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Harvest of Loneliness. Dir. by Gilbert G. Gonzalez and Vivian Price. Prod, by Gilbert G. Gonzalez. Films Media Group, 2010. 58 mins. (http:// harvestofloneliness.com)
Between 1942 and 1964 approximately 4.5 million Mexicans served as legal guest workers on farms and agricultural fields in the western United States. Known as braceros (derived from brazo, the Spanish word for arm), these temporary workers left a mixed legacy in the history of labor relations and immigration between the United States and Mexico. Labor organizers have almost universally condemned the bracero program as exploitative and abusive; while some farmers and government officials have praised the program as a practical solution to the need for temporary labor during times of harvest.
As its title may suggest, Harvest of Loneliness has nothing positive to say aboue the bracero program and its legacy. For instance, according to Henry R Anderson, a public health scholar who was one of the first to study braceros in California - and the author of A Harvest of Loneliness: An Inquiry into a Social Problem (1964) - "the bracero program was used as labor-buscing device pure and simple. The very existence of the program on the books...