Copyright by

José Guadalupe Villagrán 2019

The Dissertation Committee for José Guadalupe Villagrán Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation:

Revisiting the ‘Midwest Stream’: An Ethnographic Account of Farmworkers on the Texas-Michigan Circuit

Committee:

Martha Menchaca, Supervisor

John Hartigan

James Slotta

Néstor Rodriguez

Shannon Speed

Revisiting the ‘Midwest Stream’: An Ethnographic Account of Farmworkers on the Texas-Michigan Circuit

by

José Guadalupe Villagrán

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin May 2019 Dedication

This work is dedicated to those who work the hardest and receive the least recognition. The farmworkers I write about herein and those whose stories escape documentation are and always have been the people I attempt to remain most dedicated to in my academic work. My parents, brothers, cousins, and friends who have all labored and loved as migrant and seasonal farmworkers: it is to you whom I am dedicating this dissertation. I hope to not let you down.

Acknowledgements

A work like this written by a person raised by a village has plenty of acknowledgement to make. First and foremost, I want to acknowledge and praise my wonderful and loving wife, Elizabeth Teresa Villagrán, for being my rock in all things. Your love and patience mean the world to me. Additionally, I would like to acknowledge my family including my mother María Del Rosario Pérez, brothers Pedro Villagrán Jr. and

René Villagrán for helping me make this life one worth living and providing me with the type of support necessary to overcome the unjust hand we were dealt. I would also like to acknowledge my nieces and nephews who inspire me constantly. Julia, Sophia, Aleyssa, Rene, Jr. (“Juni”), and Xavier, you all are so special and talented, and I know our family is in good shape moving forward with you all leading us. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my in-laws Dennis, Linda, and Greg. You all are the best and I am constantly reminded of how much you love me because of your love for Elizabeth. As for the work itself, I would like to acknowledge the unwavering support of my dissertation committee supervisor and longtime friend and mentor, Martha Menchaca, who as a pioneering Chicana anthropologist, gives me ground to walk on. Your support for me has never wavered and for that I could not repay you. To the rest of my committee, I want to take the time to say that I appreciate you all for being such great mentors in your own ways. Shannon Speed, you taught me how to keep my heart in my work while never ceding an intellectual inch. Thank you for always having my back. Néstor Rodriguez, there is nobody better to talk shop with. I am proud to follow in your South Texas footsteps. John Hartigan, you have consistently pushed me to think deeper and always have time for my ramblings. I look forward to doing this anthropology stuff with you as a colleague. James

v Slotta, you really did push me across the finish line with your excellent mentoring. Thank you for your kindness and frankness; I am proud to call you a friend.

As for intellectual and emotional support toward accomplishing this project I would like to list several fellow graduate students, activists, and friends by name in no particular order for being hugely influential in my time working on this project and throughout my time in graduate school: Kate Layton, Perla Garcia, José Centeno, Jaime Puente, Álvaro Corral, Valerie Martinez, Liliana Rodriguez, Alejandro Flores, Greg Gonzales, Alex

Menaker, Valerie Martinez, David García, Amanda Gray, Alberto Gonzalez, Danielle

Good, Natasha Saldaña, Luis Guevara, Daniel Perera, Joey Russo, Nóra Tyeklár, Qui’chi Patlan, Lara Sánchez-Morales, Manuel G. Galaviz, Frank Rodriguez, Erika Galindo, Samantha Herrera, Eduardo Martinez, Delia H. Rosado, Hector Guzmán López, Arnold

Serna, Sareth García, Maria Romero, Raul Alonzo, Josué Ramirez, Carolina Ruiz, Debbie Cruz, Kevin Spence, Daniela Dwyer, Lisa Guerra, Myrna Ibarra, Martha Sanchez, John- Michael Torres, Criss Rocha, Julieta Paredes, Claudia García, Juanita Valdez-Cox, María “Doña Mari” Gómez, Yvette Salinas, José Torres, Susan Law, Osvaldo López, Diana Salazar, Santos Ramos, Angelica De Jesus, Nerli Paredes Ruvalcaba, Luis García, Elías

López, Leonel Ornelas, Claudia Gonzalez-Rivas, Bruce Lack, Miguel “Froggy” Torres, Haida López, Aleida Martinez-Flores, Gil Guzmán, Jerry Garcia, Dennis Valdés, Karma

Chávez, Anne M. Martinez, Charles Hale, Jason Cons. Some organizations I would like to acknowledge that were tremendously helpful are: La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), Texas RioGrande Legal Aid (TRLA), Fuerza del Valle Workers’ Center, and Michigan State University Migrant Student Services. These organization do the type of work necessary to bring a better day for farmworkers and they should be cherished for their roles in the community. I am forever indebted to all of your service to our community and your accommodation of me for my research. vi Finally, I would like to acknowledge my father Pedro Villagrán, Sr. His early departure from this world absolutely devastated our family but I am convinced that it is through his continued presence that we have achieved stability in our lives and that this dissertation has been completed. Quisiera ser mitad de lo que fue usted.

vii Abstract

Revisiting the ‘Midwest Stream’: An Ethnographic Account of Farmworkers in the Texas-Michigan Circuit José Guadalupe Villagrán, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2019

Supervisor: Martha Menchaca

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the farmworkers who have historically migrated from South Texas to various parts of the U.S. Midwest, composing a farm labor circuit known popularly as the “Midwest stream.” This flow of farmworkers has slowed since the late 1990s as migration for farm labor has declined significantly across the nation, but the farmworkers who remain living and working between these two intricately linked sites are the focus of my project. I conducted my research between 2014 and 2016 within the two historical bases of the stream: the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas and the state of Michigan. In essence, this work is an ethnographic update on these workers as well as a tracing of the historical and structural forces that shape the lives and migrations of U.S. farmworkers today. I begin with a historical contextualization of the stream by detailing how an agricultural empire in South Texas and a booming sugar beet industry in Michigan helped to establish a flow of workers from South to North in the early twentieth century. I continue by looking at how this stream evolved throughout the century, especially due to the Mexican guest worker program of the World War II era known as the “bracero

viii program,” and post-war industrialization. U.S. agriculture since the mid-twentieth century has followed a trend of increased farm size and crop production that leads to migrant and seasonal farmworkers remaining necessary to this day despite technological advancements in farming.

Today’s farmworkers of the Midwest stream continue to inhabit a world marked by work that is physically grueling, low-paying, temporary, and filled with broken contracts and wage theft. Additionally, these farmworkers continue to live in housing that ranks amongst the nation’s worst. Throughout this dissertation I examine why migration between these two sites has slowed while also exploring the ways in which the subjugation of a racially marked farm labor supply has been codified into the structure of U.S. agricultural production that impacts workers of the Midwest stream and beyond.

ix Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... xv

Introduction ...... 1

A Note on Positionality and Terms...... 4

Farmworkers by the Numbers...... 6

Methods: Doing ‘Field-Work’ in the Midwest Stream ...... 11

Methodology: Engaged Auto-Ethnography ...... 16

Chapter Outline ...... 20

Chapter 1: The Development of Commercial Farming and the Construction of a Farm Labor Supply in Texas and Michigan (1900-1964) ...... 25

The Early Years: The Formation of the ‘Magic Valley’ in Texas and a Sugar Beet Boom in Michigan ...... 26

The Valley and Michigan at the Turn of the Century (1900-1914) ...... 27

Border Hostilities and Early Migrations from the Valley to Michigan (1915-1929)...... 33

The Great Depression and Mexican Repatriation (1929-1940) ...... 42

Braceros, the Undocumented, and Mixed-Status Texas Mexicans: The Mexicanization of the U.S. Farm Labor Force (1940-1964) ...... 46

World War II: The Emergence of Guest Workers and the Undocumented in U.S. Agriculture ...... 47

Internal Migration to Escape Wage Stagnation: The Solidification of Three Major Domestic Farmworker Streams ...... 55

The Midwest Stream: South Texas Migrants...... 57

Chapter 2: Family Migrations and Resistance in a Post-Bracero Era (1965-Late 1990s) ...... 59

South Texas Families Replace Braceros and Lead the Movement for Farmworker Justice (1965-1989) ...... 60

x Decreased Production in South Texas and Advancements in Farming Technology Impact the Midwest Stream ...... 62

The Valley’s First Farmworker Uprising: La Casita Farms and the Emergence of the Texas UFW (1966-1975) ...... 65

Unions of the Midwest: Obreros Unidos, and FLOC (1966-1989) ...... 75

The Split: The Texas Farm Workers’ Union and the Texas UFW (1975- 1985) ...... 80

The Valley Loses its Farms but not its Migrant Workers (1989-Late 1990s) ...... 94

Seasonal Farm Labor Dries Up but the Valley Remains a Migrant- Sending Hub...... 96

Valley Urbanization and NAFTA: The Infrastructure of International Trade ...... 99

Michigan Fresh Fruit Market Drives Migration into End of Century ...... 103

Chapter 3: The Midwest Stream Today ...... 105

Larger Farms and Crop Specialization ...... 105

Today’s Valley Citrus: A Case Study ...... 107

Scott the Family Farmer in Michigan ...... 109

Continued Exploitation and Migration: Today’s Valley Farmworkers ...... 113

The Undocumented and the Daily Commuters ...... 114

The Rio Grande Valley: The Highest Rate of Wage Theft in the Country .118

Housing as a Shared Struggle: South Texas Colonias ...... 123

Policy and Changes to Enforcement Shape the New Midwest Stream: Workers Leave Michigan, Working in U.S. Corn Belt ...... 125

Maintaining an Imported Farm Labor Supply: Today’s Michigan Farmworkers ..135

Mechanization Rises, but Fresh Fruits Still Drive Migration to Michigan.136

Michigan Taps New Streams: From Texas Families to Florida Solos ...... 137

xi Farmworker Services in Michigan: The Burden of an Inorganic Labor Supply ...... 141

Michigan Farmworker Housing ...... 142

Michigan: Piece Rate as a Win-Win for Farmers ...... 146

Social Alienation and Farmworker Mental Health ...... 148

The H-2A Visa Guest Worker Rise and Continued Dependence on Exploited Mexican Labor ...... 151

A Legal Expert’s Take on H-2A ...... 155

Farmers and Their Hesitancy to Embrace a Government-Run Program ....161

Concluding Thoughts ...... 165

Chapter 4: Continued Colonialism in U.S. Agriculture ...... 168

Theorizing Migration ...... 170

Beyond the Neoclassical Approach ...... 171

Who Depends on Whom? Dependency between Farmers, Farmworkers, and National Projects ...... 172

Familial Migration ...... 176

Neoliberalism’s Multi-Pronged Attack on U.S. Farmworkers ...... 178

The Economic Toll of Neoliberalism Leads to Increased Immigration and Enhancement of Border Securitization ...... 179

Neoliberalism as a Technique of Governance: The Problem with Farmworker Success Stories ...... 184

The Question of Citizenship in U.S. Agriculture...... 190

Lacking Juridical Citizenship: Farm Labor and Deportability ...... 191

The ‘Failed Citizen’: The Struggles of Workers with Legal Status...... 192

Farmer Lust for the Silent, Desperate Worker ...... 195

Racialized Labor: Body, Space, and Labor Market Segmentation ...... 197 xii They Like It and They’re Good at It: Essentializing People of Mexican Origin as “Ideal Farmworkers” ...... 198

Racializing Space: How America’s Fields became Mexican ...... 201

Gender In and Out of the Fields...... 205

Less Women: More Money, More Problems ...... 206

The Sexualization of Farmworker Women ...... 208

Chapter 5: The Other Side of Narratives of Victimhood: Farmworkers Manage, Overcome, and Triumph ...... 214

Today’s Farmworker Movement ...... 215

UFW and FLOC: Today’s Farmworker Unions ...... 215

Pushing the Largest Purchasers for Increased Pay: The ‘Fair Food’ Model ...... 216

The Silver Linings of Migrant and Seasonal Farm Labor ...... 220

El Disempléo: Unemployment Checks and Time Off ...... 220

Luisa Migrates to Send her Children to College ...... 221

Trabajando en Aire Libre: Farmwork as Choice and Identity ...... 224

Forging Bonds: Working and Family Unity ...... 227

Farmworkers Resisting Outside of Organizing ...... 228

Lawyering Up ...... 228

Migrant Farmworkers and Technology ...... 230

Farm Ownership: Turning the Table ...... 231

Conclusion ...... 235

The Impact of Increased Animal Production and Fast Food on Sustainability and Farmworker Health ...... 235

Increased Animal Production and Farmworkers...... 236

xiii Farmworkers’ Poor Nutrition Fueled by Today’s Food System ...... 237

Concluding Thoughts ...... 239

Bibliography ...... 243

xiv List of Figures

Figure 1: Growth in acreage of Valley irrigated lands ...... 35

Figure 2: America’s Migrant Farmworker Streams ...... 56

Figure 3: Photo of author, mother, and brother in Wisconsin cucumber fields – 1995 .....99 Figure 4: Farmworker housing in Northwest Michigan (Photo courtesy of Miguel

Torres) ...... 145 Figure 5: Farmworker housing in Southeastern Michigan (Photo courtesy of the

author) ...... 145

xv Introduction

This dissertation is an ethnography of migrant and seasonal farmworkers living and working in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas and in the state of Michigan. These two regions have a linked agricultural labor history as both have been critical players in what many have termed the “Midwest stream”: the flow of farmworkers between South Texas and the U.S. Midwest that was most active between the mid-1960s and the late 1990s.

While the stream has slowed since its late twentieth century heyday, I set out to examine its remnants by conducting ethnographic fieldwork in both areas between August of 2014 and July of 2016. The diminishing number of workers migrating from South Texas to

Michigan, in particular, is the focus of my study as I ask the central research question: Why has migration for farm labor from South Texas to Michigan slowed? Additionally, in order to capture a more detailed account of today’s farmworkers I also ask: How have the living and working conditions for workers in this circuit changed since the 1990s (the end of its prominence)? To answer these questions, I spent time with farmworkers, farmworker advocates, and farmers of the Texas-Michigan farmworker circuit documenting the stories that numbers alone cannot tell us.

To be clear, I look at the lives of those whose occupation on a farm is not fixed, but rather temporary and/or migratory. Many people in America might work in agriculture, but only a certain unlucky few have the burden of working as a migrant and/or seasonal farmworker. This work is generally harder than other employment in agriculture because it is: physically grueling, low-paying, temporary, and unstable as work shortages come and go with the natural ebb and flow of crop production. And while the majority of agricultural 1 production in the United States now occurs through the use of machinery, a large number of seasonal fruits and vegetables still require hand-picking; many other “hand-requiring” jobs such as de-tasseling corn, hoeing weeds, and packing produce are season driven and rely on temporary workers throughout much of the country. The age of industrialization which swept through the country throughout the end of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century drastically reduced the significance of farming as a staple of the

American economy causing farming in general and migrant and seasonal farm labor in particular to be relegated to the American historical past in much of the popular public imaginary, but the millions of workers that find themselves there today are living and working very much in the present.

What follows is an ethnography of the migrant and/or seasonal farm laborers who work in some of America’s most lucrative crop industries. My work is primarily influenced by the following theoretical traditions: dependency theory, neoliberalism, cultural/juridical citizenship, and racialization. Dependency theorists explore the unequal relationship between wealthy nations and low-income nations and the situation of U.S. farmworkers necessarily requires discussion of U.S.-Mexico relations which many consider a prime example of this type of dependency. A discussion of neoliberalism, viewed as both a political/economic doctrine and as a technique of governance, allows for further contextualization of U.S. farmworkers along political, economic, and social lines.

The discourse surrounding juridical and cultural citizenship allows for an examination of a topic that is central to the American farmworker. Theories surrounding racialized labor which typically examine the multi-faceted ways in which a homogenous and often 2 subjugated labor force is constructed are quite useful when examining U.S. farmworkers because of the overwhelming homogeneity of ethnic Mexicans working in American fields, an issue that is covered extensively in this dissertation. In fact, all of these theoretical traditions will be discussed at length at later points in this text as I contextualize today’s Midwest stream. Broadly speaking, my examination of South Texas and Michigan tells a story of America’s farming past, present, and future; this is a story I have authored both through my research and my own lived experiences. Of course, the farmworker present is one that is clearly intricately embedded within a farmworker past and it is with this understanding that I proceeded to craft a historical ethnography.

I place my work within the tradition of historical anthropology set forward by those such as Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf, Martha Menchaca, and others who refuse to concede the dissolution of the significance of history in shaping the present. Here I wish to explain my two chapters dedicated to the historical contextualization of the U.S. farmworkers I studied by reading the following passage from Sidney Mintz’s significant

1986 work:

My bias in a historical direction will be apparent. Though I do not accept uncritically the dictum that anthropology must become history or be nothing at all, I believe that without history its explanatory power is seriously compromised. Social phenomena are by their nature historical, which is to say that the relationships among events in one ‘moment’ can never be abstracted from their past and future setting. Arguments about immanent human nature, about the human being’s inbuilt capacity to endow the world with its characteristic structures, are not necessarily wrong; but when these arguments replace or obviate history, they are inadequate and misleading. Human beings do create social structures, and do endow events with meaning; but these structures and meanings have historical origins that shape, limit, and help to explain such creativity” (1986, xxx).

3 Indeed, my bias toward the historical in this dissertation is also apparent. As my research and writing progressed it became increasingly clear to me that one could not talk about today’s U.S. farmworkers without historically delineating the forces that shape their lives.

As this dissertation reveals, history very much shapes the present of U.S. farmworkers as they continue to face the severe consequences of generations-long exclusion and exploitation causing time, in many ways, to stand still in U.S. agriculture.

As well, I place my work within the tradition of scholarly investigations of migrant and seasonal farmworkers across the U.S. carried out by those such as anthropologists

Patricia Zavella, Martha Menchaca, Ann Aurelia López, Angela Stuesse, David Griffith, and Seth Holmes who combined provide a myriad of analytic tools with which to examine the lives of U.S. farmworkers including historical, political, economic, and social forces. I aim to contribute to the critical work offered by these scholars as we collectively attempt to seek a better understanding of the structure of U.S. farm labor in hopes that we may one day see the end to their hardships.

A NOTE ON POSITIONALITY AND TERMS As a child of Mexican farmworker parents who was raised in the border region of

South Texas known as the “Rio Grande Valley” (“the Valley”, colloquially), my personal history has been shaped by migration and farm labor in many ways. In my community along the border migration was by no means a rarity. For generations the Valley has maintained a substantial population of both immigrants from Mexico (and to a lesser extent

Central America), and “internal migrants”—those who travel to work crops seasonally in

4 various parts of the country and then return home to their South Texas base when the season is over. I learned first-hand about this lifestyle in the summer of 1993 when I found myself, age seven, with my eleven-year-old brother and my middle-aged, recently divorced mother working in Eastern Wisconsin’s cabbage and cucumber fields.

“Migrantes,” or “Migrants,” we called ourselves. To this day, many migrant farmworkers in South Texas do not feel the need to complete the phrase by adding the

“farmworker” part to “migrant farmworker.” Perhaps the word stuck with us because the movement itself of bodies, vehicles, and belongings from our South Texas homes to el norte, or “the North,” where we found ourselves in culturally disparate worlds from our own, was the most significant part of being a migrant farmworker to us as opposed to the farm labor itself. Or maybe we used “migrant” as shorthand because of the word’s prevalence in social service programs offered to us that have seemingly entered deeply into farmworker vernaculars. Schools with high migrant and seasonal farmworker populations developed “migrant labs,” (a classroom setting migrant farmworker students are allowed access to for academic support as well as for free school materials) “migrant counselors,” and an array of other “migrant” somethings. Finally, many others simply refer to themselves as “farm workers” when working as either migrant or seasonal farm laborers.

For the purpose of this dissertation, I use the term “farmworkers” to refer to all migrant and/or seasonal farm laborers1 because the removal of a space between the words “farm” and “worker” is intended to denote more of an identity rather than an action. As well, there

1 Excluding year-round, non-migratory farm labor and livestock workers. 5 are times where I will use the acronym “MSFW” which is short for “migrant and seasonal farm worker” and is commonly used in literature and data on farmworkers. Narrowing down who counts as a “farmworker” deserves a bit more attention.

The question of who constitutes a migrant and seasonal farmworker is more complicated than might first appear. For the most part, researchers and others working with migrant and seasonal farmworkers rely heavily on governmental classification to define who a farmworker is and typically they are qualified along metrics of distance traveled for work (migrant) and days worked per year (seasonal). And because I did not conduct my own enumeration in this study, I rely on this classification as well. I consider a “migrant farmworker” one who has traveled at least 75 miles for employment in agriculture and a

“seasonal farmworker” one who has worked in agriculture for 150 days or less in a year— a metric used by many. While these thresholds can seem arbitrary, their usefulness lies in attempting to count today’s farmworkers.

FARMWORKERS BY THE NUMBERS Currently, there are approximately 2 million migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the United States according to most estimates, although a precise enumeration of U.S. farmworkers remains elusive for many reasons not limited to them being a highly mobile workforce of whom a substantial portion are understood to be undocumented, or without proper work authorization (people whose employment is not legal are difficult to track). It is not a revelation that undocumented immigrants are particularly overrepresented in agricultural, cleaning, construction, and food preparation jobs (Passel 2006). Former

6 Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack recently admitted as much at the 2013 Agriculture

Outlook conference when he said that “agriculture relies to a great extent on immigrant labor, and everybody in this room understands and appreciates that a good deal of that labor isn’t necessarily in this country legally.” Given this understanding, farmworker enumerations are inconsistent and have a high likelihood of underreporting the overall number of workers. This creates a situation where those of us engaged in research of farmworkers rely heavily on data accumulated largely by varying government agencies that we are certain has significant shortcomings. For example, sources of farmworker data have inconsistent estimates for the overall national migrant and seasonal farmworker population. Estimates range from around 750 thousand (U.S. Department of Agriculture

2017a, IX-21) to just 1.35 million (Zahniser, Taylor, Hertz, and Charlton 2018, 9). This is both a matter of taxonomy and a slippery enumeration process. While neither of these studies can account for the full undocumented population, they give somewhat of a range for the total farmworker population nationally.

For a deeper demographic look into U.S. farm labor I look at the National

Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor. This study is ideal because it looks only at migrant and seasonal farmworkers rather than others working in agriculture and because it attempts to factor in the high number of undocumented farmworkers. It tells us that 69 percent of farmworkers were born in Mexico and that 83 percent of all U.S. farmworkers are “Hispanic”—this includes U.S.-born

“Hispanics” and those born in Central America—with about only half having legal permission to work in the United States (Hernandez and Gabbard 2018, 1). The significant 7 distinction here is “shuttle migrants” versus “follow the crop migrants,” as NAWS distinguishes. Shuttle migrants move more than 75 miles to one fixed work location in a year whereas follow the crop migrants move 75 miles within the United States more than once in a year to different seasonally available crop production jobs. The drawbacks with their findings are that they do not enumerate the overall farmworker population and while they survey farmworkers across the nation, they do not disaggregate the data by state besides California. Still, their attempt to uncover farmworker demographics without ignoring the undocumented and their dedication to a thorough analysis of the farmworker demographic makes their data worthwhile for farmworker researchers. Beyond governmental publications, I also turn to academic studies on the farmworker population such as the recent 2015 work in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics entitled

"Why Do Fewer Agricultural Workers Migrate Now?”. This study claims that overall, there has been a 60 percent decrease in migratory farm labor in the United States since the late

1990s (Fan, Gabbard, Peña, and Perloff. 2015, 665). The authors look at a broad array of mostly governmental datasets on farmworkers to come up with this figure of a 60 percent drop in overall migration for farm labor and then attempt to hypothesize why this is happening. They claim that an increase in restrictive immigration policy and upward social mobility of Mexicans in both the U.S. and Mexico has had a large role in the decline of migration for farm labor. As border enforcement became tighter, migration for farm labor was negatively impacted as undocumented people faced the added risk of increasingly vigilant immigration enforcement. Additionally, people like me and others who were raised as farmworkers typically settle out into other industries. Finally, they attribute changes to 8 structural changes in both the United States and Mexico as having impacted the decline in migration for farm labor. They claim, for example, that some U.S. migrant farmworkers who have traditionally had Mexico as their base are moving on to other industries in

Mexico causing a decrease in this particular stream of workers. As for structural changes in America causing reduced migration they point to increased restrictive immigration enforcement, something I concur with and detail at length in this dissertation. The drawbacks to this study for my purposes are that it does not disaggregate data by state or region. It relies quite extensively on faulty data from government publications and is a purely quantitative analysis which, while useful, gives us little in the form of qualitative analysis. Finally, as a national study, it likely skews heavy in the direction of California, the Pacific Northwest, and Florida while my present study looks at an older and increasingly less significant part of the American farming sector. Fortunately, for disaggregated, site-specific data I can turn to other options.

At the state level, Texas is the third-leading agricultural-producing state in terms of cash value in the nation, behind California and Iowa, respectively bringing in approximately 22.75 billion dollars in 2017 (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2019, np). As well, Texas has more farms and ranches combined than any other state in the country with

248,800 covering nearly 130 million acres and is estimated as having the third highest number of total hired farm laborers (this includes any type of farm and seasonal farm laborers in the country. As for migrant farmworkers, Texas ranks only the eleventh highest state with relatively few migrant farm laborers working within the state (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2017b, np). This makes sense when considering that ranching is dominant 9 in Texas (ranching requires less workers), as opposed to crop production which requires higher amounts of workers, and that much of the agriculture labor supply in the state can be found organically in distinct Texas regions, decreasing a necessity for migratory labor.

One also must consider, however, that the state is still home to one of the largest migrant farmworker populations as many people in the Valley in particular, do not necessarily do farm work in Texas but rather venture northward to other states to work and so are counted as part of the farmworker population elsewhere (Gerber 2006). As such, Texas remains a hub for migrant farm labor to other states. Most of this labor pool is located within the Rio

Grande Valley, which is what we see when turning to the few available datasets that break down the demographics of Texas farmworkers such as the one conducted by Michael

Gerber in 2006 on behalf of the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs. As well, for many of these migrant workers, South Texas is their home base and there they may file for unemployment, find another short-term job, or continue to work in the fields with the latter becoming increasingly rare. There are an estimated 289,600 MSFWs in

Texas as of 2015 without disaggregating the data for the Rio Grande Valley (Texas

Workforce Commission 2018, np). The study does affirm, however, that the Valley is home to the highest percentage of crop production in the state as well as the largest northern- bound migrant farmworker supply in the state. From their analysis as well as the available data on Valley farmworkers via governmental sources, I estimate that the Valley must have a population of around 70,000 to 100,000 MSFWs who either do work locally and/or migrate outward for farm labor.

10 The state of Michigan ranks sixth among U.S. states in overall hired farm labor, number of migrant farmworkers, and number of seasonal farmworkers (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2017b). Additionally, Michigan recently underwent a vast profiling of the state’s farmworker labor force in Alice Larson’s 2013 enumeration study which disaggregates the migrant and seasonal farmworker population by county and whose use of surveys and interviews reveal information regarding migration patterns and industry changes that provide valuable insight for my project. She concludes that the total MSFW population in Michigan in 2013 is 49,135 (38), a number disputed as an underestimation by some farmworker advocates in the state who told me via informal interactions that they did not believe this number. Larson finds that the majority of Michigan’s migrant and seasonal farmworkers are of Mexican origin and her findings lend support to the claim that many previously migratory laborers are beginning to settle permanently in Michigan and that it seems likely agricultural production will continue to rise in the state as their specialty crops of blueberries and cherries among others remain in high demand. While lacking precise data on the number of farmworkers in these regions, this composite of sources provides a workable profile of farmworkers in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and

Michigan.

METHODS: DOING ‘FIELD-WORK’ IN THE MIDWEST STREAM The stream of hundreds of thousands of Texas farmworkers largely of Mexican descent that flooded the U.S. Midwest and other parts of the country throughout the early to mid-twentieth century formed, in part, what Historian Marc Simon Rodriguez has

11 referred to as “The Tejano Diaspora” (2011). Texas Mexicans and their culture proliferated throughout the country as workers who sought to leave the horrid working conditions of

South Texas were recruited nationally by public and private farming interests who were eager to receive the cheap, plentiful labor of the South Texas Mexicans (Valdés 1991,

Weber 2015). By World War II, the idea of securing migratory labor from those of Mexican origin for U.S. farms found its way into government policy through the bracero program2 and by the end of the twentieth century farm labor in the U.S. had clearly become “Mexican work.”3 In South Texas, with its proximity to the Mexican border, Mexican immigrant workers were utilized in abundance ever since commercial farming arrived to the region in the early twentieth century (Bowman 2016, Valdés 1991, Weber 2015). But in places distant from the border such as Michigan, available local labor supply has seemingly never been great enough to keep up with demand and farmers in the state have traditionally looked to other regions like Texas and, increasingly, Florida, for help in the form of largely

Mexican labor.

My two sites of study, South Texas and Michigan, were chosen, in part, because of my personal relationship to both communities. I was raised in the Rio Grande Valley and attended Michigan State University as an undergraduate through a federally funded migrant farmworker assistance program. I also found them to be ideal research locations because of their linked histories as a farmworker-sending and farmworker-receiving regions joined

2 A government-coordinated guest worker program that recruited hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmworkers which will be discussed at length later in Chapters 2 and 3. 3 Here the quotations serve to denote a process of racialization in which people become racialized in the popular imaginary despite Mexicans not being racially homogenous. 12 by a shared labor supply. Ultimately my goal was to examine what is left of the once- thriving migratory circuit known as the “Midwest Stream” between Texas and Michigan and the greater U.S. Midwest. To this end, I spent 23 months from September of 2014 to

August of 2016 conducting ethnographic research with migrant and seasonal farmworkers.

I spent eight months in South Texas, six in Michigan and returned for nine more months in the complex work environment of South Texas in order follow the seasonal peaks of agricultural labor in these two locations to examine the scene of U.S. crop production. I conducted research by interviewing farmworkers I met through the organizations I worked with as well as through connections I had already fostered with family and friends in the communities. I also interviewed as secondary target groups farm owners, and farmworker advocates and service providers whom I met through my positions with the various organizations I worked with. Additionally, especially because I was interested in looking at why migratory farm labor has decreased so rapidly, I interviewed former migrant farmworkers who provided rich details as to why their migrations ceased.

Overall, I conducted structured, open-ended audio-recorded interviews with twenty

MSFWs, two with former MSFWs, five with farm owners, and ten with farmworker advocates between both regions. These interviews were structured into ten very broad questions that I presented the interviewees geared toward answering my research questions with opportunity given for interviewees to include their own questions or address topics or questions not brought up during the interview.

In Texas, I began working with La Unión del Pueblo Entero or (LUPE) as an office volunteer, where I was able to identify members of theirs who were farmworkers while 13 reviewing their membership applications. This opened the door for me to make connections with several farmworkers while participating in regular operations of the organization such as answering phones, helping translate documents, and participating in voter registration efforts, among other tasks. LUPE originated as the Texas branch of the California-based

United Farm Workers (UFW) founded by labor leader César Chávez but has since moved on to broader advocacy that includes immigrant and working-class struggles, and now exists as a sort of quasi-union in the deeply anti-union climate that permeates Texas

(Amberg 2004). The organization as it exists today emerged from the ashes of the long- gone Texas farmworker movement which attempted for years to gain union recognition for

Texas farmworkers and was headquartered in LUPE’s current location in the city of San

Juan in a building then known as “El Cuhamil.” And while I discovered that only around

15 percent of LUPE’s current membership is composed of farmworkers—a number indicative of the fall of agricultural significance in the region—their offices remain covered in farmworker décor and they still are sometimes referred to by those in the community as

“La Union de Campesinos” or “The Farmworker Union.” Additionally, I volunteered with other groups that more specifically advocate farmworker causes such as the “farmworker division” of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, or TRLA (a free legal services organization), and

Fuerza Del Valle Workers’ Center (a relatively new non-profit fighting wage theft across the Valley that has won several cases for local farmworkers). With TRLA I helped with everything from outreach (making visits to farm labor sites) to typing court documents and attending legal mediations for cases involving Valley-based farmworkers. With Fuerza Del

Valle Workers’ Center I was simply an active supporter and attended meetings and events 14 as they pertained to farmworkers, including a case involving a large group of watermelon packing shed workers who were victims of wage theft. Because these three organizations all worked so closely, yet all had different functions, I was able to do farmworker advocacy in various ways and was privy to working with groups offering various services of importance for most farmworkers ranging from immigration related help (LUPE) and housing conditions (LUPE and TRLA) to wages (TRLA and Fuerza) and working conditions (TRLA and Fuerza).

Michigan, situated among The Great Lakes, is a major player in the U.S. agricultural scene. Michigan’s climate and fertile soil make it ideal for the production of a variety of crops such as blueberries, asparagus, cherries, and watermelons among several others. During the harvesting season in late spring and throughout summer, Michigan farmers have for decades relied on an imported labor class consisting mostly of Mexican- origin people to harvest their crops (Alvarado and Alvarado 2003; Valdés 1991). The crops are primarily harvested in the western counties of Berrien, Kent, Muskegon, Oceana,

Ottawa, and Van Buren among others interspersed throughout the state (Larson 2013).

Here I worked with a migrant and seasonal farmworker advocacy group based out of

Michigan State University named Migrant Student Services or MSS. MSS provides various migrant services predominately in education. They run the College Assistance Migrant

Program (CAMP) which admits students from migrant and seasonal farmworker families into the university and provides them structural and financial support and the High School

Equivalency Program (HEP) which allows for farmworkers who have not attained a high school diploma to receive their G.E.D. at the university through an on-campus education 15 program. Michigan State University’s MSS also works with other resource providers and advocacy organizations in order to assure that the state’s farmworkers are served on multiple fronts. With MSS I was in many ways hanging out with old friends who I had known since my own days as a student in the program. My position as a former CAMP student gave me significant access to farmworkers via the connections MSS has with the farmworker community in the state. I was essentially serving as a representative of the organization in their recruitment efforts. I traveled with MSS staff to labor camps and farmworker student recruitment events to promote the services MSS offers, while making ethnographic inroads through their established position. Additionally, I helped mentor the incoming class of farmworker students when the fall semester began. This organization was distinct from the organizations I worked with in Texas in that its primary focus is the provision of academic services through a major academic institution rather than grassroots advocacy, yet MSS is active in working with other farmworker advocacy groups in the state and even is well connected to several farmers in the state. From within my position with MSS I had access to the entire gamut of agricultural production in Michigan.

METHODOLOGY: ENGAGED AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHY Yes, I spent several years as a migrant farmworker as a child; no, I am not guaranteed to produce better work on the topic than others because of this. I do, however, have a different starting point from others who have not been farmworkers and I utilize the benefits that come with auto-ethnography to my advantage in this project. Auto- ethnography, or the study of one’s own cultural group, offers promising possibilities for

16 researchers. The works of Deborah Reed-Danahay (1997) and Ellis, Adams, and Bochner

(2011) provide a useful theoretical overview of the varying types of auto-ethnography and their academic history originating in the postmodernist turn, allowing me to situate my own project among these types. While these scholars among others (Abu-Lughod 1991; Adams

2011; Tedlock 1991) believe in the generative capacity of auto-ethnography, it is critical to also consider the critiques that have been levied against it. Criticisms of auto- ethnography mostly revolve around issues of objectivity and representation. Concerns about representation within auto-ethnography are typically due to the perception that the researcher often over-imposes their narrative over the narratives of those being studied

(Coffey 1999) or cannot sufficiently disentangle themselves from the subjects they are working with to provide a strong ethnographic account, thus disrupting the data collection and writing process (Abu-Lughod 1991; Sparkes 2000). In order to confront this critique,

I attempt to disentangle myself sufficiently (while not overly compromising my insider status) by confronting my present situation of privilege and socioeconomic comfort. While

I have some insider status, I am about two decades removed from having been a farmworker and so I must resist the temptation to centralize my personal narrative and experiences in this project. Though it certainly helps that I have been there before, I am not a farmworker now and cannot dwell in the past in order to paint an ethnographic present.

The way that I describe the farmworker experience through the writing process as an auto- ethnographer brings up other representational issues. Anthropologist Donna Young discusses one of these issues when she says that “even when we work at home, we tend to respond and to write as if we were outsiders. That is, we continue to translate the ways of 17 one group of people for another group of people. We don’t assume a native audience, we assume an academic audience…We become outsiders” (2005, 208). This process of becoming an “outsider” through the academic writing process is one I seek to avoid through maintained collaboration with my research subjects, a continued open advocacy for their rights and an effort to employ language that is understandable by more than just an academic audience. Still, I must take these critiques of auto-ethnography very seriously and while I do not agree that auto-ethnography is inherently limited I believe these points of concern remain useful in a dialectical sense and respond to them as necessary.

Ultimately, my end goal is to produce ethnography along the lines of what Steven Tyler envisioned when he said that “We better understand the ethnographic context as one of cooperative story making that, in one of its ideal forms, would result in a polyphonic text, none of whose participants would have the final word in the form of a framing story or encompassing synthesis—a discourse on the discourse” (1986, 227). But achieving this goal is easier said than done, methodologically speaking.

Looming over the head of all qualitative researchers is the question of objectivity especially as it pertains to our methodology. Our descriptive analyses will always be inherently subjective even when we adhere closely to the most academically sound methods of qualitative research. The debate over objectivity in academia has led to a multitude of reactions by various disciplines and has, in many ways, allowed for the discussion of activist research, which anthropologist Shannon Speed defines as “the overt commitment to an engagement with our research subjects that is directed toward some form of shared political goals” (2008, 215). The work of Speed and others draw influence from 18 the 1988 work of biologist philosopher Donna Haraway, which calls into question a researcher’s positionality in the process of producing and interpreting “objective” knowledge and data. This intervention by Haraway facilitates the emergence of activist research by destabilizing the ground on which “scientific objectivity” walks and by assigning value to partial perspectives which are typically “preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world.” (1988,

584). On the other hand, Haraway also warns us against the possibility of the activist researcher’s work being compromised due to an over romanticization of the “view from below.” According to Haraway, either the perspective from below is dismissed or it is inaccurately articulated thus causing a given project’s academic integrity to come into question. This trap, according to activist anthropologist Charles Hale, can be avoided considering that “activist research does bring an additional demand for empirical rigor, and a well-developed methodological canon that can guide us to produce the best possible understanding of the problem at hand, the confidence to distinguish between better and less good explanations and the means to communicate these results in a clear and useful manner” (2001, 14). Carrying this further, Haraway argues that “it is precisely in the politics and epistemology of partial perspectives that the possibility of sustained, rational, objective inquiry rests” (1988, 584). For Haraway, partial perspective is the only perspective through which knowledge is produced because traditional academic notions of objectivity are themselves imbued with subjectivity which only allows for a partial inquiry as opposed to an all-encompassing one. The seemingly omnipotent, omnipresent perspective that Haraway dubs the “God trick” is one that many scientific purists seek but 19 will never attain. They can never see all sides to a given surface and can never live the experience of the subjugated. Additionally, activist scholars remind us that we must reckon with the political implications of our actions and/or inactions in research and the ethical responsibilities we carry as we walk on always-subjective grounds. While Hale, Speed and others call for a methodology in which research goals are mutually created between the researcher and community activists, the lack of existing farmworker activist collectives in these regions made their call rather difficult to heed and so my project perhaps falls on the peripheries of what might be considered “activist research.” Still though, my position as farmworker advocate was not concealed at any point throughout my study and my intentions of promoting and fighting for a better situation for farmworkers is no secret. For what it is worth, I felt that my position as a former farmworker and an open advocate for farmworkers helped me capture a story from below while my academic training and current position of relative privilege allowed me to capture the stories of those at the top such as farmers I interviewed whose lives were far more complex than a dichotomous good guy/bad guy structure would allow.

CHAPTER OUTLINE In Chapter 1, “The Development of Commercial Farming in Texas and Michigan,”

I review the historical processes that created the migrant farmworker circuit between Texas and Michigan by reviewing the histories of farm labor in both regions and discussing the origins of this migration circuit in the period between 1900 and 1964. Here I rely heavily on the various works of labor historians of the regions (Bowman 2016; Rodriguez 2011;

20 Valdés 1991; Weber 2015) who have laid a solid foundation for understanding the connectedness between labor in these two geographically distant regions. In this chapter I review archival data to discuss how the expansion of commercial agriculture in the twentieth century steadily developed an ethnic Mexican labor force to work in America’s booming crop industries. I examine the impact that the use of Mexican guest workers during and after World War II had on the American farm labor force and in particular within the sites of the Midwest stream.

In Chapter 2, “Family Migrations and Resistance in a Post-Bracero Era (1965-Late

1990s),” I examine the period between 1965 and the late 1990s when the use of Mexican guest workers ended and American farmers came to largely rely on a domestic, but still ethnically Mexican, farm labor force. In this chapter, I discuss how domestic migrant streams formed between U.S. sites throughout the nation as a result of the years of incoming Mexican guest workers and undocumented immigrants who settled mostly in the

U.S. Southwest and Florida. In particular, the three states of California, Texas, and Florida became hubs of a large supply of ethnic Mexican workers who worked both locally and across national migration circuits filling the void left by the departed Mexican guest workers, especially in the case of Michigan. Additionally, I explore how farmworkers began to resist subjugation during this time by examining farmworker uprisings and organizing efforts from a significant worker strike at La Casita Farms in the West Rio

Grande Valley in 1966 to farmworker union activity throughout the Midwest in the period following the late 1960s. Finally, I conclude the chapter by examining the gains made by

21 the farmworker uprising and what farmworker life along the Midwest stream looked like in the decades following these farmworker uprisings.

Chapter 3, “The Midwest Stream Today,” is a discussion of my findings where I attempt to answer my central and secondary research questions: “why has migration for farm labor between south Texas to Michigan slowed?” and “how have living and working conditions for workers in this circuit changed since the 1990s?”. I begin with a discussion of how the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas faced a major transformation as it rapidly moved from an agricultural economy to a service sector economy during the last decades of the twentieth century. While the population of farm laborers working locally diminished,

I discuss how low wages in the region have maintained the Valley as a prominent migrant farmworker sending region. Most MSFW from South Texas today are heading to the U.S.

Corn-belt states of Illinois, Nebraska, and Iowa, while Michigan is primarily now using workers from Florida and “H-2A visa” guest workers from Mexico. Michigan’s shift from the use of traditional Texas workers to Florida and H-2A visa guest workers is central to my discussion in this chapter. As for my secondary question of how living and working conditions have changed, I discuss my findings that conditions have only improved marginally as enforcement of employment protections for farmworkers remains underwhelming. This is especially the case in the Valley where an undocumented labor supply is bountiful as opposed to Michigan which has to offer services and pay higher wages to recruit a farm labor force it does not have locally. Ultimately, the data as well as conversations with farmers and farmworker advocates revealed a picture of how migrant farmworker streams change and how living and working conditions seemingly do not. 22 Chapter 4, “Continued Colonialism in U.S. Agriculture,” is an analysis of my findings by examining them under various theoretical lenses related to the farmworker experience. Here I offer further nuance to what the numbers demonstrating a decrease in migration between these regions tell us and review the theoretical discourses of dependency theory, neoliberalism, citizenship, race, and gender that helped to organize my observations. If farmworkers are victims of perpetual subjugation, an answer is owed to how this subjugation occurs. U.S. farmworkers are the intersection of multiple margins and this chapter is my attempt at identifying and illuminating these areas of marginalization.

