History, Public Memory, and Creating the Bracero Archive

Abstract

While conducting research for his Ph.D. dissertation on the Bracero Program, Mario Sifuentez discovered a troubling lack of documentation on those workers in the Pacific Northwest. According to Sifuentez, “the voices of the people I was trying to write about were absent. Official documents treated braceros like data in a mathematical equation on agricultural output.” Having grown up in eastern Oregon in a family that had been coming to the Northwest for generations to work in agricultural fields, this research was deeply personal. Sifuentez began recording oral histories of braceros in the Pacific Northwest that were eventually uploaded the online Bracero History Archive and led to his recently-published book, Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest.