Main FI Index | Main Newspaper Index

Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive


Fourth International, March-April 1953

 

Allen Winters

Peonage in the Southwest

 

From Fourth International, Vol.14 No.2, March-April 1953, pp.43-49.
Transcription & mark-up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

(This is the first of a series of two articles.)

In the problem of the “bracero,” the poor, often illiterate Mexican laborer, there lies concentrated today a whole complex of social problems. The influx of braceros into the United States that began during the last war has in the past few years become a flood, a flood that millions of Americans feel is about to engulf them.

The problem of the braceros is their exploitation as cheap manual labor on the factory-farms of the Southwest; but inseparable from this exploitation are the problems of America’s migrant farm labor class, its great Mexican-Amierican population, and its workers’ unions in the Southwest,

The movement of the braceros across the 1600-mile border between the United States and Mexico has become a mass migration which in many respects makes that border a fiction. Most of these men are illegal entrants, “illegals,” or “wetbacks,” so-called from their practice of wading the shallow Rio Grande river into Texas. More than a million of these men, and tens of thousands of Mexicans legally brought into the United States under contract, cross the border each year. The minimum estimate of illegals now in the United States is one million. [1] The real figure is undoubtedly higher, two million, perhaps three million.

The deportation figures of the Imimigration Service indicate – but only indicate, since only a minority of border jumpers are ever caught – the number of illegal entrants in this country. In l940, 400 were deported. [2] By 1945 the figure had risen to over 16,000. In 1950, 500,000 illegals were arrested and deported from all the border states, 225,000 from. California alone. The contract workers, though fewer in number, swell the above figure considerably. In 1950, 70,000 were brought into the United States [3], and in 1951, over twice that number

The yearly migration from: northern Mexico passes through the border states and then spreads fanlike throughout most of the farm states in this country. The braceros concentrate most heavily in three rich farm regions: the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas and the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys of California. Many also work seasonally on farms in Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, in the Northwest, and in the southern states of Arkansas and Mississippi. Many of the illegals, and almost all of the contract workers, return to Mexico each year, thus giving a tide-like seasonal pattern to their migration. The ones that stay after the harvest periods go into semi-hiding near the border towns, or disappear in the Mexican districts of such large cities as Los Angeles.
 

A System of Virtual Peonage

The use of Mexican immigrants as cheap manual labor on the great Southwestern farms is not a recent occurrence. It is a thoroughly entrenched system, “a systematic exploitation of an underprivileged class of humanity as cheap labor.” [4] In the two states where braceros are used most intensively, Texas and California, the practice is more than a century old. In Texas, braceros early replaced the native Indians as farm workers and have been the basic labor supply on the large farms ever since. In California, bracero labor is but the latest stage in a long history of exploiting foreign workers on farms.

In summarizing the migrant’s plight the only difficulty that arises is whether to compare their conditions to peonage or slavery. In the words of an officer of the Immigration Service, their life is a “horrible peonage ... slaves are treated better than the men on some of the farms we have visited.” [5]

Although they are attracted by the promise of high wages, the braceros come in such numbers that they are actually forced to accept wages which permit only a bare subsistence. The wage system for braceros, and for American farm labor in general, is governed almost entirely by what the traffic (the workers) can bear. In most areas the prevailing hourly wage for illegals varies from the rare maximum of sixty cents down to sums of five or ten cents. Wages for legally recruited contract workers are only slightly higher, varying according to pressure from the Mexican government.

As low as these figures are, real wages are usually even lower. Deductions for spoilage, for bailing wire, for carrying sacks, all reduce cash pay. Piecework pay, and daily eight-hour wage rates for ten and eleven hours of work are common. There have been many reports of men working for weeks and never getting paid. [6]

Most of the illegals, and all of the contract workers, are restricted to one type of work, manual farm labor. And in this work they are generally restricted to the hardest jobs, the stoop jobs: cotton picking, vegetable thinning, etc. Those illegals able to escape from! farm work and find jobs in cities are even there confined to the lowest-paying work at manual labor.

Off the job, the braceros find no respite from their harsh conditions. A bracero’s house, most commonly the house of many braceros, is usually the crudest sort of shack or hovel. Often it is no more than a ditchbank cave, and for many their roof is the open sky. Sanitation facilities in their shacktowns are of the crudest sort. Health and social services are non-existent. The diseases bred by such conditions are spread by rapid migration. As a result the braceros suffer a disease-death rate much higher than that of the native populations. [7]
 

A Means of Depressing Wages, Dividing Workers

These are the conditions the braceros face in this country: extreme overwork, miserably low wages, living conditions often worse than those of farm animals, and the hatred of the native population wherever they work. Before going further into the problem of the braceros it is necessary to analyze the source of this hatred. It is a result of other social problems which the presence of the braceros has so greatly aggravated.

