Lettuce Carrier

The Emergency Farm Labor Program, or the Bracero Program, brought laborers from Mexico to the United States on short-term contracts between 1942 and 1964. In the lettuce fields of Stanislaus and Imperial Counties in California, field laborers used small, square wheel barrows, called humps to pack and move boxes of lettuce. Each box held about twenty-four or thirty heads. This hump was used in the California fields of the Jerry Pepelis Packing Company from 1960 until 1964, when the Bracero Program ended. By then, humps were abandoned for more efficient, automated methods of harvesting.