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Labor History

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Labor strategies and agribusiness counterstrikeduring the Bracero Era: the peculiar case of theNational Farm Labor Union, 1946–1952

Catherine Vézina

To cite this article: Catherine Vézina (2016) Labor strategies and agribusiness counterstrikeduring the Bracero Era: the peculiar case of the National Farm Labor Union, 1946–1952, LaborHistory, 57:2, 235-257, DOI: 10.1080/0023656X.2016.1161146

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0023656X.2016.1161146

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Labor History, 2016VoL. 57, No. 2, 235–257http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0023656X.2016.1161146

Labor strategies and agribusiness counterstrike during the Bracero Era: the peculiar case of the National Farm Labor Union, 1946–1952

Catherine Vézina

Department of History, Centro de investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City, Mexico

Cross-border relations, and their international context, deeply influence certain internal and local affairs. The Bracero Era (1942–1964) is an example of the impact of a bilateral program designed to satisfy various public and private interests in Mexico and the United States as part of the unionization movement. Many authors agree that the bracero program represented one of the major challenges for the workers in California’s industrial farming. During these years, California remained the state that legally employed the highest number of Mexican migrants and benefited the most from its proximity to Mexico.

After World War II, the complex reconversion of the national economy affected the union movement in the United States. If labor relations in the industrial sector were difficult to man-age, tensions in the Californian agro-industry, affected by the bracero program in force since 1942, reached critical levels.1 In 1946, newly regrouped under the banner of the National

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the responses of the political establishment and the agro-industry to the militant actions of the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU) from 1946 until 1952. It confirms the well-known hypothesis that the maintenance of the bracero program affected the efforts to form agricultural unions in California, but it also underlines strategies and the roles played by the agro-industry, California Farm Placement Service and other federal instances of government in the weakening of agricultural unionization. It argues that the agricultural unions’ weakness in California throughout this period can be attributed to the needs of the food-processing industry and the latter’s special relationship with the political establishment. I demonstrate that while the failure to consolidate agricultural unions in California during the postwar years, is not attributable to the strategies adopted by the NFLU per se, it is closely related to a lack of support from the major political players and to the privileged relationship they built up with Mexican officials. The influence of some public servants, political representatives and agribusiness lobbyists has been crucial for the continuation of the bracero program and has also obstructed the NFLU to organize efficiently strikes and boycotts.

© 2016 taylor & Francis

KEYWORDSFarmworkers; braceros; agricultural unions; agro-industry; National Farm Labor Union

ARTICLE HISTORYreceived 10 February 2015 accepted 16 November 2015

CONTACT Catherine Vézina catherine.vezina@cide.edu

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Farm Labor Union (NFLU), the agricultural labor movement shook the agro-industrial sector.2 Before this time, despite the large numbers of Californian farm workers, efforts to unionize them remained ineffective as limited, and during the early 1930s, sparsely supported strikes had been bitter failures.3

The lack of organization and cohesion among workers, and also of support from the big unions, explains the failure to organize agricultural workers in the 1930s. The defeat of attempts to unionize, along with the powerful influence of the agro-industrial sector, greatly limited the agricultural movement achievements until the postwar period. In many ways, despite the challenges that Californian agricultural workers faced, they were not so different from other, better organized laborers, such as Pennsylvania’s steelworkers. They lived on wages rather than on what they produced themselves, had no personal relationship with their employer, and worked in close proximity to a host of other workers for companies that had similar structures to the big US manufacturing corporations.4 When the NFLU appeared on the scene just after World War II, the union movement in the agricultural areas of California organized, and adopted dispute and industrial-action strategies similar to those that were to be successfully employed by César Chávez nearly 20 years later. Considering that the Farm Workers Association succeeded in unionizing farmworkers later in the 1960s,5 how can we explain the weaknesses of the National Farm Labor Union in the postwar period?

It is surprising to see how little attention has been given to the actions of the NFLU in comparison to the union movements of the 1930s or the 1960s. The “bracero” period seems to be considered as a lost period in the history of agricultural unionism. In an article about American unionism in the postwar era, Irving Bernstein, then Associate Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California, does not mention the existence of this agricultural union.6 Years before Bernstein wrote the article, the NFLU had disappeared from the California agricultural scene. Juan Gómez Quiñones, who published an excellent book about the organization of the Mexican labor in the United States, does not mention neither the existence of the NFLU nor the conflicts stimulated by the legal and illegal immigration in the agricultural sector; instead, he closely studies the relationship between immigration and unionism in the nonagricultural sectors.7 Vernon M. Briggs Jr. is one of the few authors to analyze the NFLU’s struggle against agribusiness and the bracero program; however, he concludes that the fight against Mexican workers was misguided: “Mistakenly, the union made the displacement of ‘legal’ workers the central issue during the 1952 walkout […].”8

Although the NFLU appears to be relegated to the background in the study of agricultural unionism, some authors have related the failure of this attempt to organize farm workers to contextual elements, such as the weakness of the civil rights movement before the 1960s. In an article published in 1977, Craig Jenkins and Charles Perrow showed that the failure of the NFLU and the success of the United Farm Workers (UFW) were not due to their respec-tive strategies. They argued quite correctly that the explanation lay in the national context, particularly in the surge of the civil rights movement, which favored the UFW. As Donald H. Grubb tells in his short history of the NFLU, before the rise of that movement, mobilization in support of farm workers remained hard to achieve: “The NFLU could not have created, in the days before Martin Luther King, the spirit of the 1960s which led thousands of unorganized people to picket on behalf of farm workers […].”9 He suggests, however, that the NFLU may have lacked some creativity in using the outside supporters it did have, but he also men-tions the importance of the powerful allies of the agro-industry in neutralizing agricultural

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unions’ actions. Although he agrees with these observations, Marshall Ganz suggests that the explanation for the failure of the first attempts at labor organization cannot only be attributed to the greater responsiveness to groups like the UFW, the funding of the union or to the charismatic leadership.10 He argues that the strategies used by the UFW are crucial to understand the momentum achieved in 1966 by this organization. In his comparison between AWoC and UFW tactics, he underlines the ineffectiveness of spontaneous strikes in fields where domestic and bracero workers labored, recuperating ethnic identity to create a base of solidarity.11

In the last decade, the question of temporary workers and the labor dynamic imposed onto them in the “formative era” of Californian capitalist agriculture received renewed inter-est. The bracero experiment is a central point in each of these theses about the changing landscape of farming; moreover, in these new studies about agricultural unionization in California, the NFLU is getting greater attention from the scholars. In his book about the strategy and leadership of the farm worker movement during the 1960s and 1970s, Matt García links the collapse of the NFLU directly with the DiGiorgio strike in 1950 (which I will look at later). He interprets the fight against the bracero program as the main reason in the delay of other mobilization tactics by the farm workers associations.12 Although he mentions the impact of Ernesto Galarza’s scholarship and activism for the betterment of working con-ditions of farm migratory labor, he does not consider any of the actions of the NFLU after 1950.13 other studies observe the consolidation of industrial and capitalist farming in this state in relation to the realities of the bracero program. In his major contribution in the study of the bracero program and its relation with labor organization, Don Mitchell focuses his attention on the evolution of the agribusiness landscape; to understand the realities of this transformation and of the bracero era, he considers the interests of many players involved in this experiment. He carefully examines the difficulties of unionizing farm labor in California and relates them directly to the competition due to braceros, the preference given to them by the growers in the state, and the sympathetic attitude of the Farm Placement Service toward the employers. Although I agree with these authors on the importance of the civic rights context and the bracero program in explaining the poor results obtained by the NFLU, I believe that this interpretation neglects other important factors.

