All They Will Call You

Bracero is a term from Spanish that literally means “one who works with his arms.” It is used figuratively to refer to agricultural laborers, primarily from Mexico, who work on a temporary basis in the US. In All They Will Call You: The Telling of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon, bracero refers to participants in the Bracero Program, an American government program from 1942 to 1964 that brought temporary workers from the Mexico to pick crops, build railroads, and provide other labor. Alternative terms that are used are contratado, or contractual worker, and enganchado, “hooked.” Because workers brought to the US under this program were supposed to be temporary, they were obliged to do the “bracero shuffle” where they would leave the US at the end of a contract and then return soon after (91).

Tim Z. Hernandez occasionally refers to the agricultural workers as campesinos, meaning “farmer” in Spanish. This term is used both for those who remain in their home farms in Mexico and those who come to the US as temporary workers to pick crops. The term campesino serves to underscore the community and solidarity that exists between members of this class of Spanish-speaking agricultural workers.