It’s not even 7 p.m. on a Tuesday in the small town of La Mesa, New Mexico, just north of the Texas border, and there’s already a waitlist at Chope’s Town Bar & Cafe. In the foyer of the main ranch-style adobe building, Albert and Ella Avila wait on a bench for one of Chope’s red vinyl-lined tables to open up, having driven half an hour from Las Cruces to celebrate their son’s visit from New York. They raised their four kids on the restaurant’s enchiladas and chiles rellenos — even in the womb, when servers slipped a pregnant Ella extra food.
Across a gravelly lot, smokers stand outside a smaller adobe building painted with 7-Up logos and grape bunches advertising Italian Swiss Colony wine, vestiges of another time. The bar inside is lit with neon signs plugging domestic beer. On weekends, bikers in all-leather everything pack the room, but locals line the bar tonight. Les Lane, just off work hauling feed to dairies, has haunted Chope’s bar since the ’70s. He says it still looks the same, minus a pool table and a working cigarette machine.
The basic beats of Chope’s story are printed right on the menu: Around 1915, Longina Benavides began selling enchiladas out of her dining room, hanging a kerosene lantern by the door to let passersby know they were fresh. In the 1940s, her son José and his wife Guadalupe, whose portraits hang over the dining room, took over and expanded it into a restaurant. José — nicknamed Chope for the chopos (regional slang for overalls) he often wore — built a reputation that Lupe backed up with her New Mexican recipes after stepping into her mother-in-law’s kitchen.
She quickly filled out the menu with what were just becoming Mexican staples in the U.S.: tamales, flautas, and gorditas. Her chiles rellenos — whole chiles stuffed with cheese, dredged in flour and dipped in egg batter, and fried — came to rival Longina’s enchiladas as a signature dish. In the ensuing decades, the couple would expand, transforming the small welding shop next door into a separate bar space. Their daughters run the place now.
Everyone in Doña Ana County knows Chope’s is special. The bright purple-and-red hues of its mural stand out among the acres of chile, corn, and cotton fields, as does the cluster of cars in its parking lot off Highway 28, which winds past a post office, an abandoned cotton gin, a small grocer, and modest homes down a network of dirt roads. Chope’s is part of people’s lives — it has always been here for them and feels like it always will be. This is where you go to celebrate birthdays, graduations, and even weddings. It’s where you bring out-of-town guests to show off how good enchiladas and chiles rellenos really can be. If you move out of the Southwest, Chope’s is the place you miss, and it’s your first stop on a visit home.
It’s also officially one of the most important restaurants in America. In 2015, Chope’s earned a rare honor for restaurants when the National Park Service named it to the National Register of Historic Places. It wasn’t just that Chope’s had been run by the same family for 100 years without interruption: Places that end up on the list have to be historically significant, whether that’s due to an association with a person, event, architectural style, or discovery. Chope’s tells a story that has largely been lost in American history, that of the braceros, the Mexican men who came to work American fields for two decades in the middle of the 20th century as part of a bilateral guest-worker agreement. Though the braceros’ labor was critical to the American wartime economy, Chope’s is one of the few places left in America that remembers.
In 1942, farming communities across America were hurting. The country had just entered World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and young men were enlisting in record numbers. Though women rose up to fill the labor gap, American farms still needed help. In response, Franklin Delano Roosevelt struck a deal with Mexican president Manuel Ávila Camacho to bring Mexican workers to the U.S. on temporary contracts as part of the Mexican Farm Labor Program, more commonly known as the Bracero Program.
Mexican men had long crossed the border to work on American farms. According to a Center for Global Development report, seasonal migration from Mexico to the United States began in the late 1800s. In 1909, William H. Taft signed an agreement to bring 1,000 men to work in the sugar beet fields, in an early predecessor to the Bracero Program. In the years that followed, the border became porous: Whenever American farms needed more workers, privately run companies recruited aggressively in Mexico and brought men to work in arrangements that were secretive and often exploitative, with dismal living conditions and little to no compensation. Then, when the labor market contracted, mass deportations ensued.