In Chapter 5, “The Other Side of Victimhood: Farmworkers Manage, Overcome, and Triumph,” I highlight stories of farmworker agency and contest the notion that MSFW are one-dimensional victims of a system built on their exploitation. I examine how farmworkers of today are advocating for themselves and how they are shaping their own lives independent of the cyclical, systematic oppression they face as laborers. Several farmworker organizing efforts are active nationally and groups like the Coalition of

Immokalee in Florida as well as the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in Ohio and North

Carolina provide examples of how farmworkers resist their subjugation. Not all farmworkers do farm labor for the same reason and often times there is strategy behind the choice to “go up north.” Whether the goal is to work to gain particular farmworker benefits from service programs or unemployment benefits in order to rest for half the year and spend free time with one’s family, farmworkers choose to migrate or work seasonally for a variety of reasons that must be seriously considered. This strategizing of today’s farmworkers of

23 the Midwest stream is a strategy that has developed over the course of the long and complex history of this flow of farm laborers rooted in the early twentieth century.

24 Chapter 1: The Development of Commercial Farming and the Construction of a Farm Labor Supply in Texas and Michigan (1900- 1964)

The entry of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans during and after the [Mexican] Revolution introduced an enormous, exploitable labor pool to South Texas and the rest of the Southwest. These migrants entered the region at the same time that newcomer farm interests descended on South Texas from the Midwest and Southeast. These simultaneous population shifts allowed for the explosive growth of the agricultural economy that began in the mid-1910s and continued, despite depressed conditions elsewhere, into the 1930s. Agricultural (and some industrial) interests in the rest of the United States watched this spectacular growth fueled by labor surpluses and low wages and sought to draw much of this labor force away from the border region, helping to create a nationwide migrant labor stream (Weber 2015, 42).

In this chapter, I look at the historical development of the Midwest stream from the starting point of the early twentieth century until the mid-1960s which is the time in which the flow of workers from Texas to Michigan reached its zenith. Since the early twentieth century, the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas has been an epicenter of cheap—mostly immigrant—labor. What took shape early in the century was a system of exploitation of ethnic Mexicans at the hands of ambitious Anglo land developers and farmers arriving mostly from the U.S. Midwest. These exploited Mexican workers were mostly newly arriving refugees fleeing the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The newly arriving, Anglo farming interests who dreamed of turning the Valley from a ranching economy to one of large-scale agriculture, quickly capitalized off of these arriving refugees to turn the region into what they dubbed, “The Magic Valley,” a place where one could buy land cheap, farm year-round, and pay low wages. As the Valley’s farming industry began to boom by 1915, the violence of the Mexican Revolution continued to send Mexicans northward and thus helped to create a subjugated, racialized labor force of Mexican farmworkers in the Valley.

25 This continued arrival of subjugated Mexican workers into the region kept pay low and working conditions poor, causing many of those already present to migrate throughout the nation seeking improved wages and working conditions mostly in agriculture.

The history of early twentieth century Mexican farmworkers of South Texas is thus not a local history, but rather a national one because it is from this often overlooked, geographically remote border region that much of America has extracted much of its farm labor. One simply cannot tell a complete story of twentieth century agriculture in the United

States without at least mentioning, if not centering, South Texas in general, and the Rio

Grande Valley in particular. Valley farmworkers worked their way around the country for generations planting, picking, and packaging a large portion of the country’s crops as they left behind a Valley that was anything but “magic” to them. What follows is an exploration of the origins of the Midwest stream.

THE EARLY YEARS: THE FORMATION OF THE ‘MAGIC VALLEY’ IN TEXAS AND A SUGAR BEET BOOM IN MICHIGAN

The story of the Midwest stream begins in South Texas at the beginning of the twentieth century. Historical events of the nineteenth century and prior—from the incorporation of Mexicans into the U.S. following the Mexican American War of 1848 and

American Westward expansion, to the slavery and indentured servitude in U.S. agriculture—are certainly relative to the contemporary situation of Midwest stream farmworkers, but it is in early twentieth century South Texas that a commercial farming apparatus was built that would link these two regions indefinitely.

26 The Valley and Michigan at the Turn of the Century (1900-1914) The impetus for population and thus economic growth in the Rio Grande Valley was right at the start of the twentieth century largely due to the emergence of commercial agriculture in the region and the political tensions in Mexico culminating in the Mexican

Revolution of 1910 which sent northward into the region a large labor supply (Bowman

2016; Montejano 1987; Weber 2015). In a fairly dry region that had previously relied on ranch wells to secure just enough water for human and livestock consumption, irrigation would have to be figured out. Ultimately water pumping plants and irrigation canals addressed this challenge of gathering water for large-scale irrigation and marked the beginning of a process infrastructure expansion for commercial crop production in the area

(Foscue 1933). Additionally, newly-formed land companies amassed large swaths of land that could be used for farming by purchasing what was previously very cheap ranch land from mostly ethnic Mexican land owners. By 1904 the Valley became connected to the St.

Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Railway so that the movement of people and goods to and from the area was greatly facilitated. This followed decades of steady railroad development throughout South Texas following the end of the Civil War. Over the next several years an intricate system of canals would be built to supply the water necessary for commercial farming (Bowman 2016; Menchaca 2011; Montejano 1987). This effort was led and privately financed by newly arriving Anglos mostly from the U.S. Midwest whose goal was to connect this barren ranch land to the American economic grid in order to turn a profit in a region that had long occupied a nebulous zone of the nation from where a popular saying emerged that Valley residents “paid their taxes in dollars, but bought their groceries

27 in pesos.” Groceries, to these arriving Anglo farmers, would have to be bought and sold in dollars. They quickly began pushing for changes to the local political and economic system to encourage the development of large-scale farming. Their vision would require further acquisition and development of ranch lands that would need to be built from the bottom up in terms of irrigation and field preparation. The newly arriving Anglo farming interests were eager to accomplish this transformation but first had to wrestle the political system and land away from the area’s ranchers.

The “newcomers” and “old-timers,” as historian David Montejano refers to them, had competing interests. The newcomers, mostly Midwestern Anglos, wanted to convert

Valley ranch land into fields for crop cultivation and had notions of reforming or

“civilizing” the region’s political and social system while the old-timers, a mix of Anglo and ethnic Mexican ranchers and ranch hands, wanted to maintain their ranching operations resenting any change to the system they had long grown accustomed to. Ultimately the newcomers would prevail and by 1910 thousands of acres had been purchased by farming interests, a railroad ran through the region connecting it to the north and south, and the political system had shifted to favor farmers over ranchers. Laws were passed allowing farmers to build fences which prevented ranchers from taking their cattle to watering holes.

Taxes unfavorable to ranchers were imposed as the interests of farmers prevailed. As a result, the ranching culture which had previously been central to the South Texas economy, was all but finished.

And while the Midwestern Anglos representing the farming interests in the Valley fancied themselves pioneers and even liberators of these “backwards” ranchers in South 28 Texas, their arrival had an adverse effect on those already in the region, especially the ethnic Mexican population. Many of the area’s old-timer Mexicans could not afford the increased taxes and thus suffered land dispossession to the benefit of the farming developers. To make matters worse, periods of drought in this time led to cattle deaths which further hurt both Anglo and Mexican ranchers in the area. It would not be long before the ranch system would be fully replaced by farming and before the ethnic Mexicans of the region would be forced to work the land they once owned as a part of a subjugated labor class (Menchaca 2011; Montejano 1987). Dispossession through legal maneuvering was widespread and still other Valley Mexicans sold their land to those who they understood would inevitably own it one way or another. Put simply, the newly arriving Anglos were not so benevolent and rather than assimilate to the local culture like previous, smaller groups of Anglos in the region had by learning Spanish and adopting ranch style living, these newcomers imposed their own culture onto the region and never looked back

(Montejano 1987).

This development of the Valley at the turn of the century was part of a greater project of western expansionism throughout the U.S. Southwest. Local efforts to reform

South Texas industry were reinforced by national efforts to expand farming lands. Arthur

F. Corwin and Lawrence A. Cardoso note that “Citrus and cotton cultivation in California,

Arizona, and the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas flourished because of rail facilities, cheap labor, and desert irrigation projects encouraged by the Federal Newlands Act of

1902” (Corwin and Cardoso 1978, 46). While the Newlands Act was not introduced in

Texas until 1906, it was hugely impactful in the creation of the irrigation system in the 29 Valley that was needed to sustain the farming industry envisioned by early expansionists.

The act allocated federal dollars for construction of irrigation projects and required that water users repay construction costs from which they received benefits. The federal support for this irrigation funding was born out of a governmental desire to increase Anglo settlement in the Western United States (Davison 1979). As it turns out, the development of the Valley into a farming economy was about much more than profits.

The changes that took place in the Valley at the turn of the century are described along economic terms in the following way by the Texas State Historical Association

(TSHA), “The coming of the railroad and irrigation made the Valley into a major agricultural center. In Hidalgo County, land that had been selling for twenty-five cents an acre in 1903, the year before the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway arrived, was selling for fifty dollars an acre in 1906 and for as much as $300 an acre by 1910” (Vigness and Odintz 2015, np). This period of investment into the Valley by newcomer Anglos certainly infused life into the region in the form of infrastructure helpful for economic development and thus increased habitability in a region that had never sustained a large population, but as this TSHA passage demonstrates there was basically a land grab in these years between 1900 and 1910 and old-timers, especially ethnic Mexicans, were losing the battle for land. As a new infrastructure for farming in the Valley was being fortified by newcomer Anglos, land companies began to advertise their now lucrative plots of land across the Midwest by selling the Valley’s tropical climate favorable to year-round farming and by embellishing their accounts of the region. What was in actuality a hot, humid, flood- prone, drought-prone, bug-infested river delta was being sold as a tropical paradise with 30 ideal weather and an endless supply of Mexican laborers who could work both as farmworkers and as servants (Brannstrom and Neuman 2009). Ultimately, this marketing campaign was successful and drew another wave of Northern Anglos into the region as by

1915 tens of thousands of newcomers began flooding into the Valley convinced by land companies to sign a purchase agreement and take their crack at farming in the region. They arrived, however, to a tense scene with thousands of Mexicans filing in daily fleeing the violence of the Mexican Revolution.

Following the exile of Mexican leader Porfirio Diaz in 1910 and the subsequent wars between Mexican generals between 1910 and 1915 that shook Mexico (Menchaca

2011), South Texas experienced a wave of incoming refugees who would prove to make an ideal labor force to the Anglo farmers, even as the relationship between both already- present and newly-arriving Mexicans and newcomer Anglos was tenuous. Whereas old- timer Anglos had more of a fond, if benevolently racist, attitude toward Mexicans, newcomer Anglos often brought with them deeply-held racist attitudes and therefore received this influx of Mexican refugees with trepidation. This made for a very tense region by 1915.

At the very end of the nineteenth century, Midwestern farmland was dominated by grain cultivation and the entire region was known as the “bread basket” of the United

States. In the lead up to the twentieth century, however, it became the target of investors and local government officials who sought to capitalize off the nation’s increasing consumption of sugar. With advancements in farming technology at state-run universities, investors and Midwestern government officials felt the region would be a prime location 31 for the commercial cultivation of the sugar beet (Valdés 1991). Michigan, in particular, had recently exhausted its massive nineteenth century lumber supply which put the pivotal industry on its last leg. As tree stumps covered large portions of the terrain, the state was prime for a new industry to develop when the sugar beet interests arrived at the very end of the nineteenth century. After using scientists to optimize the beet farming specifically in Southeast, Central, and East-Central Michigan, sugar beet companies began to emerge rapidly as a response to low domestic sugar production and increasing costs of importing the commodity. Among the leading companies in the state were the Michigan Sugar

Company and the American Beet Sugar Company and they expanded quickly. In 1897 there were only four operating sugar beet factories in the nation but by 1903 Michigan alone had opened 24 sugar beet factories (Valdés 1991, 4). But because the state did not have a history of intensive farming, there were early concerns over how Michigan farmers could secure a labor supply for the production of beets. Wrote one sugar beet expert from the USDA in 1904, “The single problem that confronted the capitalists…was: ‘Where are we going to secure labor to grow beets?’ It was certainly the hardest problem they had to solve” (In Valdés 1991, 3). Their problem was compounded by the fact that the U.S. had barred Chinese migration federally via the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and in 1907 barred

Japanese labor so two Asian immigrant groups that had a history of U.S. manual labor were no longer viable options. By the time of U.S. involvement in World War I in 1914,

European immigrants would stop being viable options for laborers as well as migration from Europe all but stopped during the war. Despite early plans advanced by the USDA and the sugar beet corporations to hire Anglo Americans to perform agricultural labor, they 32 never saw this vision materialize because not enough of them were ever willing to work in farm labor (Mapes 2009). Unlike South Texas, Michigan could not count on an incoming stream of workers fleeing the Mexican Revolution. If they wanted workers, they would have to be proactive about procuring them.

Border Hostilities and Early Migrations from the Valley to Michigan (1915-1929) While tensions between Anglos and Mexicans in Texas existed, the relationship between the two groups became even tenser after the Mexican Revolution. In general,

Americans felt unsure and untrusting about this wave of Mexican refugees as they did not view them the same as the previous waves of nineteenth century European immigrants.

Mexicans’ race, culture, and commonly leftist political views were brought into question in order to scrutinize and challenge their arrival to the U.S as American politicians could not agree upon whether Mexicans were an asset or a problem (Menchaca 2011). These federal tensions found their way to the local situation in South Texas as the area became a sort of frontier battleground Anglos felt they needed to defend. This was especially the case after the discovery of “El Plan de San Diego” in 1915. This “plan” was a Texas Mexican document written anonymously by purported Mexicans convening in the small South

Texas town of San Diego, about 100 miles north of the Valley, promising an armed uprising and a death to all Anglo males. The purported authors of this “plan” were a group often referred to as the sediciosos, or a mix of Mexican and Texas Mexican armed revolutionary sympathizers. Regardless, all South Texas Mexicans became increased targets of Anglo

33 aggression and overzealousness as a response to the discovery of this document (De León

2011).

What followed was a “border war” between Anglos and Mexicans that saw the extralegal murders of hundreds if not thousands of Mexicans in period between 1915 and

19194. The Texas Rangers, a statewide law enforcement agency, was the primary fighting force on behalf of the Anglos while the small groups of marauding revolutionary Mexicans were supported by Texas Mexicans seeking their own liberation in South Texas. There was certainly a revolutionary spirit from Mexicans on both sides of the Rio Grande but what transpired was a mostly one-sided affair that saw cattle thievery and a handful of murders of Anglos by Mexicans lead to the violent death of what was likely thousands of Valley

Mexicans (De León 2011; Gonzales 2011; Montejano 1987). In 1916 the National Guard was deployed to the region to bring stability in this period of Anglo attempts to tame South

Texas Mexicans and their terrain.

The murders and other forms of rogue violence committed against ethnic Mexicans in South Texas often went unpunished as Anglos had the privilege of language and familiarity with the legal system and the Texas Rangers had their badges. As the fighting wore on the economy in the Valley came to a halt. Tens of thousands of people cleared the region as many Mexicans sought refuge across the border and many Anglos sought refuge in Corpus Christi and San Antonio. Many would later return after the violence slowed

(Montejano 1987). The widespread violence finally came to an end in 1919 when a state

4 It is not known precisely how many ethnic Mexicans in the region were murdered in this period, but several scholars maintain it was at least hundreds but likelier in the thousands For more see Villanueva 2017. 34 representative from South Texas (J.T. Canales) intervened and called for an investigation of the Texas Rangers accusing them of causing more violence than they were assuaging

(Harris III and Sadler 2007). While the Texas Rangers were not formally charged with any crimes, the investigation caused reforms within their organization and gave the region the ability to stabilize in time for the ascent of farming in the local economy by the 1920s.

Despite the violence brought on by the Texas Rangers against Texas Mexicans in this decade, the population of Mexicans in the region still skyrocketed. From 1910 to 1920 the number of Mexican immigrants in Texas increased from 125,016 to 251,827 (De León

2011, 33). With much of the violence behind them and a large pool of workers available, farming, especially of citrus, experienced a boom heading into the 1920s.

The period from 1910 to 1920 had proven to be monumental in transforming the

Valley into a place primed for commercial agriculture. The largest county in the region,

Hidalgo County saw an increase of irrigated lands from 21,048 acres to 160,532 and neighboring Cameron County, the second largest county in the Valley, went from 29,439 acres to 60,008 as land was cleared of brush, soil tilled, and irrigation canals organized

(Bowman 2016, 32).

Figure 15: Growth in acreage of Valley irrigated lands

5 Data obtained from Texas Almanac Archive via Sadasivam 2018. 35 Irrigation of the Rio Grande Valley 650,000 600,000 550,000 500,000 450,000 400,000 350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000

total irrigated total acres 150,000 100,000 50,000

0

1974 1910 1913 1920 1925 1929 1939 1949 1952 1959 1964 1969 1978 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2007 2012 1904

Having secured a water source for growth of crops, a railroad connecting the region to larger markets, and a steady, cheap labor force, the early farming interests had clearly won, and won big. They not only got the economy they wanted, but they were able to successfully subjugate Mexicans into an exploited labor class. On a newly imposed racial hierarchy, Anglos were at the top and ethnic Mexicans at the bottom. Historian David

Montejano describes this process in the following way: “In the transition from stock raising to farming, as Paul Taylor put it, the ‘American whites’ had become the farmers while the

Mexicans had become the laborers who cleared the land of brush and tended the crops”

(1987, 114). Landless Mexicans fleeing the revolution to South Texas were joined by dispossessed ethnic Mexicans who were often working alongside them as farmworkers on lands they used to own. Yet it did not go well for all Anglo farmers.

Early farmers found many failures along their way as they discovered that the

Valley was more marketing than substance. First of all, the land had become too expensive.

36 In 1916, an acre of Valley land sold for $2,200.00 an acre which was unusually high for

Texas (Cline 1940). Additionally, there were problems with irrigation, bug infestations of crops, and crop disease that made for a rough start and because of this many aspiring farmers walked away from their investment losing everything (Bowman 2016). But for those who stayed, they pressed on and were determined to make the project work; they had land, labor, and water and were determined to make the “Magic Valley” a reality. There had simply been too much investment in the region to give up. Also, the fact that the state government took an active role in supporting farming growth in the region did not hurt.

In 1923, an agricultural research substation was established with state funding in

1923 in the city of Weslaco named “Substation 15” under the management of Texas

Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Texas A&M) in order to aid in soil and crop research for the area to address many of the early failures farmers were having. The substation proved to be successful and the rest of the 1920s brought expansion to Valley farming as crops like grapefruits and onions among others were adapted to the conditions of the Valley and began to thrive. Because citrus was rising in popularity across the nation at the time, the Valley’s sub-tropical climate and cheap Mexican workforce was eventually a boon for those who survived the original hiccups of farming in the region (Bowman

2016). The continual supply of Mexican workers had no small part in this overall success.

By the mid-1920s, there were efforts on the side of Texas farmers to mobilize the

South Texas workforce into a migrant labor supply for the rest of the state. For example, in 1923 the Texas Labor Bureau was created which functioned as a free employment agency for Texas employers. Texas farmworkers were facilitated into migrant circuits 37 between the Valley and the Winter Garden just northwest of the Valley to most of the rest of the state leading to an intra-state migrant circuit throughout the 1920s. John Weber argues that this intentional mobilization of workers allowed for the state to create a constantly moving workforce that while earning increased wages from more steady employment would ultimately have difficulty organizing against their employers (2015,

56).

Having accomplished much of their vision, South Texas farmers celebrated their successes. In 1926, the city of Mission in western Hidalgo County organized its first city parade—which remains to this day—called the “Citrus Parade,” forever leaving the industry’s stamp on the region. By 1927, a local college was established in the city of

Edinburg named Edinburg College (it would later become “Pan American University,” and finally “The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley” among other names) and the vision that newcomer Anglos had of modernizing the Valley was all but complete, even as many smaller farmers still awaited the profits they were advertised.

Even though the Valley was able to maintain a steady farm labor force following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, many of the newly arriving workers found the Valley’s early twentieth century violence and perpetually deplorable working and living conditions to be too much as the profits of Valley citrus certainly did not trickle down. Many newly- arriving Mexicans were not willing to accept this Anglo version of modernity which in addition to the incredibly challenging labor and low pay, included a racially segregated society that subjugated ethnic Mexicans like never before as schools and other public institutions in the region became segregated along ethnic lines in the 1920s (Bowman 2016; 38 Montejano 1987). Even so, a small middle-class community was forged among ethnic

Mexicans between a mixed group of farmers, ranchers, school teachers, reporters, business owners, and government employees despite the imposition of racial segregation in the community by newcomer Anglos (Menchaca 2011). But for the rest of the Mexicans living and arriving to the Valley, it became a revolving door. It was a revolving door in the sense that the work on Valley farms was so backbreaking and low paying with little room for worker grievances that many did not last long and instead chose to leave to work in farm labor throughout various parts of the nation. As workers filed out, new ones filed in and the mass availability of cheap, degradable labor became a part of the Valley’s economic structure (Weber 2015). The labor was so cheap that it would sustain Valley farmers above the average American farmer after the impact of the Great Depression of 1929. It was so cheap, that Michigan beet farmers sought to tap into it.

Michigan sugar beet companies, in order to increase production, had to convince farmers to harvest more beets, especially as the start of World War I in 1914 necessitated increased production because of America’s role as chief food supplier to the Allies. But the war also meant a shortage of workers (Alvarado and Alvarado 2003). In order to convince farmers to harvest more sugar beets amidst a labor shortage, many companies agreed to secure their labor force. Sugar beet companies began contracting with South

Texas farmers to essentially borrow their workforce to work in the Michigan beets seasonally (Badillo 2003; Valdés 1988, 1991). With this, Mexican workers became a sought-after labor force in the region as many began to be recruited both from South Texas

39 and from Mexico. Of course, with many South Texans and Mexicans eager to leave violence and poverty, this would not be challenging.

Migrant labor would be the only way that Michigan could keep up with the pace of the kind of agricultural expansion its farmers and investors were seeking. The year 1918 was a pivotal year for the recruitment of Mexican workers to Michigan as historian Dennis

Valdés details in his foundational work:

Recruitment of Mexicanos to the midwestern beet fields became formalized in the 1918 season. The corporations hired enganchistas (recruiters) and sent them to the Mexican border and into Mexico with promises of seasonal work in the beet fields, good working conditions, and high pay. Enganchistas facilitated arrangements, often informal, that induced thousands to enter the United States and sign work contracts. The beet companies, moreover, succeeded in convincing the secretary of labor to continue to apply the 1917 exemption after the war ended. By 1920, the Michigan, Holland—Saint Louis, Columbia, and Continental sugar companies had recruited more than five thousand Mexican workers, mostly single males, for the Michigan and Ohio beet fields (1991, 9).

By 1919 the Michigan Farm Bureau was created as a collective of Michigan farmers with an eye toward expansion of farming and with many ethnic Mexicans in South Texas seeking a break from the violence at this time and willing to do farm labor, we see the first

South Texas Mexicans make their way up as a part of the “betabeleros” or “beet workers” that began arriving in Michigan and across the Midwest in the early twentieth century.

Michigan beet companies began to erect housing units near the crops and promised to compensate workers for the cost of transportation to the Michigan worksites into the 1920s.

With the prospect of earning a better wage many Mexicans made the journey to Michigan via South Texas (Mapes 2009; Valdés 1991).

40 The Texas betabeleros found fairly quickly that farm labor up north was only marginally better than in South Texas. First of all, many workers who transported themselves with the promise of being compensated were frequently paid much less than what was agreed upon. Second, these workers were culturally alienated as there was no established Mexican presence in the multi-ethnic, European-heavy Midwest. Because they were perceived as non-white the newly arrived Mexican workers experienced racism perpetuated by Mexican stereotypes of the time that centered on the violent, bandit image popularized by the Mexican Revolution. Lastly, earnings were not significantly higher than those of South Texas and the work in sugar beets was backbreaking (Valdés 1991; Weber

2015). Still though, many South Texas Mexicans would return seasonally to work in the sugar beets of the Midwest, forming an early farmworker migrant circuit, because: wages still were higher, the racial order was not as strictly enforced as in South Texas, working conditions were less exploitative, and because the Midwest had larger cities like Detroit and Chicago that offered the potential for work outside of agriculture (Valdés 1991, 24-

25).

Michigan beet farmers in the 1920s relied increasingly on an ethnic Mexican farm labor force as the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act on immigration heavily restricted immigration to the U.S. except for those in the Western Hemisphere which was specifically intended to keep a stream of Mexican immigrant laborers flowing in to the country (Menchaca 2016;

Ngai 2004). Also, at this time, Texas Mexicans working in Michigan were using much of their hard-earned money to purchase used, Detroit-made vehicles which were substantially cheaper than what they cost in Texas and only a small amount more than the cost of a train 41 trip back home for a family. As a result, Mexican farmworkers in the area became more mobile than ever. Some used their vehicles to return to Texas and used the money they had earned working up north to buy a more affordable South Texas home or simply to live in an area with a lower cost of living. Many Mexican workers with vehicles used them to drive around the Midwest and other regions of the country looking for better job opportunities. Some continued to work in agriculture while many others found more preferable factory jobs which were not nearly as grueling as farm labor (Valdés 1991).

With the thriving sugar beet operations throughout the Midwest continuing to draw Texas-

Mexican farmworkers and the proliferation of accessible automobiles facilitating Mexican workers’ entry into factory jobs, a Midwest Mexican labor market became substantial by the 1920s due in no small part to the migrations of South Texas Mexicans. Then, just as business was booming, the Great Depression hit in 1929 and altered the course of Michigan farming and Mexicans in the region.

The Great Depression and Mexican Repatriation (1929-1940) For Valley farmers the Great Depression meant that the markets for their produce would simply not be as strong as the nation suffered economically and thus the price they were getting paid for their crops drastically declined. For example, in the mid-1920s prices per box of grapefruit sold out of the Valley averaged between three to four dollars per box and by 1938 that price had dropped to $1.75 per box (Cline 1940, 240). Yet even so, the region’s farmers were not hit as hard as other parts of the country as farmers were

42 subsidized by cheap Mexican labor. And so land sales and farming continued. A Valley farmer by the name of Walter Ellis observed:

Even now when people are talking depression and waiting for something to happen we are going right along planting and gathering good crops, and receiving fair returns considering the conditions elsewhere. I was driving out for an hour this morning and saw three new houses under construction (Weber 2015, 133).

The Mexican working class continually lived in what most Americans would consider

“depression-like” conditions before and after the period of the Great Depression so it can be said that the depression did not change life substantially for those in the Valley early on.

Eventually, their wages would dip as a consequence of the depression and many migrated out when offered higher wages by farmers throughout the state and country who could outbid Valley farmers easily while still reducing labor costs by recruiting some of the nation’s cheapest labor. Besides a drop in wages, Valley Mexicans were also impacted by repatriations that took place following the depression in which state agents from the Bureau of Immigration coordinated the mass deportation of Mexicans across the nation. Valley

Mexicans were long used to straddling both sides of the border so as work dried up nationally and there was only so much work to go around regionally, many Valley

Mexicans headed back south either on their own or through state-led repatriation. Mexican workers would not flood back into the Valley until the World War II era (Weber 2015).

For the most part, farming was able to survive the depression in Michigan. While many were hit hard, similar to the Valley, farming provided a steady supply of an essential commodity so the beet industry in Michigan carried on. Michigan farmers actually farmed more sugar beets in the period following the depression because the surplus of suddenly

43 jobless people meant that farmers were able to reduce wages for farmworkers and remain operational. Additionally, as even more acres of land were farmed than before the depression, more jobs were actually available in Michigan sugar beets in the early 1930s than in the early 1920s—albeit at depression-level wages (Valdés 1988). But wages eventually got so low that many Anglos were no longer willing to do the work, and

Mexican beet workers in Michigan were therefore mostly spared from the national repatriation efforts—something that could not be said about those who had been working the higher paying jobs in the cities (Valdés 1991). During the first months of the Great

Depression, the U.S. government initiated a repatriation program for Mexican immigrants that were on charity relief roles or those who were unemployed. Scholars estimate that around 400-thousand Mexicans were deported between 1929 to 1933 (Menchaca 2011;

Ngai 2004). To avoid repatriation in the Midwest, Mexican workers who had been living in Michigan cities like Detroit and Saginaw found work as farm laborers in the beet industry during the depression because they were willing to work for the substandard wages many others were not in order to stay in the country (Valdés 1991).

During this time, farmers in western Michigan were beginning to harvest fruits that required large amounts of manual farm labor, such as cherries and a variety of berries, so even while the depression hit the state, hiring for farming continued to rise. Initially a mix of Anglo, Black, and ethnic Mexican migrant workers combined to fill these roles as many

Americans found themselves desperate for work. As a response to the depression, worker movements and unions ascended in significance nationally at this point and farmworkers began to organize around issues of better pay and working conditions. In Texas, the 44 unionizing efforts were strongest in San Antonio, where pecan workers led by a young organizer, Emma Tenayuca, went on strike at the Pecan Shelling Company in 1938. In

Michigan and the U.S. Midwest there was considerably more upheaval from farmworkers than what was seen in Texas. Groups like the Beet Workers’ Association and the

Agricultural Workers Union Local 19724 chartered by the American Federation of Labor emerged across the Midwest during the era of the depression as workers fought back against wages they viewed as too low even considering the times since farmers were still turning profits (Valdés 1991). While early strikes and other farmworker organizing efforts

Midwest and across the nation were not particularly successful, they sent a message that farmworkers too had a voice and desired the fair pay and protections being demanded by the broader workers’ rights movements. Unfortunately, much of these farmworker efforts throughout the country were ignored.

The New Deal brought with it many progressive policies for workers culminating in the monumental National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 and the Fair Labor

Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938. Although FLSA was progressive legislation guaranteeing industrial workers a minimum federal wage, this privilege was not extended to most occupations dominated by racial minority workers; it did not apply to domestic workers or farm laborers (Lieberman 1995; Lipsitz 1998; Weber 2015). So even though they had organized and mobilized to fight for better wages, farmworkers were left out of many of the New Deal worker protections. Writing about this exclusion of farmworkers, legal scholar of race Juan Perea argues that race was at the core of the debate, claiming that

“During the New Deal era, the exclusion of agricultural and domestic employees was well- 45 understood as a race-neutral proxy for excluding blacks from statutory benefits and protections made available to most whites” (2011, 96). As Perea argues, farm labor as well as domestic labor was simply still too Black, especially in the South, for farmers to concede protections to their former slaves. It would take another 28 years to amend the FLSA to include some farmworkers (1966) and the NLRA to date does not include farmworkers.

They continue to lack the legally protected federal right to organize and negotiate with their employers afforded to other American workers. Farmworkers were basically used as bargaining chips to pass worker protections for others. As a result, much of the domestic farm labor supply began dissipating throughout the country by the late 1930s and into the

40s. The ethnic Mexican pecan shell strikers in San Antonio eventually got the company to pay more, but they then replaced their hundreds of workers with Anglo women and so hundreds of San Antonio Mexicans who formerly worked in pecans migrated to work in the Michigan beet fields (Valdés 1991). As the small American farm was giving way to more large-scale, corporate farming operations heading into the 1940s, Mexican workers became farm labor force of choice throughout the nation.

BRACEROS, THE UNDOCUMENTED, AND MIXED-STATUS TEXAS MEXICANS: THE MEXICANIZATION OF THE U.S. FARM LABOR FORCE (1940-1964) By 1940, commercial farming was so widespread throughout the country that the that recruitment of farmworkers from outside the state was commonplace in regions that lacked organic farm labor supplies, like the Midwest. There, farmers joined various agricultural collectives of which several were sending labor recruiters to Texas to recruit

Mexican labor in the late 1930s and early 1940s (Valdés 1991, 92). Having seen how ethnic

46 Mexican workers had been used by Anglo farmers in South Texas to create the booming

“Magic Valley,” and having dabbled with them as well when hiring early betabeleros prior to the Great Depression, Midwestern farmers, including those in Michigan, were interested in syphoning these workers away from Valley farmers again. This would not prove too difficult as they had an eager audience in Valley workers who had endured years of poor pay and working conditions in the Anglo-dominated, racial hierarchy of South Texas. In addition to recruiting Mexican workers from South Texas, Michigan farmers also recruited a mix of Anglo and African American workers throughout various parts of the U.S. South who were still struggling from the depression. The federal Farm Placement Service was coordinating efforts at the national level to move migrant farmworkers to places of need at this time while the Michigan Field Crops Incorporated (MFCI)—founded in 1940— managed the placement of migrant farm labor at the state level (Galarza 1964; Valdés

1991). This mix of workers would not last long, however, as World War II brought with it a new farmworker: the guest worker.

World War II: The Emergence of Guest Workers and the Undocumented in U.S. Agriculture Soon after America’s involvement in World War II commenced at the end of 1941, it became apparent that there would be a labor shortage on America’s farms for the foreseeable future. Nearly an entire generation of would-be agricultural workers went off to war, and in response the United States looked to its southern neighbor for assistance as it sought to obtain a replacement labor supply from Mexico. Under a series of bi-national agreements with Mexico, laborers were recruited and made the journey north to work on

47 U.S. farms by the tens of thousands. The influx of Mexican farmworkers achieved the desired effect and agricultural production was sustained in many parts of the country during the war-time shortage. The “bracero program”, as this labor recruitment effort would become known as, would serve to cement the flow of Mexican farm labor into the U.S. for years to come (Galarza 1964; Menchaca 2016).

The workers did not come without condition. Mexican officials were well aware of the violence and discrimination endured by ethnic Mexicans in the United States, especially in places like Texas, and were sour about the mass repatriation of Mexican workers that occurred during the Great Depression6. Therefore, the guest worker agreement included provisions to ensure the fair treatment of the workers they would be sending. The bracero workers were essentially a “loan” to the United States and Mexican officials requested that they be given a contract with a fixed wage, a guarantee of at least seventy five percent of the employment offered in the contract, and protection from discrimination. Further, the

Mexican government explicitly excluded the state of Texas from the agreement, a measure intended to both protect workers and punish the state for its record of hostility toward

Mexicans. The Midwest, by contrast, received thousands of Mexican workers through the bracero program, establishing a reliable agricultural workforce during the war. Caribbean workers were recruited to Midwest farms in large numbers as well, through a separate

6 The number of Mexicans deported during the “repatriation” efforts of the 1930s is uncertain and heavily contested. Estimates range anywhere from several hundred thousand to one million. As well, there is disagreement as to the nature of the deportations as some claim many or most Mexicans left voluntarily while others claim many or most Mexicans left under coercive terms. For more read McWilliams 1976 and Hoffman 1972.

48 agreement known as the Emergency Farm Labor Program, with Jamaica accounting for sending the most non-bracero guest workers to the region. However, historian Dennis

Valdés argues that because the Jamaican workers were Black and spoke English, they were not heavily favored by many Midwestern farmers. According to Valdés, this was due to anti-Black racism and due to the Jamaican workers’ ability to more directly appeal to their employers for improved working conditions. Ultimately it was the Spanish-speaking

Mexicans who became the ideal, non-domestic workforce to Midwestern farmers during and after World War II. Yet as Michigan and the Midwest took in braceros, they continued to take in regionally and ethnically varied groups of workers from within the country as well (Valdés 1991). For certain, there was not a shortage of workers in Michigan at this time.

Following the conclusion of the war in 1945, U.S. farmers became more focused on the export rather than local supply market and needed the requisite workers for this vision so the U.S. petitioned Mexico to continue the bracero program. As many countries in Europe were in shambles because of the war, the United States stepped up their food production in order to supply the global market and it is in this time following the war that

America’s farming experienced a second boom. Corporate farms began to emerge and compete with smaller family farms despite opposition in areas like the Midwest (Lauck

1998). This, combined with a reduced labor force due to agriculture declining in significance relative to other industries following the war, is precisely why American officials sought to continue the bracero program. The U.S. government, however, declined to sign a new agreement with Mexico guaranteeing a wage or pay for the transportation 49 costs of braceros. The bracero program had been beneficial to the Mexican economy and the United States was well aware that they did not need to proactively offer too much to

Mexico in exchange for continued use of braceros. After long negotiations, Mexico’s president agreed to allow braceros to continue working in limited states without a worker protection contract.

In this same post-war moment, the ban on braceros to Texas was gradually lifted, with the exception of a few counties (Menchaca 2016). U.S. border regions like the Valley experienced population growth during the war as job seekers began to flock to the bracero program contracting centers located in Mexico’s border communities. Those who were rejected at the contracting centers often found themselves far from home and with the tempting option of an illegal border crossing as employers awaited them on the other side, especially in agriculture. Neither country was able or perhaps eager to curb the illegal migration and thousands of Mexican workers crossed into the United States during this time. Largely because of this flooding of undocumented workers into Texas, Mexico eventually caved and began sending braceros to the state as described below by historian

Otey Scruggs:

In the years after 1947, due largely to the continuous influx of wetbacks, Mexico gradually removed its ban on the emigration of braceros to Texas. As early as 1943, the availability of illegal entrants had made it unnecessary for the farmers of southern Texas to worry unduly about the ban on braceros. As long as they could obtain wetbacks, they could ignore braceros, whose use required the farmers’ acquiescence in conditions of employment which they detested (1963, 263).

There was no reason for the Mexican government to believe that they could keep their citizens from crossing into Texas for employment, so they essentially stopped trying. The

50 magnetic pull of the U.S. farm labor demand was simply too strong and there was no reason to believe that U.S. farming and political interests would relent from trying to employ

Mexicans. They were likely right; at least an example from after the Texas ban was lifted would suggest so. In the five-day period between October 13th and October 18th of 1948, the U.S. Border Patrol allowed 6000 would-be braceros to enter through El Paso as their contract was being negotiated and then turned them over to cotton growers so that Texas growers could pay them a wage lower than what Mexico was demanding in the contract

(Galarza 1964, 49-50). With this dynamic in place, the U.S. agricultural workforce, especially in Texas, quickly became largely a mix of Mexican undocumented workers and braceros in the late 1940s, even as tracking the precise number of undocumented workers remains elusive (Cockcroft 1986; Galarza 1964; Menchaca 2016; Valdés 1991). Valley farmers, however, did not use too many braceros compared to other Texas farmers at this time due to the ongoing migration of undocumented Mexican farmworkers into the region.

In 1950, for example, the Valley only requested 1500 total bracero workers (Weber 2015,

205). While Valley farmers preferred having the option of bracero labor, they certainly did not depend on it like the average American farmer as undocumented migrants kept filing in.

This influx of undocumented Mexican migration to the United States began to trouble many across the nation and in May of 1954, in the middle of the bracero program and despite all of the good-faith promises made, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization

Services (INS) initiated a second repatriation effort of Mexicans just two decades after completing the first one. Under “Operation Wetback,” Mexicans from across the U.S. faced 51 deportation as an estimated total of one million Mexicans were deported of which hundreds of thousands were believed to have had legal status. Anthropologist Martha Menchaca notes, however, that many undocumented farmworkers were curiously left alone compared to undocumented workers in the cities (2016, 85). And while several farms were raided by

INS, even in South Texas (Weber 2015), it seems that there was certainly concern over the depletion of a very profitable farm labor system as farmworkers were not as targeted as they could have been. It was clear that a substantial portion of the agricultural workforce in the mid-1950s was undocumented, yet most of the deportation efforts of Operation

Wetback focused on cities.

At its peak in 1959, the bracero program admitted 445,197 workers (Craig 1971,

130) while the U.S. Congress through the Joint Committee on Agriculture admitted in a

1954 report on “Mexican Agricultural Workers” that there may have been up to one million undocumented (Mexican) workers working in U.S. agriculture in this period (Menchaca

2016, 84). By 1961, 117,368 of the nation’s 291,420 bracero workers that year were working in Texas—the most of any state in the nation—meaning that the state had become a hub for both bracero and undocumented farm labor (Scruggs 1963, 251).

In the period following World War II, America turned to Mexican farm labor, in part because much of the American workforce was experiencing upward social mobility via post-war industrial expansion and thus decreasingly willing to work the nation’s crops.

The bracero program alone ushered in approximately 4.6 million workers from Mexico and that is not counting the potentially millions more who were working without documents from Mexico at that time. This period would prove to change the demographic of U.S. 52 farmworker indefinitely. Although Mexican-origin migrants had already been performing agriculture on a large scale in some parts of the country for several decades at this point, the bracero program infused so many Mexicans into the farm labor market that it transformed the face of the American farmworker into a brown, Spanish-speaking one.

And with this transformation came countless stories of abuse and violence. Because of concerns over diseases like diphtheria and tuberculosis at the time, many of the braceros were fumigated with toxic chemicals such as DDT upon their entry (Galarza 1964; Valdés

1991).

Braceros were not protected from poor treatment and alienation as had once been agreed to by the United States and for the undocumented worker things were worse. The undocumented worker of this time was routinely treated as less than human as wage theft and unsafe work environments were typical; farmers understood that they had leverage with these workers that they simply did not have with the braceros. Prior to the termination of the bracero program there were no federal or state laws regulating farm labor housing.

In 1959 the U.S. Department of Labor authored a report recommending that federal laws applied to slums be applied to farm labor camps. The recommendation was not adopted nor did any state pass sanitation, health codes, or overcrowding ordinances to protect the health of farmworkers. Only bracero camps were regulated and were required to pass sanitation standards. As the undocumented farm labor force increased due to U.S. demand, the housing problems expanded and began to come to the attention of the American public.

By 1964 the U.S. farm labor scene was riddled with exploitation and abuse and public

53 outcry as well as a decreased labor demand led to the end of the bracero program

(Menchaca 2016; Weber 2015).

Upon reflection, some might view the bracero program as a sort of win-win where farmers and farmworkers coalesced to benefit each other in times of uncertainty and need for both groups. Yet many others view this entire scenario a bit more cynically because of the overwhelming evidence of how intentionally this foreign labor market was created and how its architects hardly concerned themselves with the welfare of the Mexican worker, regardless of status. Additionally, it is difficult not to comment on how convenient this structure of bracero and undocumented labor was for those who did not care to spend more money on a well-treated workforce or deal with the long-term problems of worker discontent as a revolving door kept new workers coming in and jaded employees moving out. James Cockcroft describes this national system of exploited Mexican labor in the following way:

A laborer without rights is an employer’s dream come true. And the Mexican migrant workers have the added advantage, from an employer’s point of view, of being easily importable and deportable as long as they are defined as outside the law. As we shall see, America’s employers call the tune when it comes to letting Mexican laborers in or kicking them out, and they do their level best to keep the border doors revolving at a rhythm that suits their needs (1986, 15-16).

As it turns out, the rhythm that suited farmer needs in the mid-twentieth century was migratory, mostly Mexican labor. But as the bracero program ended in 1964 and as policy restricting migration from Mexico was passed in 1965 (Menchaca 2016), the role of three domestic migrant farmworker streams that were developing in the post-war era increased significantly.

54 Internal Migration to Escape Wage Stagnation: The Solidification of Three Major Domestic Farmworker Streams While World War I might have set the wheels in motion for the creation of a domestic migrant farmworker stream, the demands during and after World War II generated an institutionalized farm labor system highly dependent on Mexicans and other racial minorities. As Anglo Americans were leaving the agricultural workforce, racial minorities, especially Mexicans, began to fill the jobs farmers were no longer able to fill.

