Bracero Program - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

  • Woody Guthrie's poem Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos), set to music by Martin Hoffman, commemorates the deaths of 28 braceros being repatriated to Mexico in January 1948. The song has been recorded by dozens of folk artists.
  • Protest singer Phil Ochs's song "Bracero" focuses on the exploitation of the Mexican workers in the program.
  • A minor character in the 1948 Mexican film Nosotros los pobres wants to become a bracero.
  • The 1949 film Border Incident looks at the issue.
  • Famed satirist Tom Lehrer wrote a song about Senator George Murphy in response to an infamous racist gaffe referring to Mexican labor which included the line: "After all, even in Egypt, the Pharaohs/Had to import, Hebrew Braceros".

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