Organized Labor

August 10, 2026

The Book That Killed the Bracero Program

The standard telling jumps from a CBS documentary to Chavez at Delano. The honest telling names the union man in the middle: Ernesto Galarza, who lost sixteen years of strikes to bracero strikebreakers, picked up a pen, and wrote the book that made Delano possible.

On August 14, 1964, the US House of Representatives voted not to reauthorize Public Law 78. Four and a half months later, on December 31, the Bracero Program expired. Twenty-two years, roughly 4.6 million contracts, around two million Mexican workers. The largest guest-worker program in American history was over.

It did not end because the country grew a conscience.

The Mexican Farm Labor Program started on August 4, 1942, as a wartime deal between Washington and Mexico City. It was meant to be temporary. Growers liked it. In 1951, Congress passed Public Law 78 and put the program on a renewal cycle that outlasted the war by 19 years. Congress renewed it in 1954, 1956, 1958, and 1961. Each renewal was a choice.

What the program was, in the fields, is not complicated. At processing centers, officials stripped workers and sprayed them with DDT. Housing was overcrowded. Wage theft was routine. The Mexican government withheld 10 percent of every bracero paycheck into a "savings fund" the Mexican government was supposed to pay out when workers returned to Mexico. Most workers never saw the money. The Smithsonian-led Bracero History Archive calls it the largest wage theft in the Americas. Growers blacklisted workers who complained.

Braceros resisted anyway. They walked off jobs. They organized where they could. The point about the program is not that the workers were passive. The point is that Congress and growers designed the program so that the next busload of contract labor coming up the highway could break any strike, bracero or domestic.

One man understood that trap from the inside. Ernesto Galarza, a Mexican-born scholar who served as secretary of the National Agricultural Workers Union from 1954 to 1963, spent sixteen years running strikes in California that kept losing to imported strikebreakers. In 1964 he published Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story. The book documented, with names and dates, how growers and federal officials had rigged the program to depress domestic farm wages. Labor historians credit it as the intellectual hammer that finally broke the program's political support.

Galarza was not alone. A 1960 CBS documentary had already moved public opinion. Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz, serving under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, publicly declared in 1964 that large-scale use of foreign workers in American agriculture should end. Mechanization was reducing grower demand for hand labor. All of it mattered. But Galarza's book was the piece that made renewal politically too expensive.

The House voted the program down on August 14, 1964.

Nine months later, on September 8, 1965, Filipino farmworkers under Larry Itliong and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee struck the grape growers of Delano, California. On September 16, Cesar Chavez's National Farm Workers Association voted to join them. The two organizations merged into the United Farm Workers in 1966, with Dolores Huerta as a founding vice president.

The Delano strike was winnable in a way Galarza's strikes had never been. The strikebreaker pipeline had been shut off by Congress the year before.

The program did not end because America grew a conscience. It ended because workers and the writers who stood with them made it politically cheaper to kill than to keep. And the moment it died, farmworker organizing in California became possible for the first time in a generation.

Sources

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