Mexican and Mexican-American Agricultural Labor in the United States
Author: Martin Howard Sable
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 1987
Total Pages: 454
ISBN-13: 9780866565424
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Labor Rights Are Civil Rights
Author: Zaragosa Vargas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-10-24
Total Pages: 400
ISBN-13: 1400849284
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched, Labor Rights Are Civil Rightspaints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era. Drawing on extensive archival research, Vargas focuses on the large Mexican American communities in Texas, Colorado, and California. As he explains, the Great Depression heightened the struggles of Spanish speaking blue-collar workers, and employers began to define citizenship to exclude Mexicans from political rights and erect barriers to resistance. Mexican Americans faced hostility and repatriation. The mounting strife resulted in strikes by Mexican fruit and vegetable farmers. This collective action, combined with involvement in the Communist party, led Mexican workers to unionize. Vargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights. He details how interracial unionism proved successful in cross-border alliances, in fighting discriminatory hiring practices, in building local unions, in mobilizing against fascism and in fighting brutal racism. No longer willing to accept their inferior status, a rising Mexican American grassroots movement would utilize direct action to achieve equality.
Jon Lewis
Author: Richard Steven Street
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2013-10-01
Total Pages: 459
ISBN-13: 0803230486
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBefore the film, César Chavez, Chavez's life was depicted in photographs by his confidant, Jon Lewis. In the winter of 1966, twenty-eight-year-old ex-marine Jon Lewis visited Delano, California, the center of the California grape strike. He thought he might stay awhile, then resume studying photography at San Francisco State University. He stayed for two years, becoming the United Farm Workers Union’s semiofficial photographer and a close confidant of farmworker leader César Chávez. Surviving on a picket’s wage of five dollars a week, Lewis photographed twenty-four hours a day and created an insider’s view of the historic and sometimes violent confrontations, mass marches, fasts, picket lines, and boycotts that forced the table-grape industry to sign the first contracts with a farm workers union. Though some of his images were published contemporaneously, most remained unseen. Historian and photographer Richard Steven Street rescues Lewis from obscurity, allowing us for the first time to see a pivotal moment in civil rights history through the lens of a passionate photographer. A masterpiece of social documentary, this work is at once the biography of a photographer, an exposé of poverty and injustice, and a celebration of the human spirit.
Immigrants on the Land
Author: George E. Pozzetta
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1991
Total Pages: 416
ISBN-13: 9780824074043
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFirst published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936
Author: Lisbeth Haas
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 1995-05-07
Total Pages: 300
ISBN-13: 0520083806
DOWNLOAD EBOOKReview: "Study of the Mexican population of Upper California especially around San Juan Capistrano. Addresses culture, economics, and social life"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
On the Road for Work
Author: G. Thomas-Lycklama-Nijeholt
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2012-12-06
Total Pages: 223
ISBN-13: 9400987579
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMigratory farm workers provide the extra hands that are so badly needed during the planting and harvest season in the United States. Although these workers have been essential to the American agricultural system for more than a hundred years, our knowledge of them is limited and quite fragmentary; it can be divided roughly into two types of information. On the one hand, we have the statistical data collected by various censuses and the data gathered by agricultural econ omists to study the supply of and demand for farm labor. The economic aspects of farm labor generally predominate in such material. On the other, we have the scientific studies and journalistic descriptions that report on migratory farm by using a qualitative approach. The social scientists and journalists who workers have compiled these reports lived in the labor camps and have vividly described the dismal and oppressive conditions these workers must endure. The drawback of the first type of data is that its orientation to economic problems makes it too superficial and one-sided. It fails to interrelate the diverse economic factors affecting the lives and work of all farm workers, and conse quently presents a distorted and incomplete picture of migratory farm worker life. Also, because the migratory farm workers are quite elusive and usually keep a low profIle, they are often underrepresented in such data. The data gathered by using qualitative methods have the major disadvantage of being quite limited in scope.
