The American jobs my immigrant father ‘stole’ cost him his life

Dear xenophobic America,

On November 14, 2024, I “confessed” that my late Mexican immigrant mother, Carmen Mejía Huerta, “stole” American jobs. My mother’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” consisted of working as a domestic worker (doméstica) for several decades, “stealing jobs” from White American women. These are the same gendered jobs that millions of White American women discarded and outsourced during the second half of the 20th Century to the present to pursue leisure and employment opportunities. 

Like my mother, my late Mexican immigrant father, Salomón Chávez Huerta, participated in “criminal behavior” in the American workplace, “taking away jobs” from White American men. His first “American job heist” occurred during the 1960s, as a participant of the Bracero Program (or Mexican Farm Labor Program). As I documented in a past essay, “The day my Mexican father met César Chávez,” the “…Bracero Program represented a guest worker program between the United States and Mexico. From 1942 to 1964, the Mexican government exported an estimated 4.6 million Mexicans to meet this country’s labor shortage not only in the agricultural fields during two major wars (WWII and Korean War), but also in the railroad sector.”

While invited as a “guest worker” during a critical time in American history, my father and millions of hispaisanos were treated more like beasts of burden. In other words, instead of being respected as essential farmworkers (campesinos), they were treated like dispensable animals—not that animals should be abused or neglected. At the Mexican and U.S. processing centers as part of the Bracero Program, government officials forced the Mexican men from the countryside to strip naked in large groups without privacy. The immoral officials then sprayed the prospective braceroswith the pesticide DDT.  DDT causes cancer, among other illnesses. 

After suffering this traumatizing experience, my father rarely spoke about it. Once working on the agricultural fields, the exposure to toxic chemicals continued for my father and his paisanos, as the immoral farmers sprayed their agricultural fields with pesticides linked to cancer and other illnesses. These are the same pesticides that the United Farm Workers (UFW) fought against for many years. 

From 1975 to 1985, my father “stole” another American job, when he worked as a janitor in a manufacturing factory. The factory produced chrome wheels for automobiles.  For a decade, my father was exposed to hexavalent chromium, as part of the chrome-plating process. Like DDT and other pesticides, hexavalent chromium causes cancer and other illnesses.  One day, the young white foreman ordered my father to work closer to the furnace, where it was more dangerous.  Instead of exposing himself to the extreme heat, he quit. Like in the 1960s, when he worked as a farmworker, my father experienced toxic exposure and workplace abuse at the factory while never exceeding the federal minimum wage!