Loreta Garcia arrived in the United States with her husband, Arturo. Like the rest of the women in this series, Oregon was not the first stop in their journey. The common denominator in the lives of all these women, aside from landing in Umatilla County, was the work trail they followed. In several cases they were one degree removed from the original Bracero Program which originated in 1942 to carry the US through its labor force shortage through the end of the Second World War, and lasted in its first iteration through 1964.
Like Loreta, the other women in this series, Beatriz, Rosamaria, Maria Rosario, María, and Esperanza, all were beaconed by family or their families' employers to come work for farmers and ranchers in Oregon. In an era when "papers" were an enigma to most, some of these women knew little of what it took to work in the US. They simply followed the route on which their husbands embarked, like their fathers before them. Their husbands in some cases became managers, small business owners, or independent contractors, but their wives, these women, rarely managed to break the barriers that kept them in the lowest paying positions in their trade. Most did not complain, they considered themselves fortunate to have steady employment and the protection of their employers, though the disparity between their wage and the yielding of the growing agribusiness world in their surroundings is glaring.
This section paints each of their stories in their own words, or in the words of their surviving daughters. Each is a titan in her own fashion, and the arch behind their families' successes.
Like Loreta, the other women in this series, Beatriz, Rosamaria, Maria Rosario, María, and Esperanza, all were beaconed by family or their families' employers to come work for farmers and ranchers in Oregon. In an era when "papers" were an enigma to most, some of these women knew little of what it took to work in the US. They simply followed the route on which their husbands embarked, like their fathers before them. Their husbands in some cases became managers, small business owners, or independent contractors, but their wives, these women, rarely managed to break the barriers that kept them in the lowest paying positions in their trade. Most did not complain, they considered themselves fortunate to have steady employment and the protection of their employers, though the disparity between their wage and the yielding of the growing agribusiness world in their surroundings is glaring.
This section paints each of their stories in their own words, or in the words of their surviving daughters. Each is a titan in her own fashion, and the arch behind their families' successes.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.