In many areas where braceros are widely used their employment has depressed the wages and working conditions of residents far below average US levels. Illegals and contract workers cut into rather than supplement the domestic labor force. They push tens of thousands of Negroes, Mexican-Americans, and unskilled non-Mexicans; already the poorest workers, out of both farm and city jobs. Native workers are forced to become transients themselves and work for lowered wages. As a consequence, thousands upon thousands of Texans migrate northward each year in search of better jobs. [8]

The whole process is hardest on the native farm migrants who suffer doubly because of exploitation of the braceros. Not only can they find fewer jobs, and jobs for shorter periods, but they are forced to accept wages no higher than wages paid to the braceros. In the midst of a general national prosperity our migrants have been fighting conditions often worse than those of the depression. For a period in 1950 there was widespread publicity about migrants who not only were poor and homeless but actually starving in California. It is more than a mere coincidence that there are today in the United States between one and three million native migrant farm workers, a number equal to the estimate of each year’s bracero influx. [9]

The results of bracero employment have been felt not only by farm workers and unorganized city workers, but by the organized labor movement of the Southwest as well. The braceros today constitute, in fact have always constituted, the most effective anti-union weapon the Southwest’s farm-owners possess. Organized labor in Texas has for decades pointed directly at Mexican immigration as the source of its weakness. In Texas it is common to see illegals working alongside union men even in the building trades, a field completely controlled by unions in most states. For forty years organized labor in Texas has claimed to have fought Mexican immigration, but has so far been unable to prevent it.

The Southwest’s labor movement would strike at the heart of its problem if it turned its wrath from the impoverished braceros to the employers who use immigrants against the union movement. Not only the big growers but city employers as well have long used braceros against the unions, both directly as strikebreakers and indirectly as a threat against any type of union activity. Both illegals and contract workers have been used against almost all the National Farm Labor Union strikes in California. The same has been done in Texas, where the employers have even gone to the extreme of using contract workers, with the consent of the federal government, to influence union elections. [10]

The growers do not limit themselves to direct anti-union activity. They also use the braceros against other workers on the job. On almost all the farms there exists the practice of job division, the separation ef American and bracero workers into different areas, different jobs, different responsibilities. Mexican workers are paid less for the same work Americans do; Mexicans, even Mexican-American citizens, are shut out of jobs that carry responsibility; they are always given the hardest, the least desirable jobs; and everything possible is done to separate the American and bracero workers, to create competition and discrimination among them, and so divide them organizationally. The practice is by no means new. It is only a continuation of the discrimination that has always been used against minority groups of farm workers in the Southwest.

As might be expected the growers often receive aid from the government in their anti-union activity. To cite only a few cases:

On top of such open subversion of the law, local sheriffs and their hoodlum deputies have worked hand in glove with the vigilantes to terrorize the workers and their leaders when they make any attempt to unionize or otherwise protest their conditions.

Another group of Americans that suffers greatly from these conditions is the large Mexican-American population of the Southwest. Already one of the poorest and most oppressed national groups in this country, they suffer doubly: they lose their jobs to the braceros and are forced to work for lower wages both on and off the farms; and they suffer an increased discrimination from American workers who see in all Mexicans the source of their troubles. The Mexican-American then reacts against this double pressure and turns against the bracero as ferociously as does the American worker.

The total effect of this anti-Mexican prejudice, as seen by the Southwest’s own sociologists, has been to retard by over a generation the assimilation of the Mexican-American population into the main current of American culture. [13] The enormous influx of braceros, carrying with them their own language and customs, has made large sections of the Southwest once again a cultural peninsula of Mexico.
 

Forces Behind Large-Scale Migration

The “bracero problem,” which is the entire problem of emigrant Mexican workers in the United States, involves two large groups of these workers and two definite problems: the so-called “wetback problem,” which involves the great mass of braceros who come illegally into this country; and the “contract-worker problem,” which has been created by the government’s attempt to legalize the bracero labor system. Most writers use the term, “wetback problem” alone, and thereby give the entire issue a strictly legalistic cast, implying that a solution can be found in stopping illegal border crossings and legalizing the foreign labor supply. This, in fact, is the approach of the US and Mexican governments who, in their frenzied efforts to legalize the problem, have only aggravated it. The superficiality of this analysis will become obvious with a thorough understanding of the problem, the class problem, of the braceros.