Besides braceros, various groups of domestic farmworkers were migrating within the country. Anthropologists David Griffith and Ed Kissam characterize the changes to

American farm labor following World War II in the following way:

Thus, the years 1940 to 1964 constitute a key ‘formative’ period for U.S. agriculture’s labor supply. Links with Mexican, Puerto Rican, and other overseas labor forces, although established earlier, were expanded during this period. Anglo workers declined in importance. African Americans maintained a continued presence in the South, East, and Northeast. It was during this period, too, that Texas, California, and Florida solidified their importance as labor supply states and what we have labeled ‘nodes’ in international migration networks (1995, 16).

Texas and California developed a predominantly Mexican labor supply throughout the post-war period while Florida maintained a more mixed field of workers including

Southern Blacks and various Caribbean groups of workers including Jamaicans, Haitians, and Puerto Ricans. This multicultural group of workers in Florida, however, would dissipate and Florida farmers increasingly turned to Texas Mexicans for farm labor in the years after 1965 (Griffith and Kissam 1995, 18).

Through the post-war era, three distinct migratory routes for farm labor formed in which workers predominantly from the sending states of California, Texas, and Florida made their way to receiving states that lacked a sufficient domestic worker supply to work 55 the increasingly large farms. As these states became hubs of surplus agricultural labor, local workers from these areas migrated outward to find better wages and conditions thus forming distinct migratory streams. The three streams that emerged were the Western stream, the Midwest stream, and the Eastern stream. While undocumented workers were a critical component of all three streams as workers never stopped filing in from Mexico, these streams were also worked by a substantial number of legal residents and U.S. Citizens

(Griffith and Kissam 1995).

Figure 2: America’s Migrant Farmworker Streams

The Western stream includes workers from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and

California who migrate along the western part of the country including up to Washington.

The Eastern stream consists of farmworkers primarily from Florida who migrate throughout the Southeast and eventually make their way all the way up to New York. Some of these migrants also migrate west to Ohio and Michigan along their return meeting with the workers of the Midwest stream. The Midwest stream is composed of workers from

56 South Texas who migrate through various parts of the U.S. Midwest with Michigan as the most prominent landing spot historically speaking.

The Midwest Stream: South Texas Migrants Throughout the period from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, as braceros and undocumented Mexicans joined the existing Texas-Mexican workforce, farm labor in

South Texas was cheap and plentiful. As wages remained low for all workers in the area due to a constant labor surplus at this time, many chose the option of the newly forming

South Texas tradition, migration for farm labor. It was during this time that the Midwest stream was solidified. South Texans migrated to Michigan and the Midwest throughout most of the life of the bracero program. John Weber affirms this trend when he notes that:

An increase in out-of-state migration occurred during World War II as many Mexican Americans left Texas for employment in the booming war industries and the fields of the Midwest and West…When Texas growers first gained access to workers legally contracted from Mexico in the early 1950s, the migrant stream out of Texas only grew (2015, 216-217).

The Texan migration pattern was observed in the following way in a 1968 Michigan State

University sociology report: “The typical migration pattern was to have a ‘home base’ in

Texas where migrants stayed the five winter months and to spend the other seven months of the year on the road, moving from state to state doing farm work” (Choldin, Trout, and

Wilson, 21). The migration of Texans to the Midwest, however, was not a unilateral process as efforts to recruit these South Texas workers by Midwestern farming interests during the bracero program were also underway.

57 The “Annual Worker Plan,” an effort by both Texas and Midwestern bureaucrats and farmers to funnel workers into the Great Lakes region, was created in 1954. Dennis

Valdés describes its formation in the following way:

Midwestern and Texas Farm Placement officials cooperated with employers to achieve ‘continuity and stability of employment for seasonal migrants approaching year-round work’…The AWP saved employers the expense of a recruiting license and setting up recruitment facilities in Texas. It reduced their paperwork and served as a conduit to crew leaders (1991, 147).

Essentially, the AWP was a coordinated effort go get workers on the same year-round schedule between farming sites in South Texas and the Midwest, a migrant stream synchronization of sorts. By the time of the end of the bracero program in 1964 and the passing of policy restricting immigration from Mexico in 1965, these Midwestern farmers would rely more than ever on South Texans and the migrant stream that formed in the

World War II era.

58 Chapter 2: Family Migrations and Resistance in a Post-Bracero Era (1965-Late 1990s)

The end of the Mexican guest worker initiative known as the “bracero program” in

1964 was followed by the restriction of Mexican immigration to the United States via the

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Menchaca 2011; Weber 2015). Suddenly the seemingly endless supply of Mexican farmworkers in many parts of the country had been derailed, somewhat. For Michigan, the Midwest stream of Mexican American Texas farmworkers that had formed during the bracero program would prove vital upon the program’s conclusion. What follows in this chapter is a historical account of the Midwest stream between 1965 and the late 1990s, a period in which declining crop production in the Valley of South Texas left many of the region’s farmworkers with few better options than to migrate northward to work the crops of the Midwest. I begin with a brief discussion of the post-bracero influx of Texas Mexicans to Michigan. I continue with a discussion of the decline in farm labor significance in both regions by the late 1960s because of advancements in technology and decreased farming production in South Texas. I then discuss some of the farmworker movements for better pay and working conditions that emerged in 1966 in both parts of the Midwest stream as these farmworkers used their leverage with the end of the bracero program and the restriction of Mexican immigration to demand improved conditions for themselves. Theirs was an effort to finally end the revolving door system of farm labor that skirted improved wages and conditions through the continued arrival of exploitable workers. The success of these movements had mixed results as farmers reacted strongly, and in some cases with physical violence, to keep

59 farmworkers as subjugated as possible. By the end of the twentieth century, international trade and advancements in mechanization would transform agricultural production in both regions, but the flow of farmworkers “al norte”, northward continued to play an essential role in Michigan’s agricultural industry.

SOUTH TEXAS FAMILIES REPLACE BRACEROS AND LEAD THE MOVEMENT FOR FARMWORKER JUSTICE (1965-1989) The end of the bracero program and the restriction of Mexican migration changed the landscape of American farm labor. For the Valley, the end of the guest worker program was not a problem for farmers as the region was beginning to see sharp declines in agricultural production. The border community’s historic farm labor surplus was actually beginning to worry some people about the economic prospects of the region moving forward. In Michigan it was a different story as the end of the bracero program represented a loss of tens of thousands of workers for the state. Even though Texas workers already had a history of migrating to Michigan, it was not until after the termination of the bracero program in 1964 that Michigan began relying almost exclusively on this labor. Coinciding with the loss of Michigan braceros was the fact that Anglo and African Americans were rapidly leaving the Michigan farm labor force by the late 1950s and into the early 1960s.

And so even though Mexicans from South Texas had long constituted parts of larger labor forces in the Midwest it was in the post-bracero moment that they began to dominate the

Michigan and greater Midwest agricultural workforce. In record numbers, follow the crop migrants made their way north working at various sites along the path from South Texas

60 to the Midwest. In an interview with me, former farmworker Juanita Valdez-Cox recalled her time spent as a follow the crop migrant on the Midwest stream:

We all went to West Texas, we started in Hereford and we did the short-handle hoe thinning of the lettuce. From there we would go to Michigan and in Michigan we did a lot of cherry around Muskegon, Shelby, Traverse City. It was cherry, apples, cucumbers, I think those were the main crops that we did. To asparagus we did Illinois. There was asparagus and corn detasseling. We Went to those states. In Colorado we did a lot of long-handle hoe by the acre of sugar beets. We did a lot of sugar beets.

At the same time networks of shuttle migrants, farmworkers who travelled to work a single crop before returning home, were establishing and expanding. By the late 1960s, the

Midwest stream was in full form as it became customary for Midwestern farms to have

South Texas families working for them seasonally in crops ranging from Michigan fruits and cucumbers, to Ohio cucumbers and tomatoes to Illinois corn detasseling (Valdés 1991).

In 1964, the final year of the bracero program, an estimated 28,598 Texas farmworkers migrated to Michigan. The number jumped to 39,800 just two years later in

1966 and to 43,400 in 1967 (Texas Good Neighbor Commission 1967, 5). According to survey data, 60 percent of all Michigan farmworkers in 1968 were born in Texas (either migratory or “settled-out” seasonal workers living in Michigan) with 81 percent of that large pool of workers reporting the Rio Grande Valley as their place of birth (Choldin,

Trout, and Wilson 1968, 23). Reflecting on the significance of Valley workers to Michigan agriculture, Rochín, Santiago, and Dickey. note:

It is difficult to imagine what Michigan’s agriculture would be like today without the stream of Mexican migrant workers which gained prominence in the 1960’s. What started in this decade was a regular, reliable migration of workers from northeastern Mexico and southern Texas to Michigan. Many were Texas-born, Mexican-origin workers. An uncounted, or more precisely, uncountable, number 61 were undocumented aliens who sought work far from the U.S.-Mexico border and in relative safety from the U.S. Border Patrol (1989, 3).

It was clear that what had started as a trickle progressed into a full-blown stream of workers from the Valley to Michigan and the greater Midwest by the late 1960s. As Dennis Valdés notes, “By the end of the 1960s, they [Tejanos] composed between 80 and 90 percent of the migrant labor force in the Upper Midwest” (1991, 168). Valley workers were heading northbound for work as their own farm economy was falling apart and employment grew increasingly limited.

Decreased Production in South Texas and Advancements in Farming Technology Impact the Midwest Stream In the Valley, agriculture had actually began slowing by the 1950s as a series of freezes, which permanently damaged thousands of acres of citrus crop, swept through the region. The first of the freezes was in 1949 then quickly again in 1951 and finally in 1962

(Vigness and Odintz 2015). These freezes slowly diminished farming in the region, especially of citrus, while also putting out many small farmers and leaving behind only those large and strong enough to survive such devastation (Bowman 2016). Nonetheless,

Valley farmers were resourceful with the dead citrus trees and planted cotton between their rows rather than simply bulldozing the land and calling it a wash. This environmental situation led Valley farms to become major producers of cotton which provided Valley workers a great deal of employment opportunities for several years throughout the 1950s

(Santa Ana 2017). By the 1960s, however, cotton was picked by machine throughout Texas and farm labor jobs in South Texas declined.

62 As Valley farming continued to be ravaged by environmental disasters, the industry’s decline in the region was causing a problem. What would a region of farmworkers do for employment? By the late 1960s, efforts to transfer the Valley’s workforce out of agriculture and into something more stable and year-round were already under way. This was clear in a 1968 report about the region by the Monthly Labor Review when its authors argued that the Valley had basically built too big of a farm labor force for the local economy’s own good. They commented: “Confronted with a labor surplus and low-income problem within the farm sector, one solution was to stimulate the rate of transfer from farm to non-farm employment. And, in fact, the Government has attempted to encourage out-migration through training, education, and social service programs”

(Miller and Glasgow 1968, 20). While some farmers in the region had made fortunes, the vast majority of the growing Valley population lived in poverty, and a fading exploitative labor system was to blame. By the mid-1960s, Valley farmworkers had to find other ways to supplement their income. Many continued to work part-time in agriculture or found odd- jobs, but most were left with little options but to migrate seasonally to look for employment elsewhere, and this is precisely why they were so readily available for Midwestern farmers following the end of the bracero program. The 1960s, thus, were the key years for the formation and solidification of the Texas-Michigan farmworker circuit. As tens of thousands of South Texas farmworkers filed into the Midwest, they brought their culture with them. Famed Valley musician, Gilberto Perez recalls going on tours performing for the workers of the Midwest stream beginning in 1962, touring Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois:

63 At the time, había campos de gente (there were camps of people), migrant people. Mostly Tejanos from aquí de Tejas (here in Texas). They used to migrate up north everywhere. They had camps for all the people to live there. (To promote) they would make flyers and spread them in los campos (the camps) or by telephone, whichever way. We made it, thank God (Martinez 2014, 13F-14F).

As Valley agriculture began declining in significance by the 1960s, most of the region’s poor/immigrant class “migrated up north everywhere” as Perez recalls, irrevocably linking the two regions.

Advancements in farming technology in the mid to late 1960s changed the scope of farming in both areas. As mentioned previously, machine harvesters of cotton largely displaced Valley farmworkers by the mid-1960s; soon only the citrus and vegetable industries continued to depend on manual labor (Miller and Glasgow 1968). At the same time, advancement in sugar beet farming helped reduce Michigan’s need for farm labor as well. Describing the advancements, Valdés notes:

In the 1940s, the [sugar beet] corporations and the farmers with whom they contracted adopted monogerm seeds and automatic topping machines. In the next two decades they experimented with pesticides and selected herbicides, as well as precision space planters, electronic thinners, and mechanical blocking machines; these innovations eliminated many field tasks. The impact of these changes on seasonal labor was erratic but cumulative. The sugar beet industry in the Great Lakes region offered nearly full-time employment to about forty thousand people for seven to eight months a year in the 1920s. By the early 1970s it provided a few weeks of sporadic employment to fewer than ten thousand (1991, 201).

For Michigan, the new harvesting machines meant that farmers in the state could reduce labor costs significantly. As well, advancements in technology for other crops in the state reduced the farm labor force necessary in a given season as those numbers have plateaued around between 45 and 70 thousand (Larson 2013; Rosenbaum 2002) since their peak of

64 just over 80,000 in the late 1960s, a time in which 80 to 90 percent of the state’s farmworkers were Texas Mexicans (Valdés 1991, 168).7

As Michigan farmers continued to rely on labor from outside sources, the Valley remained its primary sender for decades. The age of the “betabeleros,” or Texas-to-

Michigan sugar beet migrant workers, was over. But while the Michigan economy was developing in a way that de-centered the significance of agriculture to the overall economy throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, specialized crops emerged in the place of sugar beet that compelled the state to continue recruiting tens of thousands of farm laborers. For example, whereas only 2200 acres of blueberries were farmed in the state in 1950, that number rose to 9700 acres by 1976 (Longstroth and Hanson 2012, np). Valley workers, in a farm economy hitting a nose-dive locally, continued to heed the call and migrate northward to the Great Lakes state. But this time things would be different. U.S. farmworkers were excluded from worker protections in the New Deal legislation of the

1930s, and then continually undermined throughout the years of the bracero program. In this new era, they would begin to demand the same rights workers in other industries had been afforded.

The Valley’s First Farmworker Uprising: La Casita Farms and the Emergence of the Texas UFW (1966-1975) La Casita Farms was a prominent employer with large operations in Starr County primarily in melon production. In 1966, Starr County had the lowest household income in

7 I cannot emphasize enough that enumeration of farmworkers is very challenging and that in my own experience, many who work with farmworkers are perpetually dissatisfied with numerical estimates of farmworkers. 65 the state and outside of government and self-employment, agriculture was the main source of employment for this Valley county. La Casita Farms employed hundreds of local farmworkers at a time and had a large role in helping to set a very low standard for pay and working conditions in the region. For many in the area, my family included, they and farms like it were the only available options for employment. La Casita stood right at the entrance of America’s revolving door of farm labor and they were well aware; they were taking advantage of a lopsided system that favored farmers at the expense of farmworkers.

In 1965 when the federal minimum wage was $1.25 per hour, farmworkers in Starr

County were being paid between 40 and 85 cents per hour (El Malcriado 1967, 2). My mom’s first job at the age of fifteen was de-weeding onion fields with a knife for 50 cents per hour in 1964, she is not sure for whom. She and her brothers would get picked up by

“troqueros,” people who were basically contractors who would use their trucks to pick people up to go work in the fields. She said that often times they would not know who they were working for. She later ended up working at La Casita Farms, in 1968. By then they were paying one dollar per hour.

Paying farmworkers less than the minimum wage has historically been allowed through exclusion under the Fair Labor Standards Act (Boone 2015). La Casita’s advantageousness was exemplified by the fact that the melon workers for their California operations were earning nearly double the rate that they were paying out in the West Valley

(Houston Metropolitan Research Center 2016). In addition to the low wage, Valley farmworkers endured harsh working conditions including exposure to pesticides.

Prominent Valley farmer and longtime McAllen mayor, Othal Brand, was especially 66 notorious for exploiting workers. His callous remarks while speaking as a member of the state pesticide regulatory board about his opposition to a ban on the cancer-causing chemical, chlordane reveal an attitude of complete dehumanization of farmworkers: “Sure, it’s going to kill a lot of people, but they may be dying of something else anyway” (Texas

Monthly 1991, np).

In June of 1966, Valley farmworkers decided that they had enough, and with the help of organizer Eugene Nelson of the National Farm Workers Association (NWFA)8 of

California, they called for a strike against La Casita Farms and several other growers and began to picket their operations, an act that would catch the mostly-Anglo power brokers in the region by surprise. This was after all, the perfect set up for labor, the revolving door.

How could workers here stand up for themselves knowing they live adjacent to thousands of impoverished Mexicans on the other side of the river? For Valley Mexicans, this strike was a long time coming and represents the first major worker-based resistance to the colonial set up of the Valley. They were tired, so they marched.

On July 4, 1966 the farmworkers set out on a 400-mile march to the state capital of

Austin as a part of their greater strike efforts. Their intentions were to meet with Governor

John Connally in order have him call a special session of the legislature to pass a state minimum wage bill and the right for the union to bargain on their behalf. Connally would issue a proclamation saying he would not meet with the farmworkers regardless of their efforts (Burka 1979). While the march, popularly referred to as “La Marcha,” did not

8 By August of 1966 they would change their name to the now widely-known “United Farm Workers” or UFW, who were famously founded and led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. It is noteworthy here that while Nelson worked for the UFW he led these efforts outside of UFW sanctioning. 67 accomplish its intended goals in securing a meeting with Connally or having a special session of the legislature called, it was incredibly useful in galvanizing support for farmworkers and Mexican Americans more broadly and served as an inspiration to the broader farmworker and Chicano movements (Montejano 1987). Yet while La Marcha may be what many people remember about these 1966 farmworker efforts, the marchers still had a strike on their hands upon returning home.

From the beginning, La Casita reacted to strike efforts by recruiting workers from across the border and by using violence against strikers who were picketing their operation.

Because of the Valley’s geographic positioning, strike-breakers were perpetually waiting just across the border and farmers always knew that they had this advantage in their employer-employee relations. So, while workers joined the strike, busloads of strike- breakers were easily brought in. This would not be an easy victory and it seemed that

Eugene Nelson was in over his head as the leader of the organizing efforts. Famed labor leader, and co-founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW) of California, César Chávez then sent a trusted organizer, Antonio Orendain, to relieve Nelson in September of 1966

(Bowman 2005; Holley 1981).

Antonio Orendain became the leader of the Valley strike efforts in September of

1966 as he replaced Eugene Nelson under the direction of the UFW’s leader, César Chávez.

I was fortunate enough to interview Orendain months before he passed away in 2016 and he spoke to me about the strike as well as his eventual departure from the UFW in the

1970s when he formed the TFWU. He mentioned how the strike had been so monumental in building alliance in the South Texas cause for farmworker justice that he was originally 68 shunned by several strikers because he had not been at the march. When I met him, he spoke fluidly still, if poetic, about the situation he encountered upon arriving to South

Texas from California after years of organizing alongside César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and others at the UFW (of which Orendain was a co-founder and original treasurer). He spoke of the sharp differences in the two regions often through anecdotes such as one in which he phoned his teenage children living in Fresno, California after first spending some days in the Valley and instructed them to brush up on their Spanish because the Valley was far more Spanish-speaking than Central California. As a Spanish-dominant immigrant,

Orendain liked the Valley’s almost exclusive use of Spanish amongst the ethnic Mexicans in the region. Other anecdotes describing the distinctions in life for Valley farmworkers were not as light-hearted as he spoke of violence inflicted upon farmworkers and their advocates at the hands of state agents like the oft-revered Texas Rangers, including during the strike efforts of 1966.

I was placed in contact with Antonio by a labor activist and friend of mine, Hector

Guzmán. Hector, at this time, was the director of Fuerza del Valle Workers’ Center—a non-profit organization working to recover worker wages and resolve other worker issues throughout the Valley with whom I worked with as a part of this project. Hector happened to rent a house owned by this foundational labor organizer and was able to arrange a meeting between us. When I arrived at his house on the south side of the city of Pharr, I made several observations before even arriving to the door. The first one was shone upon by our arriving headlights as they illuminated a hanging image of Ayatollah Khomeini which I read to be a gesture toward a sort of third-world, anti-imperialistic politics. As we 69 approached the entrance to the house, the next thing I noticed which immediately signaled to me Antonio’s complex personality was a sign right by the entrance of his door that read in Spanish, “mi casa es mi casa” or “my house is my house.” Now, one might assume that this sign was purely satirical or tongue-in-cheek, but now knowing Antonio’s strong personality and just how much he wound up feeling vanquished by Chávez and the UFW

(which he went on to explain), one could also reasonably assume that the sign was a gesture toward Orendain refusing to cede an inch on what he perceived as an encroachment on his organizing vision. Or maybe he was just being funny, or perhaps his wife had purchased it without regard to his preferences. Walking into his house, and having little idea as to what exactly to expect, I was delighted to find a very hospitable woman named Susan Law, who had married Antonio some years after his longtime wife Raquel had passed. Susan has a long history of working with the Valley farmworker movement as well and recently was working with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid (TRLA, the non-profit law firm originating in the Valley providing free legal services to the indigent with whom I volunteered for this project). Susan then let us into the nice looking home and we found a pepper-haired

Antonio sitting as she explained to him that we were there to talk. I introduced myself, and we began talking and by “talking,” I mean me mostly listening before I was finally able to blurt out that I wanted to interview him for a study I was conducting on farmworkers. He lit up and agreed to an interview.

The night I came back for the interview, Antonio was a bit more prepared for me as he was sitting by the kitchen table looking ready to talk. Antonio did not need you to ask him questions for an interview. He had a story to tell and he began to speak extensively 70 and almost uninterrupted shifting seamlessly and gracefully through various topics from personal turmoil and tragedy to his vision for farmworker organizing in the region. He caught me somewhat off guard by beginning with a metaphor-rich anecdote about the day his brother died from a lightning strike injury in his hometown of Etzatlán, a small town in

Northwestern Jalisco. From this anecdote, I knew that I was in for a far different interview than I was previously accustomed. Orendain would go on to use excessive amounts of anecdotes and metaphors as he spoke.

Antonio crossed illegally into California in 1950 at the age of 20—getting caught, deported, and returning on multiple occasions—and began to work without legal permission as a farmworker. He recalled being quickly blown away by the racism in the state and the conditions under which Mexican workers were living and working. He would spend his first couple of years in the U.S. migrating between California, Idaho, Oregon, and Montana. It was in these years as a young, alienated laborer on both sides of the border that Orendain clearly formed his vision of justice for farmworkers. He was among one of the only early leaders of the farmworker movement to have worked as an undocumented farmworker in the U.S. and years later when Chávez and the UFW were criticized for calling the border patrol on undocumented Mexican strike breakers, Orendain was trying to coordinate organizing efforts with workers on both sides of the border. Additionally, in

1969, then leader of the Texas UFW Orendain said the following to a large group of union farmworkers after César Chávez spoke to the crowd on a rare visit to the Valley from

Chávez:

71 We want to stress that this union is for all workers, regardless of citizenship. We are trying to help all farm workers, whether they are from Texas, Mexico, or any other state. We have learned a lot from our past mistakes trying to organize here in Texas. Now we are building the union from the ground up. No flashy publicity, no dramatic but hopeless strikes. Just the hard work of organizing a union and building it up until it is strong enough to win for the farm workers those rights and benefits which other American workers enjoy (Bowman 2005, 62).

As a former undocumented worker in California and with a thorough understanding of the

Valley’s revolving door of Mexican labor, Orendain’s vision included organizing on both sides of the border from early on.

But as Orendain found himself in charge of a strike that he had little preparation for, with almost no financial support, and a great deal of opposition from farmers who were tied with local political leaders and law enforcement, the effort was doomed from the inception. Orendain expressed to me in our interview that his first impressions of the Valley farmworker situation were cause for serious concern. He remembers anticipating that it would be bad because Texas Mexicans migrating to California in the mid-twentieth century were so malnourished that the descriptor “Tejano” or “Texas Mexican” referred to a starving, desperate looking worker. According to the labor leader, he was taken to a location near the strike site soon after his arrival by a couple of the local Valley strikers where they promptly took him out of the car, opened the trunk, and pulled out several weapons as he was told by the men that their plan was to harm any of the scabs crossing the picket line. He claims he had to talk them out of it (of course, the incident never occurred) but whether or not this anecdote is accurate, it speaks to the nature of the tension of the South Texas strike of 1966; this was for some a revolution. Orendain would find out just how bad things could get for those who challenged the local power establishment as 72 over the course of the strike multiple arrests, a border blockade, the controversial burning of a railroad trestle near the strike site, and repeated use of physical violence by Texas

Rangers made this no ordinary labor dispute. Orendain and the union were able to muster some positive attention for the strike amid such chaos as 250 stores, including large grocer

Safeway, began to boycott La Casita goods (Bowman 2005). Yet even as gains were made,

Chávez and the UFW offered little support to the efforts, preferring instead to concentrate on winnable California. In May of 1967, just eight months after arriving Chávez recalled

Orendain to California and sent UFW organizer Gilbert Padilla to the Valley in his place.

The strike would be defeated due to the aggressive push back the strikers received at the hands of local farmers and law enforcement, amongst other reasons, just a couple of months later by the end of the summer of 1967. Even though the strike did not lead to a victory at

La Casita, it is widely given credit as the one of the catalysts of the Texas Chicano civil rights movement as across the Valley and state, ethnic Mexicans drew inspiration from these farmworkers as they pushed for an end to the Anglo-dominated power structure that had been implemented in the early twentieth century. Just as the strike ended, the Valley was hit hard by the most catastrophic twentieth century event in the region: Hurricane

Beulah.

If the development of agricultural infrastructure was the greatest moment of construction the Valley experienced during the twentieth century, Hurricane Beulah which made landfall in September of 1967 was conversely the greatest moment of destruction the region endured in the century. The gigantic natural disaster pummeled the region with immense flooding which caused health crises and destruction to infrastructure like the 73 Valley had never experienced before (Peavy 1970). The 1968 season wound up being a complete wash in the region as farming and just about everything else was interrupted for at least a year. The Valley and its largely working-class population were not looking good in 1968 as indicated in this report:

The problems facing most American farm workers are formidable and well known. Less known but especially serious are these problems when cast in the environment of the lower Rio Grande valley of Texas. The combined effect of the long term decline of agricultural employment, adverse weather conditions, low educational levels, and other problems has helped create an area unemployment rate significantly higher than that for the State as a whole (Miller and Glasgow 1968, 18).

This high unemployment rate continued to drive migration out of the region into the 1970s as a population built up to be a farm labor market was beginning to struggle to secure employment in a transitioning Valley. As for the Texas UFW, things slowed down considerably after the La Casita efforts while under the leadership of Gilbert Padilla. The end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s gave way to the broader Chicano

Movement in the Valley as the fight to desegregate schools and the political infrastructure took precedent over the farmworker movement locally (Montejano 1987). Antonio

Orendain returned as the leader of the Texas UFW following Padilla’s departure in 1969 but most of this time for Orendain and the farmworkers was spent doing fundraising and supporting the California UFW efforts, some of which had trickled into other parts of the

Southwest including West Texas (Bowman 2005). In 1972, Orendain oversaw the construction of the Texas UFW’s new headquarters, “El Cuhamil” in the city of San Juan.

In 1974, a statue of an eagle was placed on the compound commemorating the loss of a 3- year-old farmworker daughter of the Midwest stream, Manuella Rosel, who died in a 74 farming accident in Central Michigan in that season. Her father, Hipolito Rosel, was an active member of the Texas UFW and chose to donate some of the money he earned from his daughter’s wrongful death settlement to the construction of this commemorative eagle according to conversations his children had with several of my South Texas activist friends.

But by 1975, Orendain would establish a separate union as tensions between he and Chávez reached a fever pitch. Orendain, flustered by what he felt was neglect of Valley farmworkers by Chávez, called for strikes and pickets in 1975 that were not approved by

Chávez. After the labor leader witnessed news coverage of violence that had erupted during an unsanctioned, Orendain-led picket in the Valley, he attempted to reprimand his fellow

UFW co-founder (Valley Morning Star 1976). Antonio did not take the rebuke kindly; he instead formed a separate union and named it the “Texas Farm Workers’ Union.” Hipolito

Rosel, the family of José Torres, and many others would follow him. For Orendain, there was plenty of energy and ability emanating from South Texas farmworkers. These abilities as organizers were on full display across the Midwest.

Unions of the Midwest: Obreros Unidos, and FLOC (1966-1989) In Michigan, there had been some small migrant farmworker resistance in the 1950s via the “Migratory Workers Defense League” who held several strikes but did not have sustained success (Moralez 2011). By the late 1960s, it became clear that South Texas migrants to the Midwest would challenge farmers in ways that braceros could not. The U.S.

Secretary of Labor issued a report in 1965 about the state of Michigan farm labor and in it was some farmer angst about this new cohort of Texas workers. The report included the

75 following observation: “One pickle grower reported to us…that this year’s Texans were much harder to handle than the braceros; the Texans all had cars, the grower said, and if you spoke sharply to them they just drove away” (Monthly Labor Review 1966, III). But just because these workers were not as susceptible to abuse as the braceros, does not mean that they had it easy. Conditions for farmworkers in the Midwest had always been only marginally better than Texas and the long-term use of braceros made several farmers accustomed to a more abrasive style of managing their workforce. Reflecting on her first migration to Michigan in 1965, a long-time farmworker leader I discuss later in this chapter, Maria Gomez, recalled the shame and suffering of having to stay in horse stalls when her family arrived to work there. What else could they do, she asked, they were already there. But as it turns out, many South Texas Mexicans did find something they could “do” as organizing efforts erupted throughout the region.

In the Midwest, the primary farmworker organizing efforts began in 1966 and were in Wisconsin and Ohio (Barger and Reza 1994; Rodriguez 2011). Migrations across the country made many of the migrant workers that lived and worked within the Midwest stream well suited for the activism it would take to stand up for themselves against continued subjugation. Historian Marc Simon Rodriguez describes this in the context of

Texas-Wisconsin migrations when he says of one of the early farmworker advocacy groups in Wisconsin:

UMOS became one of the largest migrant service organizations in the United States, operating nationwide, linking migrant workers from South Texas and Wisconsin to programs from coast to coast. This expanded mission made sense, since the activism that developed across the translocal migrant stream tied migrant communities together in ways that enabled the crosspollination of activism, ideas, 76 and leadership. These tangible results flowed from a highly fruitful mix of political wisdom that farmworkers had gained in resisting domination by Anglos in Texas, the continued force of progressive labor traditions in the Midwest, the New Left, and the experiences of Tejano activists and institution builders in Wisconsin (Rodriguez 2011, 157).

This crosspollination of activism, ideas, and leadership led to the emergence of several organizations in both the Valley and Michigan in the 1960s dedicated to fighting for the rights of this racialized labor class. The Midwest saw the rise of farmworker unions such as Obreros Unidos out of Wisconsin in 1966 and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee

(FLOC) out of Ohio in 1967. The United Farm Workers (UFW) were also active across the region including Western Michigan throughout the 1960s and 1970s. While Michigan never really sustained a farmworker movement outside of UFW activity and some minor involvement from FLOC in the Southeastern corner of the state, the emergence of this

Midwest farmworker organizing activity spoke to the needs particular to workers in the

Midwest and the emergence of the farmworker movement nationally spoke to the continued subjugation of Mexican farmworkers rooted in the days of early twentieth century South Texas.

In 1966, a group of farmworkers originating from across South Texas formed

Obreros Unidos (OU) in Wisconsin. Many in this group of organizers would become activists of the Chicano movement and were heavily involved with the founding of the

Chicano movement-based political party, “La Raza Unida,” in Texas. Most prominent among them were brothers Jesus and Manuel Salas from Crystal City, in the “Winter

Garden” of South Texas. Wisconsin had received far less Texas migrants than Michigan and received more from the Winter Garden than the Valley, but they were nonetheless a 77 battleground for Midwest farmworker organizing efforts in the mid-1960s and they too were launched with a march. In August of 1966, Jesus Salas led a group of hundreds to a march to the state capitol building in Madison. This group grabbed the attention of state government officials quickly and were immediately taken far more seriously than Valley farmworkers had been in Austin. Salas was able to gain minor policy changes regarding pay and working conditions from the state as a direct result of the march. By October, he and others would create OU to continue farmworker organizing efforts as they gained recognition from the AFL-CIO and became affiliated with the United Farm Workers of

California (Rodriguez 2011).

In the years that followed, OU worked mostly with Wisconsin cucumber workers.

They spent considerable time organizing the migrant workers to Wisconsin from their home base of South Texas before seasons began. They were very interested in the organizing efforts in South Texas by the Texas UFW run by Antonio Orendain and Gilbert

Padilla during the late 1960s and essentially believed in a coordinated organizing effort across the Midwest stream. These were South Texans organizing the Midwest; they recognized the interconnectedness of farm labor in both regions. Unfortunately, Chávez and the UFW grew tired of Salas and OU efforts in Wisconsin and Texas and asked them to step down operations in 1970. When the OU leadership decided to break away from the

UFW, they lost the support of the AFL-CIO and ultimately ceased organizing efforts by

1971 (Rodriguez 2011). Their legacy of organizing workers of the Midwest stream is one that has left many wondering about what could have been in Wisconsin.

78 In 1967, a Valley native by the name of Baldemar Velasquez formed the Farm

Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) in Toledo, just on the southern side of the

Michigan/Ohio state line. In describing the working conditions of Ohio at this time which motivated him to organize Midwestern farmworkers, Barger and Reza note the following about Baldemar Velasquez:

He remembers the poverty his family endured, especially the time he and his brothers huddled in a bed while snow drifted in through the walls of their home. He remembers the maltreatment by growers, like the one who cheated his father and paid only half of what they were promised for the work they had done. Baldemar also remembers the insults and racial slurs of local Anglos. These experiences in the long term served to shape his convictions and his commitment to making meaningful changes for other farmworkers who have suffered similar injustices (1994, 57).

FLOC followed a similar strategy to OU and organized Ohio workers in their home states of Texas and Florida. They had a very difficult time organizing in this time and did not built a substantial membership throughout the 1970s. By the 1980s they gained major notoriety and membership, won a significant campaign for tomato workers against

Campbell soup, and gained affiliation with the AFL-CIO (Barger and Reza 1994). They are still active today, running operations in Ohio and North Carolina and are still run by

Velasquez.

Migrant farmworkers of the Midwest stream weaved together a system of group defense and advocacy out of the dark webs of labor exploitation they were handed. In

Michigan general support for UFW and broader farmworker efforts had grown and in 1967 a “march for migrants” took place from Saginaw to the capital of Lansing, a 70-mile trek

(Alvarado and Alvarado 2003). A region that had such few Mexicans in it just a generation

79 prior was now becoming a northern hub of ethnic Mexicans because of years of workers streaming in. But as mechanization continued to improve, the 1970s were marked by a decline in overall farm labor migration to Michigan even though the rates of farmworkers did not drop as significantly as some had predicted and tens of thousands of workers remained needed in the proceeding decades, workers mostly from South Texas (Badillo

2003; Larson 2013; Rochín, Santiago, and Dickey 1989; Valdés 1991).

The Split: The Texas Farm Workers’ Union and the Texas UFW (1975-1985) For Orendain, it was not enough for Valley workers to be supporters of California’s movement. He was interested in the plight of workers in the everywhere and had supported the California movement for many years but during our interview he spoke of needing to take action in the Valley that Chávez never authorized. In November of 1974, Orendain begrudgingly went to Chicago at Chávez’ request in order to work on a campaign the UFW was pushing for regarding the grape boycott. But by January of 1975, Orendain was back in the Valley ready to rupture with Chávez and lead Valley workers to strike once again.

For certain, there was a clash in organizing visions between the two leaders. While he was still highly supportive of the efforts of the UFW, Orendain seemingly grew disillusioned with Chávez’s hesitancy to launch anything substantial in Texas. He had spent much of the early 1970s feeling the California labor leader did not consider the Valley a priority, and by 1975 he decided to take action into his own hands. The UFW was able to successfully push the state legislature for the passing of a state “agricultural labor relations board” which codified the right of farmworkers to collectively bargain into state law (Del Castillo 1996;

80 Menchaca 1995, 132) yet he kept preaching patience to Valley workers and telling

Orendain that it was not time to fight for collective bargaining at the state level in Texas; this flustered the Texas UFW leader. In May of 1975, Orendain began calling for strikes and pickets without the approval of the UFW. Quickly the Valley strikers were met with the violence typical of the region when a farmer, C.L. Miller of El Texano Ranch, fired his shotgun on the picketers outside of his property who he accused of throwing melons and rocks at his truck. Thirteen workers were wounded, but thankfully none died (Bowman

2005; Holley 1981). After more violence in erupted in Orendain’s 1975 efforts, a frustrated

Chávez, seeing some of the images on national television coverage, began to denounce

Orendain (Valley Morning Star 1976).

With Chávez denouncing and seeking to reprimand his former trusted organizer,

Orendain broke away from the Texas UFW and recruited many of those in the movement to follow him to a new organization in August of 1975: the Texas Farm Workers’ Union.

Chávez scrambled to find a replacement for Orendain and ultimately placed Rebecca

Flores, a San Antonio area native, in charge of operations of the Texas UFW. Rather than abandon efforts in Texas and allow Orendain’s new organization to take the lead, Chávez chose to keep the Valley on the UFW’s national agenda and so in the late 1970s and early

1980s two of the very few farmworker unions in the entire country were operating year- round in South Texas. While still working out of the building he oversaw construction of in 1972, which continued to function as the Texas UFW headquarters, Orendain developed tense relationships with the new Texas UFW leadership following the split in 1975. The tension reached a fever point when on January 12, 1977 Orendain and his staff were 81 escorted out of the office in a dramatic scene that involved a heavy police presence

(Bowman 2005; Gutiérrez 2019; Holley 1981). The TFWU would need to find new space after sharing a tense office with the Texas UFW for over a year.

During my interview with Antonio Orendain, he spoke of his perception that

Chávez was never truly invested in Texas farmworkers. A story he recounted of Chávez’ role in attempting to sabotage a TFWU march to Washington D.C. in 1977 illustrates this antipathy Orendain felt Chávez maintained against the efforts of Texas farmworkers.

Teresa Palomo Acosta describes the formation of the cross-country march in the following way:

In 1976 TFWU began campaigning for passage of a state law to establish a Texas Agricultural Board and grant fieldworkers the right to vote on union representation. Senator Carlos Truán (D-Corpus Christi) and Representative Gonzalo Barrientos (D-Austin), among others, sponsored the legislation, which did not make it past subcommittee hearings. The bill may have been introduced during subsequent sessions as well. On February 26, 1977, Orendain led his union members and their supporters on a 420-mile march from San Juan to Austin. The march ended at the Capitol on April 2. A few months later, on June 18, 1977, TFWU started a historic 1,600-mile journey from Austin to Washington to win more public support for agricultural workers and gain an audience with President James E. Carter. The march culminated at the Lincoln Memorial on September 5, 1977. Religious leaders and union officials endorsed the march by the forty people. Carter, however, possibly at the behest of UFW president César Chávez, refused to meet with the marchers (2013, np).

This notion that Chávez may have urged President Carter to not meet with Orendain and the TFWU was consistent with what Orendain discussed with me. In our interview, he claimed that several Catholic churches along the route through East Texas and the U.S.

South refused to house the marching farmworkers on an alleged phoned-in order of

Chávez. Orendain claims to have been told directly by several clergy members that they

82 could not house them because Chávez had specifically instructed them not to. The reality is that Chávez was not going to allow Antonio Orendain to organize uninterrupted in South

Texas. This scorn from the California labor leader would be the biggest challenge for the

TFUW short-lived existence. Timothy Bowman captures the significance of this moment when he comments:

It soon came out that Chávez contacted Carter and told him that Orendain and the TFW ‘were not proper representatives of the Texas farm workers.’ Orendain did not learn this until sometime after he had left Washington, but the news infuriated him. In his mind, all of his union’s arduous efforts ‘were sabotaged by Chávez.’ If he had previously hoped for a future reunion with Chávez and that the UFW would get involved in Texas, he now understood that this would never happen. The march to Washington had been his grandest effort, and if it could be ‘sabotaged’ by Chávez, there clearly was little room for Orendain’s small union within the farm workers’ movement (2005, 112).

This tension between the two labor leaders became evident during my interview with

Orendain when at one point I was not as cautious with my words as I should have been, and we had the following interaction:

Author: “Cuando fue que se separó de la unión?” When was it that you separated from the union?

Antonio: “Separé?! ¡Me corrieron!” Separated?! They ran me out!

Orendain’s aged body suddenly did not seem so frail as he perched up to exclaim this to me and his voice picked up some added bass. I was reminded to choose my words more wisely on such a sensitive topic whose generally accepted narrative had worn on him over the years.

His reaction made me ponder the way in which some people had dichotomized these two leaders in a way that portrayed Orendain in a negative light. Over the course of

83 my own involvement with farmworker organizing and activism, I had consistently heard murmurings of Orendain’s “aggressiveness”. Compared to popular depictions of Chávez, perhaps anybody would seem aggressive. But beyond comparing their demeanors, it was clear that there were glaring distinctions between the two. Chávez was a U.S.-born citizen and military veteran; Orendain entered the country from Mexico illegally. Chávez was a strong Catholic, draped constantly in the imagery of the Virgen de Guadalupe and the colors of Mexican Catholicism (Griswold del Castillo and Garcia 1995); Orendain was draped in a darker aesthetic including his oft-worn black cowboy hat and thick, black mustache, had a skeptical, at best, outlook on the role of the Church in the farmworker movement (Bowman 2005; Griswold del Castillo and Garcia 1995). Chávez adopted many mainstream Democratic Party principles; Orendain was a political radical. It was becoming clear to me that despite having many qualities of a prominent leader and organizer,

Orendain’s image was not quite as palatable in comparison to Chávez. He left me wondering about the significance of this dichotomous imagery and how their difference in style and lived experiences may have led to the factionalizing of the Texas farmworker movement. This “non-Chavezness” was clear the night of our interview in some of

Orendain’s own words when discussing his early days as a farmworker organizer when he said that he liked to tell people that:

Por tantos miles de años estamos esperando que venga Cristo. Cristo dijo que su reino estaba a la vuelta de la esquina. Ya llevamos muchos años y no ha llegado. Ahora, si aparece el diablo y me dice el diablo, ‘Yo te ayudo a organizar’ hasta con el diablo trabajo.

For thousands of years we have been waiting for Christ. Christ said that his kingdom was around the corner. We have been waiting many years and he has not 84 arrived. Now, if the devil appears and tells me, “I’ll help you organize,” even with the devil I would work.

He followed this up by mentioning to me that:

Y anduve detrás de César porque como era mojado yo, nunca pensé ser número uno. Pensaba ayudarle a Chávez, algo así, ser no más alguien para ayuda

And I was behind César because as an undocumented immigrant I never thought to be number one. I thought I could help Chávez, something like that, just be someone who could help.