In this article, I demonstrate that while the failure to consolidate agricultural unions in California during the postwar years is not attributable to the strategies adopted by the NFLU per se. Instead, it is closely related to a lack of support from the major political players and to the privileged relationship they built up with Mexican officials. The influence of some public servants, political representatives and agribusiness lobbyists had been crucial for the con-tinuation of the bracero program and had also obstructed the NFLU to organize efficiently strikes and boycotts. This article investigates the responses of the political establishment and the agro-industry toward the militant actions of the NFLU until 1952.14 It confirms the well-known hypothesis that the maintenance of the bracero program affected the efforts to form agricultural unions in California, but it also underlines strategies and the roles played by the agro-industry, California Farm Placement Service and other federal instances of gov-ernment in the weakening of agricultural unionization. The administrative efforts to delay the official recognition of strikes, the contradictory messages sent by Californian, American and Mexican officials about the way to address labor conflicts where braceros were hired and legal strategy used by the agro-industry to circumvent the actions of the NFLU help to explain the downturn in the militancy after 1952.

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This article describes the reaction of US society to the demands of agricultural unions, and the national context that gave rise to the strikes in the agricultural sector, which influenced the struggles of the NFLU.15 It focuses on the period 1947–1952, when strikes took place in the San Joaquin and Imperial valleys. This period coincided with the first years of NFLU activism, forming part of the wetback16 decade (1946–1954), when there was a large influx of illegal Mexican immigrants. Based on a research in the Ernesto Galarza Papers, Governor Earl Warren Papers, as well as Mexican archives, I conclude that the agro-industry’s strategies, facilitated by its privileged relationship with important political and administrative actors, must be taken into account when explaining the failure of the NFLU to organize farm work-ers in California. After analyzing how the reconversion of the economy helped to generate an anti-union atmosphere, the article examines the Californian context in which the NFLU faced the powerful agro-industrial lobby, paying particular attention to the actions of the union during this period and evaluating their outcomes.

Employment situation and overview of the Californian economy

The challenging reconversion from a war economy to a civilian one led to a redefinition of labor relations in the United States. In order to support the reconversion program, the Department of Labor adopted policies aimed at achieving high productivity and balancing prices and wages. The department found itself in a delicate position, as workers who had agreed to have their wages frozen as long as the war lasted now demanded raises. With the abolition of the National War Labor Board,17 collective bargaining became the primary means whereby workers could seek to improve their working conditions. Between Victory Day in May of 1945 and June of 1946, 4650 strikes, involving over 5088,000 workers,18 broke out in the United States.

In order to foster stable labor relations and avoid excessively costly conflicts, the Department of Labor proposed a review of price-control mechanisms and supportive hous-ing and social-welfare programs so as to eradicate the causes of financial insecurity among workers. In 1946, Congress came out in favor of adopting measures aimed at preventing strikes of the magnitude of those that occurred in 1945 and 1946 from happening again and threatening the US economy. This fear that unstable labor relations might harm economic reconversion led to the passing of the Taft-Hartley law in 1947, which limited the leeway of the unions and abrogated the 1935 Wagner Act that had safeguarded the trade-union rights of private-sector employees.19

Workplace tensions were not limited to the industrial sector just after the war as the agricultural sector in the Golden State also suffered a number of lengthy labor conflicts. As in the rest of the country, employers argued that the United States could not allow produc-tion to stall. As we will see, in California, the employers of agribusiness formed a dominant financial lobby that bullied weak agricultural unions. The end of World War II gave rise to a certain amount of anxiety in California regarding the economic reconversion and the job situation. As well as having to deal with postwar realities, the state had to adjust to a special demographic situation. Industries had opened their doors to thousands workers in search of El Dorado during the war, and this migration led to a vigorous growth of the Californian population, which increased from just fewer than seven million people in 1940 to almost sixteen million in 1960.20

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Housing programs for all of these workers had to be rethought after the war ended, and the temporary lodgings provided by the Federal Government fell into disrepair.21 The unemployment rate in California followed the nationwide trend (4.14% in 1950, compared to the national rate of 5.2%22); however, due to its high population level resulting from internal migration to the state, the number of unemployed workers quickly surpassed 300,000,23 with the highest unemployment rates occurring in the counties where the big agricultural businesses were located. The underemployment rates recorded in the state’s most productive zones were, paradoxically, higher than urban rates (Imperial, 5.2%; Kern, 6.01%; San Joaquin, 6.01%; Los Angeles, 3.95%).24 Unlike those in most states east of the Mississippi, the majority of unemployed laborers in California did not live on subsistence farms;25 instead, they worked as farmhands and agricultural workers living in precarious conditions.

Agro-industry and the unionization of California’s agricultural workers

Agriculture, a backbone of the California economy since the nineteenth century, devel-oped quickly after World War I and occupied a dominant position at the national level. over the years, crop diversification in this region made it a major producer and exporter of agricultural products, a process big growers largely dominated. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the concentration of land ownership and creation of railway and farming empires determined the state’s economic structure. Already, in 1925, the average farm-property size in Imperial County was around 118 acres,26 and around 202 acres in the whole of California. Twenty years later, the average acreage per farm reached over 250 acres.27 When the NFLU was founded, the DiGiorgio Fruit Company, the most important vegetable and fruit exporter in the region, owned almost 16,000 acres in Kern County.28 As Carey McWilliams and Don Mitchell explain, the power of agro-business in California is based on a massive vertical and horizontal integration of agricultural corporations.29 Enterprises such as o’Dwyer and Mets, DiGiorgio and other San Joaquin and Imperial Valley growers formed cooperatives and grower-controlled labor associations which strengthen their dominant position. Associations such as the Agricultural Labor Bureau of the San Joaquin Valley, and the Imperial Valley Farmers’Association provided growers with a flexible labor supply and a stronger political power.

The preponderance of big farming properties and the commercial nature of Californian agriculture had a decisive impact on the unionization of farmworkers and the automation of agriculture. During and after the 1929 economic crisis, tensions rose, creating an explosive situation as the industrialized nature of Californian agriculture led to the “proletarianiza-tion30” of the workforce. During this period, starving farmworkers watched helplessly as big farming companies, unable to sell the food they produced at a profit, destroyed crops. In 1933 and 1934, this situation led to spontaneous strikes in agricultural areas across the state; in response, employers did not hesitate in the use of violence against strikers, often with police collusion.31 Relations between agricultural employers and farmworkers were strained in California; throughout the period following World War II, employers effectively managed to block the development of collective-labor organizations, mainly by employing braceros and “wetbacks” as strikebreakers.

The attitude of the Mexican consuls contributed to the stagnation of working conditions for agricultural workers in the region.32 According to Gilbert G. González, despite the con-suls’ official duty to safeguard the rights of Mexicans abroad, in fact, they contributed to

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the mistreatment of Mexican farmworkers in California by suppressing all unions, or other workers’ associations, until the bracero program ended.33 Ernesto Galarza, who was the NFLU’s director of education and research, confirmed that the lack of support from Mexican government’s representatives made it difficult for Mexican workers to form associations.34

After WWII, the NFLU fought to set up unions and improve the living conditions of farm-workers in California. There was scant progress in the effort to unionize agricultural workers in the Imperial Valley region at the very beginning of the 1950s, and the advances that were achieved remained shaky due to the automation of big farms and the competition resulting from the bracero program.35 For example, in response to the union agitation in the Californian countryside, the cotton growers in the region automated their production faster than in any other part of the United States.36 This state of affairs, along with the use of Mexican labor to break strikes on California farms, made conditions for domestic workers increasingly precar-ious. As the years went by, it became more and more difficult to justify the bracero program. With automation of cotton farming in the late 1950s, it became increasingly difficult for the growers’ lobby to exert influence in order to keep the bracero program running, since it could no longer justify the need for large amounts of stoop labor.37

other factors, such as organizational context, had a great impact on the union leadership’s strategic decision-making, and could be decisive to the success or failure of the group’s actions.38 Ganz sees the structure of the NFLU and its relations to the AFL more as a prob-lem than an advantage, because of the “insulated” character it conferred. Since the NFLU’s leadership team had to report to the California State Federation of Labor (which represented the AFL unions), its only official sponsor, it did not create strong ties with its constituency. Moreover, the unionization of farmworkers did not appear in the high priorities of the AFL during these years, while the flamboyant actions of the NFLU caused some tensions with the State Federation of Labor, which resulted in weaker support after 1952.39 In these con-ditions, the effective financial and tactical support it offered was limited and the NFLU did not manage to create the necessary outside sources of income as to sustain its mobilization. Though the union movement managed to garner sympathy in some sectors of Californian, prevailing anti-communist sentiments in the state population did not favor unions such as the NFLU as they struggled against powerful economic and political lobbies.

