Objectives

• Students will compose original corridos (Mexican American folk songs) telling the stories of bracero workers during World War II

• Students will demonstrate their comprehension of the themes and formulas of corridos by using them to compose new corridos

• Students will describe the experiences of Mexican braceros immigrating to and working in the United States 

This activity supports the following Common Core Literacy Standards in History/Social Studies:

• RHSS.6-8.2. Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary soure; provide an accurate summary of the source distinct form prior knowledge or opinions.

• WHSS.6-8.2. Write informative/explanatory texts, including the narration of historical events.

Instructions

Step 1: Pass out or display the "Americans All" poster (without its description). (Optional: ask students who the intended audience for the poster is, what its message is, and why it might have been created.) Ask students to share what they know about Mexican and Mexican Americans in the United States war effort during World War II. After showing the poster, give the background of the bracero program.

Historical Context

From 1940 onward, there was a major increase in demand for the United States' agricultural products, as the US became the "breadbasket" to the Allied Powers during World War II. The increased demand was a welcome change to growers after the lean years of the Great Depression. However, even before the US entered World War II, there was a chronic labor shortage in agriculture, especially in the backbreaking "stoop work" of planting, tending, and harvesting vegetables. This work was sometimes dangerous and was the lowest paid; although the New Deal had been generally good for labor, agricultural workers were denied such benefits. After the US declared war in 1941, growers announced a "crisis" shortage of agricultural workers. This was in part because Anglo and African-American workers left the fields to join the armed forces or for higher paying (and less difficult) industrial war production jobs. 

To alleviate the crisis, growers looked to Mexican and Mexican-American workers, who were already known as a hard-working and cheap source of labor. Despite quota laws, agricultural producers had continued to hire Mexican workers in the 1920s and 1930s; immigration enforcement tended to the look the other way when it came to undocumented Mexican workers because cheap labor was so important to overall agricultural output. In some ways, then, the bracero program was a formalization of an ongoing labor practice and migration pattern. 

In 1942 the United States and Mexico signed an agreement that would allow Mexicans to come to the US to work as "braceros" (helping hands). Within two months of the agreement, the first workers arrived in the U.S. The quick turn around indicates the desperate need growers had for workers in time for the 1942 harvest. Thousands of Mexicans who saw the potential economic opportunities and adventure joined. The program lasted until 1964. Throughout its span, the bracero program was an exception to the U.S.'s otherwise strict immigration policy of restricting immigrants from Mexico.