The 'Braceros' - America's Mexican Guest Workers
The History Hour
BBC
4.4 • 912 Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2018
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From 1942 to 1964 the US actively encouraged American farmers to hire tens of thousands of migrant workers to come to work legally from Mexico - they were known as 'braceros'; also, when Moscow invited thousands of foreign students to attend an International Youth Festival in the former USSR; a witness to the funeral of the Duke of Wellington; plus Arafat's final weeks and why was JKF's killer allowed to defect to the Soviets?
Photo: A group of Mexican Braceros picking strawberries in a field in the Salinas Valley, California in June 1963 (Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, |
| 0:05.2 | the past brought to life by those who were there. |
| 0:08.0 | This week, from the 1950s, an attempt to break the ice in the Cold War, |
| 0:12.4 | as thousands of students from the West were |
| 0:14.8 | invited to a Moscow festival. |
| 0:16.8 | Somebody from the crowd came up and said, forgive us please. |
| 0:20.4 | This is the first time we've been free to talk to foreigners. |
| 0:23.0 | Plus the last days of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, |
| 0:27.0 | a remarkable recording of a man who was at the Duke of Wellington's funeral more than 170 years ago, |
| 0:32.0 | and Lee Harvey Os during his years as a defector in the USSR. |
| 0:37.0 | They put a piece of paper on my desk. It said I've come to revoke my American citizenship. |
| 0:43.6 | That's all coming up later in the podcast, but first, America and immigration. |
| 0:48.0 | Throughout his campaign for the presidency and during his time in office, |
| 0:51.6 | Donald Trump has consistently returned to the theme of immigration. |
| 0:55.0 | He sees an unchecked flow of migrants into the US as a threat. |
| 0:59.0 | And he's promised to build a wall along the border between the US and Mexico, and he's even sent American |
| 1:04.6 | troops to hold back the arrival of a caravan of Central American migrants. |
| 1:09.2 | But history can give us another perspective on this issue. Back in the 1940s and 50s |
| 1:14.4 | thousands of Americans were contracted to work on American farms as legal |
| 1:19.2 | laborers. It was part of a scheme known as the Bracero program and to this day it serves to inform the debate around legal and illegal migration into the US. |
| 1:28.5 | Mike Lanchin has been listening to archive recordings of some of those early Bracero workers. |
| 1:34.0 | I heard they were hiring people to come and work in the US, |
... |
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