In fact, Orendain was “the only Mexican national to join and become an officer in the

[UFW] from the beginning” (Gutiérrez 2019, 270). These tensions between the two labor leaders that emerged in their days working together in California were recently described in the following way by pioneering Chicano activist and scholar, José Angel Gutiérrez:

He and Chávez did not get along due to Orendain’s vocal opposition to white staff in high positions, excessive use of religious symbolism, and the inaccessibility of Chávez to workers. Orendain also always spoke in Spanish, making non-Spanish speakers rely on others to translate—in contrast to Chávez, who always spoke in English without Spanish translation except on rare occasions meeting with workers. Chávez kept Orendain at arm’s length and finally exiled him to Texas in 1969 (2019, 270).

Orendain was definitely not César Chávez, but his preference for the Spanish language and his previous status as an undocumented immigrant made him a natural fit in the region and his time in leading farmworkers in the Valley and eventually throughout the state as the

TFWU spread operations to the Texas Panhandle kept the Valley farmworker movement alive throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s.

In addition to Orendain’s interview, my discussion with José Torres, a former active member of the TFWU, allowed me to learn further about the union and the influence of

Orendain. Torres currently works as a paralegal for the farmworker division of Texas Rio 85 Grande Legal Aid (TRLA), a position he has held since 1978. I met him when I volunteered for TRLA while conducting research for this project. The first time I stepped into José

Torres’ office at TRLA I was blown away by his collection of anti-capitalist décor that signaled to me somebody who was unapologetically invested in leftist politics.

Additionally, Torres is a son of the Midwest stream and we discussed at length his involvement as a young man in the farmworker movement in Saginaw, Michigan during the early 1970s. In Saginaw, Torres participated in farmworker efforts from performing

“know your rights” plays to helping settled out farmworkers seek social services.

Something that José Torres made clear in the interview and in numerous conversations we had, is that the TFWU was able to quickly build a large and active base after the split between the two organizations because Orendain was widely recognized as a leader by the local farmworker community and because Chávez’s continued pleas for patience to Texas farmworkers were read by many as indifference to their cause. Torres articulated as much when he said the following in explaining why he and his family chose to side with Orendain and join the TFWU:

In reality the United Farm Workers were not providing the resources, and what have you, so that farmworkers in Texas could be organized and they were saying, ‘No, you have to wait and wait and wait’ and it was a question of urgency that farmworkers needed to be organized. And historically the process to organize farmworkers is that farmworkers begin to protest, you know, organize strikes and other activities and so you know that is what was being done here in Texas by Orendain.

For Torres and others of the TFWU, it was clear that they felt Chávez did not take their struggle seriously and that they were tired of being in California’s shadow. But something else that stood out to me throughout my time interviewing and working alongside José 86 Torres was just how much he had been influenced by Antonio. For Torres, farmworker justice meant the right to collectively bargain, not incremental gains in pay and working conditions through the legal system or policy. In fact, he pointed this out as the key difference between the TFWU and the Texas UFW after they split in 1975:

They did not support collective bargaining at all. They were opposed to collective bargaining because they said it was the wrong time.

This talk of collective bargaining was at the core of the TFWU’s 1977 march to Austin and

Washington D.C. and was something that Antonio brought up to me in our interview as the only way farmworkers can have justice. Torres uttered the phrase “collective bargaining” on five separate occasions during our hour and a half, recorded interview. For them, nothing else can work, especially in the Valley.

Through my interview and several interactions with the fiery paralegal, it was clear that for him the movement for farmworker justice in the Valley was derailed. The TFWU would carry on some wildcat strikes throughout the Valley and state in the early 1980s before formally ceasing operations in 1985 (Bowman 2005). Today, Torres spends his days handling cases for the farmworker division of the Texas RioGrande Legal Aid and so he sees just how many problems persist in Valley agriculture even as crop production locally has declined. Additionally, he handles cases of migrant farmworkers from the Valley who migrate throughout the country so even as that population shrinks, many of the cases of injustice prevailing in the lives of both seasonal and migratory workers who live or work in deep South Texas end up on his desk. When he speaks of the need for another farmworker movement in the region, he is not simply somebody holding on to a nostalgic

87 memory of what could have been but rather someone who feels that the solution has been there all along in the form of pushing for collective bargaining rights for Texas farmworkers.

What might be read as pessimism by some and astuteness by others, Torres’ way of framing the status of today’s farmworkers exemplifies the Orendain/Chávez rift that shook the farmworker movement in the Valley. According to Orendain, Chávez was more interested in symbolic or token victories than substantive change for farmworkers;

“tokenism” Orendain called it (Bowman 2005). Orendain felt as if Chávez had a blind optimism about a very dire situation in South Texas because it served the purpose of good public relations for the efforts in California which to Orendain always represented

Chávez’s top priority. For Chávez and the UFW, the fact that farmworkers gained some meaningful federal protections throughout the 1970s had much to do with collective actions around the issue of which the 1966 La Casita strike and march played a prominent role; for

Orendain these were reactionary victories that the Valley was being sacrificed over, tokenism. And here Torres was being Orendain-like in his pessimism, or frankness, about the state of farmworkers in the region all these years later saying that the only way forward is through collective bargaining. In fact, Torres is quick to point out to anybody who will listen that minimum wage laws do not mean much when one considers the rate of inflation and the slow nature of increasing the federal minimum wage. For him, not much has changed for Valley farmworkers. He sees today’s situation, aside from scale in numbers of workers, not very different from the one in 1977 that motivated a 24-year-old Torres to

88 join the 2000-mile TFWU march to Washington D.C. Today, older and with decades more experience under his belt, he marches on.

To be clear, Chávez and the new leadership of the Texas UFW were explicitly opposed to pushing for collective bargaining for Texas farmworkers in the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s. They simply did not feel it was the right time and that without a base of contracted union members they would be wasting resources and energy building an ineffective apparatus that would surely be the victim of legislative gutting. Instead,

Chávez and new Texas UFW leader Rebecca Flores believed advocating for policy changes to improve the lives of farmworkers while slowly building a base was the best way forward.

Flores stated bluntly in 1981 that a “collective bargaining bill doesn’t do you any good until you have contracts and a union. We’re just not there yet” (Holley 1981, 7). They felt that they would first need to earn some legislative wins and build a stronger base of workers.

In order to gain perspective of the other major farmworker organizing force in the region following Orendain’s departure from the Texas UFW, I conducted interviews with two women who are prominent figures in the organization’s current incarnation, La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), for whom I also volunteered while conducting my research.

Juanita Valdez-Cox is the current director of the organization and was involved with the

Texas UFW since the late 1970s as a former migrant farmworker herself. Doña Mari also became involved with the Texas UFW in the late 1970s and worked for many years a migrant farmworker. She is now a leader and volunteer with LUPE who continues to regularly attend meetings and functions, and even has a small building named after her at 89 the LUPE compound (formerly known as “El Cuhamil” by Orendain and the TFWU). What

I found in talking to these two leaders is that they were both deeply galvanized by the message that Chávez, Orendain, and others had brought down to the Valley from California and as women who worked as migrant farmworkers themselves, they had a desire for justice in the Valley via policy reform.

Maria Gomez, or “Doña Mari” as she is affectionately known, was born in the

Valley city of Pharr in 1948. She was born to undocumented immigrant parents but raised mostly in Reynosa, Tamaulipas just across the border in Northern Mexico until about the age of 15 when she crossed back into the Valley to begin working as a farmworker in 1963.

She would not become involved with the Texas UFW until 1977 when she joined a

“wildcat,” or spontaneous, strike organized by, Jesus Moya an organizer of the TFWU. She describes the fear of uncertainty around joining a wildcat strike, how her husband tried to convince her that they could not participate when she told him while hunched over the onions they were working in:

El miedo que se lo lleve el viento.

May fear be carried away by the wind.

They became strikers. Not because of want but because of need. Not because they were eager to pick fights, but because they sought peace. Not because they were not afraid, but because they were too afraid to continue living as anything less than human. Inspired by her participation in this wildcat strike, Doña Mari sought out further participation in the farmworker movement and thus went with her family to the Cuhamil building in San Juan, where Rebecca Flores was now running Texas UFW operations with Orendain, Moya, and 90 the rest of the TFWU having recently relocated. She became employed by the Texas UFW soon after and had various duties including helping to organize colonia residents to demand more public services, helping to organize “organic farming” trainings to encourage self- sustenance among union members, and monitoring farm labor conditions by visiting fields and reporting infractions to the local department of labor. Gomez commented on how the group began organizing various colonias throughout the Valley as almost all Valley farmworkers lived in them:

Mucha gente de la nuestra, la que vivían en las comunidades [colonias], trabajaban en el campo. Entonces era una cosa combinada, verdad? El campo y las comunidades porque de allí venia la gente. De allí eran los trabajadores.

Many of our people, that lived in the communities [colonias], worked in the fields. So it was a combined thing, right? The fields and the colonias because that is where the people came from. That is where the workers were from.

By the time the Texas UFW would transition into “LUPE” in 2003, they were organizing around housing and community issues exclusively and had dropped farmworker-specific organizing efforts all together. My interview with Juanita Valdez-Cox, LUPE’s current director, helped me piece together further what was going on with the Texas UFW following the split with Orendain in 1975.

Juanita Valdez-Cox is a well-known leader in the Valley as she is the current director of La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) and has been since its inception in 2003.

Her involvement with the farmworker movement and the Texas UFW began in the late

1970s shortly after the split had occurred with Orendain. By the time Valdez-Cox joined the Texas UFW, its leader was Rebecca Flores who together with her then husband, attorney Jim Harrington, had previously been involved with the UFW in other capacities. 91 Juanita spoke to me at length about how the Texas UFW was working with colonia residents on the issues of housing and water supply as she first became familiar with them because they had an operation out of her colonia, “Colonia Seca” in the city of Donna.

Much of the work they were doing was with another organization she mentioned in the interview, “Colonias del Valle,” an early colonia advocacy group run by Alejandro Moreno who would go on to become a state senator. So, while the TFWU was organizing strikes and marches for pay increases and collective bargaining rights in the late 1970s and early

1980s, the Texas UFW was engaged in more of a general community organizing approach.

Theirs was a strategy revolving around organizing the community to push for policy changes and enforcement of existing laws. Valdez-Cox mentioned how the group worked to push for changes on issues that deeply impacted Valley farmworkers such as the use of the short-handle hoe which was preferred by farmers but brutal for farmworker health, access to drinking water, bathrooms, and a hand-washing station to rinse pesticides off with. These are all issues Valdez-Cox boasts about eventually winning through the efforts of the Texas UFW and the help of supporters like Texas RioGrande Legal Aid (TRLA) who handled much of the litigation involved. According to Juanita, the workers were after a lot more than simply pay as she recalled:

At the first convention [in 1977], I remember they put together a list of things that they wanted to work on. And I remember that some people were criticizing because the eight or ten things that they came up with didn’t include an increase in the minimum wage at that time9. The resolution was that they wanted to get rid of the short-handle hoe; that they wanted water; that they wanted the toilets; that they wanted the hand-washing facilities because of the pesticides; that they wanted some

9 Federal minimum wage for most farmworkers was passed in 1978. Additionally, it is worth noting that the previous efforts in the 1966 strike at La Casita Farms revolved around increased pay which they had generally accomplished by the late 1960s and early 1970s. 92 control over the pesticides so that they wouldn’t be poisoned while they fed the world; that they wanted that whenever there was a natural disaster, to be able to get some assistance. And also, if they were hurt in the fields.

The low pay was one thing, the “chinga” (hard work) was another. While Juanita recalled their victories with pride, she also made mention several times of the difficulties of organizing in those early days with the Texas UFW. Similar to the TFWU contingent, she expressed concern over César Chávez’s distance from the efforts in Texas and felt like there was not a lot of monetary investment from the California UFW. She commented on her early days working for the Texas UFW:

You come to work in the union and there wasn’t like training. We didn’t have training, we didn’t have an office, or a desk or anything like that. And they say, ‘You either sink or you swim.’ But I think it was César and Dolores’ way of showing that there was more in us than we could see for ourselves. It was their way of telling us: ‘Sabes que si, tu eres campesina pero tu vas a poder.’ ‘You know what, you are a farmworker but you will be able.’

This is where the key difference lies in those who followed Chávez, Rebecca Flores, and the UFW. To them, Chávez’s distance was read as more of a of tough love that the famed labor organizer was imparting. He was not “ignoring” the Valley. He was helping Valley farmworkers by showing them his way, teaching them the art of resiliency and tact. Waiting until the time was right. This was not abandonment, it was initiation. She recalled inspiration she drew from an interaction that she had with César on one of his few visits to

South Texas when she confronted him about this sort of alienation of the Valley:

Pero César no tenemos agua. No tenemos agua para tomar. Nuestras calles, si se quema una casa, no tienen ni nombre. Como van a llegar los bomberos? El bos no entra, vamos todos enzoquetados a la escuela. Y tu e la pasas en California. Y nosotros?’

93 But César, we don’t have water. We don’t have water to drink. Our streets, if a house burns, don’t even have street names. How will the firefighters arrive? The bus does not enter, we arrive to school covered in mud. And you pass your time in California. And us?

Valdez-Cox would recall this as a learning moment:

And then I remember him saying, ‘You know what, at the end of the day, who’s gonna go back to that situation? You’re right. I’m gonna go back to California. Who’s gonna have to suffer through the lack of water and all the things that you just mentioned? It’s gonna be you, it’s in your hands. It’s your responsibility. You’re gonna have to take it on.’ He taught us that we could do it.

To the group of Texas UFW loyalists who fought for the farmworker cause in the post-

Orendain days of the organization, Chávez’s message of patience and teachings of methodical political organizing and lobbying for incremental changes while building a base resonated loudly. Nationally, the efforts of the UFW and others had helped to achieve federal protections for farmworkers including minimum wage and unemployment benefits.

The passing of federal laws including the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1978 and the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act in 1983 were seen as major wins in the national farmworker movement and the Texas UFW would go on to push for and win policy changes at the local and state level throughout the 1980s (Holley 1981; Palomo

Acosta 2010). They would continue to organize farmworkers from within their colonias throughout the 1980s under the leadership of Rebecca Flores and Juanita Valdez-Cox.

THE VALLEY LOSES ITS FARMS BUT NOT ITS MIGRANT WORKERS (1989-LATE 1990S) Valley farming continued a decline into the end of the twentieth century. This was especially the case after the freezes of 1983 and 1989 ravaged the citrus orchards. For many, the 1989 freeze was the nail in the coffin for agriculture in the region. The

94 enthusiasm for farming was dissipating in a changing Valley. Additionally, the intermittent droughts and floods that had pummeled the area’s agriculture for decades were consistently tough on many of the vegetable crops. An urbanizing population and the 1994 signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a trade agreement between the U.S.,

Mexico, and Canada that opened up trade between the three countries, combined to diminish agricultural significance in the area greatly. The region was set to keep expanding as a budding international trade zone in the 1990s and agriculture was in the way. Much of the farming in the region declined during the decade with many more farming operations emerging across the border in Northern Mexico to supply fruits and vegetables to the

United States (Ong Hing 2010). The Valley became a more significant produce-receiving zone than a produce-sending one. With developers buying up much of the land that farmers no longer had the will or means to resuscitate, houses and retail stores began replacing substantial portions of the Valley’s former fields. The days in which one could point to any part of the Valley and find a citrus orchard or a vegetable field were over and a new, urban

Valley was taking shape. This transition was witnessed by a longtime farmworker named

San Juana who I interviewed for this project. She commented on these changes:

Antes aquí había mucho trabajo. Ahorita es muy poco que hay. Cebolla que hay es muy poco. Repollo también. Rancheros están haciendo casas en vez de sembrar. Antes, Donna era puros labores. Ya no.

Before, there was a lot of work here. Now there is very little. Very little onion. Cabbage too. Farmers began building houses instead of farming. Before, Donna was all fields. Not anymore.

While farmers did not necessarily build all of the housing themselves, San Juana’s perspective here is clear and shared amongst many of the older people in the community. 95 The fields were replaced by houses and businesses and suddenly a community of farmworkers and frequently arriving immigrants found themselves in a new, service-sector economy that took over the region. The Texas UFW efforts to organize farmworkers continued throughout the 1990s. This included support of a national grape boycott, protests at major grocery chain HEB, and attempts to see if locating the troqueros, or truck-driving contractors10, could help with organizing farmworkers (Palomo Acosta 2010). They did not have a great deal of success with winning any union contracts with farmworkers but fought diligently in lobbying for policy changes which certainly improved the lives of

Valley farmworkers. There would be less and less farmworkers to organize, however, as by the end of the decade the Valley was urbanizing and significantly fewer people, especially relative to the increasing overall population, remained working in agriculture.

Valley migrants continued to be important to Michigan farmers into the late 1990s, as the state remained a top recruiter of migrant farm labor due to an ever-expanding fresh fruit industry of which Michigan became a major player in the 1990s. What follows is an exploration into the Midwest stream at the tail end of the twentieth century, the last potent years of the Texas-Michigan farmworker connection.

Seasonal Farm Labor Dries Up but the Valley Remains a Migrant-Sending Hub The twentieth century was a period of great farming innovation in the Valley of

South Texas. The local research substation run by Texas A&M University innovated several plant species to adjust to the various obstacles that farmers encountered. Yet the

10 Maria “Doña Mari” Gómez, as well as a former UFW staffer also spoke to me about some of these efforts. 96 twentieth century was also a period in which a series of catastrophic weather events punished local agriculture. Freezes continually killed off large amounts of citrus while floods and droughts adversely affected vegetable production (Bowman 2016).

Valley farmers regularly reacted to ecological problems by planting new crops to reignite the agricultural economy, such as when cotton was introduced after the freeze of

1951—as discussed in Chapter 1. But with the freezes of 1983 and 1989 things were different; each freeze cost the Valley over half of its citrus from the year prior (Sadasivam

2018). The Valley had experienced devastating losses before, but this time around efforts to restore citrus production were not as enthusiastic as they had been in previous generations. Additionally, agriculture had already been in decline. By 1960 it had lost its position as the largest employer in the region and by 1980 less than 9 percent of all Valley residents worked in the once-prominent industry (Briody 1987, 31). With the freezes of the

1980s and changes to tax laws further burdening farmers, many of them reacted by selling off much of their farmland rather than continue growing crops. This was described in the following way by Jessica Rocha of the Brownsville Herald:

But the freezes, along with changes in tax laws and agricultural developments, forced the surviving growers to adapt to their new circumstances in some inventive ways. Before the freezes, absentee landlords owned large tracts of land maintained by grove-care companies like Thompsons. But faced with laws eliminating the tax advantages for non-farmers with land, plus such large costs for replanting the fields with no immediate return, many of them chose to sell (Rocha 2003, np).

Many farmers sold large tracts of their land for housing the growing population, much of which in the form of colonias, unincorporated, substandard housing that is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3 (Garza 1996). The Valley had seemingly lost its “magic” just in

97 time for land developers to convert the once omnipresent fields into land for housing and commercial development in order to accommodate a growing population that further boomed following NAFTA in 1994. In an informal discussion with a citrus processing plant administrator, he made it clear to me that the two freezes of the 1980s were devastating for Valley agriculture. In our conversation he discussed extensively the freeze of 1989 in which the move to sell off old farm land became widespread among his citrus- farming friends. As this longtime citrus worker explained, it was a safer bet to sell land increasing in value to developers than to risk another future loss. Between the change to the tax law and the losses from the freezes of the 1980s, farmers sold a substantial portion of farmland to give way to urban development.

Valley production of citrus, which for decades was central to the Valley’s economy is today only a third of what it was at its peak in the mid-1950s, as vegetable production, largely in the form of onions, cabbage, and greens among others, outsells citrus (U.S.

Department of Agriculture 2017b). Citrus has fallen from about 120,000 acres of harvested citrus to about 24,400 (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2018b, 8). Retail stores, import warehouses, and housing subdivisions replaced the orchards and vast vegetable fields. But because these new jobs did not improve the situation of wage stagnation across the region

(Owen and Martinez 2004), many Valley residents, long accustomed to farm labor, continued as migrant farmworkers into the 1990s.

Wage stagnation in the region due to undocumented labor supply has remained constant for about a century now. The undocumented labor supply suppresses wages across industries, but perhaps none more than agriculture. For many years this wage suppression 98 in South Texas has been a boon for places like Michigan where farmers are reliant on worker willingness to come and work in the state. Farmers distant from the border do not need to outbid the low-paying South Texas employers by much to attract workers from the region and this continues to this day. As my mom would often remind us when we began migrating to Wisconsin in 1993, the new Valley jobs paid minimum wage and often required language abilities and skillsets she simply did not have. We had to migrate. But every time we returned from Wisconsin after a season of farm labor throughout the 1990s, we were returning to a larger, commercial-business developing Valley.

Figure 3: Photo of author, mother, and brother in Wisconsin cucumber fields – 1995 (Photo courtesy of the author)

Valley Urbanization and NAFTA: The Infrastructure of International Trade Growing in population at a rapid pace, the Valley was clearly becoming a more urban region by the end of the 1980s. A widely-dispersed population of 355,180 people in

99 1970 had nearly doubled to a whopping 701,888 people by 1990 (Texas Association of

Counties 2018, np). Sociologist Peter M. Ward discusses the changes of this era. He notes:

Since the 1980s the border has entered its third and most accelerated stage of urbanization and growth. Of the fifteen largest cities in Mexico today [1999], eight are located in border states and three lie on the border itself. While the cities on the U.S. side do not hold such paramountcy, on both sides of the border urbanization is happening at some of the fastest rates in the world (1999, 19).

This growth was spurred in large part by the industrialization of the border in Mexico that caused population increases along various parts of the U.S.-Mexico border (Hackenberg and Alvarez 2001; Schoolmaster 1993) and would continue throughout the 1990s. By the year 2000 the population boomed to about one million (Texas Association of Counties

2018, np). In this time, Valley farmers became increasingly willing to sell their land and soon development of retail and housing followed. Writing a report for the Environmental

Affairs Division of the Texas Department of Transportation, Lila Knight notes:

While the number of acres planted in citrus eventually rebounded to 42,000 acres by 1993, commercial and suburban development of land became more profitable than growing citrus. Out of 750,000 of available land in the Valley for irrigation, only 190,000 acres are suitable for growing citrus. Much of that land is located in the area surrounding US 83 near the cities of McAllen and Mission. Today, however, much of that land is urbanized (2009, 91).

A visual I can still remember distinctly from my Valley childhood in the 1990s is the endless “for sale” signs over vacant lots and equally endless “Cantu Construction”—the most prominent construction company in the region—signs near housing construction sites. The Valley was being built anew and the infrastructure left behind by the farming expansionists of the early twentieth century was now in the way.

100 The irrigation canals that once served as the economic veins of the Valley, pumping economic viability into the region now served as more of an obstacle than a life source, as evidenced by Lila Knight’s 2009 study. According to her report, the agency has long been attempting to find a way to build necessary roads throughout the Valley to accommodate an ever-increasing population and have found the canals to often be in the way. For this reason, plans to shut down many of the canals would later be introduced (Knight 2009).

The free trade agreement of 1994 between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico went a long way toward changing the U.S. farming market. What trade liberalization looked like to the Valley was the reduced production of textile and agricultural commodities, expansion of businesses involving international trade, increased employment in service- sector jobs and an expansion of border security and enforcement infrastructure11. These changes to the region’s economy did not come as a surprise; they were fully expected

(Garza 1996). NAFTA turned border regions into “free-trade” zones where raw materials and commodities may be passed back and forth without customs duties which meant that overnight the Valley became an epicenter for international trade of many commodities including produce. It was now cheaper for American purchasers to have many produce items imported rather than domestically grown and so as Valley farming was declining, the

Valley import sector boomed. As well, this new economy helped spur population growth which brought with it new jobs to accommodate urban needs such as retail and health industry jobs (Griffith and Kissam 1995). If irrigation canals, railroads, and roads were the

11 I will be discussing the impact of border securitization on the Midwest stream in chapters four and five 101 key pieces of infrastructure for economic activity in the Valley throughout most of the twentieth century, international bridges, retail centers, and medical districts became the key infrastructural components of the post-NAFTA Valley.

Following NAFTA, farmers who had managed to survive the freezes and rapid urbanization of the previous decade found themselves struggling to compete with Mexico.

By 1998, the infamous Valley farmer and politician, Othal Brand, ceased his Griffin &

Brand vegetable farming operations citing geological issues and increased competition from Mexico (Vandenack 1998). The Valley economy changed drastically following

NAFTA and although farming of specialty crops like grapefruit, sweet onion and watermelon would survive, the rest of the Valley moved on from agriculture to service sector industries.

The service sector employment that emerged in the Valley to accommodate a rapid post-NAFTA population boom differed from the previously dominant agricultural employment sector, amongst other reasons, because the work was year-round. With this, some Valley farmworkers began to jump the migrant ship as Valley agriculture was sinking and opportunities for year-round employment in typically far less rigorous jobs emerged as a viable option for many. Former farmworkers like Rosa who I interviewed for this project and who had spent decades migrating to Michigan from her home base of Weslaco found steady, year-round employment far more appealing even if it was only at a minimum wage. The migrating had worn on her so when she was able to land a position as a gas station cashier in the late 1990s, she jumped on it. We see that when given an option, many prefer not to migrate for farm labor even if it does pay a better wage. The urbanizing, free- 102 trade Valley was starting to offer people other options from import warehouses and retail stores to call centers and other indoor, less back-breaking jobs in this hot and humid region of South Texas. And while thousands of farmworkers remained, for many other Valley residents, farm labor had been reduced to a symbol of the community’s collective history by the end of the twentieth century.

Michigan Fresh Fruit Market Drives Migration into End of Century Despite the decline in relative significant of agriculture to the Valley’s economy, throughout the 1990s, the rise in Michigan’s fresh fruit market kept workers from South

Texas flowing up in search of work. “High-density” plantings of crops such as apples, cherries, and blueberries continued to necessitate a rather large manual labor force. For example, blueberry farming acreage increased from 2200 acres in 1950 to 9700 acres by

1976—a 440 percent increase in 26 years and to 14,690 by 1991—a 151 percent increase in 15 years (Longstroth and Hanson, np). Michigan apples went from 4.03 million trees in

1950 to 8.85 million in 1997 (U.S. Department of Agriculture nd, np). The continued growth of Michigan fresh fruits, in an age when fresh fruit consumption was popularized by public health and produce-marketing campaigns, made Michigan remain highly reliant on hand labor. This labor continued to come in from South Texas, with Florida workers coming increasingly by the early 1990s, especially to work in blueberries. Even as machines came into the picture with many of these crops, they simply cannot pick plant and tree crops in the same way that a fresh fruit market demands. People do not want their fresh fruits damaged or bruised, but the workers? That’s a different story.

103 As this dissertation demonstrates, migration from Mexico into South Texas supplied Valley farmers with a labor surplus of mostly undocumented workers for nearly the entire twentieth century. With the passing of NAFTA in 1994, the Valley experienced another boom in undocumented immigration from Mexico and thus was able to continue its revolving door model of exploitable labor, new workers coming in pushed old workers out12. While geopolitical forces continued to infuse the labor pool with new workers and drive farmworker migration, efforts to organize farmworkers floundered amidst tensions between factions of the farmworker rights movement. This era did bring policy changes that ostensibly benefitted migrant and seasonal farmworkers but laws on the books do not always reflect the reality in the fields. If we accept the popular refrain that Ellis Island was the golden door of immigration in the early twentieth century, South Texas was the revolving door of the latter half of the twentieth century. As workers continued to file in and out to meet the nation’s farm labor needs, they remained replaceable and subjugated.

The contemporary iteration of the Midwest stream features a changing demographic of migrant and seasonal farmworkers whose living and working conditions have scantly improved.

12 In 1986 there was major immigration reform under the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), America’s attempt at closing the revolving door of undocumented laborers. The act would make it illegal to hire or recruit undocumented laborers knowingly and required employers to affirm citizenship of their employees. The act proved to do little to curb undocumented immigration, however and the pull of border industrialization and the push of a tanking Mexican economy, along with selective enforcement of the law, would ultimately drive the expansion of a significant undocumented population in the Valley as part of the overall 1990’s NAFTA boom. IRCA also allowed for the adjustment of legal status of 2.7 million undocumented immigrants, most of whom were Mexicans. In total 1.9 million people who adjusted their status qualified under the Special Agricultural Worker or SAW program designed for farmworkers (For more see Menchaca 2016).

104 Chapter 3: The Midwest Stream Today

In this chapter, I detail how the Midwest stream has transformed since the 1990s.

An array of changes to the political and economic foundation of the stream have caused less workers to migrate to Michigan from the Valley of South Texas. For the most part, only a small, aging contingent of South Texans still migrate to the fruit and vegetable farms of Michigan. I describe how this longtime reliable network of potential workers for

Michigan farmers to tap into are now increasingly either trapped in the border region immobilized by their lack of legal status in an era of increased enforcement or migrating to the U.S. “Corn Belt” to work in the ever-expanding, corporate corn industry.

Additionally, I explore how many Michigan farmers have found the combination of

Florida’s young, single male workers who migrate in larger crews as well as H-2A visa guest workers from Mexico a convenient replacement for the Texas families that are arriving in smaller numbers. Throughout, I provide an update to the living and working conditions of today’s Valley and Michigan farmworkers and draw historical connections between the origins of the Midwest stream and the continuation of farmworker subjugation seen today.

LARGER FARMS AND CROP SPECIALIZATION From the beginning of commercial farming in the United States, farm size has steadily increased. This became especially true at the very end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century as farms grew exponentially in average size and “crop specialization,” or planting higher quantities of fewer crops, became widespread in

105 American farming. James M. MacDonald et al. highlighted this trend in a recent report they submitted to the U.S. Department of Agriculture when they said that: “Although most cropland was operated by farms with less than 600 crop acres in the early 1980s, today most cropland is on farms with at least 1,100 acres, and many farms are 5 and 10 times that size” (2013, 1). Texas and Michigan were no exception to this rule as both places experienced a reduced number of overall farms with a simultaneous rise in farming acreage and levels of production.

In my conversations and interviews with several farmers it was clear that this shift in farming deeply impacted their hiring practices. Some went from hiring groups of about fifty workers in the 1980s and into the 1990s to groups of several hundred workers by the early 2000s. They also add that in today’s specialized crop market they have all but lost control over the rate of exchange to the corporations that purchase their crops. In today’s economy, purchasers set the market value of crops and are highly inflexible, according to farmers. This, in turn, has affected farm labor wages and conditions in both regions I looked at for my study, and it also has impacted the flow of workers from South Texas to

Michigan.13 In the Valley, the story of a California citrus giant that moved operations to

South Texas in 2012 provides a clear example of how this type of farming can impact a farm labor force.

13 This impact on the Midwest stream’s flow of workers will be discussed at length in my subsequent section entitled, “Continued Exploitation and Migration: Today’s Valley Farmworkers.” 106 Today’s Valley Citrus: A Case Study While the Valley has generally experienced a decline in farming since the mid- twentieth century, today the industry has actually arrived at some stability via the practice of crop specialization. Far from the days of planting a wide variety of vegetables, the region is now steadily focused on specialized crops including citrus (grapefruit) and onions among others that are labor-intensive. Citrus remains a hugely significant crop in the Valley. The

Ruby Red and Rio Star grapefruit varieties, in particular, are two of the highly sought-after grapefruit varieties internationally. Grapefruits and oranges are also valued by the juice market. There is disagreement as to whether or not the citrus industry in the Valley will continue to thrive, but some remain optimistic for its potential despite a large decline since the crop’s heyday (Linden 2015). Still, the South Texas citrus industry is a 100 million dollar a year industry with around 24,400 acres hanging on in the urbanizing Valley (U.S.

Department of Agriculture 2018b, 8). Recently, a company from California originally under the name “Paramount” and now “Wonderful” came into the region aggressively purchasing up citrus grove operations as well as contracting with many local farmers to purchase their farmed citrus. Their move into the area was described in the following by one of the Valley newspapers:

In 2012, the company bought Healds Valley Farms, based in Edinburg, and took over more than 4,000 acres of citrus groves, as well as buying fruit from an additional 6,000 acres from independent growers.

Within a year, the company purchased Mission-based Rio Queen Citrus Inc. which covered another 5,000 acres across the Rio Grande Valley. The Healds Valley Farms deal meant Wonderful Citrus picked up half of the Texas citrus market (Mosbrucker 2015, np).

107 Wonderful clearly came in with the intention of monopolizing the citrus industry in the region and even bought out the largest citrus juice processor in the region and state, the

Texas Citrus Exchange (The Packer 2015). Additionally, according to a source of mine with many ties to workers and crew leaders in the region, a meeting took place in 2013 between local crew leaders and Wonderful, then Paramount, over the company’s imposition of a new labor practice requirement in their orchards that workers cut citrus crops with scissors rather than by hand so as to minimize damage to the crop. Apparently, this was causing workers to pick so slowly that they were regularly earning less than the minimum wage and thus crew leaders were having trouble keeping their workers content and feared losing their workers. As the face of the employer, crew leaders were growing frustrated with what they viewed as excessive expectations from their new bosses and even considered striking. I was able receive consent to audio-record my anonymous source on this matter and we had the following interaction:

Source: The crew leaders themselves wanted to go out on strike!

Author: Really?

Source: Yes.

Author: Because they were feeling too much pressure from Paramount or why?

Source: Because their workers were not making the minimum wage because of the changes that Paramount had instituted.

Author: So, they had workers mad at them so then they were mad at Paramount?

Source: Yeah. And the crew leaders well know, but sometimes they forget, that without the workers they are nothing. You know? So, they had no choice but to go and advocate on behalf of the workers and Paramount told them, ‘No, no, no, this is the way it’s gonna be done, whether you like it or not. 108 And if you don’t wanna work for us, that’s ok. There’s other crew leaders that will work for us and we own 80 percent of the citrus industry here and we will be accumulating the other 20 percent sooner or later so sooner or later you’re gonna have to come and work for us.’

After this interaction, the crew leaders reportedly retreated, and a strike never came to fruition. And whether or not the imposition of this new method of picking citrus went down this particular way, it is true from my interviews and interactions with local citrus workers that this change occurred. None were happy about it. This story in the greater context speaks to the ability, if not tendency, of large agricultural monopolies to negatively affect working conditions. Other Valley farmers reported a sense of antipathy toward this encroachment by Wonderful. One West Valley farmer I interviewed, who plants mostly sorghum therefore not having to hire many workers, commented:

Eventually all of this, the family farm, is going to get wiped out by corporate farms like Wonderful.

This speaks to the idea that it potentially does not behoove most workers or farmers to continue to follow this model of crop specialization on increasingly large farms because large corporate farms seem primed to continue to displace family farmers and smaller operations and subsequently adversely affect working conditions for farmworkers. My interviews in Michigan also reveal that this concern over agricultural monopolization, especially as they are region known historically for their large amounts of family farms.

Scott the Family Farmer in Michigan I first met Scott’s wife, Jennifer, at a farmworker event I attended when in Michigan in which a couple of farmers made appearances to greet and inform a group of farmworker

109 advocates about the upcoming season. I felt struck by the presence of farmers at an event for farmworker advocates because I had been around a more antagonistic climate in South

Texas and it occurred to me that I had entered a different world—one without an organic farm labor supply. Employer cooperation with employees is critical if farmers plan to remain in the good graces of the farmworker community and thus retain their increasingly vital and difficult-to-secure labor force. Jennifer seemed approachable so I reached out to her about my research on farmworkers and she suggested that I interview her husband who runs their farming operations.

Of all the interviews I conducted with farmers, Scott’s was one that most stood out to me because he opened up and we had some rather extensive conversations about his outlook on Michigan farming which he has been an active part of for about 40 years. Scott is a man in his mid-50s with a burly farmer look replete with a netted cap and a thick brown suede jacket, at least the day I met him. He grew up working his father’s farm before starting his own operation. His decades farming in the region gave Scott plenty of insight and I ultimately left the interview with a much clearer understanding of how some

(Michigan) farmers feel about the industry in general, and their workers in particular. What

Scott drew my attention to in particular was the plight of farmers having a perpetual feeling of insecurity based on regulation and markets that they feel they have little control over.

While he admitted that he did well for himself and has a large operation, he described the growth of his farm in a way that was almost negative saying that he had to increase the size of his operations to stay in business. He laments his inability to sustain a profitable smaller farm. Essentially Scott feels the pressure of market forces and competitiveness in an era 110 where only the strong are surviving. He speaks almost nostalgically for the old days when farming moved a little slower and paperwork was significantly less. Additionally, the challenge of having sufficient workers to avoid losses to unpicked crops is a difficult balancing act for farmers and is why they cling so tightly to their contractors and crew leaders. With so many moving parts around operating a successful farm, managing hundreds of seasonal workers can become overwhelming. In today’s era, according to

Scott, family farmers have little choice but to adjust their business models to meet increasingly complicated market demands. Scott’s blueberries and strawberries are divided with about 35 percent of his fruit marketed with his own name while the remaining 65 percent of it gets sold under brand names such as “Dole,” “Driscoll” and “Naturipe.”

Speaking to some of his irks with this process, Scott told me a story about a “sustainability audit” that he received a few years back from a major chain (purchaser) in which he was asked how he ensures the well-being of his employees. This really bothered him because he perceives it as a disingenuous gesture and claims purchasers feign care for workers in place of paying more for their purchases and thus skirting their own accountability to the workers. He articulated this position when he said:

“I’m the one that’s putting everything I have at risk. I’m housing them for free. I’m taking a gamble. I’m hiring them. And yet you guys won’t even guarantee me a breakeven price. You’re gonna sit there and tell me that I have to be sustainable. Where does sustainability start? It’s gotta start in what I get because if I don’t get it I can’t pay it. And if you don’t like the price that domestically it’s grown for even in the United States you guys are just as happy to go off-shores and buy it in companies that pay 10, 12 bucks a day. Then the auditor says, ‘Well, we go with the law of the land.’ ‘Well, you have options is all I’m saying.’

111 For Scott, both the farmer and the farmworker are under the thumb of the major purchasers in today’s market and for him the stakes are much higher with larger operations. The investment in housing and employing hundreds of workers is riskier in today’s era of large- scale production. Scott’s concerns reflect the power dynamics involved in this new way of selling one’s crops.

This hyper competitiveness in farming across the world seems to be a race to the bottom as efforts are made by global purchasers to continually go with the lowest-cost provider. Scott understands that Chile is a highly competitive blueberry market whose cost of production is far lower than his and so several times he evoked them as a potential threat to his future in farming. The portrait he paints is one where across the globe, farmers are competing feverishly with one another over food production costs as they compete with each other for perpetually lower-bidding buyers from within their various nations. With such immense pressure to lower costs to stay competitive, farmers are vigilant about keeping their labor costs low. Farmworkers with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers

(CIW) in Florida have begun to publicly address this issue through an initiative they call the “Fair Food Program” in which large purchasers agree to pay more for their purchase in order for that money to reach farmworkers and improve their wages.14 This is an effective strategy if we take Scott’s position seriously on how much pressure farmers are under in a global market. It slows down the race to the bottom and attempts to set an increased standard for farm labor wages. One wonders if this model could finally hold accountable

14 This initiative by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is discussed further in Chapter 5, 112 the farmers, packing shed owners, and crew leaders of the Rio Grande Valley of South

Texas who have an infamous history of antipathy toward their workers.

CONTINUED EXPLOITATION AND MIGRATION: TODAY’S VALLEY FARMWORKERS The South Texas border region of today, now replete with urban infrastructure, is almost unrecognizable compared to the sparsely populated farmland it once was. As new development continues to encroach upon the receding citrus orchards, the future of farming in the area is in flux. The few remaining agricultural jobs in the Valley are in the region’s specialty crops, where an undocumented labor supply surplus drives low wages and exploitative labor practices. Unlike in previous generations, the undocumented labor force in the Valley no longer leaves in large numbers in pursuit of better pay along the migrant stream, as the era of increased immigration enforcement has impacted their willingness to migrate. Texas Mexican families who used to migrate on the stream began to find year- round jobs at home in the Valley’s growing international trade and service sector economy, ending intergenerational migrant farm labor for many.

Farm labor in the Valley today is only marginally better than it has historically been. While wages have improved, the rates struggle to keep up with an inflating market and workers are regularly victims of wage theft where they earn less than the hourly minimum wage or are outright not paid for labor performed.15 Poor housing remains an issue for many of the region’s farmworkers and the large undocumented workforce both stagnates wages and creates an oppressive work environment where workers understand

15 I discuss the wage theft in the Valley further in this chapter in my section titled, “Age-Old Problem of Wage Theft in Both Regions.” 113 that they have little recourse. At the moment, the Valley farm labor force is largely split between (1) seasonal undocumented farmworkers who work locally but do not migrate, (2) migrant farmworkers with legal status who largely do not work in agriculture locally but rather migrate to work elsewhere (a rare few work on farms in both areas) and (3) daily border-crossers with legal work permits who work locally. These workers combine to labor in some of America’s most unforgiving fields.

The Undocumented and the Daily Commuters The two largest groups of farmworkers that work locally in Valley agriculture are those who live in the Valley without documents and those who cross over daily from

Mexico who are typically green card holders. With little connections and no documents, farm work is one of the only employment options for the undocumented person living in the Valley. Daily commuters sometimes drive from Mexico directly to specific work sites in the Valley but are also known to cross the international bridge and essentially solicit themselves to prospective employers whose contractors or crew leaders are there awaiting them during peak seasons. Together with a handful of local seasonal workers, the Valley’s farmworkers today remain in the furthest of margins. Long gone are the days of group solidarity inherent in a more widely shared occupation. Additionally, recent increased vigilance on the border created a level of border militarization not seen in some time. Police presence in the Valley, especially the West Valley, has been incredibly high since the border surge of 2014 (Villiers Negroponte 2014).16 For undocumented farmworkers,

16 The border surge of 2014 refers to an event in which thousands of Central American refugees, mostly women and children, arrived to the Valley seeking asylum. 114 traveling to work could easily lead to deportation. The risk of encountering law enforcement on the commute is high, as state troopers heavily patrol the area and pull drivers over at a high rate. “Mapitas” or “little maps,” a reference to the Texas logo seen on their patrol vehicles, is the word commonly used in the area to refer to the state troopers.

In the West Valley, especially in Starr County, the mapitas are in full force and farmworker mobility to and from this part of the region is stifled.

Several fields are near the border and quite literally in the shadows of parts of the border fence. Because so many Valley farmworkers are known to be undocumented, there is something inherently contradictory about their presence working along the U.S. side of this symbol of exclusion. A worker I met at a Fuerza del Valle Workers’ Center event claimed that he had seen, on one occasion, border patrol agents counting workers’ heads when they were laboring in fields along the border, supposedly ensuring border-crossers were not attempting to blend in with the workforce. He highlighted the contradiction in that he and mostly everyone in the field that day were undocumented. The notion that undocumented farmwokers may be in plain sight of border agents without apprehension is consistent with a long history in the Valley of farming interests receiving cooperation from law enforcement (Chapters 2 and 3). Additionally, it follows a nationwide trend of selective enforcement of immigration policy to suit labor needs (Cockcroft 1986; De Genova 2004;

Menchaca 2016). A field of mostly undocumented workers is acceptable because they are already working and therefore positively contributing to an industry that would be in heavy turmoil without them, but the border crosser represents a potential burden whose merit has not yet been confirmed. The image of the undocumented worker cutting onions all day 115 covered in South Texas soil, brow perpetually glistening from sweat while looking up at a border fence, is America having its cake and eating it too. It is a contradiction most are seemingly willing to live with. It is a contradiction that deeply impacted several workers I interviewed for this project, including Raul.

