THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BORDER: OPERATION WETBACK AND AMERICA’S HISTORICAL AMNESIA
Mid-20th century America was dealing with what it does best: a self-inflicted identity crisis dressed up as a national emergency. Enter the labor problem. Or, more specifically, the Mexican labor problem. By the 1950s, the U.S. had invited in hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers through the Bracero Program—a guest-worker system launched during World War II to keep American crops from rotting in fields while our men were off fighting Nazis.