MEXICO: The Bracero Returns

Early one morning last week Canute Linerio, a Solemn Indian of 46, set out again for Mexico City to look for work. Leaving his wife Margarita and two children, José, 10, and Consuelo, 13, in their tiny casita on the outskirts of Toluca, Canute boarded the Red Arrow bus, paid 31¢ fare to ride in to the capital. There, as he had done before, he read the "advices of opportunity" in the newspapers, spelling each word out slowly to himself.

He went to construction jobs, offered his services as an albañil, or bricklayer. At last he landed a temporary job at $3.30 a day.

That was big pay for a man of the pelado class (literally, "the peeled ones"), and Canuto counted himself fortunate. But it was nothing like the $7 a day he had made during the war as one of 300,000 braceros (day laborers) that Mexico sent to the U.S. to work on railroads and to harvest crops. Canute's eyes clouded when he thought of the U.S.—the rich farming land, the cities, the shoes, the-canned chicken soup he had liked so much.

Acquired Tastes. Canuto still wears his U.S. work clothes—faded khaki shirt and trousers that have been scrubbed almost white and carefully patched, a blue wool lumberjacket, his American work shoes (without socks). When he returned from the U.S. last year (he had been a track laborer on the Santa Fe near Cherokee, Okla.) he brought Margarita yard goods for dresses, and some silk panties; for the children, dresses, shirts, shoes, a leather jacket. He also brought back some new habits, such as washing his hands before meals and brushing his teeth—habits which he enforced on his family as well.

Except for two periods in the U.S. as a bracero, Canuto has spent his life near Toluca, 41 miles west of Mexico City. There, on 2½ acres of land inherited from his father, some 30 minutes' walk from the casita he has built with his U.S. earnings, Canuto grows the maize that helps keep his family alive. But there is not maize enough; to keep all the Linerios in tortillas the year through, Canuto must work part time as a bricklayer.

Not for Export. Unlike many of his fellows, Canuto ran into no racial discrimination in the U.S. He would like to go back, perhaps to California, if he could take his family with him, settle down and send his children to U.S. schools. But in Mexico, despite a new agreement to send 54,000 braceros north for this year's U.S. harvest, there is agitation to halt further export of labor. Mexican labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano asserted that Mexico itself needs the braceros. Others argued that this export of Mexican labor would lower production of Mexico's foodstuffs. There were other implications. During the war Canuto and his comrades earned $280,000,000 in the U.S., a factor in the current Mexican inflation.

Most of the returning braceros would like to have again the things they had in the U.S. In the long run this might help raise Mexican living standards. Not perhaps for Canuto himself, but for his children.