The Bracero Program “represented a significant change,” wrote Jorge Durand, a professor at the University of Guadalajara and co-director of the Mexican Migration Project, in a 2007 essay. It transformed a migratory pattern from a “dubiously legal” system into one in which the U.S. and Mexican governments could control which workers could cross the border and confirm that they returned home at the end of their assignment. It also gave the Mexican government the power to ensure its citizens were treated humanely; at one point, Mexico even temporarily barred Texas from the program due to many cases of racial discrimination.
Though the original program was a short-term agreement, the U.S. and Mexican governments continued to renew it for 22 years. In 1951, Harry Truman signed Public Law 78, which formalized the Bracero Program. According to the Bracero History Archive, “4.6 million contracts were signed [throughout the duration of the program], with many individuals returning several times on different contracts, making it the largest U.S. contract labor program.” Though many braceros went to work in California, they fanned out to farms (and railroads) across the United States, including in Washington, Oregon, and the Midwest. It did, in many ways, achieve what it intended: American farms continued to operate, even in lean years, while the Mexican workers sent money to their families back home.
Yet the Bracero Program was flawed. To start, there’s its name: Derived from brazo, the Spanish word for “arm,” many braceros found they were considered nothing more than a pair of strong arms. And while the agreement was supposed to tamp down on the exploitation of workers, it rarely did. The Bracero History Archive notes that “many laborers faced an array of injustices and abuses, including substandard housing, discrimination, and unfulfilled contracts or being cheated out of wages.” In an oral history, former bracero José García Díaz recalled how he and his colleagues had little choice but to work whenever their employer demanded, no matter the pay. “There were times that we worked two, three months without stopping one day,” he said.
Even in the best of scenarios, it was a hard life: Braceros worked 12-hour days with one day off a week. Food was often a tension point. Larisa Veloz, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso who studies Mexican migration to the U.S., says most braceros were unhappy with the quality of food they had to eat. Contracts required employers to provide braceros with adequate housing and meals, but that often meant cold bologna sandwiches, leftover meat, and unfamiliar, low-quality ingredients, which they had to buy at a markup from their employer because they couldn’t access a grocery store. Burritos, a food item unknown to the braceros, were sometimes given to them by farmers, or sold by local women as they worked in the fields, but most host communities were unwelcoming if not outright racist. Restaurants across the Southwest hung signs denying service to Mexicans.
American economic conditions also threatened the viability of the Bracero Program several times throughout its 22-year run. Though the Bracero Program was legal, it came alongside a rise of unauthorized immigration which further inflamed public opinion. When wages fell for American workers, many assumed that it was due to the influx of workers from Mexico. “It’s been a constant push-pull: We need you, we want you, we hate you,” Veloz says.
In the 1950s, as the end of the war brought a recession to America, these conditions led to Operation Wetback, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s controversial mass-deportation policy that pushed more than one million people back across the border. American politicians debated for years about ending the program and, in 1964, they finally did: The U.S. allowed the Bracero Program to expire in a bid to improve the wages and living conditions for American workers.
But while the program was a significant aspect of modern American agricultural history — with long-lasting effects — few depictions of the bracero experience exist in American media or history books. “It has to do with who writes the textbooks,” says Yolanda Chávez Leyva, director of the Institute of Oral History at UT El Paso. Though she notes that some former braceros prefer not to discuss their time in the program, ashamed of the way they were treated, these unusual decades in cross-border history have simply been seen as unimportant or indistinguishable from a long tradition of Mexican farm labor in America.
