The consolidation of U.S. capitalism in the first two decades of the twentieth century signaled an end to the open border policies. New laws in the 1920s choked off the immigration stream and set quotas and classifications based on race, social class, and nationality.³³ By the 1930s, the integration of immigration and labor policy on the farms had been formalized.

Federal policies criminalized migrant labor and, along with complicit attitudes in the unions, relegated migrant farmworkers to virtual invisibility, until economic or political crises stirred up the reactionary Right, which bayed for Mexican scapegoats. During the Great Depression, for instance, as many as 600,000 Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were forcefully deported.³⁴ Mass deportations continued again in 1954 during the height of McCarthyism, the recession of 1953, and the Korean War. Employing openly racist language and tactics, “Operation Wetback” involved the militarized round-up and deportation of least one million additional Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the name of “protecting national security and American jobs.”³⁵

The power of the growers reached its zenith in the 1930s. Despite the mass radicalization among workers and a flurry of industrial union drives, growers were able to separate out immigrants and farm labor from the gains won by the working class. A turning point for labor occurred with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935. This act guaranteed the right of workers to organize unions without fear of reprisal. Silently, farmworkers were excluded from the provisions. According to Greg Schell,
Virtually every labor protective standard passed on both a federal and state level prior to 1960 excluded agricultural workers. As the lot of industrial workers consistently improved, the earnings of agricultural workers lagged further and further behind. By the end of World War II, a marked gap existed between the protections enjoyed by industrial workers and the nineteenth century conditions endured by farmworkers.³⁶

This travesty was reinforced when farmworkers were largely excluded from the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that set general standards for such issues as child labor.³⁷
The onset of the Second World War introduced a new era in agricultural production. The deteriorating conditions in the countryside and the labor shortages in the urban areas led many farmworkers to abandon the countryside in droves. In 1942, the growers flexed their muscles in Washington to shape the Bracero Program.
The Bracero Program (which refers to those who use their arms) was a new guest worker program. As a representative of the Agricultural Land Bureau of the San Joaquin put it, “We are asking for labor only at certain times of the year—at the peak of our harvest—and the kind of labor we want is the kind we can send home when we get through with them.”³⁸

The U.S. government, as the designated middleman, supplied the growers with Mexican workers on a temporary and contractual basis. Intended as a wartime expedient, the terms of the deal proved so lucrative that the program was maintained until 1964, employing 4.8 million Mexican nationals over its twenty-two year span.³⁹

Under the contract, Mexican workers were transported to the farms to manage the harvests. Braceros were guaranteed work, a minimum wage, transportation, and housing, while they covered their own food, health services, and other expenses through payroll deductions.⁴⁰ The contract bound the guest worker to perform consistent labor and return to Mexico at the end of the harvest. Any “breach” of the contract, such as speaking out against poor conditions or involvement in collective bargaining, was a violation of the contract. Because these contracts were made with individuals, collective bargaining was precluded.
This became a recurring issue as growers found it easy to avoid their obligations and routinely defraud the braceros. The virtual absence of enforcement ensured that the practices of the growers remained largely unchecked. For instance, in 1959, there were 182,000 braceros brought into California and Arizona alone. At the time, there were only twenty-two field agents available to address grievances.⁴¹

The Bracero Program and the deportation drives institutionalized the trends of labor relations that have developed over the years in agriculture. By maintaining an isolated and disenfranchised workforce, the agricultural bosses could keep out unions, depress all agricultural wages, and push the costs of maintenance and the reproduction of labor onto the workers themselves. The threat of la migra always looms over workers who step out of line or whose services are no longer required.

Fighting back—with one arm tied down

The deftness of the agricultural bosses in manipulating labor and immigration policy was not always successful in quelling union drives and labor struggles. Spontaneous and tumultuous strikes have posed a consistent challenge to the agricultural empires.
As early as 1903, Japanese and Mexican workers organized strikes in the fields of Oxnard, California. Shunned by the AFL, immigrant workers turned to their own organizations based on national networks or local conditions. The Japanese-Mexican Labor Association grew out of wretched conditions and low pay, and the use of a labor contracting company that deducted hefty sums from workers’ pay in exchange for work. After a month of intense conflict, including the shooting death of one striker, the workers secured a favorable contract.