Between 1946 and 1951, the NFLU maintained two key strategies intended to help it gain influence in the regional politics of unionization and in the US Congress. The first goal, as presented by Marshall Ganz, was to organize secondary boycotts with important and complementary unions, such as the Teamsters, representing the canneries in California. This strategy, however, did not prove very successful due to the Teamsters’ opportunistic attitude. on the other hand, the NFLU believed it could achieve some good lobbying in Washington with partners such as the Democratic representative from California, Helen G. Douglas.40 Moreover, Harry L. Mitchell, the president of the NFLU (and later NAWU), was working mostly from Washington for this purpose, but without a clear statement from the AFL (and then the AFL-CIo), his actions resulted in little until the merging of the NFLU into the AWoC in 1959. As we will see, the agro-industry’s influence on Californian, national and even Mexican politics was widely disproportionate to the NFLU’s more modest lobbying efforts, and union militancy responded to this obstacle in a variety of ways.

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The DiGiorgio strike: “The reason of the strongest”41

From 1947 onwards, the rural union movement grew under the auspices of the NFLU, which benefited from the support of charismatic leaders such as Galarza, however, the first sig-nificant fight the union mounted ended in a bitter defeat. Despite a very disappointing outcome, the workers’ strike against DiGiorgio Fruit Company lasted over two years (summer 1947 to 1949) and rang alarm bells among businesses in the Californian countryside. The labor conflict, which turned into a test of endurance between the DiGorgio Company and its unionized workers, succeeded in destroying the paternalistic image of the big agricultural entrepreneurs in the region.

The NFLU’s attempt to impose itself on one of California’s major growers is the most studied and most impressive action of this period.42 In the summer of 1947, the strike began as workers, who had joined the NFLU, demanded a wage increase of ten cents per hour, recognition of seniority, and system for dealing with grievances.43 858 unionized workers, out of 1345 company employees, support Hank Hasiwar, the director of the union’s western division, who took actions against DiGiorgio. Though the braceros working for the company (120 in all) initially refused to cross the picket lines, company managers soon forced them to go back to the fields.44 Misinformed by the local authorities, who denied any strike was underway for six weeks, and lacking contact with the Mexican Embassy or the local consuls, these farmworkers found themselves in a precarious position and avoided joining their unionized companions:

The character of the persuasion can be surmised from the situation in which the braceros found themselves. They were cut off completely from the strikers and had no information other than what the corporation wanted them to know. All of the men […] hoped their contracts would be renewed. Failure to work meant immediate deportation. […] The Mexican consuls had not appeared to advise them. […] It was a totally captive group with no choice but to bow to the advice of the United States government and the sheriff of Kern County, which amounted to an order to return to work.45

The unions criticized the part the Mexican Embassy in Washington and the consuls in California played in these proceedings. In october 1947, despite the pressure the NFLU brought to bear, the embassy secretary told Harry L. Mitchell, the union’s president, that the Mexican workers were happy with their working conditions at the DiGiorgio Company and would stay there until their contracts expired.46 For its part, the Mexican Embassy asserted that this was a political issue for the United States government to resolve and that Mexico was not impeding or encouraging the workers to remain active on the plantations. At the same time, the Department of Agriculture used this diplomatic cover and claimed that it was only complying with the wishes of the Mexican representatives.47

The NFLU did not manage to counteract agro-industry’s influence. Certain ministries and organizations, such as the Bakersfield Farm-Labor office and the California FPS, clearly showed where their loyalties lay at the start of the strike, seeking to have braceros hired on Joseph DiGiorgio’s plantation without mentioning the labor conflict.48 Although it remained more or less clear until 1959, the relationship between the chief of the FPS, Edward J. Hayes, and the DiGiorgio Company influenced the administration of the strike and of the supply of bracero by delaying the official acknowledgment of the existence of the labor conflict.49 Thus the strikebreakers, who were joined by a large number of “wetbacks,” were able to flow in largely unhampered, accompanied by the company’s armed guards. According to Galarza, this ploy on the part of the Farm Labor office was aimed at delaying the bracero workers’

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departure from the DiGiorgio Company’s properties, thus enabling the latter to finish har-vesting its crops.50 This delay enabled DiGiorgio to keep running until May of 1950, when the NFLU finally gave up, its coffers emptied by the almost three-year-long strike.

The union managed to hold out during this extended labor conflict thanks to the eco-nomic and logistical support it received from manufacturing-sector unions affiliated with the AFL in Los Angeles and San Francisco, which boycotted DiGiorgio’s products in a show of solidarity.51 This strategy, which Cesar Chavez later used, however, failed in the case of the DiGiorgio strike, since a court injunction was issued under the Taft-Hartley law, forbidding the boycott.52 Due to its financial limitations, the NFLU then attempted to create a broad media offensive to tarnish the name of the DiGiorgio empire.53 Thanks to the NFLU’s repeated demands to withdraw the braceros in areas affected by the strike, and the union’s negative publicity against the practices of the company, at the beginning of 1948 DiGiorgio lost its permit to hire legal Mexican workers.

Following this prohibition, DiGiorgio resolutely turned to “wetbacks,” continuing to hire them again and again despite raids on its properties by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Harry L. Mitchell unsuccessfully asked the Californian authorities to intervene and put an end to the abuses:

When the National Farm Labor Union went on strike against the Di Giorgio Fruit Corporation on 1 october 1947, we immediately came up against the fact that Di Giorgio was using Mexican contract workers, the so-called Nationals, to break the strike. Subsequently Di Giorgio has used hundreds of illegals or wet-backs behind the picket lines. Several raids by the Immigration Service have not discouraged Di Giorgio from continuing this practice. […] It would seem to me an appropriate time for your State to set up a Good Neighbor Commission for the purpose of making first-hand investigation of any situation which demeans the Mexicans in California, economically, or in any other way.54

Paul Scharrenberg, Director of Industrial Relation of California, informed the NFLU that his state was not empowered to deal with the “wetback” problem. He pointed out that in the absence of a legislation designed to prevent exploitation of the alien labor in the state, no agency other than the INS had any power to act on hiring of illegal immigrants; unfortu-nately, the California Congress had thrown out a bill proposing such a law earlier that year.55

In 1948, when the NFLU’s media offensive became more energetic, DiGiorgio joined forces with Jack B. Tenney, a senator for California, to convince state authorities that the strike was being run by communist agents.56 This rumor reached Washington, where Alfred J. Elliott, a California Democratic congressman, asked the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to look into the strike at DiGiorgio.57 There was no evidence to support the allegations of a “red menace,” however, and the company ultimately abandoned this ploy. Instead, the legal strategies DiGiorgio’s lawyers employed against a documentary by the Hollywood Film Council, which had denounced the hiring of “wetbacks” and also described workers’ difficult living conditions, finally helped the company triumph over the NFLU strike.58 Accusing the union of libel, DiGiorgio sued it for compensatory damages in the amount of two million dollars, and since the NFLU was unable to pay such an amount, or raise enough funds to even respond to the suit, both sides reached an out-of-court agreement, which put an end to the strike.59

Afterwards, the State Federation of Labor, which initially had supported the documentary, and was willing to assume any expense involved to have the injunction removed, gradually lost enthusiasm for the NFLU’s actions.60 The California Department of Industrial Relations

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issued a report about a strike against 480 growers affiliated to the Imperial Valley Farmers Association seemed to confirm this erosion of AFL’s support: “The [State] Federation [of Labor] is not inclined to engage in an all-out effort after its experience with the DiGiorgio Strike where one-half million dollars was spent without achieving union recognition. Its present policy appears to be a much more modified one of giving enough support to keeping the strike going as a gad-fly to sting the farmer group while it consolidates as much political benefit for the overall labor movement as is possible.”61 Despite its defeat, the NFLU had still managed to tarnish the benevolent reputation that the Californian agro-industry sought to project. In the early 1950s, the union redoubled its organizing efforts, and outraged by the biased administration of the bracero program, diversified its strategies.

