On Sept. 17, 1963, 58 farm workers boarded a makeshift bus after working all day in the Chualar celery fields. These workers, all men, were part of the bracero program, a guest-worker agreement between the United States and Mexico initially signed in 1942 as a need for workers during World War II and renewed multiple times.

Francisco Espinoza, the foreman, was driving an old, converted lettuce truck with an attached trailer transporting the braceros. As the bus approached a railroad crossing, Espinoza, who later claimed he did not see a train approaching, or hear a train’s whistle, pressed on the gas pedal to drive over the train tracks. The driver’s cabin made it across the tracks, but a Southern Pacific train collided with the trailer, killing 28 on impact. The rest were taken to local hospitals where four more braceros died leaving the final number killed at 32. At the time, it was considered the worst transportation accident in California history, drawing international media attention, and escalating labor activists lobbying efforts to end the bracero program.

The morning after the accident, the local Salinas labor council contacted Ernesto Galarza at his home in San Jose, an iconic scholar and labor organizer who spent his career advocating for farm workers. Galarza was asked to immediately get to Salinas because there was a “town full of dead Mexicans.” Subsequently appointed by Congress to investigate the accident, Galarza spent the next year interviewing braceros and witnesses, trying to inspect what was left of the bus, and attending the trial for the driver. While Espinoza eventually was found not guilty and freed, surviving braceros — who never testified at the trial — told Galarza that Espinoza was a careless erratic driver who did not consider their safety even before the accident.

“The Tragedy at Chualar,” as Galarza titled his report to Congress, shed light on the many abuses the workers faced: loss of wages, terrible housing conditions, alienation from the rest of the community and lack of safe transportation and security measures that company owners could have taken to prevent the accident. (In fact, Chualar was not the first serious accident that involved braceros. In 1958 a bus in nearby Soledad carrying braceros had an illegal gas container in the passenger compartment that caught on fire. The bus was engulfed in flames and 14 of the braceros trapped inside lost their lives. Local newspapers called it the Soledad Holocaust.) Chualar also led to the dawn of the farm worker movement in which Cesar Chavez mobilized to organize a union that won many labor concessions for farm workers in the coming decades.

My own grandfather, Guadalupe Rodriguez, first migrated to California as a bracero and worked as a lechugero, a lettuce worker. Shortly before his death in 2022, local community activist, Juan Martinez, told me that his family happened to pass by the accident as they drove to Gonzales from Salinas, and he never forgot what he saw. In later years Martinez placed a wooden cross at the site of the accident, and in 2013 was able to get a stretch of US 101 designated as the Bracero Memorial Highway.

Recently, the Arts Council for Monterey County supported a mural project painted in Chualar near the accident site. The artist, Hanif Panni, captured the landscape of the Salinas Valley and the braceros working with the infamous short-handle hoe, eventually banned in California. It’s a beautiful mural that captures the history and the contributions through a modern painting aesthetic. The intensity of the farm work and the tragic accident is captured in one bracero in the middle of the mural. You witness the grit needed to endure (aguantar) and survive the physically exhausting labor, not just for one day or a week, but for many years, to be a successful lechugero, like my grandfather was. For many the mural will be a pilgrimage site to honor and remember the fallen braceros and their descendants.

Juan Martinez’s wooden memorial cross was recently refurbished by Monterey County Supervisor Luis Alejo and an additional steel cross was placed at the site, still capturing the region’s rustic aesthetic and the rail crossing just feet away. A larger sculpture is also under consideration, honoring bracero labor and how the immigrant workers from Mexico saved an industry and transformed it into the multi-billion-dollar economy it is today. The legacy of braceros lives on, and immigrant labor continues to contribute to making California the fifth largest economy in the world. Today the heirs of braceros are everywhere, in Congress, medicine, education, and as agribusiness owners. Let’s continue to honor braceros and capture their contributions.

Ignacio Ornelas Rodriguez, Ph.D. is a historian and works in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford University.