The newly formed Sugar Beet and Farm Laborers Union emerged from the conflict and sought affiliation with the American Federation of Labor. AFL President Samuel Gompers, displaying the racist attitudes that paralyzed the largely white craft union organization at the time, demanded a precondition, “Your union must guarantee that it will under no circumstances accept membership of any Chinese or Japanese.” The Mexican secretary of the union replied:

We [Mexicans] are going to stand by men who stood by us in the long, hard fight which ended in victory over the enemy. We therefore respectfully petition the AFL to grant us a charter under which we can unite all the sugar beet and field laborers of Oxnard without regard to their color or race. We will refuse any other kind of charter except one which will wipe out race prejudices and recognize our fellow workers as being as good as ourselves.⁴²

The union was denied a charter and ultimately disappeared against a much stronger opponent. This cycle ensured that when strike movements occurred, they were usually spontaneous and often crushed, as bosses could rely on a united front of politicians, the media, and the local law enforcement agencies to suffocate the efforts. The abandonment by the AFL—from 1919 to 1934 there was no mention of the subject of organizing farmworkers in the proceedings of the California AFL—ensured that a merciless one-sided class war raged in the fields.⁴³

Abandoned by the AFL, farmworkers turned increasingly to emerging radical movements. The class struggle fueled the rise of organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and later the Communist Party. These organizations, committed to organizing all workers—particularly the vast numbers of immigrants, Blacks, women, and the unskilled—had a large role in the farmworker movement in the first three decades of the twentieth century. These organizations provided the organizational backbone and political support for the wave of radicalization that swept through the fields in the 1930s.

A farmworker during the Vacaville strike of 1932 expressed the desperation that drove workers to fight back: “We would have to starve working, so we decided to starve striking.⁴⁴ “Between 1930 and 1932, there were ten major agricultural strikes in California, involving thousands of workers. The wave of agricultural strikes peaked in 1933, when there were over sixty strikes involving 60,000 workers in seventeen states.⁴⁵ Led by the communist inspired Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union (C&AWIU) or its successor in the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), the strike movement of the 1930s had the potential of breaking immigrant workers from their isolation. But despite the heroic and often deadly strikes, by 1938 the movement was in ruins.

The ultimate defeat of the strike movement and the exclusion of farmworkers from the NLRA can be attributed to two main factors. First, the lack of support from AFL unions prevented strikes from spreading along the assembly line of the agricultural industry and impaired solidarity from better organized non-agricultural workers. Second, the growers and the state colluded in a wave of anti-union terrorism in what writer Carey McWilliams refers to as “farm fascism.”

Invoking the Criminal Syndicalism Act, a draconian law that outlawed any activity involving radical organizations, police contingents called in “red squads” and armed goons to break up union meetings, assault and arrest organizers, and terrorize the immigrant workforce to dissuade unionization and strikes.⁴⁶ Describing the class nature of the vigilante groups, labor historian Jim Miller observes:

These organizations were filled with officials from county government and were integrated into the highest levels of the county commissioners, the Highway Patrol, the Police, and the courts. Some of the nastiest work was done by deputized vigilantes that were drawn from the American Legion, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Silver Shirts, a fascist group modeled after the German SS.⁴⁷

The growers and police resorted to locking up striking workers en masse and herding them into makeshift concentration camps. Labor leaders, attorneys, and supporters were regularly kidnapped, beaten, and terrorized. While fierce repression did not stop the strike movement, it ultimately wore it down to a breaking point.

The failure of the labor movement to win the same gains in the fields as were being won in the factories led to a rural-urban divide within the U.S. working class. While the standard of living for industrial workers improved, those on the farms withered on the vine. During the era of the Bracero Program, strikes and small rebellions were common among Mexican workers despite their illegality. According to Bert Corona, a veteran organizer of farmworkers, the small rebellions may have temporarily raised wages, but the threat of deportation prevented any significant strike and union activity until the Bracero Program was scrapped in 1965.⁴⁸

The rise of the United Farm Workers

The civil rights movement of the 1960s pulled the lid off of U.S. society and gave millions the confidence to fight back against entrenched racism and deeply rooted inequality. The urban protest movements against segregation ignited the aspirations of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, long oppressed across the Southwest.

A new generation of the sons and daughters of Mexican immigrants, radicalized by events and their own experiences with racism, filled the ranks of the emerging Mexican-American wing of the movement. The Chicano movement, as it came to be called, drew a parallel between the perennial exploitation of farmworkers and the persistence of racism against Mexican-Americans in the city. One of the most significant leaders to emerge from this generation was a former farmworker himself, Cesar Chavez.

