When 27-year-old Mireya Loza was growing up in Chicago as the daughter of Mexican immigrants, her parents taught her to value education. “My dad used to say, ‘Either you’re going to work with a pen in your hand, or you’re going to work with your hands,’ ” recalls Loza. “He’d say ‘I’d rather you hold a pen.’ ”
Photos by Lucas FogliaLoza took his advice. She earned a bachelor’s in Anthropology and Latino/Latina Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001, a master’s in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003, and then she came to Brown to pursue a doctoral degree in American Civilization, where Loza pays homage to her Mexican ancestry through her work on The Bracero Project. Organized by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the project collects oral histories and artifacts pertaining to a controversial and overlooked chapter in American history.
In 1942, the American and Mexican governments made an agreement that allowed Mexican citizens to enter the U.S. on temporary visas to help fill a labor shortage created by World War II. From 1942 to the program’s end in 1962, over five million Mexican men came to work in American fields or on railroad lines. They were called braceros, a term derived from the Spanish word for arm, and the program was dubbed the Bracero Program. “For some people it was a very degrading experience,” says Loza. “The men would have to line up naked for health checks and get sprayed with DDT. Their work conditions were deplorable.” Today, many former braceros, including Loza’s uncle, still live in the U.S., but their stories are largely unknown. Through The Bracero Project, Loza and a team of historians, including her advisor, professor Matthew Garcia, are helping to change that.
Last year, they traveled to four U.S. cities—San Jose and Salinas, California; El Paso, Texas; and Loza’s hometown of Chicago—to record braceros’ first-hand accounts of their experiences. They held town hall meetings to inform the local Mexican communities about the project and invited people to share their stories. “It was like extreme academia,” says Loza. “We were only there for a short time, and we needed to record as many histories as possible.” Loza and her colleagues met with nearly a hundred former braceros and accumulated over a hundred hours of tape during their four trips. The tapes will be transcribed, translated, and stored in The National Archives.
“At the end of every interview, I asked them how they feel when someone calls them a bracero,” says Loza. “Some said it was the worst experience of their lives. Others view it as something they had to go through to get to where they are now. They said: ‘I’m happy I did it because now my family is in the U.S. My kids have gone to school.’ ” The Smithsonian plans to compile these stories along with artifacts from the period into a traveling exhibit called “Bittersweet Harvest.” The interview transcripts will also be posted on the Internet to aid researching scholars like Loza, who plans to incorporate the material into her dissertation on Mexican immigration.
“A lot of times as a graduate student, you don’t feel like your work is making a big difference while you’re doing it,” says Loza. “But I feel like what I’m doing is very useful. We’re building archives of primary sources so this history can be written.”
— Michelle Walson