On direct examination the problem appears to the observer as a flood of braceros into this country, causing or aggravating the problems already existent in the Southwest. Two forces account for this migration, the one pushing the braceros out of Mexico, the other pulling them into the United States.

The forces pushing the braceros northward are not new; the present flood is only a part of an emigration that has been occurring for decades. First the Spanish and later the Mexicans moved northward and settled the rich regions of the Southwest, divided the land into great ranches and founded its agricultural and mining economy. Later, with the entrance and eventual dominance of Amlerican settlers from the East the Mexican population became the chief supply of manual labor on the farms and in the mines. In California a great number of foreign groups, Japanese, Chinese, Italians, East Indians, Filipinos, and many others have one after the other been the major source of manual farm labor. The Mexicans are but the con-tinuators of this state’s foreign labor supply, while throughout the rest of the Southwest they have never ceased to be the major source of such labor.

One of the reasons for the great expansion of Mexican migration in the recent past can be seen in the population figures for that country. In 1930 the population of Mexico was about 16.5 million, ten years later, 19.6 million, and by 1950 it had grown to 25.5 million; an increase of 9 million, almost 55%, in only 20 years. [14] Without a corresponding development of Mexican economy present conditions became inevitable.

In the last decade an enormous increase in the cost of living has intensified economic pressures on great numbers of Mexican workingmen. In May 1948 the cost of living index, calculated on a 1939 base of 100, was 314.2. [15] Since the end of the war, inflation has been coupled with unemployment in many areas. And in 1950, the year the migration reached its peak, a widespread drought occurred. As a result of all these factors great numbers of Mexicans feel an irresistible push northward.
 

Huge Profits in Imported Labor

And the Southwest by no means resists the bracero; rather it exerts a force which would drag the bracero northward even if he were not pushed so strongly by his own country. True owners of the large Southwestern farms want a cheap labor supply, they demand Mexican workers. To maintain this supply, the large growers have since 1942 conducted large-scale recruiting of braceros, both legally and illegally. Farmer’s agents and independent labor contractors use handbills, word of mouth, and even radio announcements to spread word, actually untrue rumors, of high wages for farm workers in the United States. After attracting the workers into this country, often struggling them in, the agents and contractors often pack them into trucks and ship them as they would merchandise to the farms.

With unemployment and living conditions so bad in Mexico, this active recruiting has made jobs in the United States appear so good that braceros have been willing to pay to be smuggled across the border. Though transporting braceros into the country is a conspiracy and an action in violation of immigration laws, prosecution of the smugglers has been slight. This is not the least surprising when one knows who the illegal entrants work for. In one Texas area, for instance, according to a veteran immigration officer, one-half the grand jury had illegals working for them. [16]

Alongside illegal recruiting, legal recruiting of contract workers has gone on steadily since 1942. The history of this recruiting, the agreements between the United States and Mexico for bringing in Mexican workers, will be covered in a later section.

The reason the growers demand bracero labor is mainly the profits that can be made by paying them very low wages. An example of the profits to be made from using these men is the report of a study made of Texas’ Lower Rio Grande Valley where in 1949 the farmers made over $5,000,000 extra profit on their cotton crop alone by the payment of substandard wages. [17]

Furthermore, the growers have no legal responsibility for the illegals; there are no social security taxes to pay, no compulsory insurance, no need to provide housing or other facilities. Also, these workers are illegal aliens, immediately deportable, and have no organization behind them. They can neither protest nor change the conditions the growers impose upon them. Contract workers, while entitled by law to some benefits, are also aliens and immediately deportable if fired from their jobs, and so they can protest no more effectively than the illegals.

