The Wetbacks

For years past, the armies of ragged, hungry men had come from all over Mexico, up the highways and the railroads, on foot under the burning sun. Drawn by the hope of the Yankee dollar, they swarmed to the border by the tens of faceless thousands. They milled briefly amid slinking dogs and neon-lighted stench of Mexicali, and then streamed, furtively and endlessly across the border into California.

Some of them paid smugglers $10 to sneak them over the line in automobile trunks. But most simply walked to the east or west of the International Bridge, jumped across the narrow New River, crawled through holes,in a 10 ft. wire fence, and scrambled up to U.S. soil. They were the prey of countless enemies. Robbers had killed some of them. Disease killed many more. Sometimes the unwary died sneaking rides atop 12-ft. hay trucks, which sped through 13-ft. underpasses on the highways.

Desert Trek. The sun killed many, too--although hundreds of them made incredible week-long treks across the barren Mojave Desert, carrying nothing to drink but a gallon jug of water, hiding under cactus by day and walking by night. Harassed immigration officials rounded them up in knots along the roads, in wholesale lots on farms, loaded them into yellow buses and took them back to Mexico. Last year 230,000 were caught in California alone. Most of them hustled back, were often caught again at the same job in the same field on the same day.

Last week the tide of illegal Mexican "wetbacks" flowed strongest into California's lush, hot Imperial Valley, where the harvest season was at its height. But they were crossing the Rio Grande into Texas, too; by autumn, immigration men estimate, more than a million wetbacks will have surged across the 2,000-mile border between the Pacific and the Gulf, hunting jobs as the Forty-Niners hunted gold.

The phenomenon of the wetbacks is not new, but until World War II, it was not a large one. The war siphoned off agricultural labor, particularly lowpaying, exhausting "stoop labor" along the lower Rio Grande, in New Mexico, Arizona and California. The wetbacks rushed into the vacuum.

More came every year. In 1948 the U.S. and Mexican governments tried to channel and control the migration, signed a series of pacts by which Mexico agreed to send labor crews across the border for specific jobs, and that the U.S. would guarantee them a "prevailing wage," housing and insurance. It was like making international agreements about locusts.

The Mexican migrants rebelled at delays and red tape. U.S. farmers, by & large, boycotted the agreement too. They had come to consider the wetbacks as a cheap, natural resource, as rightfully theirs as rain or good soil. Forced to choose between lawbreaking or paying legally imported Mexican "Nationalists" a fair wage, many farmers chose, without hesitation, to break the law. After all, wetbacks would work--and are working--for as little as 20-c- an hour, a wage comparable to that skilled labor receives in Mexico.They do not argue, do not agitate, do not complain; if they do, they can always be turned in as border jumpers. Farmers have built good barracks for some, but others live wretchedly, taking shelter in caves or rude lean-tos, cooking in the fields, washing in irrigation ditches.

Last week the illegal wetback labor system did not lack for critics: many a citizen of the states involved not only cried, "Shame!" at a condition which savored of slavery, but protested that the low-paid laborers were working the economic ruin of dozens of farming towns. In the Imperial Valley, 34-year-old Hank Hasiwar, organizer for the National Farm Labor Union, was not only agitating among the wetbacks (who, however, cannot become union members) and protesting to Congress, but also trying to unite merchants and businessmen against the system.

But the wetbacks kept coming.

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