Braceros and Farm Workers Downwind of Hanford: Forgotten Radiation Victims

In 1964 Maria Nicasio arrived in Prosser, Washington, with her parents and siblings, hoping to start a new life. The weather was good and work was plentiful. She took a job in the asparagus fields at nearby Benton City, and while the family worked beside the Yakima River they drank from it, bathed in it, and ate the raw asparagus and other crops they picked. None of them knew that living and working a few miles from the Hanford plutonium plant would have severe consequences for their health.

The Bracero Program

Hispanic and other seasonal farm workers had worked Washington's fields since the early 1900s. During World War II, as local Anglo farm workers joined the military or left for better-paid defense jobs on the West Coast, the need grew. To protect the U.S. food supply, on August 4, 1942, the United States signed an agreement with Mexico to bring temporary workers to privately owned farms in the West — the Bracero Program, which drove the rapid growth of the Hispanic community in the Pacific Northwest.

• Contracts began at 90 days, after which workers had to return to Mexico, but wartime labor shortages soon stretched them to six months.
• Routes: because of discriminatory policies in Texas, braceros went directly from Mexico to the Northwest. Workers from Michoacán went by train to Hood River, Oregon, and Yakima, Washington.
• Numbers: between 1943 and 1947 the U.S. government contracted 220,640 braceros from Mexico; 13,809 worked in Washington.
• After the program: by the 1950s a steady flow of Mexican workers reached Washington, many supporting their home towns in Mexico. When the program ended in 1964, Yakima had become the center of Hispanic settlement, and braceros were replaced by three new sources of Hispanic workers: direct illegal immigration to Washington, Hispanic immigrants moving from other states, and Mexican Americans from the Southwest.

Downwind

Braceros, Native Americans and other farm workers harvested crops through the seasons — asparagus and cherries, then peas, sugar beets, strawberries, tree fruit, vegetables, hay and hops. During Hanford's peak plutonium production, their long hours outdoors, contact with contaminated soil and blowing dust, and swimming in and drinking surface water exposed them to high levels of radiation. They also took in radioactive particles and other toxins from wild and locally grown leafy vegetables and from food bought from Native Americans.

The braceros were single men, but after the war whole families like the Nicasios were recruited for seasonal work. They lived in big army-style tent camps and barracks; the Yakima Chief Ranch camps on the Yakima River held 2,000 to 3,000 hop workers, who called them "small towns."

Because farm work in the 1940s and 1950s was seasonal and temporary, the workers who were exposed — and perhaps sickened — cannot be traced. But a 1997 study for the Washington Department of Health placed most farm worker camps of Hanford's peak years in a downwind arc from Wenatchee south and east to Walla Walla — the same region where many people were eventually compensated by the federal government for health damage from Hanford's radiation. That is strong evidence the braceros and other farm workers were affected too.

The Nicasios

Maria Nicasio's mother died of cancer at 60. Maria's oldest son developed a tumor in his forehead that could not be removed, and her 43-year-old brother a tumor in his head that could be only partly removed. Maria suffered chronic joint pain, and her father had two heart attacks. It is hard to know for certain, but the Nicasios and thousands of other farm workers were likely victims of radiation from Hanford.

Sources

Based on "Braceros & Other Farm Workers: Forgotten Radiation Victims" by Saul Bautista, National Park Service (Manhattan Project National Historical Park), a work of the United States government in the public domain. It draws on Maria Nicasio's 1999 oral history interview and the Hanford Health Information Network final report (2000), both in the Washington State Archives; Mary Kay Duffie and William Willard, "Final Report: Migrant Farm Worker Scoping Study" (Washington State Department of Health, 1997); Mario Jimenez Sifuentez, Of Forest and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest (2016); Ana R. Minian, Undocumented Lives (2018); and Trisha T. Pritikin, The Hanford Plaintiffs (2020).