In the other stream, Bracero workers were legal, but largely unprotected by labor law. Most lived in squalid conditions, overworked and denied many of the rights of basic citizenship, not to mention the more forceful worker protections put into place by the New Deal. “We used to own our slaves,” said one Florida sugar planter in an exposé into the mistreatment of farmworkers, including those in the Bracero Program; “now we just rent them.”