Torn between interests: California’s ambiguous reaction to the NFLU’s claims

In August 1949, the United States suffered the first recession of the postwar period.62 Unemployment increased as the number of jobs in sectors related to food production and agriculture dropped, becoming more severe in the first months of the following year.63 At the same time, unemployment in manufacturing as a whole reached the highest level of the postwar period, and only began to recover slowly after the start of the Korean War, which gave a boost to US industry in the second half of 1950. Meanwhile, the malaise in rural California was palpable.64 The presence of migrant workers, skyrocketing population growth, limited unemployment benefits and the automation of cotton cultivation all helped to depress wages in rural areas. Lee Sandberg, from the Department of Employment, issued a grim forecast for the 1949–1950 season:

[…] non-agricultural labor will be competing with agricultural workers for jobs. The price of grapes has dropped from $75 to $20 in a three-year period; the price of wine from $1 to 34 cents a gallon; the peach market has been demoralized; alfalfa has dropped from $30 to $17. Cotton picking began in some sections of Kern county the fourth week in August, but use of cot-ton-picking machines has jumped from 400 to 800, cutting down employment of manual labor. The defeat in Congress of a relief for unemployed agricultural workers will place a great problem on the shoulders of county officials and welfare agencies in the valley this coming winter.65

The struggles of agricultural unions like the NFLU, which were still fragile, became more and more grueling as their economic situation worsened with the 1949 recession. They received fewer and fewer financial contributions, and agricultural workers became more vulnerable after the prolonged labor conflicts. Furthermore, in this period when anticommunism and anti-unionism were prevalent, the various government departments remained subject to the agro-industry’s influence. In this harsh context, the signing of an agreement between the Californian and Mexican governments in 1949 that regularized the status of a large number of “wetbacks” in the state was perceived as an affront that further frustrated the region’s agricultural workers. It served as proof to the close relations that existed between agro-industry, the political establishment in California, and some influential Mexican poli-ticians, such as Coronel Carlos I. Serrano.66 In June 1949, the Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Affairs (or SRE to use its Spanish acronym) authorized the regularization of Mexican workers already in California illegally:

This authorization would be granted to the companies who have previously liquidated the corresponding sums that they have been retaining; I am referring particularly to the Citrus Emergency Harvest Inc. After surveying some of the strong organization that are members of

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the Citrus Emergency Havest Inc., I found them ready to liquidate all these debts through us, in exchange for our authorization for the hiring of the illegals.67

SRE reached an understanding with Governor Warren and the representatives of citrus com-panies in exchange for the deposit of the retained salaries of the braceros that had “skipped” their contracts and were nowhere to be found.68 Alfonso Guerra, the Principal officer for SRE, explained that it constituted an act of goodwill toward the state of California and spec-ified that approximately 3000 illegals had been put at the disposal of the Mexican General Consulate in California and Governor Warren.69 An official agreement between Mexico and the United States extended this arrangement nationally and facilitated the regularization of “wetbacks” until 1951.70

Despite the wide support for agro-industry from government agencies, the NFLU engaged in a number of labor conflicts during this period. Beginning in the autumn of 1949, groups of citizens joined forces with agricultural unions to denounce the living conditions of migrant workers in California.71 According to Hank Hasiwar, laborers faced conditions worse than those seen during the Great Depression, while local newspapers fretted about the lack of food for migrant families and the deaths of several children due to malnourishment.72 Moreover, Harry L. Mitchell asserted that official reports stating 10 children had died fell far short of the reality.73 In January 1950, the NFLU complained to Governor Warren about the growing presence of “wetbacks” among agricultural workers and the economic suffering this imposed on thousands of Californians. The union exposed the state’s underemployment crisis, emphasizing the drop in wages was due to the employment of “wetbacks” and that bad living conditions prevailed in camps built to lodge migrant workers. It also reported that Associated Farmers, the organization that ran these camps, had imposed rent increases of up to 200% on tenants.74

The Farm Placement Service, otherwise quite favorable toward the agro-industry, agreed that urgent steps needed to be taken to help American families in rural California.75 For the first time since the start of the migrant-labor program, the complaints of the unions and Californian families concurred, forcing the state’s Department of Employment to take serious stock of underemployment and the presence of “wetbacks” in the state’s fertile val-leys. The federal authorities and the Californian representatives of the Department of Labor as well as the Department of Justice mounted a more coordinated deportation drive in early 1950.76 As a result, the INS sent some 30 agents to southern California, and especially to the Imperial Valley.77 Though the NFLU did not exert enough influence to weaken the bracero program, which was supported by the agro-industry and its proponents in the US Congress, the union did convince California authorities and immigration services to launch more extensive deportation drives. The malaise was, indeed, palpable in this region where most of the farmland was occupied by the food-processing industry and local farmworkers suffered the consequences of the influx of braceros and “wetbacks.” The increase in the num-ber of deportations carried out in California between 1949 and 1951 constituted a relative victory for the agricultural unions. However, these actions had mixed results; the financial and human resources of the INS were not enough for a massive deportation drive and the federal laws regarding the employment of “wetbacks” did not include punitive measures against employers who broke them.78

In 1950, even though Governor Warren and President Truman setup two successive boards of inquiry that agreed with the NFLU’s recommendations about passing legislation aimed at the employers of illegal immigrants, no bill was adopted at the federal or state levels.79 As Don

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Mitchell correctly pointed out, “none of the recommendations, in the end, would change a thing.”80 The farm workers’ crisis vanished with the Korean War and the Truman and Warren administrations lost interest in the matter. Furthermore, in this new international context, regulation aimed at agricultural-sector businesses could not garner enough political support; the agro-industry, exerting influence both in California and in the US Congress, succeeded on more than one occasion in derailing legislation. The conclusions these commissions reached ultimately remained only on paper and did not result in important changes to the management of the bracero program nor did it impact working conditions for domestic farm laborers. While it may seem surprising that the wave of sympathy that the agricultural unions had managed to set in motion in 1949 did not succeed in getting measures recom-mended by the boards of enquiry adopted in California, the fact was that the economic and international contexts once more favored the Californian food-processing industry. The employment situation improved only after the US economy, which had stalled in 1949, was energized by the country’s entry into the Korean War.

The 1951 union offensive against “wetbacks”: Mexico’s apathy

Despite US participation in the Korean War, and the urgent situation that it created, the NFLU continued organizing agricultural workers. In the winter of 1951, the union unsuccessfully attempted to make its voice heard in the negotiations over a new bracero agreement under-way in Mexico City. While Senator Allen J. Ellender of Louisiana and Congressman William R. Poage of Texas indirectly represented the agro-industry, the Mexican government prevented Galarza from joining the bilateral conference. Moreover, although officials Mexican labor unions, such as the Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos, participated in the negotiations, the administration of President Miguel Alemán denied such a privilege to the Alianza de braceros nacionales de México en Norteamérica and even temporarily incarcerated its leaders, because of their relationship with the NFLU.81

