If these walls could talk – El Paso County farm that served as processing center for Bracero Program evokes memories of a different era

Francisco Uviña was 19 when he crossed the U.S. border in search for work in the 1950’s. Like many other Mexican laborers of that time, Uviña was signed up for the Bracero Program which offered a solid wage and an opportunity of a lifetime to live and work in the agriculture sector of the United States. Uviña first heard of the Bracero Program from friends and neighbors in his hometown of San Luis de Cordero, Durango. In the spring of 1953, he then joined a caravan of over 1,000 laborers who traveled by bus to to Chihuahua City, Mexico, to register for the program. This year marks the 76th anniversary of the Bracero Program, a labor program that allowed more than four million Mexican men to cross into the United States to work the fields after U.S. men went off to fight in World War II.

Historians chronicle lives, dreams of Mexican braceros in U.S. labor program

EL PASO — Emilio Solis Pallares,92, sits at his home in Fabens, Texas, listening with surprised amusement to his own voice for the first time 12 years after his story was cataloged along with the tales of hundreds of other bracero farmworkers as part of a national program by the Smithsonian Institution. “Yes, that is me and the story still remains true,” said Solis, who labored in the cotton of fields of Tornillo, Texas, for 15 years in the 1940’s and 1950’s as a member of the federal Bracero program, which recruited 4.6 million Mexican citizens to work in agriculture in the United States. Solis’ story was just one of more than 900 interviews conducted by the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso. More than 3,000 oral histories of braceros can be listened to online at the Bracero History Archive. Emilio’s oral history can be found here.