Labor Rights Are Civil Rights (ebook)

Argumento de Labor Rights Are Civil Rights (ebook)

In 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.

"Vargas does much to chronicle the role of Mexican American workers in the turbulent decades of the 1930s and 1940s and to document their important role in the labor struggles and political controversies of those years."--Robert H. Zieger, Labor History

"Professor Zaragosa Vargas has penned an extraordinary book. Labor Rights Are Civil Rights not only demonstrates the long-standing integration of workers' rights and civil rights but also provides a provocative, comprehensive sweep of Mexican-American labor history. I highly recommend it."--Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in 20th Century America

"Zaragosa Vargas has provided us with an insightful and revealing study of the crucial role of Mexican and Mexican American workers in struggles for union rights and civil rights in Southwestern agriculture and industry during the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on his extensive original research he has effectively situated those struggles in the context of both national and international political changes, producing a book that should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of these decades."--David Montgomery, author of Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century

"Labor Rights Are Civil Rights is a brilliant and much-needed contribution. Vargas not only compels us to re-think 20th century American working-class and civil rights history, but he tells a powerful transnational story, reminding us that so-called U.S. history doesn't stop at the Rio Grande."--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Zaragosa Vargas stunningly chronicles the vast oppression and previously hidden history of Mexican American workers, especially women. His hard-hitting, comprehensive narrative shows how their battles for labor rights, like those of African American workers, simultaneously became struggles for freedom. This is a major work exposing the radical and working-class roots of the civil rights movements of the twentieth century."--Michael Honey, author of Black Workers Remember, An Oral History, and Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights.

"Impressively grounded in primary sources and bolstered by a sharp analysis of the best of the secondary literature, the book is simultaneously a powerful piece of synthesis and a strong and original new interpretation."--David Gutierrez, University of California, San Diego

"Vargas's analysis is at once informative and illuminating."--Clete Daniel, Business History Review0Acknowledgments xiii
Abbreviations xv
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER ONE: We Are the Salt of the Earth: Conditions among Mexican Workers in the Early Great Depression Years 16
The "Big Swing": The Peregrinations and Tribulations of Tejano Cotton Harvesters 18
"In the Land of Bondage": Colorado's Mexican Sugar Beet Workers 27
Summer in the Country: California's Mexican Farm Workers 34
The Great Depression Hits the Mexicans of Texas and the Western States 39
Work, Leave, or Starve: Limiting Relief to Mexicans 43
"Send Them Back to Where They Came From": The Repatriation Campaign Unfolds 46
Causes and Consequences of Mexican Repatriation and Deportation 55
CHAPTER TWO: Gaining Strength through the Union: Mexican Labor Upheavals in the Era of the NRA 62
Revolt in the Cotton Fields: Tejano Pickers Strike the El Paso Cotton District 67
Radical Labor Unrest in the Colorado Beet Fields 70
In Unity There Is Strength: Strikes by Tejana Domestic, Cigar, and Garment Workers 76
Learning the Lessons of Rank-and-File Trade Unionism: The Los Angeles Garment Workers' Strike 83
For the Union: Los Angeles Furniture Workers Organize 89
"Are You A Bolshey?": The 1933 Gallup, New Mexico, Coal Strike 90
The Red Menace: The National Miners Union Enters Gallup 94
Guns, Bayonets, and Clubs: Martial Law Descends on Gallup 97
Revolutionary Unionism at Work 99
Class against Class: The Gallup Coal Strike Escalates 103
APyrrhic Victory: The Gallup Coal Strike Ends 105
The Big Payback: The Crusade against Foreigners and Subversives 108
CHAPTER THREE: "Do You See the Light?": Mexican American Workers and CIO Organizing 114
The Labor Offensive in South Texas and Cross-Border Organizing 117
A Power to Be Reckoned With: Emma Tenayuca, La Pasionaria 123
"She's Nothing but a Damned Communist": Emma Tenayuca's Work in the Unemployed Councils and the Workers' Alliance of America 126
"The CIO Doesn't Exist Here": The 1938 Pecan Shellers' Strike 134
Educating the Party: Emma Tenayuca Pens "The Mexican Question in the Southwest" 143
"Pushing Back the Red Tide": The Downfall of Emma Tenayuca 146
Left Behind: UCAPAWA and Colorado's Mexican Sugar Beet Workers 148
Shifting Gears: UCAPAWA Organizes Cannery and Food Processing Workers in California 150
Collective Action: Mexican American CIO Unionists Organize Los Angeles 154
CHAPTER FOUR: Advocates of Racial Democracy: Mexican American Workers Fight for Labor and Civil Rights in the Early World War II Years 158
Inclusive Unionism: The Case of Mine-Mill and Mexican American Miners and Smelter Workers 162
"A Society without Classes": Mine-Mill and CTM Undertake an Organizing Drive in El Paso 164
Texas Showdown: The CIO on Trial in El Paso 168
The Push by Mexican American CIO Unionists for Labor and Civil Rights Continues 170
Getting a Foot in the Door: Mexican American CIO Unionists Enter Los Angeles War Defense Industries 175
Allies of Labor: The Popular Front of the Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples 179
Suppressing Fascism: Mexican Americans Battle the Sinarquistas 188
Labor, the Left, and Sleepy Lagoon 192
Mexican American Unionists Press On to End Discrimination 198
CHAPTER FIVE: The Lie of "America's Greatest Generation": Mexican Americans Fight against Prejudice, Intolerance, and Hatred during World War II 203
Eternal Victims of Race Hatred: The Predicament of Tejanos 206
"Working Overtime on the Riveting Machine": Mexican American Women War Workers 212
Fleeing Poverty: The Case of the Spanish-Speaking of New Mexico 214
Remaining Separate and Unequal: Colorado's Mexican Americans 217
"Stolid and Stunned, Brother to the Ox": The Mexican Copper Miners of Arizona 220
"Dirty, Noisy, and Lawless": The Further Segregation of Mexican Americans in Wartime Los Angeles 224
"It's the American Way": The Racial Assault against Mexicans in Los Angeles 227
Getting the Union Involved against Discrimination in Los Angeles 232
Focusing Government Efforts on Racial Inequality 235
The Beginnings of the Mexican Contract Labor Program 238
No Freedom from Fear: The Federal Government, Race Relations, and Mexican Americans 243
"They Just Don't Get It": Fighting Racism within Labor's Ranks 246
CHAPTER SIX: Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: The Emergence of the Mexican American Civil Rights Struggle 252
Expressions of the Mexican American Union Movement and Its Repression 254
Mexican Americans Fight for an FEPC Bill 258
"Nothing --We Shot a Mexican": Mexican Americans Fight Racism 260
Last Hired, First Fired: Mexican American Job Loss after the War 265
The Right-Wing Backlash against the Mexican American Struggle for Labor and Civil Rights 270
Achieving Mexican American Civil Rights through the Ballot Box 273
Mexican American Workers Confront Braceros and the Wetback Tide 277
CONCLUSION 281
Notes 291
Index 361