The Borderlands Are Invaded
Captain Luis de Velasco, who accompanied De Oñate on the entrada of 1598, had a most remarkable wardrobe. It consisted, according to Bolton, of one suit of blue Italian velvet trimmed with wide gold passementerie, with green silk stockings, blue garters, and points of gold lace; a suit of rose satin; one of straw-colored satin; another of purple Castilian cloth; another of chestnut-colored cloth; a sixth, and daintier, suit of Chinese flowered silk; two doublets of Castilian dressed kid and one of royal lion skin gold-trimmed; two linen shirts; six linen handkerchiefs; fourteen pairs of Rouen linen breeches; forty pairs of boots, shoes, and gaiters; a raincoat; three hats including one of purple taffeta trimmed with blue, purple, and yellow feathers and a band of gold and silver passementerie. His equipment naturally matched the splendor of his wardrobe: four saddles; three suits of armor, three suits of horse-armor, a silver-handled lance with gold and purple tassels, a sword and gilded dagger, a broadsword, two shields; a bedstead, two mattresses, numerous sheets, pillows and pillowcases; a bevy of servants; thirty horses and mules, and a silken banner. Indeed, the first Spaniards to invade the borderlands did so with plumes waving, banners flying, and armor gleaming.
But when Spanish-speaking people reinvaded the borderlands three hundred years later, their leaders were landless peons who forded across the Rio Grande in the dead of night. Their wardrobe—indeed their worldly possessions—consisted of the clothes they wore. No taffeta-trimmed hats for them; no blue, purple, and yellow feathers; no gold and silver ornaments; no mattresses, sheets, and pillowcases. For these latter-day conquistadores were Mexican cholos who came to chop brush, to build railroads, to work in copper mines, and to pick cotton in lands which De Oñate and Juan Baurista de Anza had mapped and charted, explored and colonized. The first entrada was made up of Spanish hidalgos and caballeros; the second of Mexican peons. The first invaders came in search of gold and silver; the second in search of bread and a job. What the second invasion lacked in color, splendor, and majesty, was more than offset by the capacity of the peons for hard work and endurance.
Those colorful murals that one can see nowadays throughout the Southwest in which figures like Captain Luis de Velasco are depicted in all their finery might well be balanced by a few murals showing Mexican migratory workers sweating in desert cement plants, in the copper mines of Morenci, the smelters of El Paso, and the great farm-factories of the San Joaquin Valley. Captain de Velasco and his colleagues may have discovered the borderlands but Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico have built the economic empire which exists in the Southwest today.
No one knows precisely how many Mexican immigrants came to the United States in the period from 1900 to 1930 but it is generally agreed that the number was in excess of a million. Prior to 1900 there had been a trickle of Mexican immigration to the borderlands: Texas had an immigrant population of 71,062 in 1900; Arizona 14,171; California, 8,086; New Mexico, 6,649. The bulk of these earlier immigrants, of course, were concentrated in the Southwest; and, of the post-1900 immigrants, nine-tenths settled in the borderlands. At first the immigration was largely restricted to Texas, for the use of oriental labor, particularly the Chinese, barred the way to Mexican immigration in California until about 1917. The rapid increase of Mexican immigrants in the border states after 1900, however, can be seen in the following table:
1900 |
1910 |
1920 |
1930 |
|
Arizona..................... |
14,171 |
29,987 |
61,580 |
114,173 |
California ................... |
8,086 |
33,694 |
88,881 |
368,013 |
New Mexico ................ |
6,649 |
11,918 |
20,272 |
59,340 |
Texas ....................... |
71,062 |
125,016 |
251,827 |
683,681 |
Three facts should be noted about the great wave of Mexican immigration which brought to the Southwest after 1900 nearly ten percent of the total population of Mexico: it was overwhelmingly concentrated in the old Spanish borderlands; in point of time it coincided with the birth of the Southwest as an economic empire; and, in each instance, Mexican immigrants labored in the building of industries in which there had been an earlier Spanish-Mexican cultural contribution. The industries in which Mexicans were concentrated, moreover, were those vital to the economic development of the Southwest. In all essentials, therefore, the story of the invasion of the borderlands can be told in terms of railroads, cotton, sugar beets, and truck or produce farming.
1. Spanish Trails, American Rails
The Spanish introduction of the horse, mule, burro, and ox to America marked the longest stride that so many people, in so short a time, have ever taken in the arts of transportation.
CHARLES FLETCHER LUMMIS
The terrain of the Southwest is rugged, mountainous, and semidesert; waterholes are few and far between; and great reaches have remained wholly uninhabited for centuries. To establish a system of transportation in such a region was infinitely more difficult than to build a flatboat at Pittsburgh and float down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans. Spain is also a country of elevated mountain ranges, of narrow, winding defiles, of rocky trails, and stretches of torrid plain. From the eighth century, when the Spaniards had acquired the aparejo or packsaddle from the Moors, mules and burros had been used as transport. Washington Irving records that in 1486 Isabella organized, equipped, and maintained pack-trains consisting of fourteen thousand mules and burros which were used to supply an army of fifty thousand in the conquest of Granada. This efficient system of transport the Spanish brought to the Americas, where, for three hundred years, the pack-train was the lifeline of their colonies.
The trails that later became rail lines and highways in the Southwest were first discovered, charted, and traveled by Spaniards and Mexicans. The historic trail that De Anza blazed from Tubac to San Gabriel might well be regarded as the initial survey for the present-day Southern Pacific line. Long before the rail lines were built, the Spaniards and Mexicans had organized an elaborate system of pack-trains which operated over the endless trails blazed by the conquistadores. In the early days, the “King’s Wagons”—the famous Carros del Rey—made the long journey from Mexico City to Santa Fe, from Santa Fe to Veracruz, carting merchandise, supplies, and silver from the mines. Crisscrossing the deserts and mountain ranges, these pack-trains were the principal means of transportation as late as the 1880s, transporting merchandise to the towns, supplying the army posts, carrying the mail. The tinkling of the pack-train bell was heard throughout the West until the whistle of the locomotive began to echo in the mountain passes and canyons.
Mule and burro transport, so well adapted to desert conditions, was a Spanish invention and Southwestern pioneers were in complete agreement that no one could handle burros or mules as skillfully as Mexicans. For efficient service, pack-trains had to be thoroughly organized. The form of organization and the type of equipment were well established when Columbus discovered America. A typical pack-train consisted of the pack-master or patrón; the head-loader or cargador; a blacksmith; a cook; and eight or ten packers or arrieros. The duties of each man in the pack-train were defined by custom in the most precise detail. Operating from Tucson to San Diego, from Santa Fe to El Paso, from Tucson to Guaymas, pack-trains constituted an extremely efficient and economical mode of transportation for the time and place.