Chavez and his supporters dedicated themselves to spreading the concept of civil rights to the most hostile and reactionary quarter, the fields of the Southwest. The first significant victory for Chavez and the new generation of farmworker advocates—later organized into the United Farm Workers (UFW)—was the dismantling of the Bracero Program in 1965.
During the rising civil rights activity in the 1960s, Cesar Chavez and the UFW sought to build a new farmworkers union modeled on a social movement that would link together a broad coalition of forces for support. Chavez painstakingly organized and enlisted the support of Chicano students, churches, and other labor unions.

Chavez extolled the virtues of pacifism and used religious icons to project the struggle as one of passive resistance and moral suasion. Influenced by Gandhi, he chose to emulate the experience of the farmworker by committing himself to a life of poverty and religious virtue. Chavez viewed the struggle as a slow battle of perseverance and sought to appeal to civil society’s sense of morality by focusing primarily on publicity through non-confrontational means. His personal opposition to radical politics and militancy fueled the intensification of religious mysticism and traditions, especially in times of crisis. His allegiance to the Democratic Party never wavered and only deepened when the social movements of the time began to attract the attention of high profile liberals.

The UFW attracted many young militants who carried into the union the spirit of struggle that was radicalizing the civil rights movement. The militancy of the young UFW organizers and the farmworkers themselves had an effect on Chavez and the union, which was forced to turn to more aggressive tactics in the face of the power and intransigence of the growers. The goal was to break the isolation of the farmworkers and to win the basic right to organize unions. The UFW relied on a combined strategy of aggressive organizing, strikes, high visibility marches, and boycotts to challenge the reactionary growers from the farm to the supermarket.

Like the previous attempts to organize the farms, the UFW came up against a hostile and unified front of growers and the state. In 1973, a high point in strike activity, over 3,500 farmworkers and UFW supporters were arrested for attempting to organize, while thousands more were harassed, beaten, and terrorized by local law enforcement, often in league with goon squads paid by the growers. In a shameful chapter of U.S. labor history, the growers formed an alliance with the right-wing leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in order to preempt the UFW.⁴⁹ Phantom union contracts were signed with the Teamsters in order to lock out the UFW, and on several occasions Teamsters armed with clubs and chains were brought in to break up picket lines.
Government indifference to or actual complicity in the repression reached the highest echelons. In 1973, Chavez traveled to Washington, D.C., to press for a federal investigation into the violence in California. William Ruckelshaus, acting director of the FBI, unctuously responded to the allegations by commenting that the Bureau had no authority to conduct an investigation. Meanwhile, the FBI maintained a full-scale surveillance of leading UFW members and union picket lines.⁵⁰

The tenacity and courage of UFW organizers and farmworkers led to key strike victories through the 1970s which ultimately led to the collapse of the most egregious opposition. The union became a major force. The UFW pressured the Democratic governor of California, Jerry Brown, to push through the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) of 1975, a copy of the NLRA of forty years prior.

The ALRA created a set of guarantees for union organizing in California and created an Agricultural Relations Labor Board to address the grievances of those involved in farm work. The victory initiated a mass organizing campaign during which UFW membership rise to 45,000 by 1980.⁵¹ Brown appointed pro-union board members that often ruled in favor of the union. This helped create the atmosphere that with a pro-farmworker governor, the tide was finally turning in the immigrant workers’ favor. Labor militancy in the fields had accomplished the long elusive goal: The union had beaten the seemingly omnipotent growers who resigned themselves to coexisting with the UFW. How then could they seize the initiative and build on the momentum?

The idea that the Democratic Party could serve the struggle of the farmworkers led Chavez to redirect the UFW’s emphasis away from organizing and toward supporting and funding Democratic Party campaigns. Chavez himself nominated Jerry Brown for president at the Democratic Party convention in 1976.⁵² The drift into the Democratic Party was a general trend among the activist leadership of the 1960s and represented a significant break with the radicalism and independent grassroots organizing efforts that served as a catalyst for broad social movements. This strategy had a disastrous effect. To placate the mainstream political forces and appeal more respectable and moderate to the Democrats, Chavez purged the union leadership of radicals and concentrated power in his own hands. This political deterioration was compounded by the ambiguity the union displayed toward the undocumented workers in the field. As farmworker advocate Frank Bardacke points out:

Most all California farmworkers have people in their families who have trouble with their legal status, so any union trying to organize them cannot risk taking the side of the INS, the hated migra. Yet the UFW sometimes supported the use of the migra against scabs, sacrificing long-term respect for a possible short-term gain.⁵³

While Chavez had envisioned a “worker-led, grassroots union,” he moved to consolidate his leadership and determine its overall direction. The majority of the original leadership resigned or was fired when it became clear that Chavez would have the final say.⁵⁴ The exodus of those oriented towards grassroots struggle and aggressive organizing further reinforced the union’s drift to the right.

