Farm laborers’ stories finally heard. TRAVELING EXHIBIT REVEALS HISTORY OF BRACERO PROGRAM

The black and white picture showed a little known fact of American history: naked farm hands arriving in the United States from Mexico, being fumigated with the pesticide DDT.

“Dad, do you remember that?” Ofelia Alvarado whispered to her 83-year-old father during a historical slide show Tuesday evening at the Mexican Heritage Plaza in San Jose. Refugio Rodriguez, in a beige cowboy hat and black suspenders, nodded in agreement, but said nothing else. “They treated them almost as if they were animals,” Alvarado observed.

Rodriguez and millions of other farmworkers who participated in a binational labor program from 1942 to 1964 finally will have an official place in U.S. history: Curators from the Smithsonian Institution are in town this week collecting their stories for an upcoming national traveling exhibition.

The bracero program, established to fill a labor shortage during World War II, is hardly known on this side of the border.

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