Toiling in Sonoma County Fields

3 men standing in a field
Braceros in field, 1942. View in our Digital Collection.
Their ‘good old days’ reminiscences included comparisons of how many times they'd been ‘sent back’ before they became ‘legal,’ of ‘making a nest like a rabbit’ in a haystack, of cooking on the ground, washing clothes in apple boxes, of rows to hoe a mile long with no water until the end, of subsisting for weeks on stolen fruit from orchards, of working in dirt and walking all night across dark and dusty fields, of crowded holding cells and more crowded buses carrying them back to Mexico — to start all over again.

— LeBaron, Gaye. “Sonoma County Hispanics Recall 'Bracero' Days.” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, June 14, 1987.