'Braceros' helped save Sonoma County crops during World War II

There are times in our history to remember. One is the summer of 1943, when a chartered bus pulled up to the Wood ranch on River Road and 125 Mexican fieldworkers stepped off - the first braceros in Sonoma County, coming like superheroes to save the crops.

They were a welcome result of a 1942 agreement between Mexico and the United States. For Sonoma County they were a big part of the estimated 12,000 “pickers” needed annually to harvest hops, apples, prunes, grapes and pears.

It was an emergency - not just local but nationwide. The U.S. entry into World War II had taken farm labor away. Able-bodied men, from youth to middle age - had left for the military. Bay Area defense plants needed older workers and women. The migrant groups of Japanese workers were taken away to government internment camps.

With the Bracero Program, licensed labor contractors traveled south of the border to recruit campesinos and Mexico-issued “green cards” granting temporary legal access to the United States.

The workers that got off at the Wood ranch in '43 came after Talmadge (Babe) Wood had gone to the new federal office on the fifth floor of the Rosenberg building to sign all the necessary requests and promises. Wood, who died in 2004 at 103, remembered for a video interview in 1992:

“So, what I did was to phone Don Mills in Santa Rosa, who was a young man just starting out as a labor contractor to get me the workers. And I said, ‘I need a lot of help.' And he said, ‘Well, Babe,' he says, ‘I'm in contact with Mexico, and the Mexican nationals, they're called. … I think I could get some, how many could you use?'?

“I told him I could use about 150. And he said, ‘I don't think I can get that many, but I'll see how many I can get.' So he said, ‘I got 125.' But, he says, ‘You have to sign up and be responsible for 'em and keep 'em in good health and feed ‘em and clothe ‘em and have doctors to take care of 'em. And, for so many days.'?”

Wood kept his word, even retained 15 workers for year-round jobs at season's end. Soon buses were unloading in every corner of the county. Most of the workers were between the ages of 16 and 25. They carried with them little more than the clothes on their backs and the straw hats that became something of a trademark. They constituted the first significant Latino presence in this area since the Bear Flaggers and the U.S. government seized California in the 1840s.

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Benny Carranza came that first year and several more after. He spoke English and augmented his crop wages working for contractor Mills as an interpreter, going home to play professional basketball in Mexico City after each season. Carranza spoke in an interview in the 1980s about that first year, calling it “a beautiful time.” But not all his memories were about happy Sunday fiestas in the camps.

“You'd be surprised,” he said, “how growers would treat the men. They even opened their mouths and looked at their teeth - like a horse. We felt degraded for our people in those years.”

Still, illegal entries began as soon as word of the work and wages reached the border towns. Tony Tamayo was one who came legally one year, went home and came back with his wife, without the “magic” card.

There was, surprisingly, little rancor in Lolita Tamayo's story, told 30 years later, about lying in a creek near Sebastopol, eight months pregnant, praying that men from immigration would walk on past - a family story with a happy ending.

There's another happy ending to the story of Rafael Morales, who crisscrossed the border 25 or 30 times, traveling at night, hiding in haystacks, maybe working a little before he was caught but not much, not enough to send money home. Then he found a way north to Stockton and happened on a truckload of workers bound for the Grace Ranch in Alexander Valley to pick prunes. He had 50 cents in his pocket and thought he'd found heaven when, as he said in an video interview years later, he heard “the boss say he gonna buy dinner for you guys and he went to get a bunch of hamburgers, you know, and we eat and I don't spend my 50 cents.”

For Morales, it was all pretty much up from there. When the prunes were picked and into the dryers, he didn't go home but set out to find a way to stay. He walked up and down roads until he came to Harold McClish's orchard and asked him for work. Could he drive a tractor? “No,” Morales told him, but I can learn.” Did he know how to prune? Same answer. Still, McClish hired him and he stayed, eventually sending for his family to come live in a small house on the Windsor ranch where he became foreman. Later, they would buy a home of their own, staying on, learning viticulture when prunes yielded to grapes.

The Morales family's story is a tale retold with pride. Rafael, regarded as a padron in the Latino community, supported the efforts for education and social justice for immigrants until his death in 2006.

The Bracero Program ended in 1964, a decision blamed on the number of illegal entries as well as the charge that the program was costing American jobs. Labor contractor Don Mills, interviewed in the '80s, saw it another way - as “alienating the only Latino friend we had.”