In order to bring more pressure to bear, the NFLU extended its activities beyond the negotiations, attempting to pressure California and federal authorities into supervising the agricultural companies more closely so as to limit the hiring of “wetbacks.” Unable to turn a blind eye either to the claims of the agricultural unions or to the conclusions of the guberna-torial and presidential commissions, the INS had to enforce the country’s immigration laws, while dealing with the agribusinesses, which did everything in their power to obtain workers on their own terms. In March 1951, the Border Patrol’s inaction bore witness to the difficult position in which the agency found itself. While deportation drives had increased at the beginning of the year as negotiations were still underway with Mexico, this agency allowed a whole contingent of Mexican workers, brought from Mexicali as well as from inside California, to be hired without regard for the provisions of the Mexico-US treaty. The Border Patrol’s incoherent strategy reflected the mixed interests behind it: groups such as the NFLU, some citizen committees, and Democratic representatives of California, including Helen Gahagan Douglas, were pushing for greater control of the border, while agribusiness demanded that the Border Patrol relax its supervision of the illegals in the region almost daily.82

The NFLU notified Glenn Brockway, San Francisco’s representative to the United States Employment Security Bureau, about the hiring of a group of Mexican workers as a breach of the 1950 agreement. The union reported on the illegal recruitment and contracting of over one hundred illegal workers at Calexico, and accused the authorities in charge of border

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certification of acting in favor of the growers. These workers had arrived in Mexicali from the border in buses chartered by growers and then had been regularized (“dry-out”) in Calexico.83. Unhappy about these illegal favors, the union pressured California and federal authorities to deport the workers in question and shutdown the US border crossing at Calexico. The Department of Labor acceded to these demands in March, transferring the operations for hiring Mexican workers to the Mexican city of Hermosillo in the state of Sonora so as to prevent a recurrence of the kind of irregularity that had occurred in Calexico.84

Though the union had won this battle, the larger war raged on. After the Border Patrol in California took a harder line, agribusiness initiated a public relations campaign asserting that, since no labor conflict existed, US authorities had no right to deport the braceros. on 24 May 1951, tensions again rose when the NFLU called for a strike of over 6000 farmwork-ers on melon plantations in the Imperial Valley.85 It aimed at having the “wetbacks” and braceros withdrawn from California. This union action was directly linked to the passing of Mexican workers through the Calexico border crossing and the abusive layoffs of US melon harvesters in May 1951:

The melon growers had purged themselves of domestic pickers to the point that toward the end of May twenty-five employers had on their payrolls 374 domestics and 1055 braceros. one company had 65 braceros and no domestics. […] the American Fruit Company fired all its domestic workers on May 23. None of them was given cause for dismissal. Some had worked for the company for ten years.86

After a few days of picketing and citizens’ arrests, Keith Mets, the chairman of the Imperial Valley Farmers’ Association, asked Governor Warren to prevent the NFLU from forcing the Mexican workers out of the area.87 This strategy bore fruit for agro-industry owners until June of 1951, but could not prevent the California Mediation and Conciliation Service to acknowl-edge the existence of a strike directly targeting the Farmers’ Association in the Imperial Valley later that month. The mediating body stated that Californian agro-industries were dependent on “wetbacks,” concluding that such unfair competition engendered stagnation and even led to the reduction of wages in the agricultural sector.88

This new union victory was short-lived, however. Although the Department of Labor had announced that the braceros would be withdrawn from the properties of the Imperial Valley Farmers Association on 8 June 1951, William o’Dwyer, the US ambassador to Mexico, cast doubt on this announcement by announcing that no bracero would be moved out of the state.89 It is worth mentioning the privileged relation between the ambassador and agribusiness: Frank o’Dwyer, brother of the former, was then Keith Mets’ business partner. This same year, both men were accused of using undocumented Mexican workers on their properties.90 The ambassador’s remarks were in line with Mexico’s unwillingness to back the US government’s decision to start withdrawing the braceros who were in the areas affected by the strike. Manuel Tello, head of the SRE, told a Mexican newspaper that Mexican laborers affected by the strike in the Imperial Valley were not interested in participating in this movement led by a “North American union representing a minority of farm workers.”91

The NFLU denounced the attitude of the consuls and Mexican authorities during this strike, gradually increasing actions as various officials stalled in order to avoid intervening in the bracero affair.92 Galarza accused the two governments of engaging in bureaucratic stone-walling in order to avoid getting involved in the conflict.93 He even travelled to Mexico in the hope of getting his petitions heard,94 demanding that the authorities recognize the existence of a work conflict and forbid the hiring of Mexican contractual laborer, as established in

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the bracero agreement. Faced with the Mexican government’s failure to withdraw braceros from the properties where they were employed as strikebreakers alongside illegal Mexican workers, the NFLU expanded its publicity campaign. Galarza criticized the Mexican consuls in California for allowing the recruitment and hiring of illegal workers. In May 1951, following an NFLU media campaign in both California and Mexico, Mexican authorities finally asked their consuls to do their best to prevent illegal workers from passing into California, and also to ensure deportation proceedings continued for unauthorized workers already in the state. In June, the NFLU organized a protest in front of the Mexican consulate in Calexico, waving placards bearing the words, “Scabs for rent. Apply to the Mexican government.”95

In order to make its campaign more effective, the NFLU employed another simple strat-egy centered on citizens’ arrests. This consisted in arresting “wetbacks” as soon as they were found working on the lands of the Imperial Valley Farmers’Association and handing them over to the INS, which was obliged to deport them. In response to the pressure exerted by the NFLU, the US government announced that the braceros would be withdrawn from California’s Imperial Valley, and also that it would mount a massive drive to deport illegal Mexican workers.96 The results of this campaign were quite conclusive; in 1951, the Calexico border crossing alone chalked up over 20% of all the deportations effected throughout the United States, while all the bureaus set up in the Los Angeles District for that purpose achieved over 30% of the total number of deportations carried out nation-wide.97 However, taking a look at the timeline of the withdrawal of braceros and “wetbacks” from the region, I find that the order came just at the right time: at the end of the harvest season. The order to remove braceros and “wetbacks” used to break strikes was issued late, on 23 June 1951, and the strike ended at the same time as the harvest season came to an end on June 25.98

Though the NFLU emphasized that its offensive would be repeated at the next harvest, the US Congress intervened against this threat in the winter of 1952. one of the clauses contained in Bill 1851, voted into law by Congress that February, and ratified by the pres-ident in May, forbade all persons from conducting citizens’ arrests of “wetbacks” for the purpose of handing them over to the immigration services.99 The law indirectly addressed the NFLU: “(b) No officer or person shall have authority to make any arrest for a violation of any provision of this section except officers and employees of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service.”100 The union had come up against strong opposition from the agro-industry that benefited from the support of influential US politicians. As such, the NFLU was forced to deal with the bracero system, which made union struggles harder to carry out in the agricultural sector.

Conclusion

The weakness of the agricultural unions in California up until the 1960s can be explained by the necessities of the food-processing industry and its privileged relationship with the political establishment. The continuation of the bracero program, in response to the real or exaggerated seasonal labor needs of the agricultural sector, partly explains why it was so difficult for the unions to exert pressure on employers. Furthermore, the beginning of the cold war between 1946 and 1952 favored the high productivity of California’s agriculture, first because of the Marshall plan and then because of the Korean War, which gave the perfect pretext to maintain the labor importation program.