As an excuse for hiring braceros, the growers allege that native workers won’t do stoop labor, though Americans do such work wherever braceros aren’t hired. Because many stoop jobs require a great deal of skill and training farmers demand a constant supply of such labor. The most desirable workers are therefore men who are compelled to return each year, men who are isolated from the general labor mar,ket. Foreigners, especially contract workers who are imported and deported each year, are in greatest demand for this type of work since their isolation is assured. The labor contractors who hire most of the men and bring them to the farms are commonly paid $1.00 per man per day for supplying this type of worker, and are often given a monopoly on the gambling, liquor and prostitution rackets in the labor camps. [18]

The usual excuse given for hiring braceros is a lack of local labor. While this is sometimes true in certain areas at harvest time, there is almost always available native labor in adjoining areas. Most so-called “shortages of domestic labor” are really shortages at the “prevailing wage rate.” The prevailing wage rate is of course the subsistence-level wage for illegals. Though the growers usually claim that greater labor costs would break them, the same crop is almost always produced at a profit elsewhere with legal labor and at higher wage rates. [19]

The employment of illegals is actually not prohibited by law, though it is illegal to harbor a fugitive. But federal courts have said that this is not punishable since there is no specific penalty in the 1917 immigration laws. As a result there has never been any prosecution of growers who employ the illegal entrants.
 

Government Policy on the Bracero Problem

The policies of the government toward the illegals have been carried out by the Border Patrol. These policies, and the actions of the Patrol, are inconsistent and vacillating. The Border Patrol has never had a discernably clear policy toward the migrants; their actions can only be understood as a result of two forces: the degree of public protest and the demands of the big farmers.

This is well illustrated by an occurrence that has since been dubbed “The El Paso Tea Party.” [20] In 1948 the Patrol was carrying on a campaign against the illegals, arresting and deporting them in large numbers. At this time the growers in the area were clamoring for Mexican workers, claiming they couldn’t get enough Americans to harvest their crops. This was an election year and President Truman was making a campaign tour through Texas. It is reported that a delegation of local farmers and politicians complained to the President about the situation, especially at the indifference of the Patrol toward their harvest labor needs. Immediately thereafter a meeting of Immigration Service officials was held in El Paso. In the next forty-eight hours, 7,500 illegals crossed the border near the city, under the noses and apparently the closed eyes of the Border Patrol, into the eager arms of the waiting farmers. As could be expected, no explanation has ever been given by the Immigration Service.

In 1949 the Patrol in California carried out wholesale deportations. After a period these deportations dwindled down to almost nothing. And by no means because all the illegals had disappeared. In 1951, with a surge of publicity over the problem, wholesale arrests and deportations began again throughout the Southwest, finally culminating in the famous “wetback airlift.” With the disappearance of the problem from newspaper headlines deportations again slowed.

In general, the efforts of the Patrol to keep border jumpers out of the country have been a failure. The illegal entrants have a 1,600-mile border to cross, most of which is desert wilderness. Though most of the illegals cross in areas of Texas and California closest to the farms, it is still an almost impossible job to keep them out. Most officials and observers hold the view that a 1,600-mile fence plus the entire US Army would be necessary to keep all the illegals out of the country. [21]




II

To judge by its actions, the US government considers the bracero to be something less than a human being. While it has made a few demagogic attacks on the exploitation of farm labor, in action it has perpetuated the bracero labor system. It has insured the growers a legal, government-recruited pool of cheap labor; and it has done absolutely nothing to solve the problems of the migrants. In all its efforts the government has ignored the problems of the bracero, of this country’s own farm laborers, of US farm labor unions, and of the Southwest’s three million Mexican-Americans. Its actions have only enriched the corporation farmer and labor contractor.

Active recruiting of foreign workers began during the last war and has been continued to the present, with the exception of a short period in 1947. [1] From 1942 to 1947 – the period of Wartime legislation – the United States had a formal agreement with the Mexican government to recruit their nationals for farm work in this country. Similar agreements were made to bring in workers from Canada, Newfoundland and the British West Indies. In 1945 the number of foreign workers in the United States peaked at about 120,000, of which Mexicans were the greatest percentage. During the wartime period the approximate average number of Mexicans under contract each year was 68,000. In April 1947 Congress ended the program, and ordered the repatriation of all foreign workers by the end of the year.

Faced with the prospect of losing their cheap and easily manageable foreign workers and having to hire Americans who had become accustomed to higher wages and better living conditions in wartime industry, the farmers immediately protested the government’s action. By claiming a shortage of domestic labor the farmers got the US Employment Service to certify such shortages at prevailing wage rates. That is, if Americans would not work for the wages the farmers offered, then there existed a labor shortage. With the, approval of the USES the Immigration Service allowed foreign workers to remain in this country for limited periods. This procedure was followed repeatedly, permitting the foreign workers to remain in the United States as long as they satisfactorily served their employers.
 