Santiago Hubbel, a famous pack-master of New Mexico, freighted heavy mining equipment overland from Lavaca, Texas, to the Heintzelman mine in Arizona—a distance of 1,200 miles—and his pack-trains carried ore to the Missouri River in rawhide bags. Freight rates ranged from thirty to seventy cents per ton per mile and the mules, carrying an average load of 250 pounds, often made thirty miles a day. It was not uncommon for desert pack-trains to travel three hundred miles in four days and, in 1881, a pack-train, loaded two hundred pounds to the pack mule, traveled eighty-five miles in twelve hours. Pack-trains carried supplies to mining camps throughout the West and New Mexico arrieros made their appearance as far north as the Salmon and Frazer rivers.
The operation of these pack-trains was based on the most elaborate and intricate lore. In Spain the pack mules had housings, similar to those of the cavalry, of rich cloth embroidered with gold; halters brocaded with silk; and bridles, headpieces, and harnesses that glittered with silver. The arrieros of the Southwest kept this great tradition alive. In odd moments they decorated their equipment with figures of animals and birds, insignia and legend, woven with silken threads of various colors. A pack saddle, stock and all, often cost $100 and was beautifully stamped and engraved by hand, trimmed with Mexican silver dollars, cut and chased in various designs; while the bridles were inlaid with silver and gold. The arrieros dressed like their grandfathers in Spain: with high-heeled top boots and tiny spurs, silken banda or sash wrapped around the waist two or three times, embroidered shirt front, and conical sombrero with a silver snake around the crown, the underside of the brim being trimmed with silver braid.
“Such was the holiday costume of the packer of thirty-five or forty years ago,” wrote H. W. Daly in 1910, “when, mounted on his favorite mule, he would sing some Spanish ditty when visiting friends in some nearby hamlet; a man who never turned his back on a foe or forsook a friend in moments of peril, honest and honorable in all his dealings with his fellow men, kind to animals in his care, with a love for his calling and thoroughly imbued with an ‘esprit de corps’ for the pack service.” “I cannot recall,” wrote Charles Fletcher Lummis, “hearing of any arriero that ever robbed his employer.”
Used by General Crook in the sixties in campaigns against the Shoshones in Nevada, pack-trains played an important part in his later campaigns against the Apaches in the Southwest; in fact, some historians believe they were the decisive factor. Among the famous muleteers who operated these supply trains for the army were such names as Chileno John, José de Leon, and Lauriano Gómez. Later the army used this same pack-train system in the Spanish-American War, both in Cuba and in the Philippines, and it became a standardized unit in army transport. Just how intricately organized and delicately articulated the whole system was can be seen by reference to a manual of pack transportation which the army issued in 1910. The technique of roping packsaddles, for example, was highly intricate and the most elaborate lore existed about hitches, knots, and splices. Prepared by Chief Packer H. W. Daly, the manual points out that the whole system, in its every detail, was taken over from the Mexicans intact, including its vocabulary.
The load was, of course, the cargo, from the Spanish cargar, to load. The pack-train was the atajo; the pack-cushion, or saddle, the aparejo; the sweatcloth, the suadera; the crupper, the grupera; the saddle cloth, the corona; the cover for the harness was the sobre-en-jalma or sobrejalma; the bell, the cencerro; the canteen, the gerafe; the saddlebags, the alforjas; the bell-mare, the acémila; the eye-blind, the tapaojo; the currycomb, the almohaza. Much of the vocabulary of the pack-train was Arabic in origin; but its organization was Andalusian.
Estevan Ochoa, whose family had come from Spain to Mexico in the days of Cortez, was born in the cathedral city of Chihuahua in 1831. As a young man, he had journeyed to Independence, Missouri, where he lived for a time, learning the English language. Returning to the Southwest in 1859, by way of the Santa Fe Trail, he established a chain of stores and a well-organized pack-train system that supplied them. When troops of the Confederacy under Captain Hunter seized Tucson during the Civil War, Ochoa was given the alternative of taking an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy or of leaving Tucson. He answered this ultimatum by climbing on his horse and riding out alone through the Apache territory to Mesilla. A partner in the famous early-day freighting firm of Tully and Ochoa, his pack-trains freighted throughout the Southwest and deep into Mexican territory. As a pioneer resident of Tucson, he led the fight that finally resulted in the establishment of the first public school system in the territory.
Member of the territorial legislature and mayor of Tucson, Estevan Ochoa was perhaps the first citizen of Tucson in the 1870s. At his beautiful home in Tucson, scores of friends annually assembled from points as distant as El Paso and Guaymas for the ten-day celebration of the festival of Saint Augustine. When the railroad finally reached Tucson on March 25, 1880, Don Estevan Ochoa presented Charles Crocker with the silver spike used in the dedication ceremonies. As a pioneer freighter in the Southwest, Don Estevan was, in effect, presenting his competitor with a spike to be driven into his own coffin. For the coming of the railroads spelled the end of the pack-trains and proved to be the undoing of Ochoa, who died, a few years later, a ruined man.
Mexican labor was extensively used in the construction of the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe lines in the Southwest in the eighties, particularly on the desert sections built by the Southern Pacific. From that day to this, Mexicans have repaired and maintained Western rail lines. As watchmen of the rails, section hands must live near their work, while the extra crews literally live on the rails in boxcars which are shunted about the divisions. “Their abode,” as one railroad executive tersely phrased it, “is where these cars are placed.” Hundreds of Mexican families have spent their entire sojourn in the United States bouncing around the Southwest in boxcar homes.
Since 1880 Mexicans have made up seventy percent of the section crews and ninety percent of the extra gangs on the principal Western lines which regularly employ between 35,000 and 50,000 workmen in these categories. In 1930 the Santa Fe reported that it was then employing 14,000 Mexicans; the Rock Island 3,000; the Great Northern 1,500; and the Southern Pacific 10,000. According to the census of 1930, 70,799 Mexicans were engaged in “transportation and communication” mostly as common laborers on the western lines and as maintenance workers on the streetcar systems of the Southwest. In Kansas and Nebraska, Mexican settlements will be found to extend along the rail lines while the colonies of Kansas City and Chicago are outgrowths of Mexican railroad labor camps. As late as 1928 the boxcar labor camps of the railroads housed 469 Mexican men, 155 women, and 372 children in Chicago.