There have been occasional efforts to remember the braceros. About 10 years ago, the Institute of Oral History joined forces with a few other universities and organizations to collect 737 oral histories for the Bracero History Archive project. A traveling Smithsonian Institution exhibition, “Bittersweet Harvest: The Bracero Program 1942-1964,” ran from 2010 to 2017. Academics sometimes argue that the U.S. and Mexico should look to the lessons of the Bracero Program as they navigate a future cross-border relationship. And, in March 2017, the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced it is raising funds to restore a “severely deteriorating” farm in Socorro, Texas, that’s believed to be the last remaining bracero-processing site. In La Mesa, however, reminders of the braceros are everywhere.
Past Chope’s, down Highway 28, small abandoned stucco buildings dot the edge of the chile fields and pecan groves, hugging the side of the road. They’re unmarked, but locals affirm these were once living quarters for the braceros working for the likes of the Stahmann and Apodaca farms.
Mary Helen Garcia, a former Democratic state representative, says her father, Joe F. Apodaca, built those homes on his farmland at the end of the Great Depression and the onset of World War II. Even though Apodaca was not recruited to serve in the battlefields, he found he needed more help tending his fields in La Mesa. “At the time, [U.S. farmers] had wonderful relationships with Mexico,” Garcia says. “So they started bringing the braceros.”
In fulfillment of the binational contract, Apodaca built living quarters for the men who came just after the holidays to get the cotton fields ready for planting season. He built a commissary, too, which his wife Genevieve would stock with staples like beans and bologna for the braceros to purchase. If the men had any special requests, she would buy those ingredients on her next trip into town.
Every year, as the braceros prepared to return home at the end of the growing season, the Apodaca family would host a matanza, a traditional New Mexican pig roast, full of pork in a red chile stew, beans, rice, and chicharrones. Garcia was young at the time and attending boarding school, so her memories of the braceros on her father’s farm are limited. But, she remembers, “They were all very decent people.”
Braceros had a different experience in La Mesa compared to farming communities elsewhere: This part of the country, after all, had once been Mexico. Many had come to work on farms in this region long before any official agreements had been struck; Americans and Mexicans were not only more comfortable living together, but many shared ancestry. In La Mesa, they had access to the ingredients and dishes that they had grown up eating — tortillas, sopes, tamales, rice, and more. The braceros here were part of the fabric of the community. And, in La Mesa, that means you could often find them at Chope’s.
The Benavides sisters say they remember the braceros well. Now in their 70s, Amelia Rivas, Cecilia Yáñez, and Margarita (Margie) Martinez have worked here for most of their lives, alongside their sister Adelaida, who died over a decade ago. They literally lived at Chope’s: The restaurant was their family home. When they retired from their careers, they all returned to Chope’s as co-owners.
It didn’t dawn on Yáñez at the time that many of Chope’s customers were part of a government-run program — after all, there had always been and always would be Mexican men working these fields. But in 2014, two graduate students from the nearby New Mexico State University, Norma Hartell and Addison Warner, called to ask if they could research the history of their favorite restaurant for an assignment. For their cultural resources management class project, Hartell and Warner interviewed the sisters and gathered historical documents — building measurements, original deeds, photographs, old menus, and more — necessary to nominate Chope’s for the National Register. They first submitted the application to the New Mexico State Register of Cultural Properties and, with the state’s approval, it went on to the National Park Service in Washington, D.C.
Through the act of sharing the Benavides family’s story, Chope’s connections with the braceros became clear. Hartell, whose grandfathers had been braceros, immediately recognized the significance of the sisters’ stories about how on Saturdays, after payday, braceros came to the restaurant for the luncheon plate that Guadalupe created especially for them: hearty meals like pork chops or sirloin, salad, rice, beans, and tortillas, ideal fuel for hard labor.
These plates only cost $1 or $2, but if a worker was short on cash, he could always barter with leftover produce. “If they had change, she would just take what change they had,” Yáñez says, remarkable at a time when other restaurants were denying service to Mexicans entirely.
