Ex-bracero does not want program to return

One May morning in 1961, 21-year-old Manuel Alvarado strapped on his huaraches, stuffed three changes of clothes and a thin blanket into a nylon tote bag and bid his parents farewell. He was leaving their rancho of La Cañada, Zacatecas, for el Norte.

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A CROWD of Mexican men gathers at the Mexicali border crossing seeking work in the U.S. on Feb. 3, 1954.

The United States had been kind and cruel to his farming family. His uncles had regaled him with tales of the easy money available for legal seasonal workers - known as braceros - which allowed them to buy land and livestock back home. His father, however, was one of a million-plus Mexican men deported in 1955 during Operation Wetback, an Eisenhower administration policy of mass removal in the name of national security and taking back jobs for Americans.

"They sent my father to the border with only the clothes on his back," Alvarado, now 85, told me in Spanish while sinking into a comfy couch at his daughter's well-kept Anaheim home.

His father's mistreatment didn't scare Alvarado back then. He boarded a train with his uncles and cousins bound for Chihuahua, where a Mexican health official checked everyone's hands at a recruiting office to make sure they were calloused enough for the hard work ahead.

The Alvarados then crossed into a processing center near El Paso. There, American health inspectors typically forced aspiring braceros to strip naked before subjecting them to blood tests, X-rays, rectal exams and a final dusting of their bodies and clothes with DDT.

Next came an overnight bus ride to their final destination: tiny Swink, Colo., where Japanese American farmers had previously employed Alvarado's wealthier uncles, writing a letter of recommendation this time to make crossing over easier.

Alvarado stayed there until November before returning home. For the next three summers, he worked as a bracero.

"No regrets," Alvarado said of those years.