The principal large-scale importers of Mexican labor, the rail lines of the Southwest constantly fed workers to other industries since so much railroad labor is seasonal in character. Forever losing labor, the railroads kept recruiting additional workers in Mexico. This process was greatly accelerated as increased freight and passenger traffic paralleled the economic development of the region. Railroad employment naturally stimulated migration, since the companies provided transportation to various points along the line. Just how important the railroads were in setting the tide of Mexican immigration in motion can be seen from a statement made by an investigator for the Department of Labor in 1912. Most of the Mexicans then in the United States, he said, had at one time or another worked for the railroads. For years the prevailing wage for section hands in the Southwest was a dollar a day—considerably below the rate paid for similar labor on the middle western and eastern lines.
Recruited by labor agents and commissary companies, Mexicans were assembled in El Paso and from there sent out on six-month work-contracts with the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe. In 1908 some sixteen thousand Mexicans were recruited in El Paso for railroad employment. Two years later as many as two thousand Mexicans crossed the border into El Paso in a single month at the instigation of the commissary companies. Starting around 1900, railroad recruitment reached its peak in 1910 and 1912. Originally recruited by the Southwestern lines, Mexicans were used after 1905 in an ever-widening arc which gradually extended through Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.
As early as 1900 the Southern Pacific was regularly employing 4,500 Mexicans on its lines in California. By 1906 the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe were importing as many as two and three carloads of cholos a week to Southern California. The rapid extension of the Pacific Electric interurban system in Southern California also greatly stimulated the demand for Mexican labor. Wherever a railroad labor camp was established, a Mexican colonia exists today. For example, the Mexican settlement in Watts—called Tajauta by the Mexicans—dates from the importation of a carload of cholos in 1906. While the lines were being built, the cholos lived in boxcars and tents. Later the company built row-houses on its property and rented these houses to the employees. Thirty or forty such camps are still to be found in Los Angeles County. Around the initial camp site, Mexicans began to buy lots at $1 down and $1 a week and to build the shacks in which their children live today.
In the sparsely settled semiarid Southwest, the construction of the rail lines was well in advance of actual settlement. Elsewhere in the West and Middle West, settlers had promoted railroads; but here railroads promoted settlement. The first great land “boom” in Los Angeles, for example, was strictly a railroad promotion. In the economic development of the region, railroads have played an all-important role. Prior to the completion of the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe lines in the eighties, the Southwest was hardly a part of the United States. In every state in the region, the modern phase in its development dates from the arrival of the first passenger or freight train. Largely built by Mexican labor along routes first explored and mapped by Spanish-speaking people, the railroads of the Southwest have been maintained by Mexicans from 1880 to the present time. All the products of the region—copper, cotton, lettuce, produce, wool, beef, and dairy products—move to markets on desert lines dotted at regular intervals by small, isolated clusters of Mexican section-crew shacks lost in time and space.
3. Cotton in Texas
As early as the 1890s, Mexican labor from both sides of the Rio Grande was following the cotton harvest on foot into the old cotton-producing sections of east Texas. East Texas was then devoted to cotton; south and west Texas to cattle. Since the Negroes were concentrated in the eastern section, Mexicans remained a secondary source of labor. But from 1890 to 1910 the cattle industry began to retreat before the forces of King Cotton, first in middle Texas and later (1910–1930) in west Texas. In these areas the plantation system had never been firmly established and large land units and inflated land values demanded a more “efficient” type of labor at lower costs. This was achieved largely through an increasing use of mechanized methods and the substitution of transient Mexican labor for Negro and “poor white” sharecroppers and tenants. Writing in Current History for February 1930, Remsen Crawford observed that “in the unirrigated plains regions of Texas and Oklahoma millions of acres formerly used as ranges for cattle and sheep and goats are being cultivated in cotton, mainly for non-resident landlords, by Mexican tenants, or hired workers, living in miserable shacks. … New cotton gin plants have sprung up everywhere. Old towns have greatly increased in size, and new ones have been built. The bulk of the work of making and gathering this cotton is done by Mexicans imported from over the border.”
With the coming of cotton, middle and west Texas were inundated with hordes of people who, in the words of one observer, “planted cotton, talked cotton, thought cotton, sold cotton, everything but ate cotton.” It so happened that the expansion of cotton in these new areas coincided with the first rumblings of the social revolution which began in Mexico in 1910. Thus as cotton pushed its way into the Southwest, Mexicans from across the border came to meet it. “It was in Southwest Texas,” writes Dr. Edward Everett Davis, “that fourteenth century feudalism met the southern plantation” and from this meeting came the large-scale cotton farming of Texas based on the use of migratory Mexican labor. As early as 1908, writes Dr. Davis, the Mexican invasion “had driven itself like a wedge into the heart of Texas beyond San Antonio, veering to the south of the Balcones Escarpment and the ranch country, and sticking close to the cotton fields of Comai, Hays, and Caldwell counties.”1 Coming through the ports of Laredo, Eagle Pass, and Brownsville, the Mexicans had concentrated at San Antonio, and that city, “like the small end of a funnel, poured them out into the cotton fields with such speed that by 1920, the greatest density of rural Mexican population in Texas was not along the Rio Grande but in Caldwell County in sight of the dome of the State Capitol.”
In the story of Keglar Hill, Dr. Robert H. Montgomery has given a graphic account of what happened in one Texas community when this invasion began. Keglar Hill had moved from cattle to cotton in one generation. As cotton supplanted cattle, the first Mexicans began to arrive in 1887 and 1888. At first they returned to their homes across the Rio Grande after the cotton harvest. But each year a few stayed over at the end of the season and, as the number increased, they gradually began to displace the white tenants, not as tenants, however, but as day laborers. The white tenants were the first to leave, around 1900, but were soon followed to the towns by their former landlords. Since the Mexicans did not speak English and were not in the habit of sending their children to school, the rural schools vanished with the white tenants and landlords. Of some three hundred-odd white settlers who had made up this small rural community in 1895, writes Dr. Montgomery, not one remained on the land by 1910.2
Obviously it was the joint appearance of cotton and Mexicans that brought about this disintegration of rural life. But the white tenants and sharecroppers, resenting the new dispensation, tended to blame Mexican labor for the transition, whereas the Mexicans were as much victims of the transformation as the tenants they displaced. “Before the incoming hosts of Mexicans,” writes Dr. Davis, “three rural institutions,—the home, the church, and the school,—fell like a trio of staggering tenpins at the end of a bowling race. White tenants could not compete with cheap Mexican labor. Prosperous owners moved to town, leaving the menial work for Mexicans to do. Rural dwellings, orchards, and yard fences went to wreck; deserted country churches made excellent hay barns and tool sheds for absentee landlords; and the large rural schools packed with happy white children dwindled into sickly institutions for a few indifferent Mexican muchachos, as a wilderness of rag-weeds and cockleburs grew on the school grounds. … The Mexican did not hit the interior cotton lands with the impact of a hurricane, but seeped in silently and undermined the rural social structures like termites eating out the sills of a wooden house.” Needless to say, I quote this passage for its revealing explanation of the basis of much anti-Mexican sentiment in Texas rather than to describe the transformation that took place. Actually, new modes of production and new social forces had “undermined the rural social structures” of Texas; the appearance of the Mexicans was a symptom, not a cause, of this process. Mexicans did not “seep” into Texas: they were recruited for employment. To charge them with responsibility for the disappearance of rural schools and churches, while exonerating their employers, was certainly to give a vulgar and misleading interpretation to a familiar economic process.