When Republican Governor George Deukmejian came to office in 1983, Chavez used it as a “defensive” justification to plug into the Democratic Party. Leading member Marshall Ganz, who resigned over this shift, commented “I don’t want to minimize the problems of Deukmejian, but the fact is, we did build this union when Reagan was governor and Nixon was president.”⁵⁵

The strategy blew up in the face of the UFW. By the late 1970s, the right wing of the Democratic Party and especially those members of Congress who represented agricultural regions saturated with grower contributions, moved to marginalize the influence of the UFW. Democratic members of Congress such as Leon Panetta—President Clinton’s former chief of staff—formed strategic alliances with Republicans to pass pro-grower legislation.⁵⁶ Under this alliance, the liberals on the labor board were replaced by those aligned with the growers.

The Democratic Party stood by as it became clear that the social movements had run aground and the UFW could be tamed. Even with the supposed “pro-union” Democrats on the board, only 43 percent of union elections resulted in an actual contract, as the growers simply flouted the results and the Democrats refused to put any real pressure on the growers.⁵⁷

Disillusionment with the Democrats came out into the open. Chavez himself commented in frustration, “Seventeen months after the farm labor law went into effect, most farmworkers have yet to realize the promise and protection of this good law. Instead, for most, the law has been a cruel hoax.”⁵⁸

Nevertheless, the UFW continued to funnel money into Democratic Party campaigns with the hope that this could buy them a place at the table. Through the 1980s, the UFW diverted well over one million dollars away from organizing and into campaigns for Democrats.⁵⁹ The strategy of allying with the Democrats contributed to the decline of the union. The neglect of hands-on organizing allowed the balance of power to shift back in favor of the growers, who gained the confidence to refuse to renegotiate expired contracts and to rely more heavily on the anti-union labor contracting system. By the early 1990s, the membership in the UFW plummeted to about 5,000 members. As Frank Bardacke defines the problem, the union had become more of a top-down political machine than a grassroots field organizer.⁶⁰

From impasse to struggle

After the death of Cesar Chavez in 1993, leadership passed into the hands of his son-in-law Arturo Rodriguez. Rodriguez’s strategy has been to revitalize organizing efforts through industrywide campaigns and to reach out to the growing number of Mexican-born workers who are swelling the ranks of today’s farmworkers.

In an attempt to jump-start the union and regain the initiative, the UFW embarked on an ambitious endeavor to organize California’s $800 million a year, non-union strawberry industry and its 15,000 berry pickers. The ambitious drive, the largest in the U.S. in 1996, ran into resistance from the growers, who resorted once again to organizing goon squads to harass and threaten organizers and sympathetic workers.

At Coastal Berry, one of the key farms, the management, in league with the growers’ associations, organized company unions to block the UFW. These anti-worker unions are built around a layer of better-paid workers who are favored and rewarded for their loyalty to management. As Efren Barajas, UFW vice president, put it:

there are permanent truck drivers, checkers, and assistants, who are very close to the foreman, and get much better wages and treatment. The growers use that group. Attempting to mimic the UFW and confuse the public and farmworkers of their nature, they have organized marches modeled on the UFW, although rather than ‘Si, se puede!’ (Yes, we can!), the common chants of these marches are ‘Rancheros! Rancheros! (Bosses! Bosses!) Rah! Rah! Rah!’⁶¹

Pro-grower portrayals in the media argued that the UFW was trying to freeze out “worker-initiated” unions.

At another farm named VCNM, the company plowed under a quarter of its operations after the UFW won a union vote among its workers. The company later disappeared completely.⁶²

After several defeats in the organizing drive—tacitly endorsed by the pro-grower Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB)—the union retreated to organizing the industry piecemeal and concentrating on the gubernatorial elections of 1998 and support for the Democratic candidate Gray Davis. Davis, who received $1.5 million in campaign contributions from agricultural interests, turned up short on support for the farmworkers.⁶³ In office, he vetoed a bill designed to stiffen criminal sanctions for labor law violations in agriculture. The vetoed bill itself was a compromise after California State Assembly Democrats helped to kill a tougher proposal to hold growers civilly liable for abuses committed by their farm labor contractors.

