The American Kaleidoscope. Lawrence H. Fuchs
including Mexican-Americans.53
The existence of the braceros enfeebled efforts in the 1950s and the early 1960s to establish a strong union. The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, which in 1945 had become the AFL’s National Farm Labor Union, conducted a 1950 strike near Tracy in San Joaquin County, where most of the canning tomatoes in California were grown, to protest a wage cut for tomato pickers. Its weakness was quickly exposed: Teamster truck drivers refused to respect the picket lines; illegal aliens, a large number of whom were employed by the tomato growers, continued on the job; and two thousand braceros were brought in under the protection of the California Highway Patrol and local police escort.54
Nowhere but in the Southwest would a major, powerful union such as the Teamsters not respect a picket line in 1950, and nowhere else would officials of the national government act as a conduit to supply workers for employers. When the NFLU struck the Imperial Valley cantaloupe harvest in April 1951, it was virtually defeated before it started. The U.S. Border Patrol, in typical cooperation with the growers, was lax in stopping the flow of illegal aliens. When the new leader of the NFLU, Ernesto Galarza, persuaded five hundred Mexican-American workers to strike the cantaloupe growers in 1952, the growers’ association, having anticipated such an emergency, simply transferred extra bracero workers they had already brought to the valley from employers who did not need them to those who were being struck. Galarza’s protest to the U.S. Justice Department that such an action violated the law that made it illegal to fill jobs vacated by a strike or a lockout was met with a promise to investigate, but soon the cantaloupe harvest was over.55
No agricultural workers’ strike could be won in the Southwest in the 1950s and early 1960s as long as the bracero program was in effect. Strikers did not have unemployment insurance against lost wages, and when the strike was over, they found their jobs permanently filled by braceros. The established trade unions, largely indifferent to agricultural workers, had other important battles to fight. The U.S. Department of Labor gave low priority to the farm workers, a large proportion of whom were Mexican-Americans.
By the late 1950s and the early 1960s a new postwar generation of liberal politicians influenced by the civil rights movement began to listen to stories of exploitation and terrible living conditions, and they began to feel increasing pressure from a mainstream labor movement somewhat more sympathetic to the farm workers than before. When on September 17,1963, the driver of a makeshift truck full of braceros drove into the path of a speeding Southern Pacific freight train in the Salinas Valley, killing thirty-two workers, Galarza was hired by the Education and Labor Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives to investigate the conditions under which braceros worked.56 The report appeared in spring of 1964, shortly before a combination of labor and liberal interests in Congress allowed the braceros program to terminate.
Employers of the West and Southwest increased their reliance on illegal aliens once more, supplemented at the borders by a large increase in the use of commuter labor. The commuters carried work authorization cards. Some crossed the border daily to work; others moved farther inland and returned to their homes in Mexico during the off season of the industry in which they were employed. The daily commuter became a new kind of bracero; by 1970 approximately 70,000 were working in American border cities.57
Illegal alien workers may have supplied about 10 percent of the labor force in counties along the border. Many undocumented workers cooperated with employers in avoiding income and payroll taxes. Some employers failed to make contributions to Social Security or disability insurance, saving up to 20 percent of their wage costs.58 Some workers were paid less than minimum wages, but they did not complain about that, or about overtime work or inadequate safety and health standards or the absence of fringe benefits. Particularly unscrupulous employers turned in their own illegal alien workers to avoid meeting a payroll. All around, the cost-benefit advantages to employers were considerable—undocumented Mexican nationals, according to one study, accomplished more during each hour worked on certain jobs than American workers and often worked more hours per week or per year.59
Without braceros, the employer appetite for illegal aliens grew. In 1965, the first post-bracero year, there were only 110,000 apprehensions of illegal aliens. After 1976, when a new law placed a 20,000 limit on immigration from all countries in the western hemisphere (except for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens), the pressure to migrate illegally was increased for Mexicans. From 1977 through 1987, the number captured rose above one million annually in all but three years.60 Although the vast majority caught at the border were Mexicans, only about 50 to 60 percent of illegal aliens in the U.S. came from Mexico, the rest from other Latin American countries, Asia, and even Europe. The best estimate of the illegal population in the U.S. in 1978 was between 3.5 million and 6 million.61
Most illegal aliens (70 to 80 percent) did not work in agriculture at all. Even Mexican nationals increasingly bypassed low-wage farm jobs and went directly to the cities—Los Angeles was the principal center—to perform a variety of jobs in restaurants, the garment industry, light manufacturing, construction, and even in white-collar jobs. With many points of access along the two-thousand-mile border, it was extremely difficult through conventional enforcement methods to keep Mexican nationals out.
In some respects, the system of sojourner pluralism worked the way employers of Mexican nationals intended. Their availability kept the labor markets loose in the West and Southwest. When a labor surplus was no longer needed, as during the Depression, the foreigners lost their jobs. So many Mexican nationals were returned home or chose to go back during the 1930s that the total number of Mexican-born persons in the U.S. was only 377,000 in 1940.62 The total number of Asian-born nationals was even smaller. But in some ways, the system did not work as intended. The children of those Mexican and Asian immigrants who remained in the U.S. were natural-born citizens, a large proportion of whom succeeded in obtaining work of much higher status than the menial tasks assigned to their parents. Almost 700,000 Americans born of Mexican parentage lived in the U.S. in 1940.63 Most of the 285,000 Japanese, 106,000 Chinese, and 100,000 Filipinos had been born here.64 The opportunities available to Asian-Americans and Mexican-Americans were not as ample as those available to the children and grandchildren of European immigrants, but they were not nearly as restricted as those of native-born black Americans stigmatized by racially based caste.
Chapter Seven
“THE ROAD OF HOPE”
Asians and Mexicans Find Cracks in the System
THE dynamic economic expansion of the West and Southwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century opened cracks in the system of sojourner pluralism for East Asian and Mexican sojourners, a substantial portion of whom became settlers. Although the circumstances of the two groups were different in several respects—the Asians lived far from home for many years, often in a highly insulated bachelor society surrounded by a totally foreign culture—many in both groups found the boundaries of sojourner pluralism, while restrictive, permeable. As a consequence, there was more mobility for them and especially for their children than for black Americans. Most blacks could not move from town to town or open up a laundry, a restaurant, or any other small business that served whites without threatening an entire social system.
Cracks in the System: The Chinese
Probably most of the sojourners from China who stayed in the U.S. performed relatively servile or menial work all their lives, but a significant minority became independent businessmen or farmers. A major opportunity to acquire land in Hawaii, an opportunity not available in California, resulted from the tradition of racial and ethnic intermarriage in the islands. Many Chinese married local native Hawaiian women and became rice farmers, an industry they soon dominated. Many others left the plantations for Honolulu, where they became skilled workers and small entrepreneurs. Of the 692 firms listed in the Honolulu Business Directory in 1886, 219 were Chinese-owned.1
Conditions generally were more restrictive in California, where Chinese miners were expelled from many towns and were compelled to pay a foreign miners’ tax, originally