By 1940 nearly four hundred thousand workers, two-thirds of whom were Mexicans, were following “the big swing” through the cotton-growing regions of Texas. Starting in the southern part of the state in June, the migratory army sweeps eastward through the coastal counties and then turns west for the later harvest in the central section. It then splits into three units: one moves into east Texas; another proceeds to the Red River country; and a third treks westward to the San Angelo-Lubbock area. Organized in the south, the army gains recruits as it proceeds along the line of march. From the Lower Valley, where the season starts, comes the initial vanguard of about twenty-five thousand Mexican migratory workers. As the army marches through the Robstown-Corpus Christi area, an additional twenty-five thousand recruits join the procession. By the time the army has reached central Texas it has probably grown to two hundred thousand workers. During the depression, as many as four hundred thousand Mexicans made this great circle, traveling distances of from 1,800 to 2,000 miles. Over this long and wearisome route, Mexican families travel “like the starlings and the blackbirds.”
The generals of this tatterdemalion army are the Mexican labor contractors and truckers. About sixty percent of the cotton-picking, in fact, is contracted through these jefes or papacitos. The contractor, who usually speaks English, knows the routes, deals with the employer, and organizes the expedition. He is really a capitán or jefe because he happens to own a truck. Paid to transport workers, he is also hired to weigh the cotton, take charge of the commissary, and oversee the work. The trucks are often loaded with fifty or sixty workers as well as quantities of bedding and equipment. Thoroughly mechanized, the cotton-picking army moves on wheels in open or stake trucks. In an accident at McAllen, Texas, in 1940, forty-four Mexicans riding in one of these trucks were injured: twenty-nine were killed and of these, eleven were children under sixteen years of age—a tragedy memorialized in a famous border corrido. In depression years the army, of course, is inflated to fantastic proportions. The growers are anxious to have their crops harvested as rapidly as possible and, with the pay on a piecework basis, total labor costs remain the same regardless of the size of the crew.
Here is a picture of what happens, and has been happening for years, on this great circle (from a report by Pauline Kibbe to the coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, December 29, 1944);
On one Saturday afternoon in October, 496 migratory labor trucks were counted on the streets of Lubbock. Lubbock is a city of between 40,000 and 50,000. Each truck carries an average of 15 migrants, of all ages, which means an estimated total of 7,440 migrants who had come to Lubbock to spend the weekend, seek new employment, purchase their groceries, and other supplies, find a little recreation, etc. … Suppose each of the 496 trucks in Lubbock spent an average of $25.00. … That is a total of $12,400.00 income to the business places of all kinds for one weekend. Yet Lubbock had made no provision whatever for taking care of this influx of people which occurs regularly every fall, and every weekend during each fall. There is no place provided where they may park their trucks, take a bath, change their clothes, even go to the toilet. In Lamesa it was stated … that toilet facilities in the City Hall, which the migrants could use most conveniently, were locked up at noon on Saturdays, and filling station facilities were used except where the owners prohibited it because of the objections of customers.
Of 117 complaints of discrimination against Mexicans in public places filed with the Texas Good Neighbor Commission in 1944, two-thirds of the total involved mistreatment in towns of less than five thousand population. These towns were scattered over the general area through which the migratory labor movement passes. It would seem to be obvious, therefore, that a degree of correlation exists between migration and discrimination.
With the first World War creating a sharp demand for long-staple cotton, the cotton kingdom jumped from west Texas to the Salt River Valley in Arizona. Agents of the Arizona Cotton Growers Association recruited thousands of workers in Mexico for employment on the large-scale irrigated cotton farms. In most cases, the costs of transportation and of subsistence en route were later deducted from earnings. Up to June 30, 1919, 5,824 Mexicans had been imported into Arizona and 7,269 were specifically recruited for cotton-picking, not including those who came without contracts or special inducements. When the cotton boom exploded after the war, thousands of these workers were stranded in Arizona. In the Salt River Valley alone, ten thousand Mexicans were destitute in the winter of 1921 and the Mexican consul had to seek an appropriation of $17,000 to provide temporary relief. When four thousand imported Mexicans went on strike in the cotton fields in 1920, the growers had their leaders deported and arrested scores of the strikers. At about the same time, the development of irrigated cotton in the Mesilla Valley of New Mexico also began to attract Mexican workers from across the border.3
In 1910 the first cotton was planted in the Imperial Valley in California. As the cotton acreage expanded in response to wartime demands, the Imperial Valley growers began to bring in truckloads of Mexicans, in units of 1,500 and 2,000, from such communities as San Felipe and Guaymas. After the war, cotton production declined for a time and then soared to new heights as the center of production shifted to the huge farm-factories of the San Joaquin Valley. With 5,500 acres planted in cotton in 1919, the acreage in the San Joaquin increased to 172,400 acres in 1931. As the cotton acreage expanded, more and more Mexicans were imported, with the year 1920 being referred to in the farm journals as the first “Mexican harvest.” From 1924 to 1930, an average of 58,000 Mexicans trekked into the San Joaquin Valley each year, principally for the cotton harvest. In the middle twenties, over a hundred trucks loaded with Mexicans were counted crossing the Ridge Route in a single day. The townspeople would provide the Mexicans stranded in the valley towns at the end of the season, from public funds, with just enough gasoline to make the trip back over the Ridge Route to Los Angeles, where welfare and charitable agencies took care of them during the winter months.
Commanding a premium price, with a yield-per-acre nearly twice the national average, cotton soon became a $40,000,000 crop in California. Largely produced on high-priced irrigated lands which had been capitalized on the basis of five decades of cheap labor, the expansion of cotton in California was premised upon the availability of a large supply of low-cost labor exclusively earmarked for the cotton growers. Consistently opposed to Mexican immigration, the labor unions failed to note that the cotton fields of the Imperial and San Joaquin valleys were a major factor in the location of large automobile tire factories in Los Angeles which, in turn, stimulated the demand for industrial labor.