Raul is a 21-year-old, short-haired, stalky Mexican from the West Valley via the

Mexican state of Zacatecas. He has been working as a seasonal farmworker in the area for five years and I met him from my time with LUPE. As an undocumented immigrant, Raul solicited help from LUPE in attempting to apply for legal status. While he was early in this process when I met him, he was hopeful about his chances with a wife who has legal status and a U.S. born baby. When I arrived to interview him, Raul’s house made an immediate impression on me with a clothes line running right down the middle of the living room and enough Catholic décor to satisfy the holiest amongst us. The space was tightly crammed with various items, including a Christmas tree not yet thrown out two weeks after

Christmas, his daughter’s endless toys, and a table littered with hundreds of tamale husks.

Before we sat at the crumb laden and soda stained table to conduct the interview, several people went in and out of the house offering the obligatory “Buenos dias” to me in passing.

I could tell that many people lived in this house without even asking; its physical state told me so.

During our interview, Raul did not mince his words as he stated that he was only doing farm labor because of his lack of legal status. When I asked why he began working as a farmworker in the Valley, a solemn Raul answered:

Uno no tiene seguro social y allí no te piden nada. 116

One doesn’t have a social security card and there they don’t ask you for anything (documentation).

Raul is as about as quiet and serious a person as you will meet; his face was stoic the entire interview. He reminded me of so many farmworkers I have known in this way, this demeanor of seriousness to brace for an impossible world. Raul arrived to the area as a 16 year old and immediately began working in some of the tougher crops in the region. He tells me that his most detested crop is the watermelon. In the Valley there is probably no harder crop to work than the watermelon. They are heavy, low to the ground, and must be harvested during the summer when it is extremely hot. Thousands in the peripheries of the

Valley, because of their lack of status, have few other options.

The other large group of farmworkers in the Valley are also from Mexico but have legal status. The “commuters” are either legal permanent residents with legal work permits or even U.S. citizens who live in Mexico for the reduced cost of living and cross back and forth daily. Daily commuters make up the second largest group of Valley farmworkers, after undocumented workers. From my interviews with farmworkers and farmworker advocates in the area, it seems that the Valley crop that most attracts daily commuters is the onion. Contractors and crew leaders pick up farmworkers near the international bridge in the city of Hidalgo and take them to their worksites for a day of tough manual labor. At the end of the day, they are paid out and returned to the bridge to cross back home. Same day pay-outs at rates higher than Mexican wages are attractive features of the work for the daily commuters, but despite their legal status these workers are susceptible to wage theft since they do not reside within the U.S. and therefore cannot as easily contest from across 117 the border. Still, rather than reside in a colonia in the U.S. or attempt to purchase a house on meager pay, these workers repatriate to Mexico as they prefer the Mexican housing with

American pay lifestyle.

The Rio Grande Valley: The Highest Rate of Wage Theft in the Country The Valley’s reputation for rampant wage theft was recently confirmed by a

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request initiated by San Antonio Express News journalist, Luke Whyte. The FOIA documents reveal that the Valley is by far the leading region for Department of Labor (DOL) investigations on wage theft. Five of the top 20 zip codes in the nation for DOL wage theft investigations are located in the Rio Grande Valley

(Whyte 2018, np). It should be noted that in order for a wage theft investigation to be opened a complaint must be filed with the DOL. Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are less likely to report when they are victims of crime (Bernhardt et al. 2009) and many of the Valley’s farmworkers are undocumented, therefore the numbers of farmworkers who are victims of wage theft are likely significantly underreported. Still, the cases of wage theft that frequently came in to Fuerza del Valle Workers’ Center (Fuerza) and Texas

RioGrande Legal Aid (TRLA) in my time conducting research, of which many were farmworkers, were not anomalies or outlies. No, they are the stories of the most wage- deprived laborers in America.

I found out just how widespread the wage theft was for farmworkers by talking to workers, the staff at TRLA, and a former crew leader, Fernando. I first met Fernando when

I showed up to his house to speak with his father in my time with TRLA. A young,

118 charming man in his early 20s, he greeted me when I arrived to meet with his father about a case he had previously won with TRLA. Fernando and I got into some serious conversation about farm labor in the Valley and how hopeless it seems for anyone interested in justice. He told me how little he got paid working in Valley crops and how one day his hard work paid off as he was assigned to be crew leader of a local vegetable picking crew. His hard work hard earned him a promotion. But as a part of his training,

Fernando explained to me, he was instructed by the contractor that he should periodically tally workers’ production incorrectly so that he could pocket the difference. He said not only was he told to consider this option, but that he was expected to execute it. It is simply regular business practice across the Valley is what he told me. Getting a little emotional,

Fernando told me that he did not make it out of his first week in his new, highly anticipated job. Despite the pressure to do so, he said, he could not bring himself to steal the wages of those laboring under his supervision. He resigned from the job, telling the head foreman that he needed to be able to sleep at night. Unfortunately, the system is made to weed people of conscience like Fernando out as a minimally-regulated group of contractors prey on those in the furthest of the Valley’s margins. For Fernando, wage theft was a personal issue as his own dad had recently been a victim of the practice.

Fernando Sr. had previously been represented by TRLA in a case in Cameron

County in the East Valley working picking jalapeños and getting paid by the peace rate and earning less than minimum wage. The case had been resolved a couple years prior but I was there on behalf of TRLA to introduce them to somebody who was interested in learning more about the story and how these workers had been underpaid in typical Valley fashion 119 with the rate per pound of jalapeños so low that they could not consistently meet minimum wage rates. In fact, their pay was coming out to about 2 dollars an hour on many occasions according to TRLA staff I spoke with familiar with the case. Of course, prevailing wage laws mandate that workers must make the minimum wage for hours worked regardless of how much the produce in the time period, but in the Rio Grande Valley it is common practice today for workers in sectors dominated by the undocumented to get underpaid in a variety of ways and farmworkers are certainly not spared from this trend.

B & V Produce is the name of a watermelon packing shed located in the Valley city of Edinburg that went up to almost a month without paying a group of tens of workers.

Several of them contacted Fuerza del Valle Workers’ Center to ask for support in confronting their employer over the stolen wages. Hector, the director of Fuerza, had done some research and noted that the two registered owners of the packing shed had been accused of wage theft in previous cases. He informed the workers that they could and would file a complaint with the local department of labor but that there are often months-long delays in their reaction. The workers decided that with the support of Fuerza they would show up to B & V and demand they receive pay for their labor. On a warm summer day, equipped with plenty of water and picket signs, a group of about 15 Fuerza organizers and sympathizers joined a group of about 15 workers in order to picket the packing shed demanding payment to the workers. The two owners of the operation were present at the time and what ensued was gripping. After picketing outside of their property for about thirty minutes, the workers decided to walk deep onto the property all the way up to the packing shed which was situated around 100 yards from the entrance of the property. There 120 they began to demand their pay to the packing shed owners who were clearly surprised by the effort and were pacing back and forth thinking through a solution. Finally, one of them began engaging the crowd and over the next couple of minutes completely incriminated himself as several of us recorded with our cell phone cameras. By the evening the video had been viewed by tens of thousands of people on social media sites on the internet and was a feature story on a local, Spanish-language news station. Within a month from the event the department of labor had processed the workers’ complaint and required the B &

V to pay the workers backpay at twice what was owed to them. It is the widespread wage theft across the Valley that has allowed the workers’ center to help in the recovery of about

350 thousand dollars in recovered wages (Flores 2017, np). Yet even for those who do receive the pay for what they work, piece rate for crop-picking work keeps many in the region earning lower than the hourly minimum wage.

Besides the more blatant forms of wage theft, many Valley farmworkers are victims of the prevailing system of pay across the nation for crop-pickers that is perpetually cited as a reason for sub-minimum wages among farmworkers: piece rate. Piece rate means one gets paid based on what one produces. Victor, a legal advocacy service provider in the

Valley who has been working on farmworker cases in the region—both for local seasonal workers and migratory workers who migrate out of the Valley but return to it as their home base—for about a decade, argues that piece rate convolutes the pay structure and is the principal reason why farmworkers often earn under the hourly minimum wage. He observed:

121 I don’t have an issue with piece rate or contract work per se, provided that people pay above the minimum wage and provided that whatever the piece rate or contract rate is, is articulated clearly. The problem I have with piece rate or contract wage, is that in my experience it often does not exceed the minimum wage and is wholly confusing and often allows the farm labor contractor and/or the grower to obfuscate things such that people don’t even know they’re not making the minimum wage. So, a proper piece rate, and by proper, I mean a piece rate that’s set by a market that incentivizes people to pick quickly but does result in people making more than the minimum wage, so it’s a two-way incentive, the worker gets paid more and the worker does more production, I have no issue with assuming that workers understand it and that they’re getting what they should as far as what they are promised. In practice I think that piece rates are awful.

Victor went on to detail how he thinks that farmers prey on farmworker pride to push them to internalize piece rate as a good thing in which one earns what one “deserves” which will be above minimum wage if only one pushes themselves. Not getting paid the minimum wage is thus either too confusing for workers because of their lack of tracking their hours or is too much internalized as their own fault. Workers I spoke with frequently sited supporting the piece rate, especially when working with their entire families. Yet while they enjoy the earning capacity of being able to work as a family unit, advocates like Victor continue to maintain that this trade-off is simply not worth it. The solution is stable, higher wages and a climate where workers are not retaliated against when the they demand what they are owed.

Victor discussed in our interview that he feels that the two most pressing issues for farmworkers who both work locally in the Valley and who migrate outward are related to their wages and the retaliation they face when confronting their employers about wages or other grievances. What happens, according to Victor, is that the farmer or contractors need to only fire one person to make an example of them to the rest and keep workers in fear of

122 speaking out about their working and living conditions in fear that they too may receive retaliation. Victor claims that they believe this to have an impact for entire generations at various farm labor sites throughout the country where workers are hesitant to demand their rights because of the “examples” made of their previous co-workers. Indeed, several workers I interacted with acknowledged the precarious nature of their employment as they are viewed as disposable. In fact, the mother of one young farmworker college student I interviewed, Yesenia, had recently been fired from her job in the apple fields of northern

Michigan for asking her employer why he was paying 14 dollars per box rather than the prevailing 16 dollars other farmers were paying. A simple, “why are you underpaying us?” meant that Yesenia and her family had to find other employment. That this happens in

Michigan where farm labor is scarce means that workers in the Valley seemingly do not stand a chance in avoiding retaliation. Their pay, thus, is some of the worst in the nation.

Housing as a Shared Struggle: South Texas Colonias Low or stolen wages in the fields means limited housing options for farmworkers in

South Texas. Employer-provided housing in the area is virtually nonexistent, as a local labor surplus gives farmers the ability to avoid the issue of housing altogether. A handful of state funded farmworker housing units are available but require legal status to apply therefore disqualifying the majority of the Valley’s undocumented farmworker population.

The best option for many farmworkers is to purchase, rent, or build inexpensive homes in colonias— unincorporated areas often lacking in basic infrastructure, essentially rural slums (Mattingly and Hansen 2006). Colonias are impoverished neighborhoods that exist

123 in various parts of the U.S.-Mexico border outside of city jurisdictions that have minimal regulation and are therefore often without adequate essentials such as drainage, water and electricity among others. Many colonia homes are mobile homes, manufactured homes, or self-constructed make-shift structures and often provide less-than-ideal living conditions

(Dolhinow 2010; Ward 1999). Local officials are widely known to ignore colonia residents who they write off as non-voters and so there is little political incentive to improve their condition. The current incarnation of the Texas UFW, LUPE, engages in organizing efforts within the colonias in an effort to address community needs. House meetings bring neighbors together under the common cause of improving their communities, and their efforts have brought some positive changes as streetlights, road signs, and drainage are appearing more and more in Valley colonias. Still, for workers like San Juana, a longtime

Valley farmworker I interviewed in her colonia residence in the Valley city of Mercedes, the lack of infrastructure is a pressing issue. Her house was difficult for me to access for our interview because a recent heavy rain had turned much of the neighborhood into a mud pit. She apologized and talked at length about how the residents, many of whom are farmworkers, all help each other get in and out of the neighborhood when it rains and the thick mud takes over the unpaved streets. But viewed as “non-voters,” very little attention is given to South Texas colonia residents by the local political class.

Many farmworker residents who own their homes, especially those who migrate seasonally for higher wages, put their earnings toward building and customizing homes that they take great pride in. Despite the challenges presented by rural unincorporated living, farmworker housing in the Valley offers a sense of community and represents home, 124 especially for the Valley farmworker who migrates seasonally to less-familiar territories.

It may not be much, but it is theirs.

Policy and Changes to Enforcement Shape the New Midwest Stream: Workers Leave Michigan, Working in U.S. Corn Belt Since its peak in the 1900s, the Midwest stream of South Texas to Michigan farmworkers has undergone some significant changes. The flow of migrant farmworkers out of the Valley has slowed, and those who do migrate along the Midwest stream today are more often traveling to sites within the U.S. Corn Belt rather than to Michigan as they historically had.17 To be clear, farmworkers from the Valley have a long history of migrating to the corn belt but here what I seek to highlight is that those who go to the Corn

Belt now constitute a clear majority of Valley migrant farmworkers.

Because so many Valley farmworkers are undocumented and because there are immigration inspection stations both at the border and between 25 and 75 miles north of the border throughout the entire U.S. Southwest (including three in South Texas), the northward migration of farmworkers from the region is deeply restricted. This is especially true considering the increased immigration enforcement following the terrorist attacks of

September 11, 2001. Where thousands still migrate outward for farm labor, thousands more local farmworkers are trapped with only the option of the lower-paying, harsher working environment of the Valley as they are unable to join the migrant circuit for farm labor and struggle to find employment in other sectors across the Valley. Valley farm work is a sort

17 A great number of others have joined a different “migrant stream” that has formed, one that draws laborers out of South Texas to work in the fossil fuel industry. 125 of initiation for much of the region’s undocumented population and migration for farm labor out of South Texas is today largely a privilege for those with legal status.

In several of my interviews, workers who had been migrating for decades with families of mixed legal status reported to me the facility of crossing the interior immigration inspection stations that one must go through to leave South Texas. Veronica, a late-50s migrant farmworker from the Valley city of Donna to a western Michigan blueberry farm, whom I met while volunteering with LUPE, spoke to this in our interview.

Arriving to Donna in 1984, she says that her, her kids, and her husband immediately went to Michigan without documents:

Nos fuimos sin nada, sin nada de papeles. Nos fuimos con una tía que ellos eran como once. Y con ellos nos fuimos y ni nos pidieron [oficiales de inmigración] nada. En ese tiempo, pues, no estaba la ley dura como ahorita. Entre toda la bola nos fuimos, y pasamos. Antes no era como ahorita.

We left with nothing, no papers. We left with an aunt who had a group of about eleven. We left with them and they [immigration officials] did not ask us for anything. In that time, well, the law was not strict like it is today. We all went in one jumbled bunch, and we passed. Before it was not like it is today.

Veronica would go on to attain legal status by the late 1980s so could not speak to the facility of crossing after border security enhancement after 1994 and 2001. After1994 and especially after 2001, the cost of deportation increased18 and undocumented people in the

Valley became less willing to take the risk of crossing through an inspection station without absolute necessity. While rumors circulate that it is still quite easy to clear these interior

18 Here I am referring to the idea that reentry into the country following deportation has become more challenging because of a militarized border and thus more expensive when occupying a smuggler since the period of increased border securitization beginning after NAFTA and 9/11. For more see Roberts, Hanson, Cornwell, and Borger 2010 and Spener 2005. 126 checkpoints if one says they are going up to work in agriculture, none of the Valley undocumented farmworkers that I interviewed have ever risked migrating up north. But several I spoke with, such as Marisol, a young farmworker college student at MSU who spent several years migrating to two different sites in Illinois to work in the corn-de- tasseling for corporate giant, Pioneer. It is noteworthy here that all of these undocumented workers I interviewed have children and a risk of deportation carries with it the added worry of indefinite separation from their children. What in a previous generation would have been another Texas family migrating to the Midwest for farm labor has instead become an immobilized, over-abundant, exploited farm labor supply trapped in South

Texas. As a recent article by the Texas Observer notes, the removal of these inspection stations in South Texas would likely solve any issue of farm labor shortage elsewhere in the country (Collins 2017). Where, historically, Valley farmworkers have joined the migrant circuit to escape their subjugation, many working seasonally today in the Valley’s crops do not have this option available to them. For those who do have legal status, there have been some changes to policy and its enforcement that has seemingly caused them to shift away from working in Michigan at previous levels.

Changes to the unemployment law in Michigan in 1996 and changes to the hiring practices, regarding age, of farmers since 2010 have both adversely affected the number of

Valley migrant farmworkers to Michigan. James, a farmworker legal expert whom I interviewed for this project, said he noticed a shift of less Texas workers to Michigan when the state began limiting unemployment benefits. In 1996, changes to the Michigan

Employment Security Act gave farmers the option to register as “designated seasonal 127 employers” which exempted them from having to pay unemployment benefits to workers they could reasonably assure employment to the following season (Michigan Legislature

2018). Texas migrant workers, who are largely citizens or residents, have long preferred the unemployment option during the offseason and when Michigan began to scale back on paying out unemployment the state apparently suffered the loss of some of this workforce to other states with more favorable unemployment policies. Now, in no way am I saying that these other states hand out unemployment without a challenge. In fact, many of the cases I saw while volunteering with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid (TRLA) involved farmworker unemployment denial appeals in the states of Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa— cases TRLA commonly won. Yet I never saw an appeal to Michigan unemployment benefits because farmworkers are largely excluded from unemployment benefits at the policy level. They did this while replacing a citizen class of farmworkers with a largely undocumented workforce from Florida who are ineligible for unemployment benefits altogether. One wonders if these moves were intentionally corresponding.

As Michigan farmers began commonly disallowing children from the fields, especially in the blueberries, due to fear of litigation over issues regarding worker safety and pay in 2010, they seemed to have lost some Texas families from what I observed.

Veronica, the migrant farmworker from Donna to Western Michigan whom I interviewed for this project spoke at length about how the only reason she stayed migrating to Michigan after the crackdown in the blueberries was because her children were over the age of 16 when they began strictly enforcing age requirements. She recalled the shift in enforcement:

128 Hace como cinco años (2009) nos dejaban andar con ellos (sus hijos) allí. Que los trajéramos con nosotros, allí metidos entre la labor. De 12 años, ya se registraron. Tengo a dos que ellos trabajaron desde 12 años. Ellos trabajaron desde 12 años. Su número social ellos lo están trabajando todavía. Siguen trabajando ellos. Y ahorita ya entró como hace tres años (2011) la regla de 16 años. De 14 en la labor si andan con sus papas y de 16 en el empaque. Antes nos dejaban traerlos allí con nosotros, de cinco años, de seis años.

About five years ago (2009), they let us have our children there. We could bring them with us into the fields. At 12 years old they were registered. I have two that worked from 12 years old. They worked from 12 years old. Their social security number, they are working it still. They continue to work. And now, as of about three years ago (2011), the rule of 16 years old began. At 14 in the fields if you are with your parents, and 16 in the packing shed. Before they would let us bring our children with us to work, from five or six years of age.

To be clear, the federal law regarding child labor under which Michigan farmers abide has not changed in decades (Boone 2015). What happened is that in 2009 a national story broke out of Southwest Michigan at a large blueberry farm named “Adkin Blue Ribbon Packing

Company” in the city of South Haven. In this case, graduate students and ABC News teamed up to expose the lax enforcement of child labor laws in U.S. agriculture as they highlighted this blueberry farm at which they found children as young as five accompanying their parents in the fields. The repercussions to the story were huge. Adkins lost a deal with Wal-Mart and the story sent shockwaves throughout Michigan (Patel, Hill, and Ross 2009). Farmers were put on alert to obey child labor laws or risk steep consequences. While this may be a good thing for the safety of farmworker children, it certainly effects the decisions farmworker families make regarding their employment and it seems likely that farmworker families will continue to migrate to areas where their collective labor power can best be exercised. For many, that seems to be the U.S. Corn

Belt.

129 If you have ever driven through the states of Illinois, Iowa, or Nebraska you might be amazed that so much corn can fit on one earth. These fields of corn are driven primarily by large biotechnology companies who have spurred the growing of genetically modified corn, which is then used for animal feed, human consumption, and oil. A common theme in my interviews with migrant farmworkers from the Valley is that people have been migrating in high numbers to work in America’s Corn Belt predominantly located in these four Midwestern states of Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and Nebraska. Several of the workers I interviewed were recruited by farm labor contractors to work in the “espiga” or de-tasseling of corn followed by work in the corn processing plant after the de-tasseling season is over.

One worker I interviewed works in corn-de-tasseling for the same company both locally and in Nebraska. She specified that the Valley operation is very small and pays a rate higher than average for the Valley at $8.50 per hour for the plant and $9.00 for the little available corn detasseling work. She also mentioned that several of them migrate together to the

Nebraska operations. Detasseling entails removing the “tassel,” or the immature, pollen- producing bodies, from the top of the corn plant and placing it on the ground in order to cross-pollinate. These jobs typically pay above 10.00 per hour and offer some overtime with the added benefit of allowing children between 12-14 to work alongside their parents depending on the state. Also, workers report that these employers tend to be fairly strict about hiring only workers with legal status so generally Texas families are an ideal labor force to recruit for them. What is also very important to many people I interviewed that work in the espiga is that they often qualify for unemployment benefits, a privilege now often denied to Michigan farmworkers. 130 Corn farming is not new to the Midwest as it has steadily risen in production since the early days of genetic engineering in the 1950s (Nielsen 2017). In 1995, the

Environmental Protection Agency loosened regulations for the planting of genetically modified corn and with the high yield and thus low production cost of this new type of corn, it the Corn Belt began to take over the global market of corn (Bjerga, Diamond, and

Hoffman 2017).

This technology was advanced by giant, biotechnology corporations, many of which have received negative notoriety such as Monsanto, Pioneer, and Sygenta. The way it works is that these massive, billion-dollar corporations own patents to their seeds so that the majority of farmers are producing their particular crop. Additionally, these companies use their high-priced attorneys to aggressively pursue patent-infringements that often make farmers nervous to plant off-brand corn (Ma 2012). This has caused them to receive backlash as they seemingly monopolize agricultural markets:

This is monopoly capitalism in action. The fewer the companies, the more they call the shots and the more impervious they are to complaints about unfair business practices. If your only source of seed is one company, you have no choice but to pay that company’s prices. In our present agricultural system, farmers are the ones getting squeezed. Expect the squeeze to get tighter” (Sullivan 2017, np).

Besides having farmers rely on just one, “shot-calling,” seed provider, this high-production model also means that corn farming is expanding so much that workers for the de-tasseling are in constant demand. These workers are managed almost exclusively by farm labor contractors and crew leaders for the farmer and are often the only point of contact between their farmworkers and management/ownership from their recruitment in South Texas to their work sites in the Midwest. These workers are thus often at the will of their contractors 131 with little options for recourse outside. Representatives for these large corporations care little for the conditions and treatment workers are subjected to as their preoccupation is the quality and quantity of work being performed as they allow contractors full control in managing workers while they remain detached from the day to day operations. Marisol, the farmworker college student whose family has migrated to two different Illinois corn operations under Pioneer described the detachment of these corporate representatives when she described the scene of their weekly visits to field sites:

The gueros (literally “light skin” but in this case “white” or “Anglo”) would come and everybody would be like, ‘ay vienen los gueros, ay vienen los gueros’ (‘here come the whites [Pioneer representatives], here come the whites’)and everybody’s doing their work and everybody’s working because the gueros are there. They would come like once a week to check our work. Talk to the contractor a little. But they wouldn’t talk to us.

While work in corn detasseling is now new, workers I interviewed for this project as well as ones coming in to Texas RioGrande Legal Aid to pursue legal recourse are reporting many problems in the “espiga” or “corn-detasseling,” and the names “Monsanto,”

“Pioneer,” and “Syngenta” come up regularly. Because of the sheer number of workers being rushed to work in the de-tasseling, workers are staying in hotels as farmers lack sufficient farm labor camps for their expanding migrant workforce.

Gabriela, a 29-year-old single mother of three from the West Valley, recently took her first crack at migrant farm labor after she was approached by a farm labor contractor, the father of one of her friends. Because her oldest son was already of legal age to work, she took him with her as they spent over a month doing corn detasseling for a farm directly owned by Monsanto in the state of Indiana. Beyond the work, which Gabriela described as

132 relatively easy for what she was expecting, it was their housing that drew her ire. As many other espiga workers reported to me, she and her teenage child were housed in a hotel. She spoke of the difficulty of having to live without a kitchen and how a diet of fast food and microwavable items takes its toll on one’s dignity, especially as a mother and provider.

This issue of kitchen-less hotels and the impact they have on farmworker mothers most of all came up in other interviews I conducted19 and is essentially a known issue among U.S. farmworkers to this region. But in my discussion with Gabriela she pointed to a deeper problem with this hotel housing arrangement: racial/ethnic tension.

Gabriela reported that local teenagers, mostly Anglo, would also show up in small crews to work in the de-tasseling. She claims that they received preferential treatment like having more busses per worker for transportation to work sites, being allowed parking under the tree for prime shade and having shorter work days. But it was the tensions in the hotel that stood out to her. While most farm labor housing is located on or near farming operations and thus removed from the general public, hotel housing in the rural Corn Belt puts migrant farmworkers under a sort of spotlight in small communities. Specifically, she had incidents with Anglo hotel staff, one of which would continually refuse to make change for her in order for her to do laundry without explanation even though she witnessed the same hotel worker providing change to Anglo customers. As well, she had numerous encounters with Anglo hotel guests in which she felt their racism through their gawking and, on some occasions, their words.

19 Jose Torres and Marisol, the college student farmworker whose family migrates from the Valley to Pioneer’s operations in Illinois. 133 All in all, Gabriela’s month and a half working for Monsanto was a nightmare. She went up there for the elevated pay of 10.00 per hour as her minimum-wage job in the Valley with a local school district was inactive for the summer. Newly pregnant and with a signed contract, she drove across the country with her teenage son to make some extra money for the summer to supplement their very modest living. She experienced humiliation because of having to stay in a kitchen-less hotel in which her and her son were racially marked and alienated. But worst of all, her son would end up with a workplace injury where the space between his thumb and index finger was punctured all the way through and she wound up having a miscarriage just as she was returning to Texas. She recalled,

I was feeling sick. I tried to go to several doctors, but they denied me because I didn’t have insurance…The baby stopped growing.

I have known Gabriela since we were children so to listen to her relive this episode was not easy. While there is no way to directly attribute all of her misfortune to Monsanto directly, it is within their operations that she met this fate and for farmworker advocates the concern with these large corporate farming operations is that they have increased capacity to defend themselves in court when they do commit infractions.

In my time volunteering with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid (TRLA) and their farmworker division I was privy to mediation between some of these powerful, expensive attorneys for the biotechnology corporations and TRLA. In one case, Valley workers had gone to Iowa to work for Syngenta and were given less than half of the work their contract promised. Rather than immediately recognize their breach of contract and settle out with the workers, the corporate attorney drove a hard bargain and fought to delay the entire

134 process. The case wound up settling out of court at a later date but the TRLA attorney that day commented on how disturbed they were by the emboldened position of this corporate attorney because of how blatant the breach of contract was. This aggressive lawyering that

I witnessed that day seems to be in line with their legal tactics that lead to their monopolization of U.S. farms as discussed above. So, while the U.S. Corn Belt provides lots of work opportunities to Valley residents at an elevated pay rate compared to what is typically offered to the working poor by the local economy, we ought to keep a watchful eye toward the continued developments in the “espiga” of this Midwestern region if we are to take worker protections seriously.

The shape of today’s Midwest stream only faintly resembles its former self. The flow of migrants out of South Texas has slowed significantly and the farmworkers who do migrate are no longer selecting Michigan for their seasonal employment in great numbers.

Many Texas farmworkers of the Midwest stream have moved on.

MAINTAINING AN IMPORTED FARM LABOR SUPPLY: TODAY’S MICHIGAN FARMWORKERS In Michigan, farming remains a critical part of the state’s economy as the state is currently the fourth largest producer of fruits and vegetables in the nation and the sixth largest recipient of migrant farm labor of any state in the country (U.S. Department of

Agriculture 2017b). Despite industry changes, levels of incoming migrant farm laborers to the state have remained fairly consistent since the late 1990s and a flow of thousands of migrant farmworkers continue to arrive annually to meet the manual labor needs of today’s

Michigan farming operations. Migrants from South Texas and local domestic farmworkers

135 who “settled out” permanently continue to play a vital role in the state’s agricultural production, but today’s Michigan farmers have increasingly turned to workers from

Florida’s Eastern migrant stream and Mexican guest workers who hold H-2A visa work permits. Michigan’s agricultural economy, which depends on attracting farmworkers from great distances has developed a network of social programs that serve its farmworker population. Life for many Michigan migrant farmworkers, however, remains a challenging existence. Today, the state finds itself as a central zone of production in fresh fruits throughout its western coast along Lake Michigan with blueberries in the Southwest and apples and cherries more prominent to the north. This fruit-heavy, western half of the state that began budding in the mid-twentieth century is now the most significant agricultural region in Michigan and keeps the need for migrant farm labor in the state alive, even as mechanization has displaced some agricultural workers.

Mechanization Rises, but Fresh Fruits Still Drive Migration to Michigan To be clear, the percentage of Americans who participate in any form of agricultural labor has steadily declined for many years now as the U.S. Census shows that the percentage of the total workforce represented by the agricultural labor market has declined from 90 percent in 1790 to 31 percent in 1910, 12. 2 percent in 1950 and just 2.6 percent by 1990 (Spielmaker, np). Far from the days of an agricultural economy, most Americans today are not clamoring for a job in agriculture. Of course, advancement in farming technology and mechanization has allowed for far fewer hands to produce more than ever before. Places like Michigan have steadily turned to mechanization to specifically address

136 the issue of labor shortages in the region since the late 1960s (Briody 1987, 32). In a recent interview conducted by West Michigan business news website, a fifth-generation, Western

Michigan fruit grower named Nick Schweitzer commented about the worry of a labor shortage:

We’re trying to be proactive and plan for it and set up an orchard so it makes it easier, at least. If we can’t go to full robot next, we can go up to a platform of cutting down that tree (to) a point where you can reach through and pick on one side so you don’t have to go up and down every single row, and we can make it a lot quicker. It [mechanization] increases that efficiency so you need fewer workers overall and can do it a lot quicker and more efficient. It lowers your costs, too (Galloway 2018, np).

This attitude in Michigan and elsewhere has long persisted and today a tremendous number of crops can now be picked by machine ranging from hardy cucumbers to delicate blueberries. Yet there remain reasons for requiring manual labor, especially in fresh fruits because of the market demands for unblemished produce. This came up in my conversation with the western Michigan blueberry and strawberry farmers I interviewed. They use machines for juice production while they rely on migrant and seasonal labor for the “table” market: the berries people consume in their homes and are thus typically pickier about. So as farmers in the state continue to rely on high numbers of seasonal workers for to pick, sort, and package these crops, they must find ways to continue receiving a stream of workers from anywhere they can get it.

Michigan Taps New Streams: From Texas Families to Florida Solos In the concluding chapter of historian Dennis Valdés’ 1991 work on Midwestern farmworkers he discusses how farmers in the region had been increasingly recruiting

137 workers from an Eastern source of Florida as well as the Caribbean. The 1995 work of

David Griffith and Ed Kissam examining farmworkers across various American streams also commented on this trend. By the time of my research, this stream of Florida workers to Michigan was in full effect as I discovered that Michigan farmers, including ones I interviewed, have been increasingly recruiting Florida-based workers who, unlike the

Texas families that long came to Michigan, are often coming in groups of single young males. As well, many of these workers are originally from South Mexico or Guatemala.

While it is difficult to find data of precisely where all of the state’s migrant farmworkers are arriving from, recent data from the State of Michigan shows that the state is now receiving a higher rate of Floridians than Texans in their schools registering as migrants.

Considering that Texans migrate in families at much higher rates than Floridians and thus would be overrepresented in educational data, this indicates that the numbers between

Florida and Texas migrants to Michigan are not even close (U.S. Department of Education

2014). This is especially the case in the blueberry harvest in the southwestern part of the state where my observations were that a clear majority of the blueberry pickers are this group of single workers people often refer to as “solos.” Texas workers are now hardly present in blueberry picking but continue to have a significant presence within the blueberry packing sheds while also still working in high numbers in the northern Michigan crops of apples and cherries. As they have migrated to the region for decades Texans in

Michigan also tend to have more elevated positions having acquired years of skills as well as favorability with farmers. Still, Michigan’s fields, in an age of large-scale farming, is predominantly worked now by Florida workers. 138 The reasons for these changes to Michigan’s farm labor force are multiple. First, less Texas workers are arriving to Michigan for the reasons discussed in my previous section on Valley farmworkers associated with Michigan’s change in unemployment benefit distribution and enforcement of age restrictions as well as more competition from farm operations in the U.S. Corn Belt. But from their end, Michigan farmers have been anticipating the switch to Florida workers for decades as it has suited their evolving labor needs. Feeling squeezed by international market pressures, the Michigan farmers I spoke with claim that Florida workers are more cost-efficient than Texas workers because they are more often single and thus come with less “overhead” costs—housing the non-working children of Texas workers is a cost some Michigan farmers feel they can no longer absorb.

They also maintain that the Florida farm labor market is more ideal for business because they come in much larger crews (estimates of 80 per crew are common in the blueberries) than Texas workers ever did (20-30 traditionally) and their farms, bigger than ever, require this greater workforce. These Florida workers tend to be much younger than their Texas counterparts and farmers admit that they are also much more undocumented. Also, Florida solos are generally spoken of as being willing to work harder jobs and longer hours than

Texas workers. Now, to be clear, some Florida workers are migrating with their entire families and/or do have legal status while some Texas migrants are migrating sometimes as solos and/or without legal status, but both are more the exception rather than the rule.

The most obvious reason as to the difference in these worker crews rests in the location of both sending regions. One cannot leave the Valley without clearing an inland immigration inspection station which greatly limits the mobility of South Texans who do not have legal 139 status. Floridians, on the contrary, do not have to cross through immigration checkpoints meaning they can recruit from a larger pool of farmworkers.

Scott, the trans-generational family farmer in Western Michigan I interviewed for this project explained why he preferred solos when he commented:

Say you got 30 percent of your housing tied up with kids, now your costs just went up more because then you don’t have those spots for workers. That’s just the name of the game. Yes, you know I have some certain family units and I have other units that are more designed for single. Obviously as a business owner I’m gonna try to maximize my housing and try to get as many worker per the amount of space I have because that’s what makes the company work. Non-productive personnel that you have on this farm is a dead expense so that’s where the single male is definitely a way more attractive option for me than families even though I prefer families. I prefer them. The fruit’s better, everything’s better. Relationships are better, they’re a lot less problems but they cost me more.

According to Scott, he believes that Texans are the more skilled workers who pick his blueberries and strawberries best. He also admits that he finds the Texas families more likable than the Florida workers either because it is true or because the Texas families evoke nostalgia of a simpler day in farming and securing farm labor whose trans- generational experience in crops made them ideal workers. Nostalgia or not, however,

Michigan farmers seemingly no longer consider farmworker families viable. Housing non- workers adds up and Texas families became less viable for piece-rate pay after the 2009 investigation into child labor leading to stricter enforcement of farm labor age restrictions that I discussed in my previous section. To help facilitate this process of acquiring an adequate labor force, the state government is heavily involved in making Michigan an attractive place for farmworkers to choose as a migration destination.

140 Farmworker Services in Michigan: The Burden of an Inorganic Labor Supply The workers I spoke with say they choose to come to Michigan for many reasons including its increased pay, free or reduced housing, and migrant farmworker services for their children from day care to educational programs. It did not take long for me to see the stark difference in treatment of farmworkers at the hand of the state after arriving to

Michigan for my research in the spring of 2015. It was mid-May when I joined some of the staff of Migrant Student Services at Michigan State University on a trip out west to the Van

Buren County annual farmworker welcome event. The level of coordination here was rather impressive. Where in the Valley the largest event for farmworkers comparable to this event in Van Buren County was organized by the large Catholic Basilica of San Juan rather than by the state, here an effort was made to host over a hundred people who worked in various areas of farmworker support and management. The lineup of speakers who presented at the event was also impressive as they invited two prominent farmers in the county, an agricultural researcher from the MSU College of Agriculture to provide a crop report, and various state agency officials who provided workshops on several critical themes relating to farmworkers such as wage and hour laws and immigration policies. As they spoke of the many state services and policies to protect farmworkers, I was blown away by why this looked so different from Texas. It did not take me long to conclude that this had to do with the lack of a local labor supply. Sure, Michigan is a more politically progressive state than Texas and this may always be at play when talking state-level policy, but there is certainly a clear incentive for Michigan to offer state services to farmworkers.

Their economy, in part, depends on it. From a state agency dedicated to serving the needs

141 migrant farmworkers named “Migrant Affairs,” to summer educational programs and free day care provided by the state-funded “Migrant Child Task Force,” Michigan invests in social services for securing its workforce. This is clear from the mission statement of

Migrant Affairs listed on their website:

Farmworkers serve a vital role in Michigan’s economy. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) is the lead state agency responsible for the assessment, development and coordination of services for Michigan’s migrant and seasonal farmworkers. Our mission is to deliver public benefits, provide assistance, and coordinate statewide services that meet the economic and cultural needs of marginalized migrant and seasonal farmworkers (Michigan Department of Health and Human Services 2019, np).

If you build it, they will come. Especially if you build housing.

Michigan Farmworker Housing Because Michigan does not house a local farm labor supply, their farmers have traditionally offered free or reduced housing for migrant workers that are licensed through the state. Scott, the transgenerational family farmer concerned over the growing pace of a globally competitive agricultural market, emphasized that Michigan farmers would be hard-pressed to find a sufficient number of workers without offering free housing. In describing his own farmworker housing, he commented:

And I house pretty much everybody. You don’t have to live here to work here. I don’t make that a condition of working here but it just always seems to be the way it works because you’re competing with every other farmer out there that gives away free housing too to entice people to come so it’s very competitive. There’s not a lot of farm labor out there [in Michigan] that’s housed somewhere.

The housing must meet federal and state standards which basically mandate that they be functionally inhabitable. Because of this, the quality in housing varies significantly from

142 farm to farm and those with nicer housing units use it as a way of competing for workers.

Nonetheless, this housing can often prove vital to farmworkers who are among the nation’s poorest laborers as Yesenia, the farmworker college student whose family migrates from

Florida to Michigan, mentioned to me that part of the reason they migrate to Michigan is to have a place to live as their housing in Florida is not available year-round. In these cases, housing dependency almost certainly restricts the workers’ ability to stand up against farmer violations because they effectively do not have anywhere to go. And for Yesenia and her family, they have had to endure the poor end of Michigan’s farmworker housing, consistently staying in what she describes as atrocious conditions. She described their poor housing in the state to me:

Living conditions are horrible where we live. Our ceilings have holes, there’s no ventilation. It’s just horrible. It’s about the size of this room [12 by 12-foot office] for like six people, which is horrible.

Later in the interview, while describing why she believes farmworkers’ quality of life has worsened in her time working from 2004 to 2016. She says that:

Pay goes up and down; I don’t think anything really changes in the fields. In some ways they get worse. I feel like that housing gets worse. It’s just horrible. The housing is really bad as years go by. They don’t update it.

Other workers like Laura, a long-time migrant worker to one of western Michigan’s large- scale nurseries from the Mexican state of Guanajuato, mentioned to me the same complaint, only in her case she was a bit more bothered because they had recently begun charging rent to what had formerly been free housing. After migrating to the same place for almost 15 years, she claims that new ownership began to charge a “reduced rate” of rent around 2011

143 that she considers a reduction to her family’s wages since pay has not increased in that time.

When considering the question of how housing has changed for farmworkers in the state over the last several decades the answer is a pretty clear: not much. Many of the workers I interacted with spoke of living in the exact same housing conditions they have always lived in including some who have been migrating for decades. This makes sense when considering that Michigan has not passed any new farmworker housing laws since

1978 (Michigan Department of Agriculture & Rural Development 2019). Still though, farmworker housing is exceedingly available, and their kitchens are step up from the hotels that many of the workers I spoke with migrating to the Corn Belt are reporting living in.

Of course, the functionality of a house with a kitchen is always going to preferable to staying at a hotel. As a person who has been in and around farmworker housing my entire life, there is nothing really that stands out about most of the housing I was privy to in the region. The houses are typically built small, efficient and with the most basic of material resources which typically involve very thin wood and little to no insulation with the space typical of a small, one to two-bedroom apartment. It did seem like some of the housing in the blueberry region in the Southwestern state had newer units than other regions like

Southeastern Michigan and Northwestern Michigan where I also spent some time. This likely has to do with the increase in blueberry production in the region requiring more and more workers. With farmworker housing in Michigan and elsewhere, the “new” is often better as once a house is built, it will often receive little care other than basic cleaning and maintenance. A longtime migrant education worker I interviewed in the Northwestern city 144 of Hart, which is dense in cherry and apple fields, echoed this sentiment but also added that she has seen situations in which a farmer will build new housing units for preferred workers in order to reward them. In a competitive market for farm labor, Michigan farmers will often take great means to secure their work force. They also must find ways to keep costs low and one way they maintain a low budget is by using the widely-found-in-agriculture method of paying their workers via “piece rate.”

Figure 4: Farmworker housing in Northwest Michigan (Photo courtesy of Miguel Torres)

Figure 5: Farmworker housing in Southeastern Michigan (Photo courtesy of the author)

145 Michigan: Piece Rate as a Win-Win for Farmers It did not come as a surprise to me that wage theft was such a prevalent theme throughout my study. Low and/or stolen wages are built into the history of U.S. farm labor as it was not until 1978 that they were first allowed to qualify for federal minimum wage as discussed in Chapter 2. Additionally, much of U.S. crop-picking is paid by “piece rate,” or a system which pays you based on how much you pick. This was the case in both of my research sites and while it can reward the fastest workers, it is known to punish slower workers who can sometimes earn less than the hourly minimum wage in any given crop, and it creates a worker environment in which the emphasis of speed generally means the sacrifice of worker breaks and worker safety in the form of frenetic, exhausting hustling to earn more. Using the piece rate model, farmers and crew leaders in both the Valley and

Michigan have their own way of undermining or even stealing the wages of their employees. In Michigan the longtime use of piece rate with Texas families and now Florida workers has been a way of creating a win-win situation for farmers.

Sometimes it is simply an outright robbing of wages by paying them less than the hours worked or in the worst case, not paying them at all. Perhaps the most common strategy, however, is the old piece rate method of basically not honoring the prevailing wage and instead paying the worker only by the piece rate even when it amounts to less than minimum wage. This type of pay discrepancy is something I ran across in Michigan, although farmers do defend themselves against accusations that they are not honoring minimum wage laws. Leslie, a large blueberry farmer I interviewed said the following:

In general, people do not understand piece rate. Workers who are doing it understand it. And they usually prefer it because it rewards them for their skill, their 146 hard work, all of those things. And generally, they can make much more money on a piece rate than they can an hourly rate.

The Michigan blueberry farmer would go on to defend the piece rate by indicating that older, younger, and disabled family members could work alongside their family to earn more money collectively.

