new voices emerged that revived some of the hope in the fields, where conditions remained as difficult, if not worse than they had been in the 1940s. Armed with new research and imbued with a sense of purpose, these grassroots activists hit the countryside intent on making a difference.
RURAL CALIFORNIA AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Those wishing to tackle the thorny issue of rural poverty have often begun their fight in the Imperial Valley. Its location in the most southern portion of the state made it the first destination for desperate Mexican immigrants crossing the border to apply their substantial knowledge to the state’s massive agricultural economy. The tumult of the Mexican Revolution and the recruitment of Mexican workers by labor contractors during the first three decades of the twentieth century made Mexicans the preferred group in a racial-caste system that remained in flux until World War II.5 The flood of Mexican workers generated a surplus of labor that facilitated competition among a diverse population segmented by race and enabled growers to pay their employees below subsistence wages. As the first to employ farm workers for the season, Imperial growers often established the going rate for many crops in the state. The desert climate aided this process. An inversion of the typical North American growing season from a spring-to-summer to a winter-to-spring trajectory meant that Imperial growers could deliver warm-weather, drought-tolerant crops such as cotton, peas, melons, and lettuce to the market at a time of the year when such products were rare. When cultivation moved northward, so did wage levels and workers.
A researcher studying social stratification across agricultural sections of the United States in 1959 found that the Imperial Valley had a two-class system: a few farm managers in the middle class and a mass of laborers, mostly Mexican, in the lower class. These conditions strongly resembled those in the Deep South, where white landholding elites and farm managers profited from the labor of African Americans. In Tunica County, Mississippi, and West Baton Rouge County, Louisiana, for example, “lower class farm personnel,” defined as “all those who perform only the labor function on the farms, plantations, and ranches in the United States,” constituted approximately 80 percent of the workforce. By comparison, Imperial Valley farms employed 87 percent of their laborers at this level. Moreover, while all three counties employed a small middle- and lower-middle-managerial class, in the Imperial Valley these managers constituted a much smaller portion of the total population than in Mississippi or Louisiana. Such numbers suggest that the rural Southwest was a world as deeply southern as the South itself.6
After World War II, many farm worker advocates accused the federal government of exacerbating the problem with the importation of Mexican guest workers. Begun in 1942, the bilateral agreement between Mexico and the United States known as the bracero program delivered Mexican nationals to rural California to harvest crops and maintain railroads. Although initially meant to be temporary, the program continued well beyond World War II. In 1951, agricultural lobbyists convinced Congress to pass Public Law 78, formalizing the bracero program, by making spurious claims that the Korean War had compromised the agricultural labor force and threatened domestic production.7
Many scholars have documented the detrimental effect the bracero program had on farm wages and the employment of local workers. During the initial years of the program, between 1943 and 1947, California employed 54 percent of the Mexican nationals who came to the United States; however, by the late 1950s, most worked in Texas. Growers invested heavily in the program to take advantage of the discrepancies between the wages Mexican nationals would accept and what local workers needed to survive. Although the bilateral agreement required employers to pay braceros at or above the standard wage in a given region, in reality they earned far less than what their contracts promised and between 10 and 15 percent less than their local coworkers. The difference in the standard of living and wages between Mexico and the United States compelled Mexican nationals to come north despite receiving ill treatment and false promises from contractors and employers. Many braceros maintained families in Mexico with wages that far surpassed what they could have made by staying at home. Locals who had to raise families at the higher U.S. cost of living felt the pinch of the program’s downward force on agricultural wages. By one account, the willingness of braceros to work at starvation levels widened the gap between farm and industrial wages by 60 percent.8
California growers’ dependence on the bracero program varied from south to north and from crop to crop. Throughout the twenty-two-year history of the program, reliance on Mexican nationals skewed southward toward the desert regions and the south coast of the state. By the last year of the program, 1964, 42 percent of the seasonal employees in the desert came from the bracero labor pool, compared to just 9 percent in the San Joaquin Valley. On the south and central coasts, where orange and lemon production dominated, braceros constituted 38 and 31 percent, respectively, reflecting the citrus industry’s historic dependence on the program. In fact, California lemon producers, who accounted for 90 percent of the lemons grown in the United States, drew 74 percent of their labor from the program. In the desert, where a significant number of braceros worked, melon producers in the Palo Verde and Imperial Valleys drew 44 percent of their labor from Mexican nationals, while date growers located in Coachella Valley depended on braceros for 91 percent of their labor. In the San Joaquin Valley, melon producers were the biggest users of braceros, drawing 41 percent of their labor force from the program. Among grape growers, only those in the south coast region relied on Mexican nationals for more than half their labor needs, and in the San Joaquin Valley, they constituted a mere 2 percent of workers. Grape growers in the desert region had a slightly higher dependence on Mexican nationals, at 11 percent of the total number of employees, although California grape growers in general used the program much less than their peers in other crops.9
In the San Joaquin Valley, farm worker advocates worried about the impact of the bracero program on wages, but other factors shaped poverty there. In a study of rural labor conditions in Fresno County over a six-month period, from January to July 1959, a team of researchers based at Fresno State College (which later became Fresno State University) found that braceros rarely totaled more than 1 percent of the labor force in the area and recently had been eliminated from the fruit harvest altogether. Instead, growers had become dependent on what researchers referred to as “day-haul” laborers: settled workers who brought in local harvests and returned to their homes each day. In some instances, workers traveled as far as Salinas, near the coast. Most San Joaquin Valley farm workers found ample employment in the crops immediately around Fresno, which enjoyed a harvest cycle that started in April and lasted until October, the longest in the country. According to the researchers, only a small minority of Anglo melon pickers based in the county followed a year-round cycle that took them first to the harvests in Arizona and the southern California deserts, up through Kern County, and back into Fresno. Known as “aristocrats,” these workers often earned between $8,000 and $10,000 per year, making them the highest paid farm laborers in the county.
MAP 1. California growing areas and locations of UFW activity.
Most workers earned far less due to a system that facilitated constant labor surpluses and disrupted potential worker solidarity. Researchers found evidence of growers who had invested in labor camps for Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans but had recently abandoned these projects in favor of hiring through local labor contractors. Camps promised a more stable labor pool, though growers grew to resent the cost of maintaining such settlements. Most growers found it more convenient to outsource the hiring process to a third party that bore the responsibility of finding workers and making sure they got to the farms. The county Farm Labor Bureau, financed through tax dollars and grower contributions, served as one source, though researchers found that most growers preferred the completely independent labor brokers who operated without restrictions from the government. According to the authors of the report, “The farm labor contractors expressed the feeling that the Farm Labor Office [i.e., the Fresno County Farm Labor Bureau] does not play a role of significant importance in the present agricultural pattern.”
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