5. Vitamins and Mexicans
Irrigation equals Mexicans.
DR. PAUL S. TAYLOR
Twice the size of Germany and larger in area than the thirteen original states, the Southwest had a population in 1902 about half the size of the City of Chicago in the same year. Irrigation was the magic key that unlocked the resources of the region. Irrigated farming is intensive farming: with high yields per acre, heavy labor requirements, year-round production, and crop specialization. Small in area, the “winter gardens” of the Southwest have offset, by their exceptional productivity, many of the disadvantages of an arid environment. Throughout the region, the distribution of Mexicans in rural areas is largely determined by the location of irrigated crops. As an economic empire, the Southwest dates from the passage of the Reclamation Act in 1902 which outlined a development policy for the arid West and made possible the use of federal funds in the construction of large-scale irrigation and reclamation projects. Irrigation has had more to do with the economic growth of the Southwest than any single factor.
Today a visitor from the North, driving into the Lower Rio Grande Valley in midwinter, would have the illusion, writes Hart Stilwell, “of moving into a modern version of the Garden of Eden. As he drove along the Valley’s ‘Main Street,’ a 65-mile highway, he would see stately palms and green citrus-fruit trees laden with golden orange fruit; bougainvillea vines in full bloom; bright green papaya plants. … And when he came to the level, rich fields he would see bronze-skinned people by the thousands harvesting vegetables—red beets with their green tops, white and purple turnips with their green tops, golden carrots with their green tops—everything green. He might see other laborers harvesting cabbage, broccoli, endive, peppers, beans, tomatoes, new potatoes, peas, anise, cauliflower or squash.” In the valley today Mexican laborers—forty thousand of them illegal entrants or “wetbacks”—plant, cultivate, and harvest fruit and vegetable crops worth $100,000,000 a year. Virtually none of this development existed in 1904 when the St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Railway finally completed its line to Brownsville.4 A miraculous transformation, indeed; but just how was it brought about?
“The hand of the Mexican laborer,” wrote Dr. Paul S. Taylor in 1927, “is grubbing out the chaparral of south Texas.” Before the lands could be leveled, planted, and irrigated, the brush had to be cut away for this was the brasada or brush country of Texas. While an occasional tractor was used to pull out small trees, Mexicans grubbed most of the brush by hand with the use of grubbing hoes. “Grubbing brush,” the Texans said, “is a Mexican job.” And properly so, perhaps, for the Mexicans alone knew and understood the brush country. To the Anglo-Americans, writes J. Frank Dobie, the brasada vegetation was just “brush,” an all-encompassing term; but generations of Mexicans had learned to distinguish, and had named, the endless varieties of shrubs and plants to be found in this section. When these varieties are distinguished today, it is by their Spanish-Mexican names: mogotes, or thick patches of evergreen; coma, with its dirk-like thorns; the cejas or thickets; the wand-like retama with its yellow flowers called lluvia de oro (“showers of gold”); grandjero with its yellow berries; the agarita or wild currant; the bitter amargosa; the black chaparral or chaparro prieto; and the tasajillo or rattail cactus. Thousands of acres of this densely thicketed brush had to be grubbed out by hand to make way for the fabulously rich “winter garden” that exists today in the Lower Valley.
After 1900 the increasing urbanization of population, the disappearance of the backyard garden, the development of new canning processes, and the introduction of refrigerator cars, brought about an enormous increase in the production of fruits and vegetables on large-scale commercial farms in the irrigated portions of the Southwest. “Citrus fruit output,” writes Dr. Harry Schwartz, “jumped more than five fold in the first decades of this century, while grape tonnage increased four times. Between 1919 and 1939 production of fresh market spinach, lettuce, cauliflower, snap beans, and carrots increased five times or more, while celery output tripled. In 1900 most fruits and vegetables were not considered sufficiently important to justify extensive collection of statistics regarding them. By 1940 they contributed more than a billion dollars to cash farm income, roughly 30% of the total from all crops.”5 (Emphasis added.) It should be emphasized that this increased production represented a net addition to the total American agricultural income.6
Virtually all of this phenomenal increase occurred in the Southwest and was made possible by the use of Mexican labor. In the growth of commercial fruit and vegetable production in the Southwest between 1900 and 1940, there is not a single crop in the production and harvesting of which Mexicans have not played a major role. This fabulous increase in production—which set the Southwest on its feet financially—could never have taken place so rapidly without the use of Mexican labor. To grow and harvest an acre of wheat, during the 1930s, required on the average only about 13 man-hours of labor; but an acre of lettuce required 125 man-hours and an acre of strawberries 500 man-hours. Unorganized Mexican labor in inexhaustible quantities made this production possible.7
It should be noted that the increased production took place on irrigated acreages within the confines of the old Spanish borderlands. It was here that the Spanish and the Mexicans had first demonstrated the value of irrigation and had developed an understanding of irrigation techniques. Prior to the development of the Southwest, as Ray Stannard Baker pointed out, Anglo-Saxons had never attempted irrigation on a large scale and irrigation “means a complete change of many racial institutions and customs.” Thus the contribution of Mexican laborers related back to a much earlier cultural contribution which had been made by the Spanish and Mexican settlers. Reclaimed and irrigated at enormous costs, much of this land was overcapitalized. Overcapitalization, in turn, had created a terrific pressure for cheap labor. But the years during which the Southwest became an economic empire saw a great increase in living standards for the American working class brought about by the use of more efficient machines. It was precisely in the production of truck crops, fruit, cotton, and sugar beets that the least progress had been made in the introduction of machines. Thus the use of Mexican labor fitted into the economic cogs of the Southwest in perfect fashion.8
To appreciate what Mexican labor meant to the economy of the Southwest, one simple, obvious fact needs to be stressed, namely, the desert or semidesert character of the region. In the San Joaquin, Imperial, Salt River, Mesilla, and Lower Rio Grande valleys, temperatures of 100, 110, and 112 degrees are not uncommon. Those who have never visited the copper mines of Morenci in July or the cotton fields of the San Joaquin Valley in September or the cantaloupe fields of Imperial Valley in June are hardly in a position even to imagine what Mexican workers have endured in these areas. It should be remembered that the development of the Southwest occurred at a time when the living and working conditions of American workmen were undergoing rapid improvement. It was not easy to find in these years a large supply of labor that would brave the desert heat and perform the monotonous stoop-labor, hand-labor tasks which the agriculture of the Southwest demanded. Under the circumstances, the use of Mexican labor was largely noncompetitive and nearly indispensable.