While Davis did eventually sign a bill to submit growers to binding arbitration in the decisions of the ALRB, it was only after he pressured lawmakers to severely water-down its provisions. Davis ensured that limits were set on mediation at five years, and he limited the number of potential mediation cases to seventy-five. Also, it doubled the number of days required for negotiations to 180 before mediators are brought in, all factors which handicap long-term efforts to organize. Lawmakers portrayed themselves as having no other options under the threat of a veto and said they were making “significant concessions.”⁶⁴
Frustration with the Democrats among those sympathetic to the farmworkers is clearly expressed in the following editorial from the Sacramento Bee:

Despite the union organizing efforts of the legendary Chavez, despite the landmark legislation that created the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, despite the growing political clout of Hispanic legislators and despite labor-friendly Democratic majorities in both houses of the Legislature, little has been done to reform the system. Every year, bills to protect farm workers are smashed by agricultural interests, who distribute hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.⁶⁵

While some gains have been made (the UFW has more than doubled since its low of 5,000 in the early 1990s), farmworker unions have not been able to regain the initiative against the bosses. The struggle for justice in the fields has reached an impasse. The movement now stands at an important crossroads. In early January 2004, the Bush administration announced a new proposal to dramatically expand the guest worker program (the current H2-A guest worker program is currently funneling about 40,000 farmworkers into U.S. agriculture). Although U.S. employers have shed 2.3 million jobs since Bush took office, supporters of his plan said positions still go begging in sectors such as agriculture, lodging, restaurants, health care, construction, landscaping, and building services.⁶⁶ The proposal is for a new three-year temporary worker program open to the millions of undocumented workers already in the U.S. or interested in migrating from other countries. It would also open up new sections of the economy to guest workers, who would be locked into second-class status and forced to return to their native country after the expiration of the program, with virtually no chance of acquiring permanent residency.

Since this will increase the steady flow of cheap and disenfranchised labor into every section of the economy, U.S. capitalists are ecstatic. Business groups were among the most enthusiastic supporters of Bush’s initiative, which a spokesman for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called “momentous.” The National Restaurant Association commended Bush for addressing the economic problem faced by its members, who employ significant numbers of immigrants.⁶⁷ The logic of such a program is that there is a growing need for immigrants to work at jobs that U.S. citizens are unwilling to do.

As Lucas Benitez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers observes,

The growers are lobbying for a new guest worker law on the grounds that there is not enough labor available. But it’s a lie…. The problem is that most workers in this country do not want to do the work we do for the wages that we’re paid. We average $7,500 a year and the conditions of exploitation are such that any reasonable person would prefer receiving unemployment benefits. The answer to the guest worker lobbying effort is to raise wages and improve working conditions.⁶⁸

Bush’s efforts are in effect a counterpunch to the growing immigrants’ rights movement that has forced its way onto the stage in the last several years. From the victorious janitors’ strikes to the Immigrant Workers Freedom Rides in the fall of 2003, immigrant workers themselves have led the charge of a new rights movement, calling for a general amnesty. Business and conservative groups have lined up behind Bush to counter these efforts, which if successful would put a big dent in their ability to squeeze profits from second-class workers.

The last general amnesty in 1986 helped set the stage for new organizing drives in the fields and in other sectors, such as the strikes and union drives among custodial workers in southern California in 2000. The AFL-CIO has rightly criticized this proposal recognizing it as another attempt to divide and weaken workers.

New challenges and opportunities exist for the farmworkers’ movement. The AFL-CIO, breaking with its long tradition of supporting immigration controls, reversed its position in 1998 and is now advocating a general amnesty and the right to organize undocumented workers. In light of Bush’s new proposals, the labor movement will have to be ready to mobilize the fight for amnesty and immigrants’ rights. As a new fight in the fields looms in the future, its success or failure is contingent on understanding the enemy, and how to build the kind of movement that will be necessary.