They’re in a family group, they’re contributing to the family well-being, contributing to their own self-esteem because they are helping, but as an individual, even though it’s only 250.00, they aren’t making the minimum wage per hour and in a competitive market I can’t afford to pay that…I think that in those instances where regulators would say ‘We’re doing a good thing, we’re advocating for the workers.’ The families, as it plays out in real life, may think it’s not.

This way of speaking from this Midwestern farmer reminded me of words I had seen from another Midwesterner, Valley citrus pioneer, John H. Shary. Shary, writing about the

Valley family workers of the early twentieth century after arriving from the Midwest said,

The entire family works and are very handy, especially in picking cotton and corn, transplanting vegetables and in harvesting and packing time…The women soon become fair domestic servants and the men will work day and night, rain or shine, in their own steady way and can plow a furrow much straighter than the average farmer (in Weber 2015, 48).

Of course, Leslie is not wrong in that farmworkers very often do prefer the piece rate because of these reasons mentioned by the longtime Michigan farmer. Would they take a higher hourly wage for themselves so as to not involve their young, elderly, or disabled family members in farm labor? I would assume so. Is it ethical to pay anyone at any age less than the individual minimum wage? Leslie believes so, others remain skeptical. There seems to be a type of benevolent racism at play; a “we know what’s best for workers” attitude is used to justify paying a reduced wage so that you may be one of the largest blueberry operations in the country, just as Shary was a citrus giant. Sitting in front of a 147 farmer excusing their sub-minimum wage pay of children by saying it is good for their

“self-esteem” was not easy. I was once a child farmworker with low self-esteem, and I recognize these condescending attitudes all too well from my own agony as a farmworker in the region. But the issue of piece rate goes far beyond underpaying slower workers.

Social Alienation and Farmworker Mental Health On one occasion I went to a migrant labor camp with a group of farmworker service providers named the “Migrant Child Task Force.” They were providing resources such as clothes, hygienic products, books and toys to a group of farmworker families in southwest

Michigan that work mostly picking greens and vegetables. The camp was in good condition compared to other camps I have seen as it was obvious that the grower was complying with labor camp codes. Several small white buildings with at least one window boarded up for some reason were sitting on a large compound with a huge white house in between two different sets of motel-like housing units. I initially thought that the big white house was where either the grower or the contractor lived but I was corrected by one of the task force volunteers who had been to the camp before. It was actually housing for workers. The case worker said that the housing was not necessarily for preferred workers but that three different families all related to each other migrated to this camp together, so the grower decided that was the best housing option for them. Interestingly enough, I noticed that the west-most set of housing units had cars with Florida license plates almost exclusively parked near their units while the east-most set of units had mostly vehicles with Texas license plates. As I was talking with workers, I noticed that the housing seemed to be mostly

148 split by sending state: Texas and Florida. All but two of the units at the camp were filled by families. These two units were filled with single males. Because the objective of our group was to distribute resources mostly to children, the men did not come out to interact with us in the public space we were occupying. After a while, I approached the door of one set of single men who had stayed in their quarters and they invited me in. I explained to them my position as both advocate and researcher (and former farmworker) and mentioned that I was interested in tracking how farmwork has changed over time and was very interested in hearing their stories. A tall, older gentleman with a worn face and posture who was clearly the veteran farmworker of the bunch and introduced himself as “Hector,” loudly proclaimed:

Te puedo decir que tengo 25 años viniendo a este campo y ninguna cosa ha cambiado!

I can tell you that I have been coming to this camp for 25 years and not one thing has changed!

I explained I was interested in following up more with him and the others in the near future and we made arrangements for an informal hangout over some barbeque at their quarters.

I could tell that he had so much more to say. The way he belted out those words was as if he had been waiting for someone to ask him about his life as a farmworker. I asked for an interview but he said it was not necessary; he could tell me everything I needed to know right then and there. What had worn on him over the years at this camp was its remoteness.

As a Florida-based farmworker he appreciated the increased pay in the Michigan fields and the steady work, but he said that to return to a place for so many years and live seasons in isolation had worn on him. He said that is why he would rather drink when at the labor 149 camp (the entire room of guys were starting to open some beers) because there is simply not much else to do. Some places in Michigan have larger populations of Spanish-speaking people and therefore it is easier to participate in the community and avoid deep alienation.

This camp, however, was in a very small community in another part of Michigan and was very remote. We had to take a long windy dirt road to get to the camp. After traveling to the camp, it was easy to understand how this type of isolated existence could wear on someone. Opposite of the excessive spotlight shone on workers housed in hotels in the corn detasseling of the U.S. Corn Belt, this physical alienation experienced by many across the

Midwest seems equally detrimental to farmworker mental health.

Additionally, feelings of alienation via racial tensions were discussed by several of the workers I interviewed. Marisol, a young college student I interviewed regarding her experience as a migrant worker from the Valley to rural Illinois spoke to this alienation.

When I asked her what she felt the most difficult part of her farmworker experience was, she replied:

Not the work. I feel like everyone would think it’s the work, but it’s not that. I think it’s traveling, leaving your family and always having to be in new places. A lot of the times being discriminated against in other places, that’s hard.

Marisol then broke into tears. In fact, this is a common experience for many Mexican farmworkers in the Midwest as research suggests that “acculturative stress, anxiety, and depression” are common among immigrant Mexican farmworkers in the Midwest (Hovey and Magana 2000). Many of the workers I interviewed living in Michigan shared feelings of alienation. For example, my interview with Jaime, a farmworker in his late 50s from the mid-Valley city of Elsa who has migrated to northwestern Michigan for decades, revealed 150 this feeling of alienation. He discussed with me how he could never quite grow used to

Michigan even though he had been migrating to the state for almost forty years. Speaking of his love for his South Texas community, he said to me:

El pueblito donde nosotros vivimos (Elsa) está bien chiquito y dicen ‘Está bien féo, no tiene ni una tienda de comer, ni tiene tienda de mandado.’ Pero para mi está bien bonito, no?

The town where we live (Elsa) is very small and they say ‘It’s ugly, it doesn’t have a restaurant or a grocery store.’ But to me it’s very beautiful, no?

He smiles.

Pues allí es home.

Well, there it is home.

Even though Jaime has been migrating out of the Valley since 1970, when he was just 12 years old, and thus living in Michigan for almost as much time as Texas, his preference for

Texas is clear. Perhaps it is this alienation that has historically kept so many migrant workers from the Valley returning “home.” The cultural alienation for a Mexican in the

Midwest can be overwhelming and this has been evident to me since I first stepped foot in the region in 1993. This alienation and social suffering in Michigan agriculture is something I believe will only get worse in the state as farmers turn increasingly to the H-

2A visa program.

THE H-2A VISA GUEST WORKER RISE AND CONTINUED DEPENDENCE ON EXPLOITED MEXICAN LABOR The H-2 visa program for agricultural guest workers was born out of the

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 as a part of a series of laws and agreements that

151 continued the bracero program beyond World War II. The visa program’s purpose was to assign the duty of managing the importing of foreign workers to the U.S. Attorney General in order to continue the flow of guest workers (Danger 2000). In 1986 the visa program was restructured into the categories of H-2A (for agriculture) and H-2B (for non- agriculture) temporary worker visas as a part of the reforms under the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). With a large, legalized farm labor force attained through the SAW program, H-2A visas were not widely distributed in the program’s first several years as from 1987 to 1994 only 7000 guest workers per year came in through the program. By the late 1990s the number spiked considerably to about 41,000 per year (Menchaca 2016, 104).

The numbers began to increase rapidly nationally by the late 2000s as they jumped from

46,432 in 2006 to 87,317 in 2007 and 173,103 by 2008. While fluctuating over the next couple of years, the numbers have risen as of late to 283,580 in 2015 and 412,820 in 2017 according to the (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2018, np). These numbers mean the program has reached bracero program proportions. In the program’s current incarnation, it is managed from the U.S. end by the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Services which is under the authority of the Department of

Homeland Security (DHS). This recruitment of international guest workers does come with regulations set by these agencies even as reports suggest that they are not being properly enforced (Bauer and Stewart 2013). Under the current rules of the program an employer must:

(1) Offer a job that is of a temporary or seasonal nature. (2) Demonstrate that there are not enough U.S. workers who are able, willing, qualified, and available to do the temporary work. (3) Show that employing H-2A workers will not adversely 152 affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers. (4) Generally, submit a single valid temporary labor certification from the U.S. Department of Labor with the H-2A petition (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services 2019, np).

It is the existence of these rules and the bureaucratic tape tied to them that has kept the program from growing more rapidly as many farmers prefer to continue hiring undocumented labor or domestic migrants with legal status rather than dealing with a government-run visa program (Menchaca 2016). Yet for a variety of reasons I discuss in this section ranging from labor shortages to increased levels of productivity the program continues its expansion.

As mentioned, the program has steadily increased in number of workers for the last several decades and as of this writing it is becoming overwhelming popular in Michigan where state agencies like the Farm Bureau are pushing for its use. Currently, most workers brought in through the program are from Mexico (80 percent) while most of the rest are from Guatemala and Jamaica (Bauer and Stewart 2013, np). The expansion of the program and its flexibility has some concerned about what this might mean for farm labor moving forward as reminders of the horrors of the bracero program are being more commonly voiced by farmworker advocates. First, the program does not come with a cap—unlike its counterpart the H-2B visa for non-agricultural employment—so this could be motivation for farmers to purposefully drive away potential domestic workers in favor of this more vulnerable group knowing that they have an on-demand supply of unequally positioned workers who work hard and speak up little. Beyond the language barriers that may or may not exist between farmworkers and their employers (many farmers have at least a working

153 Spanish), it is their status as “non-American” that is of greater concern to farmworker advocates as history demonstrates that these types of workers are far more susceptible to exploitation.

I witnessed much of this exploitation firsthand when working as a farmworker organizer for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) which in September of 2004 signed a contract with the North Carolina Growers Association to gain the right to represent the state’s H-2A workers as a union. In the first working season of 2005 I spent three months signing up hundreds of H-2A workers into the union and the stories they told of the program were horrifying. Some told stories of particularly egregious violators who went so far as to regularly assault their workers. In one labor camp owned by a farmer known throughout the state by farmworkers as “el diablo” or “the devil,” I would encounter an almost entirely new group of workers every time I visited the site in 2 to 3-week intervals. Workers would talk to me about how several of their coworkers fled in the middle of the night to chance it as undocumented laborers because they could not bear their brutal employer any longer and on other occasions I would learn about how “el diablo” would contact the Department of Labor to switch out his workers because of his discontent with them—of course workers claimed that he would work them so hard they would inevitably slow in pace and this is when he would find some kind of excuse to have them replaced by the DOL. These were their horror stories on the U.S. side, but they had plenty of complaints about how things operated in Mexico as well. There, they claimed, they had to pay contractors massive bribes for access to the program (the number I heard regularly in 2005 was 3,000.00 USD). To afford these bribes many took out expensive loans with very high 154 interest rates and often reported having to work for nearly half of the season before they could pay off their loans creating a system of de facto debt peonage. Many workers reported this debt as a primary reason why they did not want to stir things up with their employers even when they were in clear violation of the law. It is rather frightening to owe this much money and have no alternative way of recuperating it. It is more frightening still when

Mexican contractors are known to be ruthless. In 2007, a FLOC organizer named Santiago

Rafael Cruz, working in the Monterrey branch of the union fighting against the corruption on the Mexican end of the program was found murdered inside of the union office. While accounts vary, FLOC and their supporters believe the murder to have been executed by contractors upset with FLOC’s meddling in their profits (Boyd-Barrett 2011). These concerns among others are what keep farmworker advocates up at night as it is clear we are moving in the direction of massive program expansion. I interviewed one of these concerned advocates who had extensive thoughts on the state of the H-2A visa program as a part of my research.

A Legal Expert’s Take on H-2A James has been doing work in the field of farmworker law for a while now and he has specialization in the Midwest. I met him at several farmworker events throughout my time conducting research in Michigan and while not able to build a solid rapport with him over time, I was able to secure an interview with someone who many I spoke with considered to be “the person” I needed to talk with about Michigan farm labor. But what I got was so much more than that. James has a deep expertise in many matters of farmworker

155 law but specifically he has been following closely the H-2A visa program and emphasized that he really wanted his analysis to get across on the matter. Because of his expertise and how well he spoke on the trajectory of cheap and exploitable farm labor evolving into a lust for guest workers, the following is an extended portion of the transcript of our interview as he details his worries about the program. His view is that the H-2A program is simply another way in which Michigan farmers and farm interests can maintain a subjugated farm labor class. For James, labor costs are always the expenditures that farmers most aggressively seek to reduce in comparison to other costs. He explains:

It’s happening because of some very forward-looking and intelligent establishment figures within the agricultural commodity community in Michigan led by all of the different commodity groups such as the apple group, the grape group, asparagus, etc. and kind of led by the Michigan Farm Bureau. They’ve been doing some thinking for years about how an optimum labor work force would look and given that there are three main inputs into the cost of producing these fruits and vegetables. That is, one third is the land and equipment, the orchards and tractors and all. Another third is the chemical bill. And the last third is labor. Um. They don’t feel they have any leverage over the costs that are involved in the equipment and land, but they also don’t have any incentive of reducing those costs because they want their land price high in case they ever want to sell it and a lot of them have stock, and you know, especially, the ‘Farm Bureaus’ of the world are connected pretty closely to the mechanized, to the ‘John Deere’s’ of the world.

Author: So that’s an investment that gives back?

Right. They don’t want to mess with that. For some reason they don’t wanna mess with the chemicals and they don’t push back on that and I still can’t exactly figure that out other than it’s just like pharmaceuticals, it’s just like that’s just a really powerful, powerful group and maybe they feel they can’t get anywhere with that. But look where they can get, they can get somewhere easily with this labor. This is already the lowest cost labor in the Western Hemisphere and so just make the cost lower. ‘How to make the cost lower?’ is what they’ve been thinking earnestly about, and I know this for a fact since I got here many years ago. And so how to make the cost of labor lower is a simple economic equation that goes back to the basis of capitalism and that is you gotta make the supply larger.

156 While I am not sure others would agree that the United States has the lowest cost of farm labor in the Western Hemisphere, James’ point is well-taken. His explanation of why farm labor is consistently low-paying moves us from a contextualization in which farmers pay little because of market demands to one in which farmers and farming interests collaborate to intentionally reduce costs by targeting the lowest hanging fruit which they have little vested interest in: farmworkers. He continued making observations regarding Michigan’s farm labor system:

If you can make the supply larger, it will reduce the cost. It’s just simply supply and demand. So their whole planning has been around ‘we need a bigger supply.’ And they realized that the Texas family tradition is a) not going to get bigger and in fact get smaller. And it gets smaller as a result of a couple of demographic changes. You know, 1) people like you who are offspring in the migrant stream move out of it after a while because your parents encourage you to get education and you do and you leave. So long term that Texas established family-based structure, it’s not that they’re against it, a lot of them see the value of it, but they know it’s not what they need, which is they need a bigger workforce. Right?

James is highlighting this realization that Michigan farmers had by the late 1990s that

Texas farmworkers would not be sustainable long term. His attention then switched to the way in which a change to immigration enforcement affected farm labor in the state:

So then came tightened immigration because when I started doing this many years ago, I’m telling you, no one cared. It wasn’t an issue, no one even asked a question about ‘do you have authorization to work or not?’ I mean, even though IRCA passed in 1986 and it had those employer sanctions. They were not enforced by anybody. And the employers. Remember, the sanction is against employers, it’s not against anybody else. Just an aside: it’s not against the law to work in this country without documents. It’s against the law to employ someone in this country who doesn’t have documents to work and that was never enforced. And as long as that was never enforced, everything was fine and they had this huge supply of people who were probably undocumented as well as people who were, mixed family, all sorts of people. If you had a family member who was from Mexico who came along with you one year, ‘Great! More people!’ Nobody cared until this thing about the borders and mostly it was before 9/11 but it mostly hit 9/11/2001. And when that 157 hit they started seeing that there would be some tightened enforcement. It didn’t hit Michigan immediately. They were very successful because of cozy relations between—just how Michigan is, very parochial. You know, the border patrol did not enforce these regulations about having authorized workers in the agricultural sector and if they did it wasn’t until about this time of year. ‘Oh ok, it’s October, we can go out there and visit this farmer because he doesn’t need this labor anymore.’ But they would never ever do it in July, August, September, it just was hands off. I don’t know who made that decision or how they did but every year same thing happened: no workforce raids.

As James argues, IRCA did not accomplish its goal of quelling undocumented migration as workers actually began working without legal permission in higher numbers than ever following IRCA, especially in agriculture. The legislation essentially backfired (Martin

1994). James then went on to explain how this all shifted after the election of President

Obama:

So we never had any enforcement, until Obama got elected and that is when the Republicans could finally squeeze Obama on ‘You’re trying to coddle those immigrants, we need you to prove that you won’t coddle them in order for us to give you the immigration reform that everybody knows we need.’ And when that happened, his administration bit and they started enforcement. And for the last eight years there’s been pretty, at least uniform enforcement. It started with just kind of running into farmworkers and then deporting them to actually seeking them out and seeking out groups of them. And it ratcheted up to the point that the people on high that were saying ‘We need a larger supply,’ they originally were willing to say, ‘We want that supply to be legalizing the people who are here. We know we’ve been having the same people work for us for years without papers. Yes, we’ve been doing the I-9s, we’ve been putting them in a file, but no one ever came to look at them. But now people are coming to look at them. We can’t do that anymore.’ They started by joining the cry, ‘Let’s legalize these people’ but then they realized they were in a cache 22 because they had to admit that they had undocumented people to legalize. And so when someone came along with another plan which was ‘Hey, let’s have a new system where we bring in guest workers.’ This has been so great to have these undocumented people because they’ll do whatever you ask them. Unlike the Texans who know their rights, these undocumented people do whatever because they don’t have authorization. If you tell them to work 18 hours a day they won’t complain. If they’re injured and you don’t send them for worker’s comp referral, they’ll live with it. Maybe they’ll leave but you’ll get another one. What other kind of workforce can we find that’s like them but legalized? And that’s when 158 they discovered about 10 years ago, ‘Oh, there’s a visa for that, it’s called an H-2A visa and all we have to do is apply to the Departments of Labor and we get a bunch of those so they switched like a light switch about five years ago from supporting the idea that ‘We should get blue cards leading to green cards for undocumented farmworkers’ to ‘Ah, forget that, we just want to expand the H-2A guest worker program at all costs and in the meantime we’re just gonna get into it heavy and use it. Why? Because this one third labor cost we can reduce. And you can’t believe the difference in productivity you get out of somebody who won’t complain about working 18 hours a day versus a family member who maybe needs some time off to take their child to the doctor, maybe has to go to a parent conference at school, maybe has a grandmother who is sick and has to go to Mexico for two weeks.’ This new kind of worker you don’t have to do any of that. They can just fire them and get the next one.

It is clear that James has a great deal of expertise on the matter and is speaking from a view skeptical of farmers and their interest groups. For James and for other legal experts and farmworker advocates I interviewed, they concur that there would be a plentiful domestic labor force in the U.S. if farmers improved pay and working/living conditions and followed the laws already on the books. However, instead the agricultural industry prefers desperate, fast-working labor from Mexico in order to reduce costs and family farm labor has become a less ideal option as housing family members who do not work costs employers too much in their view. But with security concerns over the undocumented status of so many farmworkers, guest workers are again being called upon in the form of H-2A visa workers.

This and any move to expand Mexican guest worker is worrisome, however, to those who follow the history of Mexican farm labor in the United States. Longtime San

Antonio congressman Henry B. Gonzalez iterated as much on the House floor in 1996 when two California congressmen attempted to pass legislation for another guest worker program that lowered the burden of proof on employers to hire domestic workers before

159 they could apply for guest workers. The bill also proposed 250,000 worker visas to be issued in the first year. To this proposal Gonzalez replied,

I strongly oppose the new guest worker proposal and, to be honest, I am flabbergasted that this is even being considered. I helped lead the fight to end the bracero program over thirty years ago…The current protestations of agricultural producers that they face shortages of labor is the same argument they used three decades ago, but obviously the U.S. agricultural sector didn’t collapse with the end of the old guest workers regime. If the growers want to ensure an adequate labor supply, then they should offer decent wages and adequate living conditions, which is something they should do anyway (in Weber 2015, 184).

What Congressman Gonzalez and James are both alluding to 20 years apart from each other is that agricultural interests are constantly looking for a way to evade improving pay along with living and working conditions. While I did not encounter or interview any H-2A workers directly while conducting research, their deplorable conditions came up several times in conversations and interviews. Discussing an H-2A worker camp in the state of

Arkansas, TRLA paralegal José Torres said the following:

I saw in the state of Arkansas, and this was H-2A workers, where they were having to sleep on the floor, they were having to sleep in this old, old building, where they had this burner with the butane tank not even ten feet away. You know, hot as hell. This was in Hermitage, Arkansas. I saw those guys when they arrived, they were saying ‘We were told we were coming to America, but we never thought we would be going through this kind of suffering.’

Michigan farmers did use a large supply of domestic laborers, many of whom had legal status, by occupying Texas families for several decades but ultimately with having to house family members who cannot work this option became less desirable in the twenty-first century. The two options that they feel they have before them now are essentially the same options available to most farmers in the World War II era: guest workers or the undocumented, unaccompanied male workers from Mexico (in this case, via Florida). Yet 160 even as H-2A labor across the country and especially in Michigan is steeply rising and the state is further involving itself in developing an apparatus to facilitate its expansion, there is certainly still pushback from some of the state and nation’s farmers.

Farmers and Their Hesitancy to Embrace a Government-Run Program The H-2A visa program seems to offer a solution around the lack of a consistent domestic labor supply while also appeasing nationalistic and security interests, yet not all farming interests are on board with it. Even as places like Michigan are now greatly increasing their use of H-2A labor, I found that farmers I spoke with were not necessarily enthusiastic about the prospects of turning to the program. The apprehension of moving forward with this type of structure seems closely tied to the culture of contradictory antagonism toward government interventionism in U.S. farming. Of course, this is contradictory in the sense that farmers are often the beneficiaries of government programs and subsidies while decrying the regulatory side of said interventionism. Agricultural economist E. Wesley Peterson points to the contradiction in America more broadly where many hold views against government interventionism in markets yet are slower to criticize it when it comes to farmers. Peterson notes,

In any case, the idea that farmers are honest, hard-working individuals who are nevertheless less well-off than their urban counterparts as a result of falling farm prices has long provided a rationale for active government intervention in agricultural markets…The idea that there is something particularly virtuous about farming coupled with the perception that family farmers are unfairly disadvantaged relative to the rest of U.S. society have made agriculture much less vulnerable to criticism for its reliance on government subsidies (2009, 127-28).

161 The “disadvantaged farmer" is better suited to receive a societal pass on this contradiction as it pertains to subsidies in a country that romanticizes its farmers just as they get a pass when they support anti-immigrant politics yet employ and benefit from undocumented labor. Ultimately, it seems that justice for farmworkers moving forward is almost exclusively dependent on farmers and their interest groups coming to terms with this contradiction and addressing it by working with regulators and farmworkers alike, yet this seems highly unlikely. While the farmers I spoke with for this project often speak of themselves as victims of unfair regulation, no farmer that I interviewed lived in what could be considered a modest house. If you are hiring 200 to 300 employers per year as most of my interviewees were, you are likely far from being an economic victim. This perceived victimhood of the American farmer, in my view, allows for the continued contradictory usage of a grossly unfair farm labor structure.

This ambivalence is what leads to today’s situation in which instead of viewing the government as labor facilitators they can trust, farmers often view them as another layer of potential regulation who may provide workers up front but may hit them with costly operational fines or requirements on the other end. The important question moving forward is can today’s farmers grow to love government contracts? Some are pushing back such as farmer Nick Schweitzer who said the following:

There are a lot of guys that are switching their wages (and relying on the H-2A visa program) just to make sure they can get workers in when they need them and the numbers that they need to be able to get the harvest done. We haven’t switched to that yet. We still get all (people) who come up from down south, but that’s the way a lot of guys are going. It costs a heck of a lot more (and) the regulations for housing and stuff too, they’re a little more stringent…The big thing is just trying to develop

162 the working systems now for mechanization in the future so we can really cut down on the workers (Galloway 2018, np).

Scott the blueberry and strawberry farmer I interviewed concurred with this position and added that the U.S. Department of Labor has not been supportive of the program, so he fears that they may be overly zealous in their enforcement of its rules. Interestingly enough,

James, the legal expert, had a response to this sort of skepticism on behalf of Michigan farmers toward the H-2A program’s more bureaucratic side:

The reason they’re against the so-called extra level of bureaucracy, there’s a legal description of that, it’s a hyper-technical term called ‘bull-shit’ because the same legal requirements existed with their domestic workforce but they didn’t have to follow them. So they were supposed to have documented workers but they didn’t. They were supposed to give everyone that they recruited from Texas a disclosure in their language in advance that delineated all the terms and conditions of employment, you know, the housing, the transportation. They were supposed to have licensed crew leaders, they were supposed to have licensed housing that met minimal standards. They were supposed to have worker’s comp. They were supposed to do unemployment. They didn’t. Why? Because it is sort of a nostalgia kind of thing about well the families didn’t push as long as their relationship worked. They were coming for years, the same family. You know, ‘Let’s not stand on formality here.’ But all of that bureaucracy existed in the other system. I nearly vomit when I go to these meetings now where they’re talking about H-2A and they talk about ‘You can get into the H-2A program but what you gotta do is all these things: You gotta have a housing that’s licensed. You gotta have a contract in advance with people that spells out the terms and conditions. You’re gonna be audited by ICE because they’re gonna make sure that these people actually do have these visas. And they go down the list and I’m thinking, ‘That’s not anything new.’ The new part is enforcement. They never enforced any of these rules before. Now, because it’s a new structure they think that there’s some enforcement. What the guys that you’re talking about don’t really know is they’ve heard this but if you ask them, ‘So have you been subject to that new bureaucracy?’ they’ll say ‘No I just heard about it’ because actually the only enforcement is United States Department of Labor Wage and Hour and they only have like that many investigators and I can show you reams of investigative reports where they totally white-wash these investigations when they get them. They are not aggressive law enforcement when it comes to H-2A. It is not aggressive. When the farmers discover that, they’ll love H-2A but right now um. Like I said, for many years the Farm Bureau didn’t jump into this so they were kind of telling people it was the boogie man, it was a bad 163 thing, it’s a lot of paperwork and it’s expensive. But if you do the other thing right, it’s not anything different.

With Scott mentioning the department of labor’s antagonism and James mentioning the

Michigan Farm Bureau’s apprehension, it is no wonder why it took so long for regions like

Michigan to embrace more H-2A workers. For farmers in the state this will likely be the most ideal scenario, even over their undocumented Florida workers, because ultimately these guest workers will remain in high supply. And as the program is managed by

American and Mexican bureaucratic actors, it eliminates the need for farmers to rely on contractors and crew leaders—they have to pay them, and they are not always reliable suppliers of labor—while they can also appease their “security-minded” detractors who might not be accepting of the political contradiction of hiring undocumented labor. In fact, as of writing of this dissertation, it is now picking up fast in use on Michigan farms. In a recent article by the Christian Science Monitor, they note that “Since the Michigan Farm

Bureau set up a for-profit affiliate four years ago (2014) to provide guidance navigating the red tape, the number of Michigan growers using the program has jumped from four to

50” (Case Bryant 2018, np).

But for those like James and the late Congressman Gonzalez who have long felt we must heed the call to avoid another bracero program as it would simply be an attempt to further skirt accountability on the side of U.S. agriculturalists toward their labor supply, there is clear worry. This worry is compounded by the fact that the program has no caps on workers and can be used to make agreements with workers from almost any country. If

U.S. interventionism in Mexico has had much to do with pulling Mexican labor northward,

164 then we can reasonably conclude that any corner of the global third world is a potential target of U.S. interventionism in the future for the sake of procuring an American agricultural labor supply if affordable travel accommodations could be made. Many of us who look closely at this issue would rather not have to learn the word for “bracero” in any other language.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Today’s Midwest stream is one that has been deeply impacted by changes to the farm economy of both South Texas and the Midwest as well as immigration restrictionism nationally. Today, less people are migrating for farm labor across the country, including throughout this midwestern corridor, and the farm labor landscape looks quite a bit like it did in the mid twentieth century with undocumented workers and Mexican guest workers performing most of the farm labor. Internal migrants for farm labor are fading in number yet remain as exploited as ever as they continue to face widespread wage theft, broken contracts, poor housing, and harsh working conditions under the frenetic pace of large- scale crop production for a competitive global market.

All in all, farmworkers of the Midwest stream are living and working in almost identical circumstances as they were in the 1990. It is my view that because of the increased use of H-2A and undocumented workers along with the fact that little to no meaningful legislation has passed in the area of farmworker protections while benefits such as unemployment are consistently undermined amidst increasingly higher-production environments, farmworkers of the Midwest stream are today facing a harsher working environment than they were in the 1990s while their housing remains largely unimproved.

165 While fewer remain migrating as many have aged out and/or moved on to other jobs, those who continue to migrate have moved more in time than in space; farmworker life remains largely the same as wages rise and fall and housing deteriorates. So how could a different outcome be achieved?

As Victor, the Valley legal expert I interviewed emphasized in our interview, the root of the problem lies not only in insufficient legal protections for farmworkers but enforcement of the ones that are already on the books. He commented:

Most of the laws we have, if we can just focus on enforcing those, would vastly improve farmworkers’ conditions.

Of course, Victor is not alone as many others, including James the Michigan legal expert, mentioned this to me during our interviews. And for Victor, perhaps no law could stand to be more stringently enforced than the one that protects workers’ rights20 to address grievances without retaliation from their employer. When I asked him what priorities should be for those interested in improving the lives of all U.S. farmworkers he offered the following commentary:

For me the number one issue is retaliation, because if we don’t enforce people’s protection against retaliation you have no rights, whatsoever. So, when we think about what cases to prioritize, because we have way more cases than we can ever take is, um, number one: is always, was this retaliatory? Because we don’t want people who have stood up for their rights to have suffered in that way and because of the signal that it sends. You know, very clearly if somebody complains and they’re fired nobody else at the work site is ever going to complain. And that’s something that historically has impact for generations, like everybody remembers ‘that one person’ who, you know, 15 years ago said something, and was never seen again.

20 The Fair Labor Standard Act, among others, protects from employer retaliation in case of disputes over payment. 166 The most typical cases of retaliation are workplace harassment and firing or refusing to rehire workers in subsequent seasons. Although against the law, many get away with it because of plausible deniability and the fact that workers are hesitant to engage in a prolonged dispute they are beginning from a disempowered, recently-fired position.

Protection from this type of retaliation would indeed enable more farmworkers to speak up and potentially organize for better overall conditions.

All these years later it seems that the only meaningful hope for farmworkers to experience significantly improved conditions and pay is to collectively bargain via unions that will protect their interests where federal protections and regulators fall short. Federally protected rights to overtime pay and healthcare, among others, would go a long way as well. But this remains a pipe dream as the future seems almost certainly to be the increased use of H-2A workers.

167 Chapter 4: Continued Colonialism in U.S. Agriculture

In this chapter I situate the farmworkers of the Midwest stream within prevailing theoretical discourses in farmworker studies. The development of the Valley for farming by means of land dispossession and conversion of the established local population into a subjugated labor class is not unique to the U.S. Southwest in what has been described by some scholars as a form of “internal colonialism” of ethnic Mexicans throughout the U.S.-

Mexico borderlands (Bowman 2016, Chávez 2011). What follows is a discussion of how this colonial model currently functions and how it contributes to the perpetuation of poor living and working conditions for farmworkers. A system nationally rooted in slavery, indentured servitude, political exclusion, and desperate immigrant labor, carries with it historical baggage that cannot be so easily isolated from the experience of today’s workers.

As the future of any nation with a self-sustained food supply depends on farmworkers, the hope in theorizing about their existence here is that we may infuse theory into an ongoing public dialogue with farmworkers, advocates, farmers, and policy makers in order to help eradicate or reduce the avoidable suffering that occurs in one of the nation’s least inspected workplaces.

A country as large and farmable as the U.S. with a population with such little interest in manual labor of almost any kind in an economy increasingly dense in service- sector employment is going to be in a tough situation when it comes to having enough labor for its food production. Add to this that the entire process of farm labor organization remains entirely submerged in a dependency on another nation’s workforce and you have a shaky foundation that is inherently exploitative and inevitably unsustainable. Ultimately, 168 the farm hands of America have always been the people in the furthest of margins at any given time in our nation’s history. While advancements in mechanization has allowed for a reduction in the overall labor force required to harvest today’s crops, the millions who remain laboring in this rigorous sector are perhaps more hidden than ever as Americans have grown increasingly detached from American agriculture and because workers are as undocumented as ever and live lives in shadows for self-preservation. In this chapter I offer some theoretical exploration of common themes that emerged during my research paying particular attention to issues of citizenship, race, gender, and political economy so that we might socially dissect today’s farmworker situation in America and hopefully move beyond the level of reactionary lament and into action with and for the advancement of those who plant, pick, and package our crops.

Undocumented immigrants compose a significant percentage of workers in several of the nation’s most difficult and dangerous occupations especially in the industries of agriculture, construction, and food service is a phenomenon that has been discussed by numerous scholars (Dudley 2019; Menchaca 2016; Montejano 1987; Valdés 1991; Weber

2015). Lack of legal work permission for millions of immigrants in America is central to this country’s ability to maintain a tenable farm labor force. The notion that Latinx people, due to their short stature and hardworking nature, are predisposed to excel at farm labor or simply to not mind it as much as others do, has been used by farmers and farming interests to justify poor conditions, low pay, and a continued dependence on undocumented labor.

Latinx immigrants often enjoy farm labor under the conditions that they are more left alone by immigration enforcement and they generally have a corresponding skill set to the 169 assigned tasks in a country where English language proficiency is increasingly needed in a service sector economy. There are clearly a bevy of material reasons for why farmwork is hard, performed overwhelmingly by Mexicans/immigrants, poorly compensated, and dangerous but there are also immaterial reasons that seem to be at play here. In these following sub-sections I explore the various theoretical terrains that speak to the farmworker experience, and I begin with an analysis of the political economy of current

U.S. farm labor.

THEORIZING MIGRATION Anglo farmers in America have long been the face of a settler-colonialist society.

Throughout the history of the country, they were used to populate regions, like the Valley, in which American financial and political interests could be imposed to secure wealth and prosperity for Anglos in what was, and still is, a society that systematically privileges them.

Speaking to the United Nations, President Harry Truman said this following the World

War II: “We believe in the family size farm that is the basis for our agriculture and has strongly defended our form of government” (Lauck 1998, 145). Dependency theory is a school of thought emanating from the mid-twentieth century discourses on post- colonialism following the independence movement of many former colonies across the world. For many scholars of this globalizing, “post-colonial” moment, their emphasis is a political-economic model, one largely divided among modernization theorists (Durkheim

1964; Landes 1998; Lipset 1959; Rostow 1960) and dependency theorists (Amin 1974;

Chang 2002; Fanon 2004; Heyman 2012; Kearney 1986, 1995; Mintz 1986; Prebisch 1959;

170 Wallerstein 2011; Weintraub 2010). Those on the side of “modernization” believe that the entire world is progressing in a linear fashion towards a form of cultural and therefore political-economic modernity in which some regions or countries are ahead of others.

Dependency theorists, on the other hand, believe that there are embedded, unequal and therefore dependent, relationships that regions or states previously colonized have with their colonizers. These theorists are overwhelmingly from countries or areas that occupy the periphery status of Wallerstein’s core/periphery classic dichotomy. Anthropologist

Martha Menchaca recently addressed this relationship of maintained dependence on

Mexico for farm labor on the end of U.S. farmers in her 2016 work in which she argues that there has been an intricate an asymmetrical system of mutual dependence between the

U.S. and Mexico over Mexico’s exports of oil and farm labor that primarily benefits the

United States. In the context of the farmworkers of this study, it is easy to see how the maintaining of such unequal relations between the U.S. and Mexico keep the U.S. farm labor market filled.

Beyond the Neoclassical Approach For many, the situation of Mexican-origin farmworkers in the United States can be explained by looking at the compounding of economic push and pull factors that essentially see the matter as one of supply and demand. Here, the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith’s capitalism is naturally ushering labor to where it conveniently needs to be for maximum efficiency. But looking at this neoclassical model has remained unable to generate a sufficient explanation for the phenomenon of Mexican farm labor in the United States.

171 There are, undoubtedly, a bevy of economic and political factors causing a “push” from

Mexico (poverty, lack of jobs, lack of education, emigration policy) and a “pull” from the

United States (high demand for farm labor, immigration policy), but examining the situation of farmworkers in America one sees what might better be described as “pull-pull” factors rather than “push-pull.” Using the theoretical framework of dependency theory, rather than the neoclassical approach, is useful to this endeavor. Martha Menchaca argues effectively that the U.S. has frequently intervened in Mexican political affairs in order to maintain a one-sided relationship in which the U.S. extracts cheap oil and cheap farm labor because of Mexican dependency on American dollars. This is not free-market capitalism playing out and today’s farmworkers in that sense are not a product of a free-market; they are a part of a meticulously crafted system, one detailed in this dissertation. As such, the neoclassical approach simply does not do justice to an explanation of the causes of a steadily racialized labor force. The maintaining of a dependent Mexico relies on interventionism that ultimately funnels labor and oil into American hands. But what is perhaps most compelling, or “new” about Menchaca’s work is that she posits that by acting in this fashion, U.S. oil and agricultural interests are setting up the nation to become dependent on Mexico and their resources of oil and farm labor.

Who Depends on Whom? Dependency between Farmers, Farmworkers, and National Projects There seems to be a very intricate relationship in the U.S. of dependence that flows in two directions as farmers are equally, if not more, dependent on the labor of the farmworker than the other way around. Following Menchaca’s lead (2016), the case of

172 today’s Midwest stream calls us to pay attention to these intricate relationships of dependence. Let us explore this in earnest.

While it is certain that Mexico “depends” on the United States for economic purposes, the inverse rarely receives attention as Americans have built a food system that is incredibly reliant on the cooperation of Mexicans. From Mexican produce exports to

Mexican farmworkers, America needs Mexicans for more than profits; it needs them to eat—this is not including the overrepresentation of Mexican labor in the food service industry. So why has this escaped the attention of many when discussing U.S.-Mexico relations? Perhaps because we presume power exists only at the top. American farmers and their political reinforcers have seemingly always recognized this power of Mexican farmworkers and they have sought to curtail it at various junctures. Mobilizing, immobilizing, hiring, firing, recruiting, deporting—these have all been collective efforts to curtail power. It would seem that collective efforts by farmworkers and their supporters, an exercise of their own collective power, could perhaps be the end to a mutual dependency that benefits one a lot more than the other. Otherwise, Americans risk starvation gambling with such a precarious system so heavily dependent on Mexicans, a system that is riddled with coloniality.

The historical formation of the Midwest stream is contingent upon the formation of an internal colony in South Texas. Arguing to this end, historian Timothy Bowman recently utilized this theoretical framework of internal colonialism in his 2016 work on the development of the agriculture industry in general, and the citrus industry in particular in the early to mid-twentieth century Valley. As Bowman argues, the development of the 173 citrus industry in South Texas was predicated on a colonial relationality between the Anglo

Midwest and East Coast farmers and the local, ethnic Mexican labor class. This form of internal colonialism occurring in the early twentieth century development of South Texas’ agricultural industry is illustrated no better than in the 1927 promotional film “The Lure of the Rio Grande Valley.” In this silent short, the Valley is being sold to prospective land investors in Chicago for a chance to buy into the “Magic Valley.” Throughout the film they attempt to provoke interest by highlighting the region’s warm weather, palm trees, and cheap Mexican labor. At one point a movie still reads, “Mexican labor in the Valley is ideal: abundant, peaceful, obedient and cheap” (Brownsville Historical Association nd, np). It is this type of racial creation of a labor class that we so commonly see in the establishment of franchise colonialism that ultimately occurs here in the otherwise settler colonial context of the United States. In other words, Northern farmers seeking fortune in the development of the Valley essentially used franchise colonial models to extract labor and of resources—in this case, year-round agricultural commodities, especially citrus—in order to individually profit while securing goods for the “mainland.” John Weber describes this second colonization of the region in the following way:

Newcomer farm interests, eager to sweep away all vestiges of the ranching society that dominated the region, set about uprooting the older system of politics, landholding, and ethnic accommodation. In its place, they created a strictly segregated world that sought to preclude Mexican American autonomy and entry into the realm of the Anglo political and economic elites. Mexican American citizenship rights became abstractions to be ignored whenever necessary.

Just as important, and certainly related to the calculated disregard of any rights enjoyed by non-Anglos, was the focus of farming interests on maintaining control of mobility within their society. The multifaceted effort to achieve this control proved central to the South Texas model of labor relations. On the one hand, mobile 174 workers built the new farm society. Growers had no interest in recreating the static land tenure patterns of the South, preferring temporary wage labor to sharecropping and tenancy. Workers constantly on the move, both within Texas and entering Texas from Mexico, provided farmers with necessary labor power without the reciprocal bonds that characterized older agricultural labor patterns. On the other hand, growers came to fear the mobility of their labor supply. While they preferred the freedom from responsibility during non-harvest times that came with migrant farmworkers, they worried that workers capable of moving when and where they wanted might abandon the fields of South Texas or use their mobility as a negotiating tool (2015, 6).

While Weber’s focus exceeds beyond the Rio Grande Valley to include the rest of South

Texas all the way to San Antonio and while he does not center internal colonial theory in the same way that Bowman does, Weber’s description here is accurate not only from what

I have read but what I experienced in my time conducting fieldwork in the region as vestiges of this colonialism remain. Many of the people in the region struggle to pronounce the Anglo names of many of the cities and roads in the area that were left behind. Labor from Mexico is treated as a commodity by most employers. Mexicans might have taken over the reins of much of the political and social leadership in the community, but what they inherited is a colonial system and much of the Mexican management class of the

Valley has remained invested in keeping this power. Additionally, the Valley remains situated within the state that fostered the growth of the internal colony to begin with meaning that decolonizing faces this added burden.

Even though the literature of dependency theorists like Immanuel Wallerstein might seem outdated to some, recent scholarship undertaken on globalized labor and migration—with tweaks to Wallerstein’s work, of course—has continued to examine the role of colonialism and the establishment of a dependency on colonial powers by the

175 victims of colonialism. This line of thinking clearly differs from the neoclassical model because it does not accept the invisible hand theory and instead promotes the idea that wealth is accumulated in the developed world through the power seized by centuries-long colonial rule and the subsequent implementation of governmental and non-governmental policies and economic pacts alike that have continued to benefit these colonial powers. It is easy to apply dependency theories to the situation of Mexican-origin farmworkers in the

U.S. because of the applicability of the core/periphery model—central to Wallersteinian thought—to both countries and the colonization suffered by the majority of people who live and have lived in Mexico. And while I believe we can point to colonialism as an explanation for just about everything, I would hate to overlook other possibilities because

I could not, ironically enough, escape colonialism.