6. Coyotes and Man-Snatchers
Spearheaded by the completion of the rail lines, the westward movement of cotton, the spread of “winter garden” fruit and vegetable production, and the phenomenally rapid economic expansion of the Southwest after 1900 created an enormous demand for unskilled labor. Mexicans poured into Texas by the thousands. “Farming is not a profitable industry” said John Nance Garner the Uvalde millionaire, “and in order to make money you have to have cheap labor.” From 70,981 in 1900 the number of Mexicans in Texas shot up to 683,681 in 1930. With enforcement of the contract-labor law being suspended from 1918 to 1921, over 50,000 workers were directly recruited in Mexico for employment in the United States. By the time the border patrol was established in 1924, and administrative restriction adopted as a policy in March 1929, the great labor pool of Texas had been filled to overflowing with Mexican immigrants. From this reservoir Mexican labor was siphoned off in all directions as the war and the Immigration Act of 1924 drastically reduced the volume of European immigration. The tip of the wave of Mexican immigration reached as far north as Detroit and as far east as Pittsburgh. “Mexicans,” said a California grower in 1927, “scatter like clouds. They are all over America.” From Texas, Mexicans were recruited, in small numbers, for employment on the plantations in the Mississippi Delta; thousands were recruited for employment in the Northern and Western sugar-beet fields; and an entire trainload was, at one time, shipped from Texas to Seattle for employment in the Alaska canneries.
Throughout the borderlands prior to 1924 the contract-labor law of 1885 was more often honored in the breach than in its observance. For a quarter of a century, Texas growers had recruited labor in Mexico whenever they needed it. In large measure this traffic had been made possible by the activities of labor smugglers who developed a lucrative racket in Mexicans. The labor smuggler or “coyote” crossed the border, not only to round up crews, but to get workers across the line in violation of the immigration regulations. For a fee of ten or fifteen dollars, the coyote would arrange to get Mexicans across the line, by having them “jump the fence” at La Colorado; or come across concealed in automobiles, carts, or trucks; or by fording the Rio Grande at night. In many cases, forged passports and head-tax receipts were provided. Once across the line, the Mexican was turned over by the coyote to a labor contractor (enganchista), who sold him for a fee of fifty cents to one dollar a head to some agricultural, railroad, or mining employer. Labor agents operating out of Laredo and El Paso had forwarding agents elsewhere in Texas, notably in San Antonio. Charging the employers a fee for supplying the labor, the contractors charged the workers for transportation and subsistence en route. The profits in this racket were really enormous and the smugglers and coyotes and labor-contractors constituted an intimate and powerful alliance from Calexico to Brownsville.
Another type of agent, the man-snatcher, also figured in this dubious traffic. The man-snatchers made a business of stealing Mexican labor and selling the same crew to several different employers. Delivering a crew to an employer, they would steal the crew at night and resell it to still another employer. In this manner, the same crew would often be sold to four or five employers in the course of a few days. Frequently the man-snatchers raided crews imported by the labor contractors and made off with them by force of arms. Shipments of workers en route to employers were often kept locked up at night, in barns, warehouses, and corrals, with armed guards posted to prevent their theft. Crews of imported Mexicans were marched through the streets of San Antonio under armed guard in broad daylight and, in Gonzales County, workers who attempted to breach their contracts were chained to posts and guarded by men with shotguns.9 “Large planters,” wrote James L. Slayden, “welcome the Mexican immigrant as they would welcome fresh arrivals from the Congo, without a thought of the social and political embarrassment to their country.”
7. Los Betabeleros
Mexicans have been identified with the sugar-beet industry since its inception; the phrase “Mexican sugar-beet worker” is as common as “Mexican sheepherder.” Prior to the tariff of 1897, the sugar-beet acreage in this country was insignificant; but, by taxing foreign sugar seventy-five percent of its value, the Dingley Tariff immediately created a great demand for sugar beets. States paid bounties, offered tax exemption, and otherwise encouraged the growing of sugar beets as a matter of official policy. From 135,000 acres in 1899, the sugar-beet acreage increased to 376,000 acres in 1906 and, for the last decade, has averaged about 750,000 acres. With each increase in the sugar-beet acreage, of course, the demand for Mexican labor has been stepped up.
The production of a large acreage in sugar beets has consistently required, until the last few years, a large amount of labor, for blocking and thinning in the spring and for harvesting in the fall. To induce labor to stay over in the area, so as to be available for the harvest, the sugar-beet companies have always used the device of contract-labor in which workers, more often families, contract to block, thin, and harvest beets for a stipulated sum per acre. For many years, the major companies included in the contract a “hold-back” provision to ensure that the workers would be present in the fall for the harvest. The growing of sugar beets is unique in that it represents “a curious union of family farms and million dollar corporations.” The sugar-beet refineries, rather than the individual farmers, have long assumed responsibility for the recruitment, distribution, and control of the labor supply.
The principal growing areas are to be found in California, Michigan, and Colorado. From the beginning of the industry, Mexican workers were used in California. Elsewhere the sugar-beet companies at first experimented with other types of labor: Japanese in Colorado; the so-called “Volga-Germans” in Nebraska and other areas; and Belgians and Poles in Michigan. But these non-Mexican groups showed a tendency to aspire to farm ownership and, in some areas, by dint of unbelievably hard effort, succeeded in achieving their goal. It was to curb this tendency that the companies shifted to Mexican labor, particularly after the first World War and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. In fact, it was at the insistence of the sugar-beet companies that the contract-labor law was suspended from 1918 to 1920 to permit direct recruitment in Mexico. By 1927 it was estimated that, of 58,000 sugar-beet workers, 30,000 were Mexicans. Today sixty-six percent of the 100,000 workers in the industry are Mexicans. In states such as Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and North Dakota, Mexicans constitute from seventy-five to ninety percent of the labor supply.
In Colorado the Great Western Sugar Beet Company began to recruit Mexican labor in 1916, at first from southern Colorado and New Mexico, and, later, from Mexico. In 1920 the company spent $360,000 in the recruitment of Mexican labor. In one year alone, 1921, some ten thousand Mexican workers were imported, most of them from Texas; and, between 1910 and 1930 a total of at least thirty thousand Mexicans were brought to the Colorado sugar-beet areas. Throughout its history, the company has shown a marked preference for the “unspoiled” Mexican, “fresh from Mexico clad in the sombrero, light cotton clothing, and even sandals of the Mexican peon.” Even during the depression years, the company attempted to recruit Mexican labor from outside the state. In an effort to prevent this practice, the governor of Colorado on April 20, 1936, proclaimed a state of martial law and stationed Colorado National Guardsmen along the Colorado-New Mexico border to turn back Mexican workers from New Mexico.