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Torn between public opinion, which had become more aware of the grim reality agri-cultural workers in California faced, and the major economic interests that lay behind the hiring of seasonal Mexican workers in places like the Imperial Valley, US authorities tried to withdraw the braceros and “wetbacks” from agro-industry properties. All the while, the Department of Employment and FPS, under pressure from important growers members of the Imperial Valley Farmer’s Association, cleverly calculated what delays were needed in order to harvest the crops and preserve a good image. This situation made it very hard for fragile unions such as the NFLU to gain a foothold in the region, and especially difficult for them to impose their demands for better conditions on the agricultural working environment. The limited results of the NFLU’s attempts to unionize are explained by the predominance of the bracero system in the region between 1942 and 1964, along with the powerful influence of the agro-industrial lobby on both California and national politics. Ernesto Galarza clearly stated that in addition to the unstable membership and the lack of funds, the NFLU had not been able to resist the pressure from the agro-industry and the support it enjoyed from federal and state politicians and bureaucrats.101

The two leaders originally hired to supervise NFLU’s operations in California, Hank Hasiwar and William Becker, based their support on the Arkies and Okies who were now established in the California agricultural valleys. The Mexican farmworkers who had participated in the union movement of the 1930s were being relayed to a secondary position; to rectify the situation, Ernesto Galarza was recruited to be the educational director of the NFLU.102 The unification of these ethnic groups under the banner of the NFLU proved to be hard to achieve because of the defiance existing between the Mexican-Americans and their bracero coun-terparts.103 NFLU’s isolation seems to have impeded the formation of a strong community spirit that could have allowed the mobilization of a stronger social movement, as was the case of the FWA. Furthermore, when the AFL-CIo created the AWoC in 1959, it incorporated NAWU (which later led to Galarza’s resignation) and chose to focus its attention on limited strike (“hot box”) strategy similar to that used to unionize industrial workers. Unfortunately, this strategy did not garner a strong sympathy among Spanish-speaking fieldworkers, some-thing that was to play a big part in the successes of the United Farm Workers organizing Committee (UFWoC).104

Furthermore, Mexico’s position toward the NFLU’s strikes did not favor the effective organ-ization nor the solidarity between Mexican-Americans farm workers and the Mexican brace-ros. The commercial interests and good-neighbor relationship cultivated between Alemán’s administration and California’s political establishment may explain the relative lethargy of the consuls when dealing with the repatriation of Mexican braceros from fields where a labor conflict existed. This arrangement seems to weaken during the presidencies of Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–1958) and Adolfo López Mateos (1958–1964). At the same time, Mexico’s international image was evolving, moving closer to the non-aligned movement and mark-ing its distance from the anti-communist discourse espoused by President Alemán at the beginning of the cold war.

on the American scene, with automation of the agricultural sector occurring during the 1950s and 1960s, the essential nature of the bracero program became less evident in the United States. Additionally, the unionization movement continued its efforts to put an end to the program that helped to create a labor surplus. In 1960, the release of the TV docu-mentary, Harvest of Shame, which showed the sad plight of migrant farmworkers, gave a boost to union efforts. Moreover, the agricultural labor campaign gained the support of the

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big labor federations, the clergy, the Chicano movement, and even the Kennedy adminis-tration.105 In 1964, the US government unilaterally abandoned the bracero program, a step that constituted an essential prerequisite for the efficient organization of agricultural workers in the United States.106

At the same time, union leaders, such as Cesar Chavez, breathed new life into the agricul-tural labor movement. In 1966, the unions merged to form the UFWoC,107 winning the first important victories for those working in the agricultural sector. The sociopolitical climate of the time played a big part in the victories of the agricultural unions, while the civil-rights movement, which was taking shape concurrently, reinvigorated union activism, with lead-ers taking it upon themselves to represent minorities in the workplace.108 As Marshall Ganz emphasized in his study of the AWoC and UFWoC strategies, the latter organization “drew on elements of an ethnic labor association […], a union, and community organizing drives [that] led to development of a “dual strategy” based on mobilization of workers […] along with the mobilization of urban supporters.”109

At the same time that President Lyndon B. Johnson was laying the foundations for his fight against poverty among minorities, Cesar Chavez was fighting for the rights of Chicano and Mexican farm workers which are a majority in this sector of activity.110 The strategic capacity of a union is not only about the leader but also, and more significantly, about its leadership team. Although the hagiography surrounding Chavez has obscured the efforts of some important collaborators, recent historiography tends to give Dolores Huerta, Chris Hartmire, Eliseo Medina, Jerry Cohen and other contributors their place and the pivotal support for the famous victory of 1966.111 Furthermore, the organization of the Farm Workers Association (FWA), which Chavez created in 1962, was more of a “bottom-up” strategy than was the top-down formation sustained by the AFL in its actions to unionize farm workers during the 1950s.112 The NFLU has not benefited from a similar plural leader-ship after 1952 or from an inclusive and democratic pattern. Ernesto Galarza was virtually the only member officially left in California and could only count on the generosity of a few volunteer farmworkers.

Even during its heyday, the postwar anti-union atmosphere, and the privileged relation-ship between agro-industry and the California political establishment, frustrated the NFLU’s actions. After 1952, the NFLU (which became NAWU) lost the financial and technical support of the California State Federation of Labor and entered a long period of “stabilization,” but did not manage to make many gains. The union’s main priority became the denunciation of the bracero system: “In a fundamental sense the NAWU was committing for an indefinite period what little it had in funds and staff to throw light on the decision-making process at all levels of agri-business land that accounted for the many assaults against the domestic harvesters […]. During this search the task of building a union would have to be postponed with the chance that it might not be renewed, even if the bracero system were, in fact, destroyed.”113 In the second half of the 1950s, Galarza carefully monitored the management of the bracero system, successfully denounced unethical administrators such as Edward J. Hayes and par-ticipated in the formation of the National Advisory Committee on Farm Labor, a citizen’s group in which Eleanor Roosevelt actively participated. In spite of its obvious weaknesses, the NFLU opened the door to the labor initiatives of the 1960s.

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Notes

1. A seasonal farm work program, set up by the US and Mexican governments, which contemplated the hiring of workers in agricultural zones where the domestic work force is too small to satisfy demand. This program, some aspects of which were renegotiated after 1947, remained in place until 1964. on the economy and labor relations in the industrial sector, see Griffith, “Forging America’s,” 57–88; Morse, “The Role of,” 37–50; Nodin Valdes, “Machine in Politics,” 203–224. In 1951, the number of farmworkers in the Imperial Valley alone was estimated at 170,000, of which between 2000 and 3000 were natives of the US, 5000 were Mexican hired workers (braceros), and the remainder wetbacks – i.e. Mexican workers who had entered the USA illegally. “Report of the mediator, Edward Peters, compiled by Paul Scharrenberg, Director of the Department of Industrial Relations, and Melvin F. Small, Department Secretary of the Governor’s office,” Earl Warren Papers (EWP), California State Archives (CSA), F3640-2377, 20/06/1951.

2. The American Federation of Labor, the most important US union of the period, oversaw the actions of the NFLU. As Donald H. Grubbs puts it, the NFLU traces its origins back to the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union who had represented the poor sharecroppers during the Great Depression. The same Arkies and Okies composed the larger clientele of the NFLU, as was its president, Harry L. Mitchell. After 1952, the NFLU changed its name to National Agricultural Workers Association (NAWU). It then tried to be more active in other states where the Bracero Program would not interfere as directly as in California. However, Ernesto Galarza tried to hold the fort in California and organized an opposition to the labor importation program that lay the foundations of the great fights of the National Farm Workers’ Association (NFW) and the Agricultural Workers’ Organizing Committee (AWoC) in the 1960s. See Grubbs, “Prelude,” 454.

3. Even the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America who had supported some of the intents to organize the farm workers in the 1930s decided in the 1940s to concentrate its efforts on organizing the cannery and packing workers. See Briggs, Immigration, 131–141.

4. McWilliams, Factories in the Field, 265. Even though agricultural industry in California is known as the most capitalist type in the United States (Mize, “Mexican Contract Workers”; Mitchell, They Saved), Californian growers have always pledged agriculture’s uniqueness as a form of production to seek exemptions from labor regulation.

5. The son of Mexican-American seasonal farmworkers, in 1962 he founded the Farm Workers Association (FWA), which became the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) in 1965. In 1966, it reorganized as the United Farm Workers organizing Committee (UGWoC), AFL-CIo, by merging with the Agricultural Workers organizing Committee (AWoC). See Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins.

6. In fact, in his report on the situation of unionism since 1945, he states that one of the sectors in which there was still much to do to unionize the workers was the agricultural sector; he suggests that the slow growth of mechanization may explain the weakness of the unions in this field during the postwar years: “The obstacles to unionization are formidable. Even here [in California], however, there are long-term forces at work – mechanization, a rising skill level, and a rapidly shrinking labor force – that suggest that someday organization may come. It is not without significance that, as this paper is written the most serious campaign in a generation to unionize California’s farms is under way.” Bernstein, “The Growth,” 151. In the same manner, while offering an historical analysis of the agricultural unionism in California from 1864 to 1964, Lamar B. Jones does not refer to the NFLU. Jones, “Labor and management,” 23–40.