Challenges ahead

The coalition of agribusiness and their allies in government have used the state to craft economic and immigration policy tailored to their needs. These needs are to maintain the flow of cheap, exploitable labor, isolated from unions and social guarantees, and a machinery to police the labor force on the ground, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, formerly known as the INS). This structure is oiled through the perpetuation of the image of immigrants and migrant workers as a threat to the economy and the stability of the jobs of non-immigrant workers. This is reinforced through the media, the two capitalist parties, and through the prominence of interlocking right-wing interest groups and think tanks.

This history of the farmworkers’ movement holds the keys for understanding how to organize a new fightback in the years ahead. Building a fightback in the fields today is essential to rebuilding a fighting labor movement in general. This new movement must be built on three basic principles.

1) Building the fight against anti-immigrant policies and institutions

A growing section of the U.S. working class is composed of Mexicans and other immigrant groups, with and without documents. From the service industry to the fields to manufacturing, immigrant workers will play a pivotal role in the labor struggles of today and tomorrow. A starting point for mobilization has to be active opposition to racist, anti-immigrant policies that perpetuate disenfranchisement and the denial of basic human rights, and opposition to labor policies such as the proposed new guest worker program that seeks to enshrine second-class citizenship for immigrant workers.

The freedom of movement of labor across borders, without the fear of death, suffering, or persecution, has to be fought for as a fundamental right for all workers. According to the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, about 356 migrant workers die yearly around the U.S.-Mexico border as a result of Operation Gatekeeper.⁶⁹ A reminder of the horrific conditions for migrant or international workers crossing the border occurred in May 2003 when nineteen workers suffocated to death in the back of a trailer after attempting to cross the border to continue on to worksites.⁷⁰ The dismantling of Operation Gatekeeper must become a major policy focus for the labor movement.

The past several years have witnessed an expansion in the use of ICE agents as facilitators for anti-union campaigns by employers. There are accounts of farm managers calling in the ICE to pick up undocumented worker leaders in the middle of union organizing drives.⁷¹ Illegal status creates the conditions for tragedies of this sort to occur regularly. Once inside the country, anti-immigrant policies ensure that immigrants remain the most oppressed section of the working class, denied basic rights. The labor movement needs to aggressively challenge these policies and organize migrant workers.

After a long history of lining up with the bosses on the question of immigration restrictions, the AFL-CIO reversed its position in 2001 calling for a general amnesty and the right of all workers, documented or not, to form unions.⁷² The willingness of the AFL-CIO to put its words into action was witnessed in the recent Immigrant Workers Freedom Rides. Modeled on the anti-Jim Crow Freedom Rides of the 1960s, rights activists and immigrant workers set out across the country from major cities and converged on New York City in a mass rally of 100,000 workers. The goal was to spread the message of legalization for the more than eight million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and better protections of workplace rights for all workers.⁷³ While this is a historic turning point, the real challenge of aggressive organizing has yet to be realized.

A revival in class struggle and solidarity in the more stable industries will help to serve as a catalyst to rebuild a strong farmworkers’ movement. International trade deals have shown that national borders do not exist in corporations’ search for profit. In fact, immigrant workers, particularly Mexican immigrant workers on both sides of the border, have played an essential role in the establishment and maintenance of the U.S. capitalist economy. The labor movement must change its outlook toward the borders. Labor militants should fight for an open border for workers and full rights for all in the United States, regardless of which patch of earth workers come from.

2) Opposing corporate globalization and organizing cross-border solidarity

The era of corporate globalization has led to the implementation of neoliberal free trade policies, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that have had dramatic and disruptive effects on workers around the globe.

It is not by chance that the introduction of Operation Gatekeeper coincided with the implementation of NAFTA in 1994. The rhetoric was that NAFTA would “attract investment from all parts of the world, stimulate development, and assure social peace; it would extend the process of economic liberalization, strengthen the cause of political reform and draw the country into the much cherished ranks of the ‘First World.’”74 Because of this, the flow of immigration across the border would be significantly reduced.
In reality, the opening up of protected Mexican markets to U.S. companies has displaced Mexican farmers and farmworkers in large numbers. This has produced large-scale migration to the cities as well as northward into the Maquiladora region of northern Mexico and into the fields of the United States. While it is impossible to know the exact number of those crossing the border, migrants’ fears have grown steadily each year since NAFTA. Apprehension rates in the year 2000, for instance were 68 percent higher than in 1994.75

The misery and poverty produced by corporate globalization will continue to displace and disperse sections of the international working class unless it is challenged. The anti-corporate globalization movement shows the potential for labor to build international connections that unite activists and workers across borders. Aligning the labor movement internationally with the social struggles in each locality can direct support against the conditions that produce destabilization. For the farmworkers, it means attacking the conditions from their source—the U.S. and other governments and international corporations—and challenging conditions and pay all the way to the fields of Watsonville, Delano, and elsewhere.