Familial Migration The idea that transnational networks alone spur more migration is referred to as family or network migration or, more negatively, chain migration. Those who discuss this type of migration cite transnational, familial networks as central to the enticing of increased migration. What is commonly understood about these networks is that they are often financially supported by economic remittances and aided by ever-advancing technology in communication and increase in travel options (Rothenberg 2000; Zavella 2011). Also discussed by those participating in discourses on family migration is how these networks serve to channel varying groups into particular occupations. Here, the applicability of this theory to the farmworker situation is that transnational farmworkers are recruiting more

176 farmworkers rather than the old days of employer recruitment abroad. Evidence for this type of migration for farm labor, both domestic and international, was widespread throughout my time in the field. For example, I was able to find a group of farmworkers who live dispersed throughout the mid-Valley who are all from the same town of

Temapache, Veracruz in eastern Mexico. These farmworkers are participating in a family and community-based migration pattern in which their individual decisions may be based on a variety of factors including increased income, but the structure of their migration is based on family and community practice. Additionally, Veronica, the migrant farmworker to Michigan who I interviewed for this project, is from a broad network of families that migrated together to the Valley city of Donna from Matehuala, San Luis Potosí in North-

Central Mexico mostly throughout the 1980s, many of whom then all migrated together to the South Haven area of western Michigan to work as farmworkers. In fact, during our interview she paused to locate and show me a log that she keeps in which community events are tracked throughout the Midwest stream including all three sites: Matehuala,

Donna, and South Haven. Weddings, quinceañeras, and more are tracked continuously so that economic cooperation can take place, thus strengthening family and community bonds across disparate locations. Considering these observations, it is clear to me that familial migration is a real force and continues to drive migration for farm labor in the United

States. Of course, the history of Texas workers to Michigan is one of family migrations so this came as no surprise. Considering these various theories of migration, it is clear that the forces that drive migration, and the relationships between the involved actors, are complex.

177 NEOLIBERALISM’S MULTI-PRONGED ATTACK ON U.S. FARMWORKERS As a political-economic doctrine, neoliberalism is defined by the reduction of barriers to a pure free market by removing the influence of state regulation and faciliating trade. Critical to the development of neoliberalism as a political and economic doctrine that prioritizes free-markets, free-trade, and high privatization, are the works of Friedrich

Hayek (1944) and Milton Friedman (1951, 1962). These two are both broadly given credit for creating the blueprint for what we now consider neoliberalism based on their contesting of Keynesian economics and the leftover social welfare programs from post-depression policies. Those who supported Keynesian economics proposed that the government should ensure an equitable exchange between labor and capitalism in order to make the economy function optimally. Additionally, Keynesian economists believed that the role of government was to intervene in the provisions of basic healthcare, education, and infrastructural utilities. To them, government was to have an active role in promoting optimal economic outcomes. Neoliberalists contested this on the idea that government intervention is not helpful for the growth of an economy and, in fact, slows it down. While its ideological founders began writing on the topic in the late 1940s, it was not until 1979 that we would see their vision translate into policy as we began to see neoliberal government policies implemented at this time (Harvey 2005; Prasad 2006). Those who have continued supporting neoliberalism over the years argue that a free market ideology is best for increasing cooperation and development of poor countries in a globalizing world

(Allison 2013; Norberg 2003; Powell 2014; Sen 1999; Viner 1960). Ultimately, they reject the notion advanced by dependency theorists of imposed dependence, or “neo-colonial”

178 setups, between first and third world nations and actors that serve to extract resources from the third world to serve those in the first world. But since the inception of neoliberal theories and throughout the implementation of policies clearly influenced by the ideology, there have been an array of dissenting voices warning against the potential dangers of widespread neoliberal policies. One school of thought (Chomsky 1999; Harvey 2005,

2006; López 2007; Menchaca 2016) generally holds a dependency theory view that neoliberalist policies are supported and advocated for by the global wealthy at the expense of the global labor class. They argue that neoliberal policies like structural adjustment programs and other interest-laden loans and programs initiated by both countries and non- state entities like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank serve to maintain global class division and imposed dependency. I agree with this latter group of scholars on the issue of neoliberal political and economic policies as it pertains to the farmworkers of the Midwest stream.

The Economic Toll of Neoliberalism Leads to Increased Immigration and Enhancement of Border Securitization Across the world, the consequence of larger more powerful countries having the economic leverage to disproportionately benefit themselves via international transactions under neoliberalism has led to mass migration to these economic powers from countries on the losing end of the deals. As people’s ways of life become interrupted via an imposing, globally-connected market economy migration becomes predictable if not inevitable. As a consequence, border securitization across the nations of trade-deal “winners” has dramatically increased in this age, especially as some “losers” have easier access to

179 transportation and are thus more able to arrive at the doorstep of the first world (Dunn

2009, Inda and Rosaldo 2008; Nevins 2002). The economic policy that drives migration is thus reinforced physically with increased border securitization.

The North American neoliberal centerpiece, NAFTA, caused a spike in migration from Mexico after its implementation in 1994 (Bacon 2008, 2013; López 2007; Menchaca

2016). One of the reasons for this spike was that Mexico began to purchase corn from U.S. farmers rather than Mexican farmers who they had long overpaid as a way of subsidizing them. This was a way of reducing expenditures by instead purchasing the corn at a lower price from American farmers whose costs of production decreased substantially with advancements in genetically engineered corn. Mexican officials were also hoping that with this move their rural corn farmers would migrate to the cities to form an industrial labor class that could help strengthen the national economy. What instead happened is that millions of corn farmers migrated to the United States, most without legal status because of corresponding immigration restriction, to continue to work in agriculture (Bacon 2008,

2013; López 2007). Of course, now the American farm labor force is as undocumented as it has been in decades and neoliberal policy is a huge reason why. However, NAFTA helped to push more than just Mexican corn farmers into migration. Because developments went according to dependency theorists’ calculations, the Mexican economy failed to improve after 1994 and with millions of Mexicans in the agricultural sector losing their jobs, migration to the United States soared (Bacon 2008, 2013; López 2007; Menchaca

2016).

180 Additionally, smaller border towns in Northern Mexico became industrial cities overnight with many people working in the newly opened trade jobs along the border (Lugo

2008; Ward 1999). This urbanization and increased trade between northern Mexico and

South Texas have helped lead to the expansion of the illicit drug trade from Mexico the

United States which has brought with it increased violence. NAFTA in particular has inadvertently caused Mexican drug cartels to earn significantly higher profits because the increase of freight daily moving across the border has made it easy for cartels to sneak drugs across thus increasing their profits and power (McKibben 2015). As northern Mexico has become more valuable terrain for drug trade operations, violence has erupted for control of it (Stea, Zech, and Gray 2010). In turn, this increased violence on the Mexican side of the border has, in part, led to U.S. border securitization in a high-alert, post-9/11

American political climate. This is, of course, in addition to border securitization that was already planned with the rollout of NAFTA. It happens that in the same year the North

American Free Trade Agreement was signed, the U.S. government also implemented

“Operation Gatekeeper” which is considered by many to be the first serious step toward militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border (Nevins 2002). What this has meant for the Valley is a hyper border militarization that traps the local undocumented farmworker majority who must deal with this mobility-limiting restriction as discussed in Chapter 3. Additionally, the liberalizing of global trade in a neoliberal age has led to increased farm sizes that thus require more workers. Put this way, it is very clear to draw the connection of the shift from

Texas families to Florida solos, or individual males, in Michigan farming. The larger group

181 of workers each farmer needs, the more maneuvering they must do to get them, and they are able to do so in a political climate that increasingly shuns government regulation.

Neoliberalists view government regulation of employers with general ambivalence and believe that less regulation is best for economic growth. And even though farmers and other employers may still feel overwhelmed by the amount of auditing that they currently undergo, the pass that they get on their workplace practices is another story. This is a pass they have long received since farmworkers were excluded from worker protections of

1930s New Deal legislation, but one that seems unlikely to change if neoliberalists continue to have their way. And while U.S. farmers have to deal with U.S. Department of

Agriculture as well as Food and Drug Administration audits, in addition to private audits from purchasers, these audits largely target the integrity of their food product and so while this still may be burdensome to farmers, their labor audits remain minimal. This occurs because there seems to be an unspoken agreement that these workers are part of an illicit economy that the nation could not effectively function without, as has been reviewed in this dissertation when we have historically seen the U.S. government’s complicity in allowing illicit workforces in U.S. agriculture. Additionally, it is the opinion of most farmworker advocates with whom I spoke that regulatory bodies such as the U.S.

Department of Labor (DOL) are deeply compromised and will only do enough regulation of labor conditions to save face so as to enable an environment where employers are largely unpunished for their perpetual infractions against farmworkers. To these advocates in both the Valley and Michigan, state regulatory bodies are so ineffective that it is more fruitful to draw publicity about the matter to force action by the DOL or by farmers than it is to 182 pursue the slow, disinterested, bureaucratic process of formal investigation requests. Each region of my study has a clear example of what this looks like.

As discussed in Chapter 3, a national news story broke in 2009 profiling child labor in Michigan’s blueberry fields (Patel, Hill, and Ross 2009). According to several people I spoke with, farmers in the area started feeling the pressure of the national media reporters in town “snooping around” and they saw that their fellow farmer Randy Adkins lost his contract with Wal-Mart and thus after this time they began to become incredibly strict about allowing children in the fields. This was a law on the books already, but rarely investigated and enforced; it took the national media, rather than the state regulatory body, to force farmers in the area to begin to follow established law. Farmers are seemingly more fearful of journalists than they are of those charged with regulating them. A similar event transpired in the Valley, although not on the level of national media coverage, that I was involved with during my research.

The case of the B & V watermelon packing shed I discuss in Chapter 3, in which a large group of workers went unpaid for work performed, is another clear example of today’s passive enforcement of farmworker labor pay and conditions. The packing shed workers contacted Fuerza del Valle Workers’ Center about the matter and within a few days, action was taken to confront B & V about the matter. The workers decided to include the media in the process. One of the local news stations arrived and ran a complete story on the matter in their nightly broadcast, even interviewing one of the packing shed operators. While it cannot be guaranteed that this public dissemination of this story of wage theft is the sole reason why the DOL rapidly investigated the matter, the director of the 183 workers’ center said it was an unusually fast resolution as often times it can take weeks or months for the DOL to even assign an investigator whereas this entire matter was resolved within a month. The DOL ruled in favor of the workers and made B & V issue backpay.

While they might maintain plausible deniability, it seems likely that the media played a role in their fast action on this occasion. Undoubtedly, this general lack of responsivity plays a role in discouraging workers from reporting violations. Whether it is an issue of under-staffing or outright collusion, it is clear that state regulation for farmworkers, especially in a neoliberal age marked by a broadening of precarity in employment, will continue to underwhelm.

Neoliberalism as a Technique of Governance: The Problem with Farmworker Success Stories In addition to neoliberal political and economic policies, scholars such as Aihwa

Ong (1996), Nikolas Rose (1996), Wendy Brown (2005), and Peter Benson (2012) look at neoliberalism as a technology of political subject-making, disciplining and control.

Anthropologist Nikolas Rose describes this process in the following way:

Advanced liberal rule depends upon expertise in a different way, and connects experts differently into the technologies of rule. It seeks to degovernmentalize the State and to de-statize practices of government, to detach the substantive authority of expertise from the apparatuses of political rule, relocating experts within a market governed by the rationalities of competition, accountability and consumer demand. It does not seek to govern through “society,” but through the regulated choices of individual citizens, now construed as subjects of choices and aspirations to self-actualization and self-fulfillment (1999, 147).

Here, Rose details how the neoliberal citizen is formed and managed through techniques of governance. In the neoliberal world, then, “citizen-subjects” have been converted to

184 “neoliberal subjects” who must be fully responsible for themselves because the government no longer considers itself responsible to provide much outside of security. Anthropologist

Aihwa Ong is more succinct in making this point when she says that “There is, however, a regulatory aspect to neoliberalism whereby economics is extended to cover all aspects of human behavior pertaining to citizenship” (1996, 739). By her 2005 work, she articulates how this neoliberal citizenship is increasingly being pushed for and managed by non- government agencies of control—financial interests and others. Considering the privatization of just about everything and the continued war on the poor in the United

States, it is clear that the manifestation of this neoliberal citizen is alive and well. Hayek

(1944) and Friedman (1951, 1962) no longer need to advocate for economic policies favoring the wealthy at the expense of the poor because they have the masses doing it for them. For many, the answer to emancipating oneself from poverty is for each individual to focus on activating themselves into a successful subject using the free market to their individual advantage. But this view simply does not account for the interventionism at play in today’s global markets and the different starting points for people across the globe. This neoliberal mindset is widespread and one that has become deeply ingrained in the

American educational system.

Currently, we are deeply entrenched in a neoliberal educational system in the

United States. The neoliberalization of education includes efforts to replace public, “K-12” schools with privately funded charter schools and to make the role of higher education one of neoliberal job training that turns each student into individual accumulators of profitable and marketable skills rather than interconnected learners (Au and Ferrare 2015; Urciuoli 185 2010). In American colleges students now commonly discuss what they are “good at” rather than “who they are” or as Bonnie Urciuoli puts it, “Skills thus become a form of self-marketing, and students readily come to imagine themselves as bundles of skills”

(2010, 162). The problem with this approach is that it does nothing to encourage students to recognize or challenge structural flaws as they often instead internalize a given person’s struggles as failures of that individual rather than dig beneath the surface to explore causation in earnest. Considering all that this dissertation uncovers in relation to the structures that construct the subjugated position of farmworker in America, this attribution of “individual failure” to farmworkers provides no benefit to an analysis of how their lives are shaped. But in the relationship between neoliberal education and U.S. farmworkers lies something more hidden that I continued interacting with while in the field: farmworker higher education remains highly funded amidst budget cuts to social services because farmworkers receiving a college education can be touted as symbols of a system working as it should rather than exposing a deeply flawed system of imbalance. Simply put, farmworker success stories are neoliberal success stories and they distract us from neoliberal tragedies.

In no way am I advocating for the removal of funding to farmworker education; my point here is that these programs remain at the expense of programs or policies that could actually provoke change in the fields. The attitude of a state providing the necessary resources to pull triumphant individuals out of this deplorable working environment does not address the root of the problem: the deplorable working environment. What I noticed in my time in the field is that the historical resistance in the form of farmworker organizing 186 to address working and living conditions of the Midwest stream has mostly dissipated while what often remains are social service programs for farmworkers aimed at removing them from such a hard life by promoting educational and job training opportunities such as the

National Farmworker Jobs Program (NFJP), the Migrant Education Program (MEP), the

High School Equivalency Program (HEP) and the College Assistance Migrant Program

(CAMP). The NFJP was created as a part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and helps farmworkers attain job training to gain either more highly-skilled employment in agriculture or to leave agriculture altogether (U.S. Department of Labor 2019). MEP emerged out of Johnson’s “War on Poverty” legislation the following year in 1965 as part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and helps fund programs that serve educational needs of farmworker children in K-12 public education (Branz-Spall,

Rosenthal, and Wright 2003). HEP came along in 1967 and helps farmworkers who have dropped out of high school attain their General Equivalency Diploma (GED) and CAMP was formed in 1972 and helps farmworkers transition into college by assisting them with their first year at universities where CAMP is present (Gouwens 2001).

While these programs all do some great work, their shortcoming is that they do little to nothing to address the atrocities in U.S. agriculture and they become perhaps overly preoccupied with sustaining themselves in the competitive neoliberal non-profit world. As a graduate of the CAMP program at Michigan State University (MSU), and as the son of a farmworker father who died from a cancer his doctor attributed to years of pesticide exposure, I would gladly turn in my degree to be working side-by-side in the fields with my father earning a living wage. An increasingly neoliberal educational system will most 187 likely preoccupy farmworker students with the tasks of marketable-skill acquiring that will keep them from examining and challenging the structural flaws leading to their families’ lived experience. Forget the idea of going to college, learning of structural inequality, and picking up a picket sign to address it. Today’s college experience hyper-emphasizes networking and resume-stuffing while leaving the worries of the collective behind. The activism I was a part of while an undergraduate at MSU was all but gone by the time that

I returned for my fieldwork a short eight years later. Fraternities, internship programs, professional development, studying abroad—farmworker students at the university are currently far more interested in these deeply-entrenched neoliberal activities rather than questioning, like so many have before them, why our families live in the margins. These students will rectify the indignities experienced by their farmworker families via skill- bundling their way toward capitalistic recognition and praise. For those who complete their education, the increased pay will affirm to them their resistance. If one does well, perhaps others may draw inspiration from them and stop “making excuses.”

Additionally, because a not unsubstantial amount of incomes for those employed in farmworker services depend on the continued presence of this specific subjugated labor class, a bit of a paradox emerges. A South Texas farmworker legal service provider I interviewed for this project, Victor, said as much in our interview when I asked if they noticed migration for farm labor declining out of the Valley:

Whether we’re talking about 1.2 million people or whether we’re talking about 100,000 people, it’s enough to care that their rights are protected. It’s kind of weird, because it [number of migrant farmworkers] seems to matter to the greatest extent to agencies whose funding is tied to representing farmworkers because they get very concerned about their grants being cut. And I understand that, especially if 188 you’re providing really good quality services to farmworkers and you don’t want people to have to go without. But if you have an institution that just exists for the sake of existing and you’re then concerned about counting heads, that gets a little odd.

My observations lead me to echo Victor’s analysis here. I have seen many a farmworker service provider concerned about the falling number of farmworkers and while I do not believe them to secretly root for more agony in the fields in order to enhance their integrality and thus job security, they certainly fill a neoliberal function. The reality is that the state is throwing relatively small amounts of money to service programs because it helps keep multiple parties content and keep reformers and interventionists at bay. Farmers get low-cost workers, workers get programs, service providers get jobs, and rather than dealing with the issue of farmworker subjugation, embedded in America’s farm labor structure, in a more meaningful way that would see farm labor become a more dignified line of work, the cycle continues. Few unions, little collective bargaining rights, and exclusion from worker protection laws remains the norm and service providers constitute, to a degree, a reactive part of this equation. Those who might otherwise be working as farmworker organizers or activists pushing for systemic changes to farming practices in

America are instead the state’s solution to keeping a sloppily-constructed system of exploited labor intact.

Much of today’s farmworker struggle is replete with “keynote addresses” and charity golf tournaments. Many who used to work in the fields and have since achieved upward economic mobility are implicated. Understandably, many want to tell of their triumphs or raise money for farmworkers, but rather than return to the fields like many

189 before us did, we seek the podium. All the while, organizing for improved conditions for those who are recently arriving or unable to leave the fields has all but disappeared and the most meaningful advocacy for active farmworkers seems to be legal advocacy programs. I believe that the real work to be done is in the dirt, not at the podium. As neoliberalism manifests in political and economic terrains, its impact on behavior cannot be understated.

Farmworkers ultimately are an ideal group for neoliberals to recruit as triumphant success stories in the sense that they are citizen-subjects who attempt to work their way out of poverty rather than rely on the welfare state to address their economic insecurity. While this may not be true in that farmworkers commonly receive types of welfare due to their low pay, the fact that the farmworker is willing to suffer profoundly to make ends meet in

America makes the “former farmworker” perhaps the most ideal neoliberal success story of all. Their suffering, a Christ-like attribute in a largely Christian nation, adds to their narrative of triumph and they are thus elevated as model neoliberal citizen-subjects, casting a shadow over those who remain suffering.

THE QUESTION OF CITIZENSHIP IN U.S. AGRICULTURE Citizenship is a persistent theme in the fields. Many lack legal citizenship, and those with it often lack cultural citizenship making upward mobility challenging. Citizenship can be viewed from a myriad of ways. There are scholars who look at how the construct of legal citizenship creates the “illegal” subject and what life for this subject is like

(Bloemraad, Korteweg, and Yurdakul 2008; Castles and Davidson 2000; Cooper and

Yoder 1999; De Genova 2002, 2004, 2007; Ngai 2004; Salcido and Menjivar 2012) while

190 others look at expanded notions of citizenship such as cultural citizenship, the right to belong in a given nation along one’s own cultural terms (Chávez 2008; Delanty 2002;

Flores 2003; Kymlicka and Norman 2000; Marshall 1950; Rosaldo 1994; Stevenson 2003), and neoliberal citizenship, the technique of governance described previously as a way of creating a self-regulating, citizen-subject (Benson 2012; Brown 2005; Ong 1996, 2005;

Rose 1999). Those who look at citizenship as it pertains to labor typically examine the wage gap (Phillips and Massey 1999; Rivera-Batiz 1999; Taylor 1992) and disparity in working conditions (Bauder 2005; Gleeson 2010; Gomberg-Muñoz 2010) among citizen and non-citizen workers. This multi-faced theorization about citizenship is quite helpful to understanding the myriad of ways in which farmworkers of the Midwest stream are impacted by this omnipresent theme.

Lacking Juridical Citizenship: Farm Labor and Deportability This “illegal” subjecthood in a nation like the United States that strictly polices citizenship status is the focus of much of the work of anthropologist Nicholas De Genova.

De Genova describes the absence of juridical citizenship in the following way:

The social space of ‘illegality’ is an erasure of legal personhood—a space of forced invisibility, exclusion, subjugation, and repression that materializes around the undocumented wherever they go in the form of real effects ranging from hunger to unemployment (or more typically, severe exploitation) to violence to death—that is nonetheless always already confounded by their substantive social personhood (2002, 427).

That this type of expulsion of the undocumented subject “materializes around” them

“wherever they go” is something I observed in my time researching farmworkers. The burden of lacking juridical citizenship is ever-present, and it erases personhood, mutes

191 voices, deletes text. Raul, the Valley undocumented worker whom I interviewed for this project uttered one sentence to me that said it all. When describing the prevalence of wage theft in South Texas farm labor, he commented:

Nos pueden pagar lo que quieran por que uno no les puede decir nada.

They can pay us what they want because one cannot tell them anything.

The undocumented farmworker’s voice to demand due pay is preempted by the pervasively present “illegality” of their existence. This is not to say some do not speak, because certainly they do, and I have heard them. But, of course, many have their words taken from them by the mental visions of their orphaned babies and continue to pick, cut, sort, and package without a word.

The ‘Failed Citizen’: The Struggles of Workers with Legal Status I thought of citizenship along a different thread when I interviewed a woman whom

I had met at a rally for a get out the vote campaign that LUPE was running. I found at as we chatted that San Juana had been a migrant worker throughout many parts of the country and as I told her about my interest in today’s Valley migrants for my research and as a part of my own life as a Valley migrant she agreed to an interview.

Outside of her colonia home in western Cameron County which was still covered in mud and water-filled potholes from a recent rain, San Juana began to talk to me about her life as a migrant and seasonal farmworker. She had a soothing cadence to her voice and it was clear that she wanted to talk. I learned quickly that the years of working and poverty had taken a toll on this long-time farmworker as she admitted bouts with depression and

192 attempts at using religion and other self-help techniques to improve her outlook. Things had not come easy for her as an immigrant, as a mother, as a farmworker, and as a U.S. citizen. San Juana was one of the couple of workers I interviewed who acquired legal status through President Ronald Reagan’s amnesty provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) from which nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants in the nation adjusted their status. This policy was passed with mounting pressure from agricultural lobbyists who wanted to legalize an illicit workforce they felt themselves dependent upon (Menchaca 2016). While many farmworkers who legalized through IRCA moved on to other industries (Martin 1994), San Juana has remained one for almost three decades since. In our discussion of her length of time working in the fields, she became quite upset and her voice became shaky as she began recounting how much verbal harassment and humiliation, she has experienced at the hands of undocumented farmworkers she has worked alongside over the years. She told me that she prefers to not let her status be known so as to not be bullied by those who might view her a “failed citizen.” Speaking to an occasion when younger undocumented coworkers of hers discovered her legal status they began to mock her and spent considerable time judging her career choice. She recalls them telling her:

Yo si tuviera papeles, no anduviera aquí.

If I had papers, I wouldn’t be here.

I was taken aback by how choked up San Juana became as she recounted this episode as I had not anticipated discussion about the “burden” of citizenship. Of course, this does not make San Juana’s experience easier than those of her undocumented co-workers, it just 193 means that she carries a burden of shame from the general view that she is a failed citizen.

In fact, she had been an undocumented farmworker herself years before attaining legal status and is an active participant of LUPE who is perhaps the largest advocate for undocumented immigrants in the Valley. What both San Juana and her undocumented co- workers do share in, however, is their lack of cultural citizenship.

The positing of anthropologist Renato Rosaldo on what he refers to as “cultural citizenship” comes to mind in the context of a U.S. farm labor workforce that is currently constructed of mostly non-citizens. As Rosaldo argues, cultural citizenship moves beyond juridical notions of citizenship and instead looks at the rights for people to exist as citizens on their own cultural terms (Rosaldo 1994). While someone may have juridical citizenship, or legal status, their lack of a cultural citizenship might continue to place them at the margins of a given society. This lack of cultural citizenship has historically adversely affected Texas Mexicans, even with legal status, arriving into Michigan. Anthropologist

Brent Metz, studying the Anglo domination of Michigan’s Mexican migrant farm labor force, puts it this way:

Despite laws enacted to protect migrant labor in Michigan, many are ineffective due to lack of advertisement, lack of legal aid offices and staff, and the lack of legal complaints made by migrants. Even if migrants know where to get legal help, they are hesitant to legally challenge members of the dominant society because they are too poor to fight a long legal battle, and too often intimidated when interacting with Anglo institutions (Metz 1990, 33).

The idea that workers with legal status may be “too intimidated” to confront their subjugators within the country they legally reside in speaks to this lack of cultural citizenship. Sure, they may have legal status, but they live under the terms of Anglo society

194 and not on their own and thus their legal status, while protecting them from deportation, does not necessarily empower them to have a seat at the table. While it is clear that those with legal status have always had and continue to have privileges over undocumented farmworkers, it is also clear that the social construct of “citizenship” has a complex impact on farmworkers of the Midwest stream.

Farmer Lust for the Silent, Desperate Worker It was a very hot early summer day in 2016 when I went with Texas RioGrande

Legal Aid (TRLA) outreach worker Osvaldo to visit with Saul in Eastern Hidalgo County.

Saul is a farmworker who had contacted TRLA that he felt he had been discriminated against by his employer near Houston who had recruited him, his brother, and his step father via the Texas Workforce Commission, a state agency that among other things connects prospective employees to employers in need. Saul detailed to us the tense work environment he immediately walked into that made him a target of unusually harsh treatment by the farm owner himself. He said he felt like the farmer was trying to run him out immediately after arriving and that it must be because of his appearance and the way in which he speaks. Saul is a small, olive-colored, bald headed Chicano guy with tattoos to spare whom when I met was standing outside of his rural trailer wearing a white tee shirt and denim shorts as he immediately spoke to me in thick Valley ‘Spanglish.” Undoubtedly,

Saul presented as a cholo, or gangster, but that did not make him any less indignant in his claim of discrimination. And just before I slipped into thoughts about how maybe there was a discord or conflict there that Saul was omitting in order to enhance his victimization

195 as he prepared to file his complaint with me and Osvaldo, Saul began to tell a story that made it clear that his discrimination case was something I had not considered: he was being discriminated because he was an American and the grower favored H-2A visa workers who he was unable to bring in so long as U.S. citizens and legal residents are filling the jobs

(this is required under H-2A program policy). Saul said that he heard murmurings from coworkers that he was being mistreated for this reason because they had heard the farmer making comments lamenting not being able to attain more H-2A workers. Here was another situation I was privy to in which legal citizenship actually adversely affected the farmworker. Again, none of this is to say that the undocumented or guest worker has an easier time than those with status because theirs is a profound struggle for personal autonomy, but nonetheless the point here is that citizenship operates in complex and contradictory ways in America’s fields and packing sheds. The point of this discussion is both to give a fair account of farmworker life as I observed it, but also to highlight how complicated the social construction of farmworker is and how “nobility” is tied to racial markers that farmers are finely attuned to. Saul’s tattoos and bald head made him a savage without any redeeming nobility and with “attitude” that clearly marks him an undesirable farmworker. Farmers want Mexican workers, not necessarily Mexican American workers.

They seem to want workers that present as destitute and desperate, the ones fleeing the

Mexican Revolution that they always wanted. The prevailing belief here is that desperation is good for productivity. Secondarily, as an employer operating within an industry as filled with potential risks for worker safety, there seems to be a thinking process that the less familiar the worker is with the American economic and legal system, the better. They likely 196 want someone who will not fight back. A cholo is typically Americanized and knows the system; a cholo fights back. The urban racialized subject has no place in the rural racialized subject’s space. The cholo can typically defend themselves in English; the guest/immigrant worker often cannot.

RACIALIZED LABOR: BODY, SPACE, AND LABOR MARKET SEGMENTATION The basic question I explore in this section is often the giant elephant in the room when talking about U.S. farm labor: Why, even when the country is in hard economic times, does it seem that only Mexicans file into the fields to do the nation’s seasonal farm labor? Why does an ethnic group that only composes less than 15 percent of the population constitute approximately 80 percent of an entire labor market in any industry? The answer to this question leads us to look at how we might rupture a cycle of racialization that is clearly not sustainable in the interest of universal human rights. Additionally, if most

Americans will not perform the most challenging aspects of farm labor, then should we not follow free market principles of supply and demand as it pertains to the farm labor market and pay enough to procure a domestic workforce? Instead policy reflects interventionism upon the free market when it is economically expedient to U.S. farmers. The truth is that

America has always depended on a racialized farm labor class in an industry run by the politically powerful. Certain occupations have historically been reserved for racial minorities, farm labor among them, and government policy was designed to ensure that predominantly Anglo employer groups reap the benefits. For example, as discussed in

Chapter 1, the New Deal negotiations of the 1930s excluded farm labor, domestic work,

197 and caregiver positions from the federal minimum wage. The reason for this exclusion is rooted in anti-Black racism (Lipsitz 1998; Perea 2011). Legal scholar of race Juan Perea comments:

During the New Deal Era, the statutory exclusion of agricultural and domestic employees was well-understood as a race-neutral proxy for excluding blacks from statutory benefits and protections made available to most whites. Remarkably, despite these racist origins, an agricultural and domestic worker exclusion remains on the books today, entirely unaltered after seventy-five years. Section 152(3) of the National Labor Relations Act still excludes agricultural and domestic workers from the protections available under the Act (2011, 96).

I concur with Perea that the continued exclusion of protections for farmworkers and domestic workers is “remarkable” considering its explicitly racist origins. However, considering how U.S. farmworkers of Mexican origin have been racialized as ideal farm laborers, it is not surprising. Currently, many who look at policy protections for farmworkers might ask themselves why they are so often excluded from various federal protections. As the asterisk to labor laws such as the Fair Labor Standards Act and the

National Labor Relations Act, farmworkers today suffer from an exclusion based in this

“New Deal” moment of racial exclusion.

They Like It and They’re Good at It: Essentializing People of Mexican Origin as “Ideal Farmworkers” Those who look at how labor is segmented by race typically follow in the tradition of Edna Bonacich’s 1972 foundational work on how labor markets are predominantly split along racial lines. Then works like those of Patricia Collins (2000), George Lipsitz (1998),

Bruce Nelson (2002), and David Roediger (2007) carry on the discourse of racial labor market segmentation along the lines of a White/Black dichotomy while a few works detail

198 racial labor market segmentation beyond this racial binary and include the Mexican

American/farmworker experience (Galarza 1964; Holmes 2007, 2013; Maldonado 2009;

Menchaca 1995; Valdés 1991; Zavella 2011). Here in the work of these scholars I find much in accord with what I experienced in my own work yet not entirely.

The origins of essentializing ethnic Mexicans as being better suited or having a better capacity for farm labor can be traced to the early twentieth century when the migrant streams were developed, and Mexican labor became idealized and justified by many. Beet company official Harry Austin said in 1923 speaking to the U.S. Congress Senate

Committee on Agriculture and Forestry: “Much of the Mexican population is descended directly from the Indian. He has by nature the inherent traits of that race. He is fundamentally rural. He prefers outdoor life to the confinement of industrial pursuits” (in

Valdés 1991, 19). While these types of utterances and countless others made about the racial characteristics of people might be read as nothing more than a sign of the times in which the popularity of eugenics had people overly ambitious to attribute racial characteristics to others, they certainly prevailed then and in my own experience they have not entirely subsided. And while one might expect that Mexicans are no longer essentialized in this fashion any longer or that at least the language farmers and others are using to talk about Mexican farmworkers has changed with the times, sadly this is not the case. Farmers I interviewed often gushed about their “Mexican” workers and how they appreciate their work ethic without realizing how their affiliations with “Mexican” as

“good farmworker” may essentialize a group of workers and thus perpetuate a cycle of racial labor market segmentation. Recently the work of sociologist Marta Maldonado 199 (2009) has shed light on the way in which Latino/Latina farmworkers have been racially constructed as desirable employees by farm owners. In her work titled “‘It is Their Nature to Do Menial Labour’: The Racialization of ‘Latino/a Workers’ by Agricultural

Employers,” Maldonado details how farm owners typically perceive Latino/Latina farmworkers to be more capable of high efficiency farmwork for both biological and cultural reasons. As well, the 2007 work of anthropologist Seth Holmes similar tracks this among Oaxacan workers. If it is in “one’s nature” to do this work, and many of the workers are getting paid a wage considerably higher than those offered in their home country, then the rest of us can rest assured that they are happy and content toiling the beautiful American soil.

Farmers I spoke with, likely cautious with their words in that they were speaking to a Mexican American, did not extensively discuss the ethnic background of their workers in any explicit terms besides saying they knew most were originally from Mexico and that they had generally good work ethics. I do recall, however, a farmer in North Carolina whom

I interacted with while organizing H-2A workers in the state back in 2005 told me that he

“loved his Mexican workers” because “them the workingest people I’ve ever met.” The utterance, replete with a Southern draw I was then unfamiliar with, has stayed with me ever since. I remember feeling that this was supposed to be a compliment but did not feel like one. The farmer was clearly drawing a connection between the workers’ ethnic background, often viewed by many as a “race,” and their labor capacity. The essentialized

“Mexican farmworker” is something that emerged in one of my farmworker interviews, however. Yesenia, the farmworker college student I interviewed whose family migrates as 200 shuttle migrants from Florida to Michigan explained to me that she resented the title of

“farmworker” altogether because of its stigma and its affiliation with a degraded

“Mexicanness.” She commented:

Not many people respect us. I know when I was younger, I would do anything to avoid being called that, I’d be like, ‘No I don’t work in that,’ you know? I’d hate being called a ‘migrant farmworker’ only because it went back to that ‘Mexican’ that’s, like, in the fields.

Embedded in her discussion of this stigma is this idea of “Mexicanness,” lending affirmation to the idea that farmworkers are a racialized labor class. Beyond the workers themselves, the spaces they live in and work in are also racially marked.

Racializing Space: How America’s Fields became Mexican In the summer of 2005, I was a nineteen-year-old volunteer organizer for the Farm

Labor Organizing Committee, or FLOC. One day, in rural, rural, rural North Carolina, lost as could be, me and a fellow organizer asked for directions from a seemingly pleasant young, white man to a farmworker labor camp in the area. He responded, seeking clarification, by asking if we were looking for the “wetback camp.” I grimaced internally.

Ironically, the camp I was searching for was occupied by legally present H-2A guest workers, but as is typical with the word “wetback,” it was not their legality or lack thereof that earned them (us) this title on that day or most others. No, in this part of rural North

Carolina and throughout much of the country, farmworker labor camps and agricultural fields requiring hand harvest are racially marked spaces where there is an almost unspoken understanding of the racial creatures that dwell there within. The fields in the United States are, without a doubt, Mexican. I do not necessarily mean the labor force that tends to the

201 agricultural commodities this country has built fortunes upon fortunes upon, but rather the green plants, brown soil, multi-colored tractors, clear liquid pesticides; this, the entire space of field harvesting the most substantial food source for Americans, is Mexican. Yet while this might seem obvious for those of us who have worked this country’s fields and who have incorporated agricultural imagery into Chicanx and broader Latinx art, many others still may not be up to date on the “current happenings” in U.S. agriculture. The subject of how space is imbued with race is predominately discussed in the context of urban settings but here I diverge from these discourses by considering it in a rural setting.

Scholars of race and space such as George Lipsitz (2007, 2011) have done much in advancing ideas on how spaces become imbued with racial characteristics and become racialized places. Lipsitz looks at how large urban areas are segregated along lines of racial imaginaries. By “racial imaginaries,” he is referring to the way in which a given space is made into a place through a racial marking. For example, for Whites/Anglos, certain spaces are marked “White” and considered safe and good while other spaces are “Brown” or

“Black,” and deemed dangerous. While some might argue that these imaginaries are based on actual demographics, this work examines the possibility that racially imagined spaces can precede their formation and can cause a gap between perception and reality (Lipsitz

2011, 27). While this work is certainly essential to understanding how urban areas are shaped, this framework is also quite useful in understanding how U.S. farms undergo spatial racialization. Inverse to urban slums, many farmworkers, especially in Texas, live in colonias, as discussed in Chapter 3, which are essentially rural slums. In the case of

South Texas, many of these colonias are built on land that was previously owned and 202 farmed by the Whites/Anglos. This land is now almost exclusively occupied by people of

Mexican origin with a small but increasing Central American population arriving. Tired of taking risks with farming and aging out of farming, farm owners in South Texas began selling much of their land for colonia development beginning in the 1980s and 1990s—as discussed in Chapter 2—and, perhaps inadvertently, continued their racial marking of this space that composes a “Brown spatial imaginary.” Just as Lipsitz describes the formation of inner city “racial spatial imaginaries” that have had a collection of social and economic forces shape their infrastructures, areas where Mexican farmworkers live and work have been developed in a similar fashion. In other areas where agriculture and thus Mexican labor are high (California and Florida) we can see this spatial racialization as well

(Almaguer 1994; Sellers and Asbed 2011). White/Anglo farmers and land developers help create the situation that serves to segregate and therefore spatially racialize U.S. agricultural fields. Much as the same with all racialization, this process serves economic purposes but also serves to concretize whiteness. Whites can be farmers; they cannot be farmworkers, at least not any more. And it is under this same logic that many callously believe that Mexicans, on the other hand, prefer to live and work in these conditions.

America’s fields are deeply racialized spaces that many in our county avoid at all costs. Even with elevated rates of precarious, temporary, low-paying employment and outright unemployment nationally, others are still not rushing into these spaces even when offered comparably higher wages (Kitroeff and Mohan 2017). I concede that many do not want to do farm labor simply because of its heavy toll on the human body, but I hypothesize that still many others would rather do anything else than do “Mexican work.” If you are a 203 U.S. farmworker today, you are most likely of Mexican origin working under a Mexican- origin contractor on an Anglo’s farm. This is the modus operandi for farm labor in America in the twenty-first century and workers are well aware of these dynamics. A worker,

Gabriel, who I met in Michigan as he settled out into seasonal farm labor in the state after years of working the Eastern stream out of Florida spoke of the racial dynamics he has seen in U.S. agriculture having worked in multiple states:

Afro Americanos si han estado en la labor, trabajan como nostotros. El lugar donde se ven mas es Miami y de Florida para allá hay mas Afro Americanos. Pero los Americanos no están. Ninguno está en la labor. Si están pero te están mandando; son los jefes que están arriba. Si, entonces ellos no van al campo. Nunca llegan allí para trabajar.

African Americans have been in the fields, they work like us. Where you see them more is in Miami and over by Florida there are more African Americans. But the Americans (Anglos) are not there. None of them are in the fields. Well they are there but only managing; they are the bosses who are in charge. Yes, they don’t go to the fields. They never arrive to work.

Gabriel’s analysis clearly reflects the racial labor market segmentation of America’s farm labor system and is one that is abundantly obvious to those who spend any time on or around U.S. farms.

Today’s exclusion of farmworkers from some principal federal worker protections is a direct result of Black farmworker exclusion from new deal legislation and so the racialization of this unprotected labor class has been transferred and maintained. While it is hardly advantageous for politicians to propose policy that benefits farmworkers, I believe another reason why demands for justice in the fields have slightly diminished is because the American public has accepted this racial segmentation of labor and also because the discourse of equality was never intended for the non-citizen and now essentially every 204 other farmworker is undocumented. Either way, the matter remains urgent. As life expectancy and wages remain low for farmworkers who are often living and working in consistently miserable conditions (López 2007), one cannot help but wonder just how much of this is due to the racial labor market segmentation of U.S. farm labor. For certain, it plays a part.

GENDER IN AND OUT OF THE FIELDS

It is well documented that farmworker women face a disproportionately hostile work environment compared to their male coworkers and compared to women in other industries. Theirs is a struggle against widespread sexual violence, hyper-sexualization and persistent workplace sexual harassment almost unparalleled in other industries aside from domestic work (Castañeda and Zavella 2007; Ontiveros 2007). For others, like Gabriela who had the miscarriage while working for Monsanto in Indiana, a central struggle is having to work and live in poor conditions while overburdened with the demands of trying to raise a family. This condition that farmworker women face of working alongside the men and/or children they must also labor in caretaking and housekeeping for is incredibly widespread and was the clear setup in my own family. While perhaps not uncommon across other industries, the unmatched rigor of farm labor makes the lives of many farmworker women impossibly difficult. What follows in this section is a discussion of my ethnographic observations on the issue of gender while conducting research in the Midwest stream.

205 Less Women: More Money, More Problems With the presence of a mostly male class of undocumented solos and H-2A workers from Mexico there is a sort of organic social experiment of what happens when there are little to no women around. I found this to be the case in Michigan labor camps I visited but also had experienced this in the H-2A labor camps of North Carolina I used to frequent when I was a labor organizer for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) in 2005.

Back then as workers would come in we would greet them at the arrival center and I recall how a local Spanish speaking priest would also greet them there and speak to them about sexual promiscuity and prostitution in particular, warning the group of men that many workers had been picking up sexually transmitted diseases from sex workers that would frequent the labor camps “preying” on their loneliness. In fact, in my time organizing workers in the state I ran into this situation on one occasion in which an empty white van was parked at the camp and when I inquired a worker told me that they were sex workers who showed up to solicit customers at the camp. Additionally, research demonstrates that

“Mexican migrant laborers” face elevated risks for STI and HIV transmission for various reasons including this use of sex workers for those away from their partners

(Apostolopoulos et al. 2006). While my observations this time around did not include issues of sexually transmitted infections, they did reveal how gender was operating in other, perhaps more subtle ways.

In Michigan, there was a clear sense that the lack of women accompanying the solos created for more raucous off-time than in the camp sites containing families. Drinking in excess and loud music with the poor choices that often emanate from excessive alcohol

206 lead to some discontent farmers who essentially have traded off the stability that comes with having families migrate for labor on their farms for the profitability of a more erratic- behaving single-male class of workers. Farmers I spoke with repeatedly mentioned that one of the major downsides of hiring solos is their drinking habits. A worker that I encountered in a labor camp in the southeast Michigan city of Blissfield while out on camp visits with MSU CAMP recruiter Leo comes to mind. He told us that he was drunk during the day on this occasion because he could not will himself out of a depression that he was in after having gone unpaid at an Indiana packing shed21 before making his way to

Michigan, and it was clear that his lack of family support was not helping the situation.

Farmworker men who perhaps drink out of isolation and depression, are what farmers like

Scott, the family farmer I discuss extensively in Chapter 3, and others say they lament about the switch to hiring more solos in place of migrants families from Texas. Too many men without the presence of women is seemingly unideal for any reason outside of profit margins.