7. See the chapter. Mass Immigration Ceases: Unionism Takes off (1921–1965) in Gómez Quiñones, Mexican American labor, 81–122.

8. Briggs, Immigration, 241. 9. Grubbs, “Prelude to Chavez,” 462.10. Although he does not observe the NFLU, he compares the strategies used by the AFL-CIo’s

Agricultural Workers organizing Committee (AWoC), a committee in which the NAWU eventually had to merge in 1959, and by the UFW. Ganz, “Resources and Resourcefulness,” 1004.

11. Ganz, “Resources and Resourcefulness,” 1022–1023; 1034.

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12. García, From the Jaws, 13–14.13. He affirms that the NFLU ceased to exist due to this legal action by the DiGiorgio Corporation.

Based on the excellent work of Richard Steven Street, this information is nonetheless erroneous. The NFLU continued to organize strikes in California until 1952 when it became the “NAWU,” still registered in the AFL.

14. As I previously said, the NFLU evolves to NAWU this same year.15. Jenkins and Perrow, “Insurgency of the Powerless,” 249–268.16. Wetback is a derogatory term largely employed during this period to designate a Mexican

laborer who enters the US illegally, by wading the Rio Grande. I use this term only to reflect the historical reality of these years and do not refer to it in a pejorative way.

17. The National War Labor Board helped to mediate between employers and workers during the World Wars I and II and was active during the World War II (1942 to 1945).

18. Morse, “The Role of,” 38.19. However, this law did not cover the agricultural sector.20. Historical Census Browser, “Total Population,” http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/php/newlong2.

php.21. Verge, “World War II,” 319.22. Historical Census Browser, “State-Level Results for 1950,” http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/php/

state.php; Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force; Unemployment Rate,” http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyoutputServlet.

23. Historical Census Browser, “State-Level Results for 1950,” http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/php/state.php.

24. Ibid.25. Historical Census Browser, “State-Level Results,” http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/php/state.php.26. Gray, The American Civil Liberties, 1.27. The national average acreage per farm was 145 acres in 1925 and 195 acres in 1945. See

olmstead and Rhode, Average Acreage Per Farm, http://hsus.cambridge.org/HSUSWeb/toc/tableToc.do?id=Da225-290.

28. Galarza, Farm Workers, 21–22. As related by Don Mitchell, the DiGiorgio was somewhat tentacular, owning acres of land ranging from the Mexican border as far north as Marysville and with a diversified chain of production (from agricultural products, to packing sheds and box factory) (Mitchell, They Saved the Crops, 121).

29. Mitchell, They Saved the Crops, 16–21; McWilliams, Factories in the Fields, 48–65.30. Nodin Valdes, “Machine Politics,” 205.31. Rawls and Bean, California, 313.32. As soon as 1910, the Mexican workers represented almost 80% of the agricultural workforce

in the southern region of California. Roos and Hennessy, “Assimilation or Exclusion?”, 278–304.33. González examines in detail the part played by consuls such as Joaquín Terrazas in breaking the

farm strikes in the Imperial Valley in 1933 and 1934, paying particular attention to the special relationship between the Calexico consul and the region’s big growers, as well as the bribes that Terrazas took in exchange for authorizing the passage of Mexican workers as potential scabs. González, Mexican Consuls, 174–196.

34. Ernesto Galarza, Farm Workers, 13.35. Dennis Nodin Valdes, “Machine Politics,” 208–209.36. Less than 1% of the California cotton farming was mechanized in 1945; in 1960, more than

90% of the cotton farming had been automated in California. In other parts of the country, the mechanization of the cotton production caught on a decade later. Ibid., 209.

37. Ernesto Galarza, Farm Workers, 210. Ibid., 224.38. Marshall Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins, 1st Chapter, Kindle Edition.39. For more information about the relation between NFLU, the AFL and the California State of

Labor, see Ibid., 279–288.40. Democrat Representative in Washington from 3 January 1945 to 3 January 1951.41. “The reason of the strongest is always the best.” old saying from Jean de Lafontaine, “The Wolf

and the Lamb.”

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42. See Galarza, Farm Workers; Mitchell, They Saved the Crops; Bernstein, “The Growth”; Grubbs, “Prelude to Chavez”; Street, “Poverty in the Valley.”

43. At the time, the wage paid to agricultural workers was around 80 cents per hour, while “specialized” workers (machine and irrigation-system operators, etc.) earned an average of 85 cents per hour. Galarza, Farm Workers, 100.

44. Ibid., 103.45. Galarza, Farm-Workers, 104.46. Ibid.47. Ibid.48. Ibid., 105.49. In 1959, a crisis in the Farm Placement Service of California is caused by a denunciation, from

the NAWU, of the wrongdoings of Edward J. Hayes who agreed to send braceros to growers who had previously refused to hire local manpower. After to resign, Hayes turn to the agribusiness and became manager of the Imperial Valley Farmers’ Association, largely financed by DiGiorgio (Galarza, Farm Workers; “Correspondence between Governor Knight and Ernesto Galarza,” Employment/Farm Labor Placement, CSA, C114.042). While Marshall Ganz states that the purge in the FPS is due to the actions of Cesar Chávez and the Community Service organization, Ernesto Galarza and Don Mitchell argue that the denunciations made by the NAWU were the detonator of the crisis. See Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins; Galarza, Farm Workers, 256–264; Mitchell, They Saved the Crops, 345.

50. Galarza, Farm Workers, 105.51. Ibid., 108–109.52. The provision of the Taft-Hartley law in question was the “hot cargo” one. The hot cargo clause

refers to the secondary boycott that other unions may adopt in solidarity with the strikers. In the case of the DiGiorgio strike, the Teamsters originally wanted to apply a secondary boycott to all products from DiGiorgio. A local judge granted an injunction against the NFLU, the Teamsters and the Wine Workers Union to impede this secondary boycott. The injunction was voided in 1951, since the Taft-Hartley law did not apply to the agricultural sector. Meanwhile, the NFLU ran out of funding and had to call off the strike. Jenkins and Perrow, “Insurgency of the Powerless,” 256; Mitchell, They Saved the Crops, 125).

53. The NFLU obtained the support of the CBS reporter Chet Huntley and of the film unions of California who helped the agricultural union to make a documentary about the work conditions on DiGiorgio’s farms. on the public relation and media offensive launched by the NFLU, see Street, “Poverty in the Valley,” 25–48.

54. “Letter from H.L. Mitchell to Governor Warren,” EWP, CSA, F3640: 2373, 10-08-1948.55. “Response of Paul Scharrenberg,” EWP, CSA, F3640-2373, 20–08-1948.56. Galarza, Farm Workers, 111. Don Mitchell also mentions the participation of congressman

Richard Nixon in this lobbying strategy. Mitchell, They Saved the Crops, 125.57. Congressional Record, 3255; 3260–3261.58. Following the suit filed by Joseph DiGiorgio, cinemas were ordered to stop showing the film,

Poverty in the Valley of Plenty, and the reels of the film were destroyed, though it can be still be accessed at “Poverty in the Valley of Plenty,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sWLqAvJcTo.

59. Galarza, Farm Workers, 114.60. “Haggerty to Galarza,” EGP, M0224, Box 35, Folder 8, 20/09/1949.61. “Edward Peters’Report,” EWP, CSA, F3640: 2377, 20-06-1951.62. “The Truman Administration,” http://www.trumanlibrary.org/chron/49chron2.htm.63. Snyder, “The Treasury,” 28; Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics,” http://data.bls.

gov/pdq/SurveyoutputServlet.64. “Relief Rolls,” The Daily Hayward Review, 19.65. “Slump in Farm,” Bakersfield Californian, 21.66. Mexican Senate Leader and close collaborator of the president Miguel Alemán. He was involved

in some illicit business and was in contact with governor Warren and William H. Tolbert (Manger, Ventura County Citrus Growers Committee) from 1948 to 1951. EWP, CSA, F3640:1268.