And just as importantly, Chope — outgoing and charming, a born front-of-the-house man — cultivated community at his restaurant. “He never met a stranger,” Yáñez says. Chope hosted a weekly coffee club of local farmers that met for four decades. He talked late into the night with braceros who came in for a drink after a long day, sharing beers with them in the bar. Elsewhere in the community, Chope was known for translating legal documents and offering his notary services, often for free to those who needed it. And Lupe would make lunch every day for the local children, whose school didn’t have a cafeteria, keeping a tally so their parents could settle up at the end of each week.
Nobody I spoke with in La Mesa remembers any stories of abuse directed toward braceros, through admittedly as landowners, they aren’t necessarily the people who would have those stories. But Rivas remembers how some of the men suffered: Not only were they lonely without their friends and family, but they also had to adjust to a new culture and language. “They would come and eat, but sometimes they couldn’t read the labels on the can,” she says. “Sometimes they would buy dog food and they thought it was meat.”
Yet in spite of the challenges they faced, many bracero workers were glad to have participated in the program. Carlos Marentes, a workers’ rights activist and founding director of the Centro de los Trabajadores Agrícolas Fronterizos (Border Agricultural Workers Project) in El Paso, says that his research into the files of about 100,000 braceros revealed a surprising fact: “We discovered those years were the most important time of their lives,” he says.
Some grew close to the families that employed them. Marentes met with one ex-bracero who still keeps a photograph in his wallet of the family of an employer who would invite him over for iced tea on Sundays. Others simply took pride in their labor. “When you work in the field, you know what you’re doing is going to feed people,” Marentes says.
Chope’s is still as welcoming as ever: The Benavides sisters have kept it up as an essential gathering place for the La Mesa community. When Chope died in 1990, Yáñez took on his role as family spokesman while her sisters became managers. By that time, Guadalupe wasn’t doing all the cooking herself anymore. For years, she had taught local women how to make her recipes and they passed them on to their own children, who came to work in Chope’s kitchen, too. In Guadalupe’s later years, the sisters oversaw both the kitchen and the front of the house. They also opened up the dining space to include two back rooms of their childhood home to accommodate the increasing demand.
Yáñez was overjoyed when she first got the call that Chope’s had made the National Register of Historic Places. Restaurants rarely make the cut, says Paul Lusignan, a National Park Service historian who reviews applications for the National Register, including Chope’s. Jake’s Famous Crawfish in Portland, Oregon, earned a spot for its turn-of-the-century ambiance and reputation as a community gathering place. In Tacoma, Washington, Bob’s Java Jive, which is shaped like a coffee pot, was recognized as an example of mimetic architecture, in which a building’s design reflects its function. Mai-Kai Restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, made the list for its Polynesian theme, which “reflects national broad patterns of entertainment” in the mid-20th century. Most of the rest are hotel restaurants.
It’s unusual for a restaurant to clear even the lowest hurdle to enter the National Register of Historic Places; a property must be at least 50 years old and mostly unchanged. That kind of longevity is near impossible in an industry constantly battling rising rents, changing tastes, and slim profit margins. But restaurants also struggle to make the case that they are significant compared to other restaurants whether due to an association with a person, event, architectural style, or discovery.
Lusignan says he isn’t aware of any other National Register properties that are associated with the Bracero Program. “[Chope’s] was part of the infrastructure necessary to have that operation be a success,” he says. “And bringing that in, I thought, was quite unique.”
But Chope’s has always felt like a national treasure to anyone who has dined there. “This place has been our heart and soul,” says Garcia, the former state legislator. “Everybody brags about it. They say, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta go to Chope’s to eat,’ and we tell ’em we were eating there many years before it became so popular.”
Today, the family-run restaurant still reflects the broader patterns of history. Not long after the braceros returned to Mexico, farming began to change in La Mesa. Cotton crops yielded to abundant groves of pecan trees, which could command top dollar yet require so much water they’re now draining the aquifer and creating disputes among neighbors over rights to the water from the Rio Grande. (“Don’t go into farming,” Rivas warns.)