3) Breaking with the Democratic Party and rebuilding an independent union movement based on class-struggle politics

The biggest challenge that lies ahead is rebuilding a combative labor movement. The steady decline of the farmworkers’ movement over the 1980s and 1990s mirrors the problems facing the entire labor movement. Rather than concentrate on organizing the unorganized and going to bat for workers through aggressive negotiations and the willingness to strike, the union leadership has collapsed into the pro-capitalist Democratic Party and has accepted concession after concession, while union leaders continue to reap enormous salaries. In the general election of 2000, the union leadership funneled $79 million into the Democratic Party.76 They have not gotten their money’s worth. Paltry results should be expected from a party beholden to corporations.

Meanwhile the AFL-CIO is in decline. The AFL-CIO’s current membership is little more than the 13 million it had in 1955, when the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations took place. In that forth-nine-year period, the nation’s workforce has doubled.77

While the recent glimmer of strike activity among grocery and transit workers shows the potential for a new spike in militancy, the big battalions of labor have continued to avoid confrontation in recent contract negotiations.78 The future of the farmworkers’ movement, as well as the labor movement as a whole, depends on the unions breaking with the Democrats and focusing on the real basis of their power: class struggle and solidarity—across borders and between workers of all languages and nationalities in the United States.

---

Justin Akers is a member of the International Socialist Organization in San Diego