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67. Embajada Mexicana en Estados Unidos de América (EMEUA), Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada (AHGE), Legajo 1453/6, Exp. 73-27/662.2/7.

68. These deposits were to be made at the name of the bracero or the Mexican government. EMEUA, AHGE, Legajo 1453/6, Exp. 73-27/662.2/7.

69. EMEUA, AHGE, Legajo 1453/6, Exp. 73-27/662.2/7.70. Vézina, “Dry-out.”71. For more details on the working and living conditions of the agricultural workers in the San

Joaquin Valley, see Mitchell, They Saved the Crops, 141–149.72. “Farm Labor Union,” Oxnard Press-Courier.73. “Child Starvations,” Long Beach Independent, 1; Mitchell, They Saved the Crops: Chapter 5.74. The NFLU estimated that 100,000 agricultural workers were stricken by poverty in January of

1950 and that more than twice that number of families were living below the breadline. Ibid.75. This support from the Farm Placement Service for the agricultural unions and their social

demands may explain some of the dispositions included in the State of California’s budget in 1950–1951. of the budget submitted by the governor in March of 1949, USD$6000,000 was set aside for building a childcare center. Some state congressmen even placed a bill before the house increasing unemployment-benefit programs. See: “opposition to Gov.”, Daily Independent Journal, 2.

76. “Letter from Glenn E. Brockway (Regional Representative, Bureau of Employment Security, San Francisco) to James G. Bryant (California Department of Employment),” EWP, CSA, F3640-1273, 24/01/1950.

77. “Inter-office Memorandum, Sacramento,” EWP, CSA, F3640-1274, 20/02/1950.78. EWP, CSA, F3640-1274, 03/03/1950.79. The Commission on Migratory Labor was set up in June of 1950. Throughout 1950, it gathered

evidence from the representatives of various organizations. In its conclusions, it attributed agricultural workers’ low wages to increasing illegal immigration: “The newly developed magnitudes of wetback traffic have brought their inevitable consequences. Foremost among these consequences is the severe and adverse pressure on wages in the areas nearest the border. A second consequence of the wetback is the competition for employment and displacement of American workers.” In its recommendations about what it called the “Wetback Invasion,” the commission came out in favor of such legislation: “We recommend that: […] Legislation be enacted making it unlawful to employ aliens illegally in the United States, the sanctions to be: (a) removal by the INS of all legally imported labor from any place of employment in which any illegal alien is found employed; (b) restraining orders and injunctions; and (c) prohibiting the shipment or interstate commerce of any product on which illegal alien labor has worked.” Migratory Labor, 70–71 and 180.

80. Don Mitchell, They Saved the Crops, 174.81. It is worth to mention that the CTM did not represent any menace for the Mexican Government.

Miguel Alemán government had already put the labor movement under the control of the state by controlling the CTM.

82. Lytle Hernández, Migra.83. Letter from Hank Hasiwar, president of the western branch of the NFLU, to Glenn Brockway

(the person from the United States Employment Security Bureau responsible for San Francisco), EGP, M0224, Box 7, Folder 6, 07/03/1951; “Letter from Ernesto Galarza to A.J. Norton (Bureau of Employment Security, Calif.),” EGP, M0224, Box 23, Folder 1, 13/03/1951.

84. The Department of Labor admitted the irregularity that had occurred in Calexico: “We raise the question in our telegram of the contracting in Mexicali yesterday of a group of men who were in neither of the above categories. These men were picked up in Mexicali by agents of unknown growers. They were processed along with other who had arrived from the north in buses chartered by growers and with illegals who were picked up in Imperial Valley and other Southern California areas.” “Glenn E. Brockway, Regional Director, U.S. Department of Labor, to Robert C. Goodwin, Director of Employment Security,” EWP, CSA, F3640-1282, 01/05/1951.

85. “Informative memorandum by H.L. Mitchell, chairman of the NFLU): The wetback strike,” EGP, M0224, Box 50, Folder 3.

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86. Galarza, Farm Workers, 160.87. “Telegram from Keith Mets, Chairman of the Imperial Valley Farmers, to Governor Earl Warren,”

EWP, CSA, F3640-2377, 28/05/1951.88. “Report of the mediator, Edward Peters,” EWP, CSA, F3640-2377, 20/06/1951.89. “The Wetback Strike. A Report on the Strike of Farm Workers in the Imperial Valley of California,”

EGP, M0224, Box 50, Folder 3, 06/1951.90. “U.S. Department of Labor to Gov. Earl Warren,” EWP, CSA, F3640: 1282, 01/05/1951. In reaction

to the first accusations about the hiring of wetbacks in o’Dwyer and Mets’ properties, the Mexican ambassador in Washington, Rafael De la Colina, inquired about the situation. His report to the Mexican Foreign Affairs shows Mexican’s sympathy with the o’Dwyer ambassador and the antipathy felt toward the NFLU: “[…] in the end, there’s nothing more to it than the political goal of Galarza to create difficulties for the State Department with accusations about the American ambassador’s brother and involved the former indirectly. State Department’s officials have no doubt about the fact that some Mexican workers may have entered illegally on the property, as it occurs in every part of the country, but it has not been done with bad motives, but because of some administrative failures that may not be solved in spite of the best of wishes.” Embajada Mexicana en Estados Unidos de América, Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada, Legajo 1454/3, Exp. 73-0/662 (72:73).

91. “Si para fin de mes,” El Popular, 1 and 3.92. See Mitchell, They Saved the Crops, 183–185.93. “Crean los braceros,” Excélsior, 1 and 13.94. “Piden de EE.UU.”, Excélsior, 3 and 11.95. “Se alquilan rompehuelgas. Acudir al Gobierno de México” [Translation is mine]. “Crean los

braceros,” Excelsior, 1 and 13.96. “Tobins Bans Mexicans,” New York Times, 36.97. García y Griego, “The Bracero Policy Experiment,” 207.98. “The Wetback Strike. A Report on the Strike of Farm Workers in the Imperial Valley of California,”

EGP, M0224, Box 50, Folder 3, 06/1951.99. Bill S.1851 was drafted by the US Senate in the winter of 1951 in response to a demand made

by Mexico in order to renew the bracero program. Since 1951, the Mexican authorities, hard put to control the large flows of migrants that began to occur after the war, have conditioned the reaching of all bilateral understandings on the passing of legislation containing punitive measures against employers of illegal workers. The bill was voted into law without much delay on 26 February 1952. on May 20th, the president ratified it, converting Public Law 283 into an instrument for preventing the “knowing employment” of Mexican immigrants illegally admitted to the United States. Congressional Record, 05/02/1952, 791.

100. Ibid., 797.101. Galarza, Farm Workers, 202.102. Galarza, Spiders, 20.103. See “Intraethnic Conflict and the Bracero Program,” in Matt García, World of Its Own.104. Mitchell, They Saved the Crops, 347.105. Hawley, “The Politics,” 172.106. Majka, “Labor Militancy,” 541.107. Today “United Farm Workers” (UFW).108. Isaac and Christiansen, “How the Civil Rights,” 722–746.109. Ganz, “Strategic Capacity,” 1041 y 1043.110. Roos and Hennessy, “Assimilation or Exclusion?”, 288.111. Pawel, The Union.112. Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins.113. Galarza, Farm Workers, 205.

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Notes on contributor

Catherine Vézina is a professor of History at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (Mexico). She received her PhD from the Université Laval (2012). In 2013, her thesis received the Genaro Estrada award from the Mexico Foreign Affairs’ Archives. Her dissertation dealt with the transnational admin-istration of the bracero program, the push and pull factors for this migration, its consequences and the governmental responses on both sides of the frontier. She is currently working on an analysis of the Mexican and American strategies surrounding the program’s decline at the end of the 1950s.

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