Chope’s relies less on its surrounding farms, too, as it has gotten busier. Guadalupe used to make a dozen chiles rellenos a night; now Chope’s makes 300 a day. So while the sisters still buy their red chiles locally and their green chiles from Hatch, New Mexico, the rest of their produce comes from a supplier in El Paso. “Our demand has gotten too big compared to when they used to bring my dad a sack of onions,” Yáñez says. “That sack of onions would last us all month. A sack of onions would probably last us a week now.”
And although their father Chope, a lifelong Democrat, was a force in state politics — “If you were undecided who to vote for and came to have a beer, Chope would tell you who to vote for,” jokes Les Lane, who’s been a regular for decades — Chope’s is somewhat less of a Democratic bastion these days, as the sisters prefer to avoid politics. In 2016, Doña Ana County voted for Hillary Clinton, but truck bumpers in Chope’s parking lot that summer proclaimed allegiances to former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson and Ted Nugent. One man at the bar told me he blamed government intervention and labor unions for the community’s agricultural decline, and complained that the new generation of immigrants was not “the quality immigrants we used to have.” Politics surrounding immigration have only since intensified in the region, culminating in the recent dueling rallies of President Donald Trump and former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas in nearby El Paso.
When the Bracero Program ended in 1964, La Mesa’s farms still needed men to do the kind of work the braceros had done: hoeing and thinning the lettuce and cotton fields, and assorted other challenging farm tasks. Garcia and the sisters say that locals don’t want to do that kind of grueling labor, so instead contractors drive buses down to the border between El Paso and Juárez well before sunrise to pick up workers for the day. “They shouldn’t have ended [the Bracero Program],” Garcia says. “If it would have kept on it would have solved a lot of the immigration problems that [the government] has nowadays.”
Some academics argue that the U.S. and Mexico should negotiate a new kind of Bracero Program that improves on the mistakes of its predecessor. A February 2017 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research points out that the U.S. gambit to raise farm wages by ending the Bracero Program didn’t work. Instead of hiring more American laborers and paying them better, the report surmises, farm owners turned to undocumented immigrants or automation to get work done.
But most people in La Mesa aren’t sure whether the program would make sense today. Farming has simply changed. No one needs a team of workers who would live in barns and tiny stucco buildings on their land. Yet Hartell hopes that Chope’s story can at least serve as a parable for modern times.
“It’s a reminder of the immigrant story,” she says. “We still have immigrant stories going on.” She and her advisor Beth O’Leary, professor emerita of anthropology at NMSU, are now working to complete an archive about the Benavides family that will reside in the NMSU Rio Grande Historical Collection.
The sisters are also considering their restaurant’s legacy. They’re all well past retirement age and growing tired. They’d like to pass the restaurant on to an heir, but the kids all have their own careers. (In recent years, though, four grandchildren have been working at Chope’s.) “It’s been in the family for so long, it’s sad,” Rivas says.
Throughout the years, the sisters have turned down several offers from outsiders who wanted to buy Chope’s, but they’re starting to reconsider their position — with just a few conditions. “We would be very, very happy to pass it along to somebody else if they would write it in their blood that they were going to keep the same menu, the same atmosphere,” Yáñez says, as Martinez interjects, “Not get rid of our workers.”
There’s still hope that someone in the family will come through and take over the restaurant. But, for now, they share a simple wish for the legacy of their 104-year-old family business:
“I just hope they always remember that it was my mother and my dad’s restaurant,” Martinez says. “They started it. Remember them.”
“Not us,” Yáñez says. “Mom and Dad are the ones that did all the work.”
“We worked hard with them,” Rivas says. “We have worked all our lives.”
Martinez nods. “Their dream became our dream.”
Amy McKeever is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C.
Robin Zielinski was born and raised in New Jersey; since 2010, she’s lived in New Mexico and is a multimedia journalist at Las Cruces Sun-News.