Alibi of the “Prevailing Rate”

Ever since then the growers have used the device of “(prevailing wage rates” to secure authorization of labor shortages. Almost without fail the USES has certified such shortages even though domestic labor was often plentiful nearby. The few areas where real shortages did exist were almost always areas from which American workers had been driven by the competition of illegals. Actually there has never been a proven shortage of domestic farm labor in this country, not even during the war. [2]

When the wartime agreement expired, heavy pressure from the farm associations pushed the two governments into a new series of formal agreements for the recruitment of Mexican Nationals. With the very first of these postwar pacts the Mexican government entered on a policy as subservient to the American farm associations, and even more hypocritical, than the policy of the US government. On the one hand, the Mexican government has continually protested maltreatment of its nationals and violations of the agreements, even going so far as to denounce the first postwar pact. But it has never acted to prevent the hiring of its citizens. It still authorizes and even helps in American recruiting programs.

Just as the US Border Patrol determines its policies empirically, so too does Mexico decide its policies. On the one side it feels the pressure of its citizens, outraged at the treatment of their countrymen in the United States, and on the other side it feels the even greater pressure of American business. The Mexican government responds, though complainingly, to the flood of American capital which has been pouring into that country for the past few years. [3]

The demand of the growers for renewed contracting brought about an agreement between the two governments in February 1948. During this period of demand by the farmers, the NFLU reported (they were receiving many letters from American farm workers asking for jobs. [4] It demanded immediate suspension of the pact, claiming that the farmers wanted the agreement so they could maintain low wage rates and break the union by using the Mexicans as strikebreakers.

In October 1948, with widespread illegal entry into the United States, with employment of Mexicans outside the scope of the agreement, and with its violation becoming more common than its observation, conditions had become so openly bad that the Mexican government denounced the agreement.

Continued demands by the growers led to the signing of another agreement in August 1949. [5] A key provision permitted the hiring of Mexicans already in the United States and the regularizing of their immigration status for the period of their employment. In effect, this provision legalized the traffic in illegal entrants. This was admittedly the main desire of the growers, and according to the State Department it was the best means of solving the problem. Ernesto Galarza, the educational director of the NFLU, accused government officials of subjecting the “availability” provision of the agreement to fifteen different interpretations. He accused the California Farm Placement Service of certifying shortages of American workers when they actually were available but wouldn’t work for bracero wages. He also accused ‘the government of deliberate lying, stating, “I now say publicly for the first time thati government officials have deliberately misled the NFLU on the facts.” [6]
 

A Sop to Public Discontent

The question inevitably arises: why did the agreements accomplish nothing toward solving the problems their backers said they would solve? Ostensibly they were to alleviate labor shortages and prevent hiring of illegals by making possible the legal hiring of foreign workers. Actually, they were designed only to make the existing labor system more acceptable to the Mexican government and other protesting groups. This is clearly admitted in a State Department bulletin which said,

Negotiation of an agreement with Mexico is not the action which determines whether foreign workers shall be brought into this country. The agreement represents an effort only to assure that those workers who are legally admitted into the United States pursuant to the action taken by the USES and the USI&NS are employed under principles and procedures acceptable to both the Mexican and the US governments.” [7]

Actually Mexicans always could and still can be legally admitted into the United States without the approval or even the consent of the Mexican government.

By 1950, when the last agreement expired, conditions had grown so bad and the demand for foreign labor had grown so great, that another pact was engineered. At the same time the NFLU was complaining that between 60,000 and 80,000 native farm, workers were available for work in the Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys, but even so, due to bracero-depressed wage rates, employers could claim a shortage of “available” labor.

In early 1951 the whole problem became even more widely publicized and criticism of the government increased to the point where some new action became necessary.

In March the NFLU forced the deportation of 115 illegals who had been legitimatized in an unlawful processing operation at Calexico. [8] Ranchers had been rounding up illegals in the United States, shipping them to the border in trucks, and having them step over and back across the border so they could be certified as new entrants and then lawfully sign contracts. It was estimated that over 4,000 illegals had been certified by this method in one two-week period.

Then came the famous series of articles in the New York Times, exposing – or rather publicizing, since it had never been secret – the whole system, of bracero labor in the Southwest: the open hiring of illegals, the vacillating policies of the Border Patrol, the fabulous profits gained from bracero exploitation, the terrible effects upon the social status and living conditions of the Southwest’s Mexican-Americans, the use of braceros against unions, and the condonement and support of the whole system by government officials all the way up to Washington.