At the outset, the sugar-beet companies sought to anchor the imported labor in the sugar-beet areas: first, by some feeble efforts at colonization; then by offering a bonus to those families who agreed to waive the payment of transportation back to the point of recruitment; and, more frequently, by simply stalling on final settlement under the contract at the end of the season. The earnings of the Mexican beet workers were, in not a few cases, so low that they were compelled to stay over during the winter months. Thus wherever Mexican labor has been imported for sugar-beet employment, small Mexican colonies have developed. In the South Platte area of Colorado, the number of stay-overs rose in a six year period from 537 to 2,084. El Paso was the principal place of recruitment for Mexican sugar-beet workers in the Rocky Mountain states, with San Antonio being the center from which they were recruited for the principal Middle Western areas. Over the years, however, Denver has come to occupy, in relation to the sugar-beet areas in Utah, Wyoming, and Montana, much the same relationship that El Paso and San Antonio occupied at an earlier period. There are today some 14,631 Spanish-speaking residents in Denver.
Needless to say, the Texas growers became extremely annoyed when the agents for the sugar-beet companies began to tap their great reservoir of Mexican labor. Noting that more and more Mexican labor tended to stay over in the sugar-beet areas, the cotton growers took matters into their own hands. Holes were shot in the tires on the trucks of the sugar-beet agents and Mexicans, in any number of cases, were prevented by force from keeping their rendezvous with the sugar-beet agents. In a final effort to stop this out-of-state recruitment, the cotton growers secured the passage of the Texas Emigrant Agent Law of 1929 which, in effect, barred outside agents from recruiting labor in Texas. The principal consequence of this law was to make of out-of-state recruitment a kind of illegal, underground conspiracy. For, despite the law, thousands of Mexicans continued to leave every year for out-of-state employment. For example, it has been estimated that nearly sixty thousand Texas-Mexicans leave the state every year. Originally this movement was organized by the sugar-beet companies through the use of special trains; but, for the last decade, it has been handled by Mexican truckers and contractors.
Most of the trucks are open, stake trucks, never intended for passenger transportation. Planks or benches are placed on the truck, which is then loaded with passengers and equipment. Frequently fifty or sixty Mexicans are huddled, like sheep, in these trucks. Once the Mexicans have crowded into the back of the truck, a heavy tarpaulin is thrown over them and fastened down around the edges so that the passengers are concealed. The reason for this conspiratorial atmosphere is, of course, that perhaps two-thirds of the Mexicans who leave the state have been recruited in violation of the Emigrant Agent Law. Outwardly the truck looks as though it were loaded with a cargo of potatoes. Before climbing into the driver’s seat, the trucker tosses a couple of coffee cans into the back of the truck which are used as urinals during the long journey north. Then, usually around midnight, the truck rolls out of San Antonio and heads north.
With a relief driver in the cab, the truckers drive straight through to Michigan, and other equally remote destinations, stopping only for gas and oil. By driving night and day, they can make the trip in forty-five to fifty hours. Paid $10 a head to deliver Mexicans in Michigan, which is ultimately charged up by the sugar-beet companies against earnings, the average trucker can make about $3,000 a season. Naturally the truckers are in a hurry; they want to make, if possible, two or three trips. Instead of traveling the main highways, they pursue a crazily zigzag course, making many detours, zooming along country roads and minor highways, in an effort to avoid highway patrolmen. Almost every season since this traffic developed serious accidents have occurred along the line of march.
Wherever sugar beets are grown—in Michigan and Minnesota, in Colorado and Montana—the same pattern can be traced. In the sugar-beet area around Findlay, Ohio—dominated by the Great Lakes Sugar Company—nearly three thousand Mexican workers are imported each year from Texas. Telesforo Mandujano, and his six sons, made the trip to Ohio from San Antonio in a truck that carried forty Mexican workers. Here is his abbreviated statement before the Tolan Committee: “The truck did stop a few times for bowel evacuations and eating, when the truck needed gas or oil; but on most occasions cans were used as urinals and dumped out of the truck. Passengers had to stand all the way and one man tied himself upright to a stake so he could not fall out if he should happen to fall asleep.” After deducting all expenses, Telesforo and his six sons made $200.10 for the season. Catarino Ramirez also made the trip from San Antonio to Findlay in a truck that carried thirty-seven adults and eight children, making the trip in two days and three nights. “No stops were made unless the truckers were forced to,” he testified, “and when such stops were made we ate if we had time.”
No aspect of Mexican immigration has been more frequently or more thoroughly investigated than the history of their employment in sugar beets. The documentation is voluminous and covers every aspect of their employment in every sugar-beet area in the United States. It would serve no purpose, here, to attempt a summarization of this data, with its appalling revelation of low earnings, miserable health and housing conditions, child labor, sickness and disease. The data, for those who are interested, is summarized in Part 19 of the Tolan Committee Hearings (the “Detroit Hearings,” September 23, 24, 25, 1941). Suffice it to say, that from 1916 to the present time, between thirty thousand and sixty thousand Mexican workers have been directly dependent upon sugar-beet employment with average annual earnings of from $500 to $600 per family.
8. In Midwest Industries
Beginning around 1916, Mexican laborers began to appear in the Chicago industrial area, in Gary, Indiana Harbor, and Calumet. Most of these workers were from such states as Jalisco, Michoacan, and Guanajuato, having “leapfrogged” from the interior of Mexico to the Midwest industrial centers, “literally passing through and beyond,” writes Dr. Paul S. Taylor, “their compatriots of the Mexican northern border states who have made the shorter migration to the adjacent southwestern United States.” Appearing first as track laborers, they were later employed in the steel mills, the packing plants, and the tanneries. From 1920 to 1930 the Mexican population of Chicago increased from 3,854 to 19,362 and is today generally estimated at about 25,000.
The small Mexican colony in Detroit had its beginnings in 1918, when several hundred Mexican workers were brought to work in the automobile industry as student-workers. From eight thousand in 1920, the Mexican colony in Detroit rose to a peak of fifteen thousand in 1928, and then declined during the depression years, when many workers returned to the Texas communities from which they had been recruited or were repatriated by welfare agencies to Mexico. Today the colony is estimated to number about 6,515 residents. Throughout the Midwest there are similar colonies, usually quite small, in most of the industrial centers, totaling perhaps seventy thousand for the region. In 1923 the National Tube Company, an affiliate of U.S. Steel, brought 1,300 Mexicans from Texas to work in its plant at Lorain, Ohio. And, in the same year, the Bethlehem Steel Company imported about one thousand to work in its plant at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. When the first trainload arrived from San Antonio, police were on hand to escort the workers to their barracks as the “Mexicans in their broad plain sombreros” marched stoically through the streets.
