Converging communities in fields of division [electronic resource] : Mexican American struggles for rights in an agricultural California town, 1940-1970
Keywords: History.

Located between San Francisco and Los Angeles near the central coast of California, the Salinas Valley is one of the most fertile and profitable farming regions on the planet. Agriculture is mechanized, highly dependent on Latino (mostly Mexican immigrant) labor, and immensely profitable for the mostly white growers who have controlled the region's political economy for generations. For most of the twentieth century, Mexican-origin people occupied a subordinate socioeconomic position in Salinas, stifled politically by a powerful grower elite who crushed agricultural workers' unionization efforts during the 1930s. It was not until 1970, under a strike led by César Chávez and the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, that Mexican Americans in Salinas experienced significant victory in their labor and civil rights organizing. This dissertation explores the forgotten pre-history of this moment of militancy to trace how Salinas's Mexican-origin population mobilized despite challenges to their politicization and protest during the post-World War II period. Histories of postwar Mexican American life and politics have tended to concentrate on the urban more than the rural, and agriculture-centered locales like Salinas remain understudied despite the fact that approximately one-third of Mexican-origin people lived in rural areas during and after World War II. In addition, scholars have only recently begun to excavate more information about Mexican American political activism during the years between World War II and the "radical" Chicano Movement era. This dissertation builds upon this emerging literature by tracing how Mexican American politicization in Salinas stalled or progressed between 1940 and 1970 due to changing national contexts of labor, internal and cross-border migration, and civil rights organizing. I argue that histories of rural Mexican Americans alter and augment existing narratives of Mexican American postwar political history and the Chicano Movement in three significant ways. First, Mexican Americans wishing to mobilize in rural communities like Salinas had to contend with changes in agricultural labor and immigration--and the complications of federal policy regarding both--in ways their urban counterparts did not. When growers began taking advantage of the Bracero Program (1942-1964) and replacing U.S. citizen farmworkers with cheaper non-unionized braceros, or male Mexican guestworkers, they deprived Mexican American workers of collective bargaining opportunities. Second, Mexican Americans faced the problem of forming community with Mexicans--specifically, braceros and undocumented migrants--when all three groups competed in the agricultural labor market and when white Salinas residents and immigration authorities conflated them all as "undesirable" and "alien" outsiders. Finally, when thirty-two Salinas braceros died in a horrific bus-train crash in 1963, urban and rural-based Mexican American community leaders converged around Salinas in a significant moment of unity to protest the Bracero Program and farmworkers' exploitation. Along with being an important site in early Chicano Movement history, Salinas became a significant center of civil rights protest through its Mexicano residents' involvement with organizations such as the Community Service Organization (CSO) and California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), even before UFW leader César Chávez's arrival in 1970. Though it was a small California town, Salinas occupied a significant and central position as a place that negotiated--as well as shaped--key moments and transitions in post-World War II labor, immigration, race relations, civil rights movements, and identity politics. By focusing on how Salinas's Mexican American residents fit into these processes, and the ways in which their community formation, politicization, and civil rights organizing were affected as a result, this project sheds needed light on how Mexican-origin people in agricultural California became political actors, in similar and different ways than their urban compatriots, between the World War II and Chicano Movement periods.