Braceros help again, retracing U.S. history

Nicolas Saldana Sandoval covered his eyes with one hand and sobbed gently. The 70-year-old man with the bushy brows and thinning hair took a sip of water and quickly regained his composure, but a big tear clung to the skin beneath his left eye -- a bittersweet bubble of memory that had welled up from nearly 50 years in the past.

Saldana and his wife, Refugio, were the first of \o7los viejos \f7to arrive in downtown Los Angeles on Friday morning with a personal yet historic tale to tell. He was a bracero, and like the World War II veterans whose places in the fields the first of these Mexican guest workers were hired to take, starting in 1942, their numbers are dwindling. Saldana entered the program in the late 1950s, toward the end of the 22-year run that brought an estimated 1 million to 2 million Mexican laborers north to work American fields and food-processing plants -- first as substitutes for farm boys who were off carrying M1 carbines or manning battle stations, and later to assure growers of a steady supply of cheap but fully legal labor.

The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History is determined to secure the braceros' stories before they go -- for scholars, for a traveling museum exhibition that's planned several years down the road, and for the sake of the children and grandchildren in the United States and Mexico, who often have gotten the story piecemeal, if at all. Last July, the Bracero History Project began an ongoing cross-country, cross-border effort to record the voices of the men who worked in the program, of the family members they left behind for hitches that could last up to 18 months, and of Americans who interacted with them along the way.

"Most [bracero] studies are on policy. Our goal is to give it a little more dimension, to focus on the social and cultural aspect, how it affected the families, the towns in Mexico, their children and their communities," said L. Stephen Velasquez, an associate curator at the Smithsonian who was overseeing the project's testament-taking swing through Southern California -- over the weekend in Los Angeles, and Friday to May 26 in Coachella, Blythe, Heber and San Bernardino. (For information: [202] 633-3905)