U.S. EXPLOITATION IN MEXICO And men came in from all over Mexico, and thls little town of a couple of thousand grew overnight intta ,desperate anthill of fifty thousand ... Then to the anthill of men came the coyotes (slang for sharp legal crooksl and they came with promises to get papers processed in eight days' time. Eight days! For they were attorneys and knew how to deal with these gringos and get things done the American way. And so men lined up in a line of tens of hundreds and gave their money to these men in suits in the shade of a big beautiful umbrella with the Mexican flag on one side and the American flag on the other side, and these men took three hundred pesos (twenty-four dollars) from each single man as fast as they could all day' long and into the night for six strâight days, and then, _onthe seventh day, they didn't corne back. And grown · men with calloused hands and knives in thelr belts fell down ·and cried ... And began by the thousands the long Journey home (19). For every ·bracero who maQaged to get papers, a dozen more were turned away. Many of these returned to their small villages in southern Mexico, but thousands remained •in the northern cities, waiting for a chance to cross into the United States. And despite the Bracero Program, the growers continued to actively recruit the undocumented workers who were even. more vulnerable to their exploitation than those under contract. The number of workers entering the Southwest illeqally during the period of the Bracero program is indicated by the numbers ofdeportations of illeqal entrants: from 6,082 in 1941, to 101,478 in 1946 to over a million in 1954 (20), . For the growers the program was a dream - a seemingly endless army of cheap, unorganized workers, brought efficiently to their doorstep by the government. Farmers ·in Northern California were supplied with braceros from contracting centers 800 miles away on a 48-hour notice. Not a crop was lost. Wages were held in line (21). 19. Edmundo Villaseno~. Macho, pp. 73, 81. Bantum, 1973. 20. Galarza, op. cit. p. 59. 21. Ibid. p. 15. 87
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