Photo by James BunoanEzequiel Acevedo wants you to know he and his friends are not extortionists. "We're not asking for what's not ours," the ex-farmworker tells me as he marches outside the Santa Ana Mexican Consulate. "If we did that, that wouldn't be right."
Holding a sign that proclaims, "Fox y Bush: Demen Mi Dinero, Rateros" (Give Me My Money, Thieves), Acevedo is joined by about 30 other men in protesting the Aug. 29 U.S. District Court decision to throw out a lawsuit asking the Mexican and U.S. governments to pay thousands of former Mexican farmworkers wages withheld from them for their work more than 50 years ago. The total tab should come to about $500 million.
"We feel cheated," Acevedo says. "We worked under a treaty between both governments. We came here legally to benefit both countries, and they still screwed us over."
The treaty Acevedo refers to created the bracero program, an agreement between the American and Mexican governments allowing Mexicans to work legally in the states from 1942 to 1964. The United States filled a labor shortage, while Mexico gave its citizens an opportunity to improve their lives.
The bracero program was so successful that it had an unintended consequence, sowing into the Mexican consciousness the hope of the American dream. It generated a wave of immigration that continues to this day. But before anyone was eligible to work, he or she signed a contract authorized by both governments detailing the work agreement. Part of the contract stipulated that 10 percent of every paycheck be withdrawn and put in a pension fund for each bracero—money few of them have ever seen.
Acevedo started as a bracero early, leaving his impoverished rancho of Jomulquillo, Zacatecas, in 1953 to pick oranges in Anaheim. He was 17. Orange County contractors chose Acevedo to work the county's then-teeming citrus groves because he fit their requisite physical build.
"They told us that they didn't want fat guys," the still-trim Acevedo recalls, "because they kept falling out of trees."
Work was routine. A bell woke up the four-men-per-room migrant camp at 5 a.m. to eat what Acevedo still fondly remembers as "great Mexican food—beans, tortillas, everything!" After breakfast, they were driven to the citrus fields and stayed there (interrupted only by a short lunch) until sunset. Pay was miniscule: six cents for every crate they filled. Acevedo averaged between 80 and 90 boxes per day. "I got up to 100 twice," he says proudly. He stayed in Anaheim for four months, and then he spent the next four years picking oranges, asparagus and other vegetables up and down the California coast.
"It was a hard but good job," he says, "good living conditions and they treated us with respect. The pay wasn't much, but it was much better than what we'd find in Mexico. We didn't have any problem with the work."
Years passed. Acevedo came back to the states legally, got a job at an orange-packing factory and made his home in Anaheim's large El Cargadero community. "I always remembered the contract and how me, my brothers and my father never got our rightful pension," he says. "But I thought to myself, 'What can I do?'"
Then about two months ago, a friend told Acevedo about a group of braceros that meet each Thursday in Santa Ana's Centennial Park. Here, they talk about the latest developments in the lawsuit, confer with lawyers working pro bono and share their experiences. Acevedo is active in the group, registering more than 200 former braceros to ensure that as many as possible get their fair share of a settlement.
Acevedo vows to fight until that settlement is achieved. "You have to fight for what's yours," he says. "The governments are ignoring our justice. If 20 years pass and God gives us the license to live them, we'll still be fighting."
