Jose Alamillo

Ventura County's Bracero Legacy
By Jose Alamillo

By the time my students and I finished the two-hour interview with ex-Bracero, Feliciano Zurape we were in tears. Separated from his family and small rural village in Michoacán, Mexico for twelve months, he recalled how lonely he felt when other Braceros eagerly waited to receive mail from their loved ones. But because he could not read or write and had no access to a telephone, there was no way of communicating with his family.  My students never expected to hear such heart-wrenching stories when they signed up for my Chicano/ Studies Service Learning course at California State University Channel Islands. During the 2008-2009 academic year, my Chicano/a studies students not only conducted interviews with ex-Braceros but also organized town-hall meetings in Oxnard and Santa Paula, California to introduce the Bracero History Project to the local Latino/a community.

In 2008 the California State University Channel Islands joined the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History along with other universities and museums to document and preserve the bracero experience. The Bracero History Project has collected over 700 interviews and dozens of photographs, documents and artifacts that tell the story of the largest guest-worker program in U.S. history.  The Bracero Program brought approximately 3 million individual Mexican male workers into the United States impacting immigration patterns, labor organizing efforts, inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic community relations, family dynamics and gender relations. Many of these oral histories and images can be found in the website: www.braceroarchive.org or in the new exhibition, “Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program, 1942-1964” at the Smithsonian Institution and other locations across the country.
 
At my campus, the Chicana/o Studies Program and Centers for Community Engagement and Multicultural Engagement viewed this national oral history project and exhibition as an opportunity to establish long-term partnerships with community organizations. We develop a relationship with local community centers, high schools, art galleries and museums and Latino/a organizations. However, as we started collecting interviews from ex-Braceros, many of which worked and lived in Ventura County, we realized that the interviewees wanted something more in return for their stories. They wanted information about the pending class action lawsuit that represented ex-Braceros who had 10 percent of their wages withheld in a savings fund by the Mexican government but that money was never returned to them. After years of litigation a settlement was reached in October 2008 with the Mexican government in which ex-Braceros would receive $3,500 in back pay but only if they provided documentation that worked under the Bracero Program between 1942 and 1946. Because they were only given two months to file claims to reclaim the lost funds, we decided to spread the word about the settlement and help our interviewees file claims. Unexpectedly, our purpose changed from simply documenting the bracero experience towards advocating on behalf of ex-braceros to reclaim their hard-earned wages.

The Bracero History Project like other archival projects that emerge from universities and museums must not only establish community partnerships but also consider how these projects will serve the Latino/a community in the present political climate and for the long term. In “Preservation Matters: Research, Community and the Archive,” Chon Noriega reminds us the archive is a political institution with a dual mission: (1) establish community partnerships (2) conduct research that makes a difference. Key to this mission is to incorporate the “community’s own contexts” in order to made these projects relevant to the pressing needs of the Latino/a community.[1]

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Growing Up in "El Ranchito"
By
Jose M. Alamillo

We still call our first American neighborhood “El Ranchito” instead of its official company name, Limoneira Del Mar.  This neighborhood was built in the mid-1930s by the Limoneira Company to house its Mexican employees and their families.  Because of its closer proximity to Ventura Beach, compared to its main ranch headquarters in Santa Paula, the neighborhood was officially known as “Limoneira Del Mar.” My family and most Mexican residents called this neighborhood tract, “El Ranchito.” It reminded my parents of their “rancho” in rural Zacatecas, Mexico. My father worked as lemon picker for the Limoneira Company during the 1970s, so he was eligible to rent a small two-bedroom company home for a family of six. To fit everybody we converted a small garage into a bedroom. Let’s just say that it was very crowded inside so we spent all day outside playing hide-and-seek inside the lemon orchards that surrounded our u-shaped neighboorhood tract of only twenty family homes.  Every birthday celebration or family gathering was held in the backyard or public park. All the school-age kids would walk through orchards to the elementary school and middle school. We lived there until the 1980s when we could no longer fit like sardines so moved into East Ventura. The neighborhood still exists but its now a retirement community.

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Photos of the Ventura County Citrus Strike of 1941