The movement to import Mexican labor for industrial employment would have reached large proportions after 1923 had it not been for two factors. Both the sugar-beet companies and the Southwestern agricultural interests were strenuously opposed to any attempt to establish a pattern of Mexican employment in industry and also feared that, if Mexicans spread into new territory, the agitation for a quota on Mexican immigration would immediately assume serious proportions. Hence the passage of the Texas Emigrant Agent Law in 1929, and the depression of that year, brought the movement to a halt. The second factor had to do with immigration policy. The first bill aimed at placing Mexican immigration on a quota basis was introduced in 1926 and was supported by a rapidly growing exclusionist sentiment. Largely for diplomatic reasons, the federal government in March 1929, adopted a policy of “administrative restriction” by simply tightening up the enforcement of existing immigration regulations with the aid and cooperation of the Mexican government. Thus the northbound movement of Mexican immigrants had virtually ceased by 1930; and, in the depression years, some sixty-five thousand Mexican immigrants were repatriated, some voluntarily, some with the aid of the Mexican government, some being summarily shipped back to Mexico by welfare agencies in this country.
This pattern of events has a twofold bearing on the so-called “Mexican Problem” in this country. It explains, to some extent, the concentration of Mexicans in the old borderlands region; and it also explains why so many immigrants have been involved in cul-de-sac types of employment. For the doors of Middle Western industrial employment were closed almost as soon as they were opened; and, in the Southwest, employment opportunities were restricted, by custom, by discrimination, and by other factors, to a few limited types of employment. It is not surprising, therefore, that the 1930 census should show that of Mexicans gainfully employed, ten years of age or over, 189,005 should have been employed in agriculture, 150,604 as common laborers.
9. The Balance Sheet
Testifying before congressional committees in the twenties, the principal employers of Mexican labor in the Southwest presented facts and figures showing that Mexicans had been a vital factor in the development of agricultural and industrial enterprises valued at $5,000,000,000. Starting with a scant production in 1900, the Southwest was by 1929 producing between 300,000 and 500,000 carloads of vegetables, fruit, and truck crops—forty percent of the nation’s supply of these products. Most of this development took place in less than two decades and was directly based on the use of Mexican labor which constituted from sixty-five to eighty-five percent of the common labor used in the production of these crops. All the gold and silver that have ever been taken from the mountains of Colorado or that may still be awaiting the touch of pick and drill, cannot compare in value to the wealth already produced by sugar beets.10 From 1900 to 1940, Mexican labor constituted sixty percent of the common labor in the mines of the Southwest and from sixty to ninety percent of the section and extra gangs employed on eighteen western railroads. Obviously the transformation of the Southwest which has occurred in the last forty years was largely made possible by the use of Mexican labor. Conversely, the employment of Mexicans in the Southwest has been of enormous importance to Mexico in this same period. Some gauge of this importance may be found in the fact that from 1917 to 1927, Mexican immigrants sent a yearly average of $10,173,719.31 in remittances to families in Mexico.
It was not only the availability of Mexican labor for this period that meant so much to the economy of the Southwest, but its exceptional adaptability to the types of work and to the environmental conditions which prevailed throughout the region. Mexicans were inured to the heat, the aridity, the dust, the isolation that prevailed in most of the areas in which they worked. With Oriental immigration barred and European immigration placed on a rigid quota basis, it is, indeed, questionable if employers could have found other available labor sources. While these employers undoubtedly exaggerated the “indispensability” of the Mexican, it is nevertheless apparent that there was a measure of truth in what they said. For example, in 1920, the Department of Labor appointed a committee to investigate the consequences of Mexican immigration. Two of the members of this committee were old-time officials of the American Federation of Labor. Yet this committee reported that the Mexicans who had been imported during the war years had not come into competition with or displaced “white” labor.
In part, the special adaptability of Mexican labor was related to the presence in the Southwest of a large resident Mexican-American population. This circumstance greatly facilitated the use of Mexican labor. From this element came many of the foremen, the straw-bosses, and the contractors who recruited, transported, and supervised Mexican labor. Wherever Mexican immigrants moved in the Southwest, they found colonies of Mexican residents, with Mexican rooming houses, restaurants, barber shops, and stores; and, of course, throughout the entire area they found Spanish-speaking people. Always a buffer group, the native-born Mexican-Americans were the go-betweens, the conduits, which made possible the rapid, large-scale utilization of Mexican labor.
Nowadays the migratory phase of Mexican immigration is drawing to a close. By 1937 machines had taken over about ninety percent of the work involved in preparing, bedding, and cultivating the land in produce or truck crops; and the practice of crating produce in the fields, rather than in the sheds, had brought about a noticeable reduction in the number of workers. Utilizing mobile, mechanized packing sheds in the fields, the shipper-growers of Texas, Arizona, and California are nowadays drastically reducing the number of workers required. Mechanical cotton-pickers are reducing the number of pickers in California at the rate of one machine where forty workers were formerly used and at a picking cost of $5 per bale; and the first successful experiment in the mechanization of the sugar-beet industry occurred in 1936.11
The use of segmented seed, first introduced in 1943, has already greatly reduced the number of workers needed to thin sugar beets. Blocking and thinning machines have been in use since 1940. Experiments have shown that the use of these machines reduces the man-hours of labor required to thin sugar beets from 27.2 man-hours per acre to 2.5 man-hours per acre. The final step in mechanization in sugar beets is, of course, the introduction of the new mechanical harvester which picks, tops, and sorts the beets. One such machine will replace from six to eight men at harvest time. First placed in general use in 1946, this new harvester is destined to have a revolutionary effect on sugar-beet production. Generally speaking, much of the seasonal farm-labor problem of the past two or three decades has resulted from the much more rapid development of machines and techniques for handling the preparation of the soil, the sowing of crops and their cultivation, than of machines for the harvesting of crops. With the perfection of harvesting machines, the rate of technological displacement in agriculture is certain to increase.
In social terms this means that the isolation of the Mexican is drawing to a close. Large employers of Mexican labor have consistently pursued a policy of isolating Mexicans as a means of holding them to certain limited categories of work. Systematically discouraging all “outside contacts,” they have kept Mexicans segregated by occupation and by residence. The effect of this policy has been to create several different labor markets, coexisting in time and space, with each group being relatively insulated from the competition of the others by the different attitudes which employers have cultivated toward particular jobs. This policy has directly fostered antagonism against the Mexican and has severely limited his opportunities for acculturation. Technological change, however, is not solely responsible for the gradual abandonment of this policy. The truth is that the Mexicans have forced its abandonment, as the next chapter will explain.