Building the Borderlands: A Transnational History of Irrigated Cotton along the MexicoTexas Border
Author: Casey Walsh
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 250
ISBN-13: 160344436X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCotton, crucial to the economy of the American South, has also played a vital role in the making of the Mexican north. The Lower Rio Bravo (Rio Grande) Valley irrigation zone on the border with Texas in northern Tamaulipas, Mexico, was the centerpiece of the Cardenas government's effort to make cotton the basis of the national economy. This irrigation district, built and settled by Mexican Americans repatriated from Texas, was a central feature of Mexico's effort to control and use the waters of the international river for irrigated agriculture. Drawing on previously unexplored archival sources, Casey Walsh discusses the relations among various groups comprising the "social field" of cotton production in the borderlands. By describing the complex relationships among these groups, Walsh contributes to a clearer understanding of capitalism and the state, of transnational economic forces, of agricultural and water issues in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, and of the environmental impacts of economic development. Building the Borderlands crosses a number of disciplinary, thematic, and regional frontiers, integrating perspectives and literature from the United States and Mexico, from anthropology and history, and from political, economic, and cultural studies. Walsh's important transnational study will enjoy a wide audience among scholars of Latin American and Western U.S. history, the borderlands, and environmental and agricultural history, as well as anthropologists and others interested in the environment and water rights.
The Tracks North
Author: Barbara A. Driscoll
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 9780292715929
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAs part of a bilateral commitment to focus on winning World War II, over 100,000 contracts were signed between 1943 and 1945 to recruit and transport Mexican workers to the United States for employment on the railroads. A little-known companion to the widely criticized agricultural bracero program, the railroad bracero program corresponded in its implementation more closely to the original intent of both governments than did its agricultural counterpart. In spite of pressure from the railroad industry to continue the program indefinitely, the U.S. government was adamant about terminating it on schedule and returning the workers to Mexico. The railroad bracero program still stands as the only historical example of a binational migration agreement between the two countries that was executed and concluded in the spirit of the original negotiations. The abuses commonly associated with the agricultural program were controlled in the railroad program by the organization of international committees wherein the Mexican government could, and did, force the U.S. government to be accountable for the plight of railroad braceros. The Tracks North is the only book-length study devoted to the railroad bracero program. Barbara Driscoll examines the program and its place in the long history of U.S.-Mexican relations. In so doing, she uses a wealth of materials seldom used by investigators of the bracero program, and also provides a clearer picture of the internal workings of the bracero program in Mexico than any other study produced to date.
Cattle Beet Capital
Author: Michael Weeks
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2022-07
Total Pages: 347
ISBN-13: 1496232313
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1870 several hundred settlers arrived at a patch of land at the confluence of the South Platte and Cache la Poudre Rivers in Colorado Territory. Their planned agricultural community, which they named Greeley, was centered around small landholdings, shared irrigation, and a variety of market crops. One hundred years later, Greeley was the home of the world’s largest concentrated cattle-feeding operation, with the resources of an entire region directed toward manufacturing beef. How did that transformation happen? Cattle Beet Capital is animated by that question. Expanding outward from Greeley to all of northern Colorado, Cattle Beet Capital shows how the beet sugar industry came to dominate the region in the early twentieth century through a reciprocal relationship with its growers that supported a healthy and sustainable agriculture while simultaneously exploiting tens of thousands of migrant laborers. Michael Weeks shows how the state provided much of the scaffolding for the industry in the form of tariffs and research that synchronized with the agendas of industry and large farmers. The transformations that led to commercial feedlots began during the 1930s as farmers replaced crop rotations and seasonal livestock operations with densely packed cattle pens, mono-cropped corn, and the products pouring out of agro-industrial labs and factories. Using the lens of the northern Colorado region, Cattle Beet Capital illuminates the historical processes that made our modern food systems.
Hoboes
Author: Mark Wyman
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Published: 2010-04-27
Total Pages: 366
ISBN-13: 1429945907
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen the railroad stretched its steel rails across the American West in the 1870s, it opened up a vast expanse of territory with very few people but enormous agricultural potential: a second Western frontier, the garden West. Agriculture quickly followed the railroads, making way for Kansas wheat and Colorado sugar beets and Washington apples. With this new agriculture came an unavoidable need for harvest workers—for hands to pick the apples, cotton, oranges, and hops; to pull and top the sugar beets; to fill the trays with raisin grapes and apricots; to stack the wheat bundles in shocks to be pitched into the maw of the threshing machine. These were not the year-round hired hands but transients who would show up to harvest the crop and then leave when the work was finished. Variously called bindlestiffs, fruit tramps, hoboes, and bums, these men—and women and children—were vital to the creation of the West and its economy. Amazingly, it is an aspect of Western history that has never been told. In Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West, the award-winning historian Mark Wyman beautifully captures the lives of these workers. Exhaustively researched and highly original, this narrative history is a detailed, deeply sympathetic portrait of the lives of these hoboes, as well as a fresh look at the settling and development of the American West.