1 Daniel Rothenberg, With These Hands (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 26.
2 Stephen Magagnini, “Struggling in El Norte, Mixtec Indians Seek a Better Life in the U.S.,” Sacramento Bee, October 20, 2002.
3 Ibid.
4 From the National Center for Farmworkers’ Health, available online at http://wwww.ncfh.org/aaf_01.shtml.
5 Estimates run as high as 800,000. See Human Rights Watch, available online at http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/crp/farmchild/facts.htm.
6 Charles D. Thompson, Jr. and Melinda F. Wiggins, eds., The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers’ Lives, Labor, and Advocacy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 4.
7 Ibid., 6–7.
8 Ibid., 7.
9 Rothenberg, 25.
10 Thompson and Wiggins, 208–10.
11 See “Failure to Protect Child Farmworkers,” available online at http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/crp/farmchild/facts.htm.
12 Thompson and Wiggins, 234.
13 For statistics on taxes and immigrants, see the National Immigration Forum, available online at http://www.immigrationforum.org/pubs/
articles/benefits.htm.
14 Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 56.
15 Ibid., 15.
16 Ibid., 20.
17 Ibid., 232. According to PG&E’s Web site, it is one of the largest gas and electricity corporations in the U.S., http://www.pgecorp.com/overview/
pgeco.html. Bank of America was founded by Amadeo Peter Giannini, a California farmer who succeeded in tailoring banking to meet the needs of agriculture.
18 This process is exemplified very well in North Carolina, where over 150,000 family farms disappeared between 1960 and 1997. Meanwhile, the average production from remaining farms has dramatically risen. See Thompson and Wiggins, 68.
19 These figures are from 1997, according to the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, available online at http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/pdfs/FarmSect.pdf.
20 See the Student Action with Farmworkers Web site at http://cds.aas.duke.edu/saf/factsheet.htm.
21 According to the Occupational Outlook Quarterly, 328,000 farming and ranch-related jobs are expected to be lost during the decade ending in 2010, available online at http://www.bls.gov/opub/ooq/2001/
winter/art03.pdf.
22 Bill Christison, “Family Farms and U.S. Trade Policy,” In Motion, available online at http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/bruss.html.
23 Anuradha Mittal and Mayumi Kawaai, “Freedom to Trade? Trading Away American Family Farms,” Food First, available online at http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/backgrdrs/2001/f01v7n4.html.
24 Anuradha Mittal, “Giving Away the Farm: The 2002 Farm Bill” Food First, available online at http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/backgrdrs/2002/s02v8n3.html.
25 The indigenous population was eliminated and the Mexican population was too small.
26 Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (Santa Barbara: McNally and Lofton, 1964), 24.
27 McWilliams, 98.
28 Ibid., 97.
29 Ibid., 100.
30 Miriam J. Wells, Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 66.
31 McWilliams, 118.
32 Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, Fourth Edition (New York: Longman, 2000), 182.
33 Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002), 102.
34 Acuña, 220.
35 “Operation: Wetback,” Over one million Mexicans were forcefully deported in military style operations that some argue was the starting point for the militarization of border enforcement. See Manuel G. Gonzales, Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 177.
36 Thompson and Wiggins, 141.
37 Kathleen Reynolds and George Kourous, “Farmworkers: An Overview of Health, Safety, and Wage Issues,” Borderlines, available online at http://www.americaspolicy.org/borderlines/PDFs/bl49.pdf.
38 Galarza, 55.
39 Gonzales, 173.
40 Ibid., 172.
41 Ibid., 167.
42 Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Mexican-American Labor 1790–1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 77.
43 McWilliams, 190.
44 Ibid., 215.
45 Rothenberg, 246.
46 See the Southern California American Civil Liberties Union, available online at http://www.aclu-sc.org/aboutus/history.html.
47 Mike Davis, Kelly Mayhew, and Jim Miller, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (New Press: New York, 2003), 199.
48 David Bacon, “Is a New Bracero Program in Our Future?” in Z Magazine, October 2003.
49 The Teamster president at the time, Frank Fitzsimmons, endorsed the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon in exchange for several pardons of convicted Teamsters, including Jimmy Hoffa. See Susan Ferris and Ricardo Sandoval, Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers’ Movement (San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1997), 180.
50 Ibid., 184.
51 Ibid., 221.
52 Ibid., 208.
53 Frank Bardacke, “Cesar’s Ghost: Decline and Fall of the U.F.W.” Nation, July 1993, 132.
54 Wells, 95.
55 Ibid.
56 Ferris and Sandoval, 276.
57 Jim Wasserman, “Governor Davis Signs Farmworker Mediation Bills,” Associated Press, September 30, 2002.
58 Ferris and Sandoval, 209.
59 Ibid., 224.
60 Bardacke, 131–32.
61 David Bacon, “A Company Union Battles the UFW in Watsonville,” available online at http://dbacon.igc.org/FarmWork/01coast.html.
62 Ibid.
63 Robert Salladay, “Burton sees Davis’s Veto on Farm Bill, Governor’s Delay Irks Author of Measure,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 9, 2002.
64 Jim Wasserman, “Governor Davis Signs Farmworker Mediation Bills,” Associated Press, September 30, 2002.
65 Editorial, “Honored by Neglect: Will State Again Ignore Farmworkers’ Plight?” Sacramento Bee, May 21, 2001.
66 Warren Vieth, “Economist See Benefits to Bush’s Plan,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2004.
67 Janet Hook, “Plan Packs Political Bonuses for President,” Los Angeles Times, January 7, 2004.
68 David Bacon, “Is a New Bracero Program in Our Future?”
69 Available online at http://www.stopgatekeeper.org/English/index.html. See also Justin Akers, “Operation Gatekeeper: Militarizing the Border,” ISR 18, June–July 2001.
70 Quent Reese, “Nightmare in Texas,” Socialist Worker, May 23, 2003, available online at http://socialistworker.org.
71 Walter Ewing, “A New Bracero Program for the 21st Century,” available online at http://www.crlaf.org/coha1814.htm.
72 See the statement by the AFL-CIO, available online at http://www.aflcio.org/aboutaflcio/ecouncil/ec0731a2001.cfm.
73 Alan Maass, “Freedom Ride for Immigrant Rights,” Socialist Worker, October 3, 2003.
74 Frank D. Bean, Rodolfo O. de la Garza, Bryan R. Roberts, Sidney Weintraub, eds., At the Crossroads: Mexico and U.S. Immigration Policy (Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, Maryland, 1997), 263.
75 Joe Cantlupe, “Arrests Up Since 1994 Crackdown at Border, County Effort Fails to Deter Illegal Flow,” San Diego Union-Tribune, February 20, 2001.
76 “Political Operation Seeks Union Support,” Associated Press, January 10, 2003.
77 Harry Kelber, “Labor Fell Far Short of Organizing Goals, But lacks Strategies to Reverse Trends,” Labor Educator, available online at http://www.laboreducator.org/inside40.htm.
78 Lee Sustar, “2002: The Year of the Almost Strikes,” Socialist Worker, February 21, 2003.