In April the President’s Commission on Migratory Labor turned in a report which generally substantiated all the criticisms made of the employers and the government by the NFLU. [9]

In the same month a blast came from Mexico, where the problems involved in recruiting workers had become a major governmental headache. [10]

Thousand of ragged workers from all parts of Mexico had joined in a “pathetic stampede” marked by hunger, sickness, repeated violence and several deaths to gamble on the slim chance of obtaining contracts. Accounts of the hiring procedure remind one of the early American slave markets. The braceros were herded by the police and the army as though they were animals. Hiring was done on an individual basis, the contractors inspecting each man and selecting only the poorest, the most submissive, the least likely to protest their conditions. Until the workers were loaded onto buses and trucks to be taken directly to the farms they had no way of knowing who they would work for, where, or for what wage.

By this time pressure had become so great that Congress decided to “do something.” Ignoring the protests of the American labor movement and the Mexican government, Congress “solved” the problem with the Poage-Ellender Bill. The bill provided for the hiring and importation of braceros by the two governments – a provision strongly opposed by the US labor movement – but contained no penalties directed against employers of illegals – the provision most strongly demanded by labor. The Secretary of Labor was to authorize the importation of Mexicans to those areas he certified as being short of domestic labor. There was to be no employment of Mexicans in jobs where domestic workers could “reasonably” be obtained, where employment of Mexicans would adversely affect wages and working conditions of domestic agricultural workers, or wherever labor disputes existed. [11]

Fifteen minutes after the bill became law, the United States asked Mexico to negotiate a new agreement. A pact was soon completed, though Mexican officials said it would be effective only for a “limited period to give the United States Congress an opportunity to act on President Truman’s recommendations for legislation to penalize employers of wetbacks.” [12] To date, this pact has been extended twice. [13]


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Section I

1. New York Times, Mar. 25, 1951, p.1.

2. Nation, May 5, 1951, p.408.

3. Newsweek, July 23, 1951, p. 46.

4. New York Times, Mar. 25, 1951, p.1.

5. Newsweek, Oct. 25, 1948, p.80.

6. New York Times, Mar. 26, 1951, p.25.

7. Ibid., June 3, 1951, p.30.

8. Ibid., Mar. 27, 1951, p.31.

9. Ibid., Mar. 27, 1951, p.31.

10. P.R. Kibbe, An American Standard for all Americans, in Common Ground, Autumn 1949.

11. E. Galarza, Big Farm Strike, in Commonweal, June 4, 1948, pp.178-82.

12. Kifobe, Common Ground.

13. New York Times, Mar. 27, 1951, p.31.

14. Ibid., June 3, 1951, p.30.

15. Kibbe, Common Ground.

16. New York Times, Mar. 25, 1951, p.1.

17. Saunders-Leonard study, as reported by G. Hill in his series on the braceros in New York Times, Mar. 26, 1951, p.25.

18. New York Times, Aug. 112, 1950, p.15.

19. Ibid., Mar. 26, 1951, p.25.

20. New York Times, Mar. 28, 1951, p.31.

21. Ibid., Mar. 28, 1961, p.31.

Section II

1. A history of the intergovernmental agreements is given by D. Goott in, Employment of Foreign Workers in US Agriculture, in Department of State Bulletin, July 18, 1949, pp.43-6.

2. P.R. Kibbe, Common Ground.

3. Aleman’s Mexico Rides High, in Business Week, Oct. 28, 1950, pp.117-8.

4. Summer Brings the Mexicans: A Statement by the NFLU, in Commonweal, July 2, 1948, pp.275-8.

5. A summary of this agreement is contained in the article, US and Mexico Sign Agricultural Workers Agreement, in Department of State Bulletin, Aug. 29, 1949, pp.313-14.

6. New York Times, Jan. 15, 1950, p.44.

7. D. Goott, Department of State Bulletin.

8. New York Times, Mar. 3, 1951, p.6.

9. Ibid., Apr. 8, 1951, p.38.

10. Reports of hiring in Mexico are contained in the New York Times, Apr. 23, 1951, p.1; Apr. 24, 1951, p.22; Apr. 26, 1951, p.8.

11. Ibid., July 13, 1951, p.24.

12. Ibid., July 21, 1951, p.17.

13. Christian Science Monitor, May 13, 1952, p.2.

 
Top of page


Main FI Index | Main Newspaper Index

Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive

Last updated on: 29 March 2009