individual Mexican workers.
These files typically detail the names of bracero workers, the provinces of Mexico they were recruited from, the jobs and wages they were assigned to, and paperwork tracking their contract and their repatriation to Mexico upon the contract’s end. Many dossiers also include correspondence from managers about employees, or correspondence from the bracero workers and their families themselves. These letters often accompany the paperwork of braceros whose contracts were terminated early, either at their request for reason of illness, physical debility, or crises back home that required their attention, or, less commonly, involuntarily after disappearing from worksites without leave or following deportations for criminal behavior or mental illness.
Many letters lodging complaints or requesting early termination reveal braceros’ difficulties in adjusting to the cold weather they were unprepared to face, as most arrived with inadequate clothing supplies and were not provided with cold weather clothing. Other common complaints included conflicts over being overcharged for meals, especially when those meals were found to be of substandard quality, or even prepared under unsanitary conditions; frustration over access to necessary medical care and requests to return home to address illnesses; a large number of the files hint at the emotional difficulties of this work as well, with a great many of the requests for early termination of contracts citing the serious illness, or even death, or loved ones in Mexico.
Other files reveal problems with language barriers that made navigating the bureaucracy of employment challenging. While some braceros were able to communicate with their employers and managerial offices in English, many of the letters written by braceros and their families in these files are in Spanish and accompanied by company-provided translations. These translations only worked in one direction, however, and communications to the workers were solely issued in English, forcing workers to pay for translators or seek out assistance from bilingual coworkers, friends, or family.
For those that are now curious to spend more time with these records, we’re happy to report that they’ll soon be more widely available to the public. A new digital project of the Gale Publishing Company, Latino Social and Political History: Perspectives on the Chicano Movement, has facilitated their digitization. The digital project will be accessible through the Hagley Library network, and the digitized records themselves will eventually be accessible through our Digital Archives.
Skylar Harris is the Digitization and Metadata Coordinator at Hagley Museum and Library