Bert Corona of El Paso, Texas, begins to organize unions for cannery and warehouse workers in the Southwest. It emphasizes a unified labor movement to combat discrimination and poverty. Mexican Americans in Beeville, Texas, desegregate the local high school. Novelist John Steinbeck publishes The Grapes of Wrath, calling attention to the poverty of migrant workers in the California grape-growing industry. The bracero program begins, allowing Mexican nationals to work in the Southwest as a source of cheap labor.
Growers prosper by having a regulated labor supply.
The program will remain in force until 1964. Seventeen are awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. In response to an appeal by Josefina Fierro de Bright to the Roosevelt administration, the Navy orders all personnel to stay out of the Mexican districts of Los Angeles. Josephina Niggli publishes Mexican Village , ten stories portraying the alienation of being part Mexican, part Anglo. The Federal District court rules the segregation to be unconstitutional.