Solos exist in the Valley as well but simply not in as high as quantity as they are not part of the same recruitment efforts as those in Michigan. Yet some groups of single men migrate together from Mexico to work seasonally in Valley agriculture. Farm labor in the Valley remains visibly more diverse by gender, however, because of the fact that many of the workers are in their home region and thus with their families. Still, women remain

21 He showed us a prepaid debit card which he claimed was his previous form of payment. This is something I have heard of from others. Some employers pay their often-undocumented workers through depositing money into prepaid debit cards for them. In this case, the worker claimed that he did not receive his final two weeks of work. 207 an integral part of farm labor in both Michigan and the Valley and for their experiences unfortunately mirror national trends.

The Sexualization of Farmworker Women It is simply not easy to be a female farmworker. Sexual harassment from a large workforce composed of many young males is not rare. Marisol, the farmworker college student who formerly migrated to Illinois to work for Pioneer in the corn detasseling, recalls that her family did not allow her to walk unaccompanied across the fields at any point in her time working because of the harassment from male co-workers:

I could never go anywhere because there’s so many men, so many single men that go. When I was going, I could never go anywhere by myself. My mom always had to be with me, my brother always had to be with me. They never let me go anywhere by myself because there were so many men and they were vulgar. So, like, I could never be alone. At times you just feel unsafe because there are just like, all these vulgar men.

Although more women are performing migrant and seasonal farm labor than ever before the workforce continues to be predominantly male. The percentage of farmworker women, according to the National Agricultural Workers’ Survey (NAWS) conducted under the U.S.

Department of Labor found that farmworker “females” went from composing 18.4 percent of the overall migrant and seasonal farm labor force in 2003 to 26 percent in 2014 (U.S.

Department of Labor 2015, A13). While this is certainly significant, it is important to note that the NAWS does not include H-2A workers, which are overwhelmingly male, thus perhaps missing a small part of the portrait. Nonetheless, this survey data reveals a trend of an increased presence of farmworker women. Unfortunately, many of these women, especially those who are not accompanied by a spouse or male family member, frequently

208 experience sexual harassment from their coworkers. Contractors, crew leaders, and farmers are also oftentimes the perpetrators of sexual harassment toward farmworker women.

I recall a visit to a blueberry farmer in western Michigan who when asked by a member of our group about an MSU CAMP student who was working for him, used a vulgar gesture referencing her breasts to confirm her identity. “Oh, her?” he said, bouncing his cupped hands up and down in front of his chest. This was an indelible ethnographic moment for me because my internal response was disgust, and while I cannot say that I witnessed this individual directly harass any of his female workers, he was certainly open about objectifying them. It is fairly well understood that farmworker women often face sexual harassment and violence at the hands of their superiors. Gabriel, the Michigan seasonal farmworker who long worked the Eastern stream out of Florida, made this observation in our interview:

Gabriel: Para una mujer sola que migra corre muchos riesgos de que el patrón la acose sexualmente. Siempre pasa eso. For a single woman who migrates, she runs a lot of risks of being sexually assaulted by her boss. This always happens.

Author: Si has escuchado de eso? You have heard of that?

Gabriel: Si, si habido muchos patrones así. Encargados como mayordomos o troqueros que hacen esto. Yes, there have been many bosses like this. Those in charge like crew leaders or drivers do this.

Gabriel would go on to detail how he has heard of this type of sexual harassment and violence against women in all sites he worked in and that support groups in Florida for farmworker women have been formed because of the prevalence of this issue. In a conversation with a service provider in western Michigan I was told about a crew leader who has been working in the same camp for decades, migrating from the Valley, and who 209 has been long-rumored to petition single women for sexual favors in exchange for improved working conditions such as easier job assignments or laxed oversight. What she went on to explain to me is that she has never been able to confirm this rumor but that it hangs over the head of all women because it is so widely discussed at the camp that women are often considered by others to be engaging in this “deal” if they are seen to receive improved working conditions and treatment.

In the B & V Produce case I detail in Chapter 3 in which a group of watermelon packing shed workers confronted their employers over lack of payment, there was also an issue of sexual harassment embedded in the group’s rage. A trio of two sisters and one of their husbands all were a part of the group that went unpaid, but it was the mother of the two sisters that drew the attention of the employers in the middle of the confrontation when she yelled at him that she knew what he had done to her daughter and he would pay. As it turns out, one of the two packing shed owners had been telling the single sister repeatedly that she was attractive and only suffered because she wanted to at work, implying that she could be assigned easier tasks or have an easier time on the job generally speaking if there she rewarded him in a physical sense. He told her that she could work in his office with him instead of having to work in packaging watermelons like everyone else. While no further action was pursued regarding this issue of workplace sexual harassment, it was nonetheless rewarding to witness the young woman’s mother bringing the issue to the attention of the perpetrator in this collective environment effectively shaming him. Still, more than shame is needed to end the sexual harassment and violence toward women

210 farmworkers. As with many other farmworker issues, enforcement of existing laws would seemingly go a long way toward addressing this issue.

Theories about sexualizing the subordinate have long been circulated (Salzinger

2007; Stallybrass and White 1986) and are viscerally present in the lives of farmworker women today. Undoubtedly the migrant farmworker woman endures an environment rife with misogyny and sexual violence that go largely unchecked due to the prevailing power structure. As you might imagine, it is not so easy for an entry-level farmworker to go to their employer or “human resources” of the farming operation to report someone in a position like a contractor or field supervisor who are essential to the management of the farm. Farmers mentioned to me how hard it can be to find a stable contractor and so when one is especially effective at timely providing a sufficient workforce, it seems likely that transgressions short of robbing the farmer might be forgivable.

While it can be argued that today’s farmworkers have reaped the benefits of incremental collective shifts in attitudes towards things previously sacrilege like divorce, the situation for women in the fields remains highly problematic. Unfortunately, it seems that not much has changed for farmworker women regarding their ability to work in an environment free from unfair expectations, harassment, and violence. Of course, The power that today’s farmworker overseers have remains vastly unchecked, and their sexual harassment of women is one among many abuses of power. Yet workplace desires and relationships are complex. Certainly, in my time around farm labor I have heard of several intimate relationships and even marriages that take place between superiors and their workers. What are we to make of these arrangements? Are they to be immediately met with 211 skepticism over the imbalance of power that birthed their acquaintanceship or are they to be given the benefit of the doubt and listed as another example of the transcendental power of love?

An intricate web of social relations is built in the day to day operations of almost any industry, and certainly farming is no exception. I was privy to some of these complexities in my time in the field, more so in Michigan than in the Valley. I was able to interview a farmer with a long-term, intimate relationship with a former worker of theirs22 and spoke with several farmworker advocates in the state about this occasional tendency.

At the time of my interview with this farmer I was not aware that they had married a former worker of theirs until it was confirmed to me by others who had worked for the farmer in the past. Because I did not know about this I did not broach the subject with the farmer but certainly this is something worth looking at more closely in the future.

While I cannot answer it, the question of where these relationships fall on the spectrum of “love” and “exploitation” is one that deserves attention. This situation in U.S. agriculture brings to mind the work of literary theorists Peter Stallybrass and Allon White when they discuss the dynamics of desire in the Victorian relationship between upper-class men and their maids. They note: “The opposition of working-class maid and upper-class male, then, depended upon a physical and social separation which was constitutive of desire. But it was a desire which was traversed by contradictions” (1986, 156). Certainly, the desire of farmworkers by their superiors are loaded with contradictions as well. The

22 Here I do not provide more details so as to protect the assured anonymity of the farmer. 212 question of whether or not a farmworker can feel genuine love toward their employer is equally interesting and centers on agency: the topic of my following chapter.

213 Chapter 5: The Other Side of Narratives of Victimhood: Farmworkers Manage, Overcome, and Triumph

Many farmworkers today, while facing some struggles of workers past, have been able to use their decades-long situation in the U.S. to their advantage in order to cope with their otherwise disadvantageous position as farm laborers. While some may consider the agency of U.S. migrant and seasonal farmworkers to be limited or encompassed (Wardlow

2006), as in their agency as farmworkers exists within the confines of the farmer’s dominion, farmworkers really do have elements of a non-encompassed agency, and it manifests itself in a variety of ways. The contents of this chapter are intended to illustrate the ways in which migrant and seasonal farmworkers in South Texas and throughout

Michigan demonstrate their agency to make their lives more tenable amidst harsh living and working conditions. My intentions here are not to simply produce a reactionary tale of how farmworkers “fight back” but rather to uncover what it is that farmworkers do to carve a life for themselves that might be overlooked or intentionally understated by others for various reasons. This chapter is intended explicitly to detail what farmworkers do rather than what is done to them. And while revealing the agency of a given individual or collective should be the goal of any ethnographer, here this act of dedicating an entire chapter to the autonomous, self-constructed and self-fashioned farmworker is a particular rupture against the monotonous narratives of powerlessness in the fields. While conditions are typically challenging and what many would deem unacceptable, those working within them typically believe that there is an “end” to these “means,” and this is how they feel about it.

214 TODAY’S FARMWORKER MOVEMENT There are still various efforts to organize farmworkers throughout the country today. From unions to coalitions and student activist organizations, farmworkers across the country continue to resist their subjugation and advocate for themselves. This section is an update to the farmworker movement history discussed in Chapter 2.

UFW and FLOC: Today’s Farmworker Unions Today there are two labor-affiliated farmworker unions in the United States in the

United Farm Workers (UFW) of California and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee

(FLOC) with operations in Ohio, North Carolina, and Monterrey (to organize the departing

H-2A visa workers departing from the Northern Mexican metropolis to North Carolina).

There an array of other labor organizations as well, but these two are foundational in that they are both affiliated with the AFL-CIO and they both currently hold several union contracts. Founded and run by former farmworkers, these organizations have stood the test of time as they have faced stiff political opposition in a neoliberal country intent on reducing the power of labor and where farmworkers still do not have the federally protected right to collectively bargain. These rights are run at the state level in California and in the case of FLOC, they are negotiated via contracts with large purchasers or growers. With

FLOC in particular we have some insight as to how to push for organizing H-2A workers which seem to be the future of farm labor, even though they are consistently under attack by the agricultural power brokers and state politicians in their state. Just recently in 2017 the North Carolina legislature passed a bill that among other things limited the right of

FLOC to withdraw dues from their member’s checks directly and was heavily supported 215 by the North Carolina Farm Bureau (Doran 2018). Although the bill was temporarily blocked by a federal judge as of late September of 2018, this effort is consistent with the history of the struggle that farmworkers have had to face in pushing for the right to organize.

The UFW continues to be the most well-known farmworker union in the country, representing California farmworkers. Beyond their historical accomplishments—they are largely given credit for many of the federal protections of farmworkers passed in the late twentieth century—and name recognition, they have the benefit of having the only state agricultural relations board in the country. Therefore, they can maintain negotiating rights for farmworkers in California. They currently have multiple contracts with farmers and farmer associations throughout the state that they manage to ensure that thousands of workers on those farms have a say in their pay and working conditions (United Farm

Workers 2019a). While they are often undermined by the continued use of exploited, undocumented farmworkers in the state, they are still active in the fight for farmworkers by farmworkers. As of December of 2018, Teresa Romero replaced Arturo Rodriguez as the new president marking the first time the UFW has a president who is either a woman or an immigrant (United Farm Workers 2019b).

Pushing the Largest Purchasers for Increased Pay: The ‘Fair Food’ Model The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) out of the city of Immokalee, a small rural farming town in West Florida, initiated a campaign in the early 2000s in which the group asked some of the major tomato purchasers in the fast food industry to pay more for

216 the tomatoes they purchase and guarantee that it go directly to the workers. After some improbable victories and attaining the cooperation of some fast food giants such as Yum!

Brands (owner of Taco Bell and Pizza Hut among other chains), McDonalds, Burger King, and Subway, they began an initiative in 2011 called the Fair Food Program that establishes a council composed of workers, participating growers, and participating buyers to work out agreements as to farmworker pay and working conditions by following a mutually agreed upon code of conduct.

The high degree of consolidation in the food industry today means that multi-billion dollar brands on the retail end of the industry are able to leverage their volume purchasing power to demand ever-lower prices, which has resulted in downward pressure on farmworker wages. The Fair Food Program reverses that process, enlisting the resources of participating retail food giants to improve farmworker wages and harnessing their demand to reward growers who respect their workers’ rights (Coalition of Immokalee Workers 2018, np).

Whether it is public relations or altruism that is the driving motivation of the buyers, their participation is vital because clearly the leverage the most power as they bring the dollars to the table. Having this type of communication between all three of these sectors of the food supply chain seems to be a reasonable path forward toward making farm labor in

America a bit more tolerable.

I recall helping with the CIW’s efforts when I was an undergraduate student activist and I remember feeling hopeful about their outlook but there was certainly a lot stacked against them. First, they were a small group in a region known to have a high immigrant population from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean and they were targeting major chains—Taco Bell at the time of my involvement—and so there was a clear power imbalance. Second, they were not a union but rather a “coalition” which represented 217 something a little more grassroots and it was curious as to how a group of farmworkers could advance their labor cause without affiliation with “big labor,” or the major U.S. unions (unlike the UFW and FLOC who are both affiliated with the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions). On this point, I remember hearing whispers in farmworker circles from at least one prominent farmworker organizer admonishing the CIW for not following the principles of unionism. “How could a ‘coalition’ sustain itself?” they wondered aloud. Yet all of these years later, the CIW is as strong as ever regardless of the doubts me or anyone else may have. I still believe that pushing for labor unions especially in farm labor is critical, but the truth is that outside of the CIW few groups are accomplishing as much. FLOC and the UFW both continue to work on various important campaigns and serve their broad union membership, but the CIW is making some serious inroads in gaining agreements from major actors to participate in a fair food program with elevated pay and a code of conduct or face the backlash of anti-farmworker publicity. They have been able to bring fast food giants to join the fair food program such as Yum! Brands

(owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and others), McDonalds, Subway, and they are currently working to get Wendy’s to join. Wendy’s has actually reacted more negatively than any of the previous purchasers as they reacted not only by ignoring the CIWs pleas, but by cutting business with Florida tomato farmers altogether and instead switching to purchasing from

Mexico. Yet while this may be a power move by the large fast food chain, the CIW reacted with the same tactic all farmworker movements have employed: using public scrutiny to leverage gains from even the most unwilling to budge. The group that drew the shortest stick in the New Deal worker protections negotiations has little leverage other than to 218 appeal to the conscious of the nation and this is why the weapon of farmworker choice has traditionally been the boycott. In fact, in March of 2017 I joined a caravan of Valley farmworkers and activists to New York City as we showed up in support of the CIW’s picketing of Wendy’s and what I witnessed was over a hundred farmworkers standing on

5th avenue in Manhattan staring up 100 stories toward the offices of the company’s largest shareholder demanding a meeting with him as they held blown up posters with his face and name on them. This inversion of the “workplace gaze,” farmworkers huddled around this billionaire’s place of employment chanting “shame,” are screeches of farmworker agency.

The conditions in Immokalee mirror those in the Valley because they too have a high domestic and undocumented labor supply. I have always felt a connection with

Immokalee as a South Texas migrant farmworker because there is so much overlap. For one, my sister-in-law grew up as a farmworker in Immokalee and at my time at Michigan

State University as a part of the farmworker education program, CAMP, I was friends with many fellow students from the region as it is the program’s other large recruiting ground.

In my time conducting research in the Valley I met with several CIW organizers and participated in events they hosted in the area cooperating with Fuerza del Valle Workers’

Center. As of this writing, the CIW has initiated efforts publicly for including South Texas in their efforts of attaining fair pay and better living and working conditions for U.S. farmworkers. While farming has decreased in the Valley and so maybe there will not be as receptive of a workforce as there was in farmworker movement days of the 1960s and

1970s the need for reform is as high as ever. Yet even as farmworkers in the Valley remain in urgent need of some type of effort and every Valley farmworker I interviewed responded 219 that they would join a union if one was available, farmworkers in the region and across

Michigan and elsewhere are doing plenty to mediate the stresses and burdens of migrant and seasonal farm labor in other ways.

THE SILVER LININGS OF MIGRANT AND SEASONAL FARM LABOR Up until this point I have contended that U.S. farmworkers are victims of colonialism, structural inequality, racialization, and political exclusion. Almost unanimously, those who are familiar with the rigors of farm labor view farmworkers as occupying among the least enviable occupations in America and while I am not necessarily disagreeing with this position I call us to slow down in our rush to victimize so that we do not overlook the positive aspects of farmworker life. The close bonds, the escape from a limited and frustrating local economy, the non-confining work environment of working outdoors, the excitement that accompanies the nerves of long travel and seeing different places one might never see if not for the migrant journey; these are all things that farmworkers also talk about when discussing their field of work from what I found.

El Disempléo: Unemployment Checks and Time Off As discussed in Chapter 3, the loss of unemployment for farmworkers in Michigan caused a shift in the migrant stream because a substantial portion of farmworkers have long preferred to receive unemployment pay during the off-season. One of the now older manifestations of migrant farmworker resistance is the act of collecting unemployment for their labor. A few of my relatives executed this strategy throughout my upbringing and in their case they often enjoyed the added benefit of the higher unemployment payouts of a

220 state like California which they lived off of seasonally in the lower cost of living in the

Valley of South Texas. In addition, their time working in California was spent in near-free migrant housing so that they expended very little in costs of living. When they would return to Texas they were then able to live more leisurely and less restricted than their time in

California as they received unemployment checks and were in their owned homes and could rest up before the next season’s work. Many of the workers I spoke with, especially those working in the corn detasseling of the U.S. Corn Belt, receive unemployment benefits to avoid having to supplement their income in other ways including working in agriculture locally or selling food items or recycled goods at flea markets (my own family sold at flea- markets in the off-season as a way of supplementing our off-season finances). While the unemployment may not be an exorbitant amount of money, it is frequently cited by migrant farmworkers as critical to their migration pattern.

Luisa Migrates to Send her Children to College I met Luisa at the farmworker “know your rights” conference held by Texas

RioGrande Legal Aid in the city of McAllen as she was an outspoken participant in the conference asking questions and participating a little more than most in attendance. Luisa was there to get informed and I soon found at after introducing myself that she had not been migrating long but had been going to Minnesota to work in the last couple of years and as we chatted between sessions I informed her of my research and she agreed to meet with me again so that I could interview her about her experience going up north. I arrived to the farmworker mecca that is the unincorporated parts of the north Valley when visiting

221 Luisa’s house with an address in a place flooded with farmworkers of both the seasonal and migratory types. Before I had been standing inside of Luisa’s house for no more than about 30 seconds, I had already surmised that she was into holistic medicine as she had piles of herbs and pill bottles and oil containers galore throughout her house and a woman came knocking on her door while yelling at her asking if she had anything to alleviate stomach pains. This is a common scene in the Valley. For generations, the subjugated farmworker class of ethnic Mexicans in the region was denied access to public health facilities because of racial segregation (Orozco 2009) and thus had to find ways to provide each other health support outside of medical facilities, something not uncommon for

Latinxs today because of lack of affordable, quality access to healthcare (De Jesus and

Xiao 2014).

In a place with such a deep history of internal colonization and current militarization, the Valley’s farmworkers are one sect, albeit often the most struggling, of many sects of vastly impoverished, previously and currently colonized subjects. As the agricultural industry declined in the Valley and other industries expanded as immigrant arrivals led to massive population increases in the late twentieth century, the colonial infrastructure that birthed and maintained the migrant farmworker stream from South

Texas to the nation remains in place in a region in which agriculture consistently represents an increasingly smaller portion of the overall workforce. Because of this, many in the

Valley understand quite well that working as a migrant and/or seasonal farmworker allows for primary, secondary, and higher education assistance for their children, whereas other jobs in the region available to the farmworker class are typically low-paying and/or 222 temporary and do not provide this added benefit of educational assistance. This makes the decision to migrate for farm labor an easy one for people like Luisa who began migrating with her two sons once the eldest was approaching college age. Older teens can work faster and thus earn more money than younger children so this choice to migrate with her high school sons, make more money in the short-term than she would staying put, and qualifying them for college assistance programs was too tempting to pass up. Additionally, as one farmworker college recruiter told me, we are seeing more and more high school students from sending communities like the Rio Grande Valley and Florida migrate for farm labor apart from their families either with a friend or a contractor or work seasonally in their home areas specifically to get consideration for college assistance23. Of course, they are tapping into local knowledges built over generations of a local farmworker presence; one wonders if Anglo youth in the Midwest who are increasingly working seasonally in the de- tasseling as well will eventually begin to apply for farmworker college assistance programs. One has to endure the hard work that is farm labor and the isolation of field work and so while these programs may have originated based on a particular plight of a racialized labor class that saw widespread disparities in educational, health, and economic outcome, others yet might argue that it is fair for anyone who does the work to qualify for services especially as programs like the College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) also considers income, making it less likely overly-privileged students gaming the system would qualify. Yet this remains a criticism from some in the world of farmworker

23 The College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) discussed throughout this dissertation and which is located in various universities throughout the country does not require for farmworkers to attend schools in the states that they migrate to. 223 education and in my own time I have known several “non-farmworkers” enter into CAMP programs. Perhaps further restrictions on who they admit and the creation of programs similar to it for those outside of agriculture is the solution to this minor glitch.

Although most farmworkers likely do not migrate exclusively to attain benefits like educational assistance for their children as there are an array of factors that drive migration.

I am simply offering the stories of those who, well aware of their lack of alternatives, use farm labor as a means to a particular end. Many work in the fields and packing sheds of

America because they understand the added benefits, and yet others do it because they like, even love, working in agriculture.

Trabajando en Aire Libre: Farmwork as Choice and Identity I did not anticipate hearing this phrase of “working in open air” as often as I did when talking with farmworkers about why they do this type of work. From my childhood memories of farm labor, I recall how central the fantasy was to me and my brother of one day working indoors with reprieve from the sun and some air conditioner (we were certainly not alone in this dream chasing). There was just never a doubt for us that working indoors in almost anything other than farm labor was the path to happiness. But when talking to farmworkers throughout my time in both regions, many workers spoke of simply enjoying working outside “en aire libre” or “in open air.” Now, certainly many, if not most, farmworkers work in agriculture because of few options to work elsewhere. But it is my experience that there is a percentage of farmworkers who truly enjoy what they do. Even when opportunities arise for some to work in the processing or packaging operations which

224 are typically considered easier labor than working outdoors in the crops, some like San

Juana, the 61 year old lifelong farmworker who continues to work both seasonally in the

Valley and migrate up north to work as well and who opened up with me about her pain as a citizen farmworker and the taunting she receives, simply want to work outdoors in the fields because they prefer it.

Por qué no me acomodo en una bodega? Como que no me acostumbro, como que a mí no me gusta estar encerrada. Por qué en una bodega vas y trabajas tres meses, o cinco o seis meses. Nunca he trabajado en una bodega así por mucho tiempo así, no más temporal. Prefiero estar afuera.

Why don’t I take a job in a plant? It is like I just can’t get used to it, like to me I just don’t like to be trapped inside. Because in a plant you go and work three months, or five or six months. I have never worked in a plant for that much time like that only briefly. I prefer to be outside.

San Juana is one of several workers I spoke with who mentioned this love for working outdoors and in agriculture in particular. Others like Laura, who has been migrating with her family from the Mexican state of Michoacán to one of western Michigan’s large-scale nurseries, mentioned to me that her favorite part of farm labor was to be able to work outside and said that this is why she would not take a job in a restaurant or warehouse:

Siento que si estuviera en alguna fabrica o restaurante o algo como que estaría muy… (suspiro)…Todo el día estas adentro, nada mas. Si, a veces convives con la gente, pero no es lo mismo que acá donde andas afuera y te da aire.

I feel like if I was in a warehouse or a restaurant, or something I feel like I would be…(sigh)…All day you are inside, only. Yes, sometimes you interact with people, but it is not the same as out here where you are outside and the air hits you.

For Laura, she ties the open air of much of farm labor to better relations with her co-workers and cannot even complete her thought on the horrors of having to work indoors. Perhaps the most dramatic story I heard to this end was one from a farmworker I met while at my 225 time volunteering at La Unión del Pueblo (LUPE) whose younger brother I would later meet in my time conducting research in Michigan as he was a newly arriving student to

Michigan State University’s CAMP program. Their grandfather apparently loved working in the onion fields of South Texas so much that he would frequently express to his family that he wanted to die within the rows of onions. As if planning it, his last day on earth was, in fact, spent working in the onions. To some, farm labor is more than an occupation they are forced into, it is something that enjoy and even an identity.

While some might answer the question of why people do farm work with the superficial answer of there being no other choice, they fail to address the identity construct of farmworker, or “campesino” that make farm work much more than a type of employment for some. As scholars who have looked closely at the relationship between occupation and identity (Darnell 2002; Gini 1998; Hill 2010; Hurtado, et al. 1993; Parodi

2000; Phelan and Kinsella 2009; Wells 2013) would argue, workers cannot be universalized as semi or non-autonomous vessels of labor production. Where, why, and how someone works depends heavily on their identity. Works such as those of Barbara

Wells (2013) and Hurtado et al. (1993) demonstrate that being a farmworker can often be about much more than finding an employer that will employ you, but rather about maintaining one’s identity. With farmworkers in particular, and all workers in general, researchers should be more attuned to how one’s occupation and identity overlap so as to not underestimate the importance of what one does for a living to that individual. I have had to learn this the hard way on occasion as a former migrant worker who asks my mother questions about farm labor that she ultimately interprets as second guessing her choice in 226 the matter. “Me gusta ser pobre” or “I like being poor” she has responded to me on more than one occasion in our discussions about the stagnant wages and other injustices in U.S. agriculture. I am not able to know if she means this actually or not but this is irrelevant because what is at play here is the idea that whether anyone else considers it a bad or a good choice, it is still that, a choice, hers. And while an untold number of farmworkers may feel they have no choice in the matter, many others feel as if they do. Some, for example, choose to do the work or at least enjoy it in part due to the family bonds that emerge from the experience of collectively working with one another.

Forging Bonds: Working and Family Unity As mentioned previously, my mother, brother and I worked as migrant farmworkers to Wisconsin from the Valley throughout the mid-1990s. We spent quite a bit of time together working side by side during summer months and as begrudgingly as my brother and I may have gotten up every morning to go work, my mother frequently stressed the importance of sticking together as a cultural value. What I found in my time spent conducting my research is that this is a prevalent theme across farmworker families. As long-time farmworker and farmworker and immigrant activist Maria “Doña Mari” Gomez told me in our interview,

Viviamos muy felices porque vivíamos todos juntos.

We lived happily because we all lived together.

As hard as the work may be, there is something quite rewarding about working side by side with your family and producing your income in a collective fashion. This point of family

227 unity in the fields is one you hear from farmworkers often. Marisol, the young college student and former migrant worker to Illinois for corn detasseling, highlighted this when I asked her about the positive aspects of being a farmworker:

Family time. It’s a time that me and my family are always together and supportive of each other. Getting through that stage together makes the family ties stronger.

This forging of family bonds through collective labor has much to teach us about kinship in the current age of highly individualized labor. In my time conducting fieldwork I was privy to other forms of what I would consider farmworker agency along the lines of resistance.

FARMWORKERS RESISTING OUTSIDE OF ORGANIZING Despite the obvious labor organizing efforts, farmworkers resist their subjugation in varied, and often subtle, ways. Their strategic resistance to subjugation paints a different picture from the one of passive victim often portrayed. Farmworkers find ways to carve a life for themselves by summoning up courage and creativity to stand up for themselves and others that do not always involve picking up a picket sign.

Lawyering Up One of the actions that the perceived-to-be helpless migrant and seasonal farmworker takes most often when aggrieved is the quintessential American act of

“lawyering up,” or retaining legal services to defend themselves through litigation. To be clear, this is not because farmworkers often have vast access to resources, but because there exists a fairly large network of farmworker legal services throughout the country that developed throughout the twentieth century in response to the crises in farm labor that 228 necessitated some type of legal redress (Cummings 2008). And while the lawsuits that push employers and contractors to follow the law are often effective, they remain a reactionary part of the system of farmworker injustice. But for the individual workers, like one of the workers whom I picked up in the middle of the onion fields and showed up to his legal mediation covered in dirt and smelling of hard labor, to show your face and put your signature on a paper demanding justice from the contractors who recruited you and the farm owners and operators who profit from your suffering is a way that farmworkers attempt to take justice into their own hands.

As discussed briefly in Chapter 3, when I was in the Valley I went into a legal mediation with some Texas RioGrande Legal Aid (TRLA) attorneys/staff representing 31 workers (10 of whom were present) in a case against a set of brothers who are local farm labor contractors and a large corporate corn farming company. Needless to say, the day was rich in tensions, posturing, and a look into one particular way in which farmworkers fight back against their marginalization. In this case, the workers were recruited to work in

Iowa and signed a contract guaranteeing them several months of work which ultimately turned into only a few weeks or even just days for some. This breach of contract via underworking migrants runs rampant in the migrant farmworker world but workers are often unaware of their ability to confront their employers about these types of infractions, or they are simply too busy. Still, after years of advocating in farmworker communities, farmworkers continue to “lawyer up” via public legal services as they choose to face their exploitative employers in court and seek restitution.

229 Migrant Farmworkers and Technology Among the clearest differences between the farmworkers of today and the farmworkers of the twentieth century is their access to technology. CB-radios, atlases, address books, and other migrant farmworker things have long been replaced by the ubiquitous smart phone. What yesterday’s farmworkers compiled an entire chest worth of materials for can now be found in the compact capacity of a modern cell phone. This advancement in technology has served as a net positive for farmworkers because it facilitates their travel and communication with one another as well as with contractors and other employers. This was clear as Scott the trans-generational Western Michigan farmer mentioned to me during our interview regarding the difficulty of maintaining a sufficient work force:

They all have cell phones. They all know where the better deal is. It’s not like the old days where you know the sugar canes in Florida where you had fences around them. You know that if they’re not happy here, you’re not keeping them.

While farmworkers have always relied on their social networks to help protect each other and help find the best employment and while nevertheless exploitation prevails on many

American farms, the fact that cell phones provide workers with instant communication facilitates the ability for farmworkers to mobilize themselves out of bad working environments. While few workers spoke of this to me during our interviews, a recent cell phone application named “AgHelp” was created by a former Michigan farmworker turned computer software programmer Feliciano Paredes in which farmworkers can see updated job openings and current pay rates (Henderson 2019). The issue that I take with Paredes’ application, however, is that he markets it more as a way of farmers solving their labor

230 shortage issue rather than a way for farmworkers to avoid poor working environments. I suppose this is an intentional strategy to promote the potential funding of the endeavor.

While this use of smart phones by U.S. farmworkers is an emerging topic that deserves more attention in studies in the future, I find its rise to represent some of the most illustrative examples of farmworker agency that we see today.

FARM OWNERSHIP: TURNING THE TABLE Perhaps the biggest form of resistance that farmworkers as a racialized labor class could engage in today is the act of buying farms and operating as competitors to their former bosses. While this is not entirely common, Latinx owned farms are on the rise in the U.S. and with Texas first and Michigan eighth in the country in terms of Latinx farm ownership (López 2007; Menchaca 1995) there is reason to believe that farmworkers are buying farms and going into business for themselves in my two sites of research. In each site I was able to interview one ethnic Mexican farmer and attain their perspectives on working in an Anglo dominated industry.

In the Valley, Latinx farm ownership remains somewhat low considering the population of the region is 90 percent “Hispanic”24 according to the 2012 Census of

Agriculture conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Of that large population of potential Latinx farmers, 74 percent of farmers in the area are Latinx (U.S. Department of

Agriculture 2018a, 2). I was able to interview a second generation, Mexican American

24 While not a fan of either term, I use “Latinx” over “Hispanic” but recognize them as function as it pertains to how people largely from Mexico and other parts of Latin America are counted in the United States. I use “Latinx” where the government often uses “Hispanic.” 231 farmer, Johnny, in the region who has been farming for decades and used to assist in his father’s farming operations throughout the 1960s; he had much to offer regarding being of the Latinx members of a traditionally hostile, Anglo club. What he made clear is that even today Anglo farmers in the Valley are not very friendly with Latinx farmers and that there are tensions present that keep somewhat of a racial/ethnic division in the Valley farmer scene. This is not surprising when considering the racial structuring of Valley agriculture in the days developers and farmers were creating the “Magic Valley.” He made the point that he believes there would be more successful ethnic Mexican farmers locally if they were able to get a hold of some of the prime farming land that many of these remaining

Anglo farmers have not relinquished, in many cases, for generations. This brings into question not only if the Valley has a future in farming but if the Valley’s future in farming will be one detached from its colonial roots.

I was able to interview one Michigan ethnic Mexican farm owner and talk with at least one other off the record in the blueberry industry of Southwestern Michigan.

Michigan is a state of with a “Hispanic of Latino” population of 5.1 percent of the state’s overall population (U.S. Census 2018). What I found was that there were several ethnic

Mexicans who had common roots in the Mexican state of Michoacán and Chicago who were now harvesting blueberries a short drive to the northeast of their former urban lives in the city. This network of farmers worked for years in various industries in Chicago with the plan of making their way out of the city and into a rural setting more like their home state of Michoacán and so besides phonetic similarity, the lush soil and affordable

(compared to Chicago) vast land in Michigan has made this group feel somewhat at home 232 over the last several years. They buy property in the area and come in as seasonal farmworkers often working in their friends’ operations before beginning to harvest their own crops. This is what Julio did who had begun farming his own blueberries only within the last couple of years when I met him in the summer of 2015. He had worked for one of his close friends, Emilio, until he had gathered enough resources and settled in the area to be comfortable enough to begin his own operation. Julio and I had some informal conversation over a couple of beers and a barbeque one day as he spoke bluntly of farming in Michigan as a Mexican person. He said that he got along well with other farmers in the area but he also made several comments about how he felt that white farmers were essentially too self-victimizing. Julio reassured me that while he was not wealthy, he had more than enough to get by and considered himself to be roughly middle class. What the white farmers in the area wanted was enough to buy another boat, he said to me with a grin as he took a swig as if to say he was happy he had enough to buy another beer and another slab of meat to barbeque. Julio knew I was in the area doing research and perhaps offered these thoughts to me proactively because he thought that might be something I would be interested in, or maybe he was just venting, or both. And while these particular farmers may not have had a long history as farmworkers, their presence clearly disrupts the racial order of farm ownership and the hope is that with this disruption a subjugated Mexican workforce might find improvement. The problem is that there is not necessarily proof that this is what happens, and we have the Valley to look at as an example. The Valley, with many ethnic Mexicans in power simply continues to operate in a highly exploitative fashion. 233 As ethnic Mexicans began to replace Anglo power brokers in the region throughout the end of the twentieth century, they inherited a system and a domestic labor supply that was historically amongst the most exploitative in the nation. Additionally, the homogeneity of the region (90 percent “Hispanic” as of 2010 Census) makes solidarity among ethnic lines less vital to people’s self-preservation as they do not find themselves as ethnic outliers or minorities. Instead, workers in the Valley build solidarity between each other based on linguistic, class, occupational, and place of origin ties. A good example of this is Veronica, the migrant farmer to I discuss in my section on familial migration in Chapter 4 who belongs to a group of workers who all live in the Valley city of Donna, are from San Luis

Potosi, and migrate to Michigan. Within this group there is a high level of solidarity as they move across the Midwest stream, including in the Valley, based on their family and trans- local community ties. But while this type of solidarity exists in the region among and within regional based groups and family ties, the solidarity across groups is disjointed at best and what we have seen in the Valley for many years now is an apathetic ruling class of ethnic

Mexicans. There is still a disproportionate rate of Anglo ownership of Valley farms and the ones who sold and moved out of the region left behind a legacy of colonialism and racial and class division that I maintain leads to an ethnically disjointed region that keeps farmworkers subjugated. Perhaps what could be more fruitful in the Valley is increased farming by a farmworker class in order to truly disrupt the farming hierarchy, once and for all. Whether or not this would have wider-felt outcomes in the community would remain to be seen.

234 Conclusion

Migration for farm labor is declining across the nation and this is certainly the case for farmworker migration from South Texas to Michigan, along the once-prominent

Midwest stream. A changing economic and population landscape in South Texas combined with the ramifications of shifting policy and farming practices across the Midwest stream have resulted in a significant reduction in the number of farmworkers moving along this circuit. What follows are some less central-to-my-project observations I made while conducting research that I feel deserve further exploration and some concluding thoughts about the Texas-Michigan farmworker stream.

THE IMPACT OF INCREASED ANIMAL PRODUCTION AND FAST FOOD ON SUSTAINABILITY AND FARMWORKER HEALTH Anyone writing about agriculture today would be remiss not to bring up the question of sustainability. For quite some time now environmental scientists and activists have called our attention to the unsustainable practices associated with commercial farming and large-scale animal production (Bacon et al. 2012; Guthman 2004). These scholars and activists warn that ecological sustainability is actively compromised by a system of food production that is more focused on lowering costs to increase profits than it is on the well- being of ecosystems and solving the problem of hunger. While an extensive discussion of the environmental, health and economic impacts of industrialized farming is beyond the scope of this project, I am interested in how my findings about the industry’s ongoing dependence on an immigrant labor force might contribute to the overall question of sustainability of the current system.

235 Increased Animal Production and Farmworkers Perhaps the greatest omission to this dissertation thus far for those currently attuned to the state of current U.S. farm labor is the situation of those working in the ever-booming livestock industry. The workers of my study are clearly impacted by this rise in animal production specifically because much of the corn we are producing in the Corn Belt is benchmarked for animal feed and gas via ethanol. But beyond the scope of this study, the examination of increased animal production in U.S. agriculture is vital to understanding a newer plight of farmworkers. The recent work of scholars such as Angela Stuesse (2016) tell a horrifying story about the lives of today’s livestock workers who are highly undocumented and greatly exploited as these immigrant workers began to provide the brunt of the hard, manual labor required in increasingly large animal farms. Stuesse tells of the atrocious conditions in Mississippi that Latinx workers are recruited to. In my own time in the field I ran into livestock workers who reported some very tough conditions, especially in the Michigan dairy industry. What we are seeing reflects some of the same things we see in the fields from hiring undocumented laborers, excessively long hours with little pay, and poor working conditions typically in isolated regions. One of the major differences, however, is that this labor tends to be a done year-round by a local labor supply largely composed of non-migratory immigrants. As of the writing of this dissertation there are livestock interests petitioning the state agencies in charge of the H-2A Visa program to consider adding livestock workers since many of the jobs are not eligible to recruit H-2A workers because the work is not seasonal (Costa 2017).

236 Farmworkers’ Poor Nutrition Fueled by Today’s Food System I had the good fortune of participating in a panel at the farmworker conference I helped organize with the folks at TRLA with longtime farmworker organizer Carlos

Marentes. Marentes is somewhat of a farmworker activist legend as he was the political cartoonist for the Texas Farm Workers’ Union and their newspaper publication “El

Cuhamil.” Additionally, Marentes has worked for years with the Border Workers Project out of El Paso where he remains active in attempting to organize Texas and New Mexican farmworkers. Of the many things one learns from spending time with Carlos is this particular connection between environmentalism and food consumption health and the work that farmworkers do. Marentes spoke to this at the conference and while I cannot argue his points as strongly or effectively as he can, his talk that day led to my drawing the connection between food demands, labor demands, and farmworker health. The fast food and mass consumption society that we have constructed, in part creates an environment in which laborers must rapidly produce in a high pressure, high demand situation working long hours that otherwise might not be so demanding with a different food system. In turn, farmworkers burdened with long hours and low resources consume the “comida chatarra” or “junk food” that Marentes brought up repeatedly on the day of the conference. This issue, while not coming up often during my research, was brought up by Marisol, the college student who formerly migrated from the Valley to Illinois. She discussed how not having a kitchen in the hotels they were housed in for multiple seasons impacted their diet:

So, it was really hard for my mom to like cook breakfast for us so it’s always like, ‘Oh let’s go to the store and buy microwavable food so that we can eat something.’

237 While some may choose as a part of their diet to regularly eat microwavable food, clearly this was not a choice for Marisol and her family. Furthermore, my observations of her in and around the migrant student office was that she was hyper aware of dietary choices her and other students were making as she regularly encouraged others to make healthier food choices. This observation I made of her made sense in the context of this situation in Illinois that she had to endure. The deprivation of choice for nourishing food options had clearly affected Marisol. This can and should be viewed as a farmworker cycle of violence and many have already begun to view it that way in academic literature (Freeman 2007; Wirth,

Strochlic, and Getz 2007). I pointed out this sad cycle once in western Michigan by asking the health practitioners from the mobile migrant clinic if they would be checking the farmworkers’ blood pressure before or after they consumed the free preservative-laden food being handed out to them by one of the other non-profits simultaneously at the labor camp. For a farmworker kid who grew up eating potted meat, ramen noodles, and other affordable unhealthy eats with a family of diabetics this scene is all too personal. But to enter the realm of dietary policing is complicated when working with the poor; there is an inherent elitist condescension imbedded in that dialogue. Yet to hear Marentes speak that day as a humble-in-appearance, lifelong servant of farmworkers who includes himself in the duped, who uses biblical scripture to explain why we should nourish our bodies, and to tie it all to the crooked food system that oppresses farmworkers to begin with opens up a critical conversation and I find it a worthy avenue to continue to pursue myself in the future when talking about issues of farmworker justice.

238 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Michigan, with its lushness and excellent late-spring and summer farming weather, remains a fruit haven with its blueberries, cherries, and apples propelling it to near the top of states producing agricultural commodities necessitating hand labor. The stories and analysis presented within this dissertation are but one attempt at understanding why people migrate for such intense labor and how they work and live in one of the nation’s oldest and most notorious industries. Through the stories of those presented within these pages we can see how government policy and enforcement on issues from immigration to unemployment, expansion of free-trade industry, and geological inconsistencies among other factors combine to change the flows of labor and undoubtedly have impacted the stream of farmworkers from South Texas to Michigan. And as Michigan has increasingly looked to “Florida Solos” and H-2A visa workers as a source of farm labor, we can see the farmworker profile in America changing to something increasingly familiar from the mid- twentieth century in which undocumented and bracero workers predominated U.S. agricultural field operations. This switch to individuals rather than families as farmworkers is viewed by farmers as an effective method of maintaining a consistent labor supply and thus avoiding losses associated with labor shortages. The only people not switching over to this type of labor are those who already have a secure labor force usually with domestic seasonal and migratory laborers from Florida, Texas, or Mexico coming in. But as James the legal expert I interviewed extensively about Michigan farm labor made clear, the effort on behalf of farmers for cost-reduction has traditionally centered on reducing labor costs as prices of chemicals and machinery are generally uncontested, therefore many share the

239 worry that the early elevated wages of H-2A labor will not last. Many believe that ultimately the program, if left to do so, will work its way toward far cheaper and more exploitable labor from even more desperate regions of the earth.

When one visits the Valley today, it is clear that this place is far from the agricultural hub it once was long ago in the ages of endless orchards and some of the largest and meanest crop producers in the world. Today’s Valley is a fast-growing, developing metropolitan region in which fields of citrus have been replaced by retail stores, import warehouses, and housing for an ever-urbanizing population. As fields deplete, bridges for international trade couriers are emerging at a rapid pace. There is no doubt what industry is in charge in this region today as the transformation from farm colony to international trade epicenter is all but complete. Yet there remain a healthy percentage of seasonal workers here who typically find themselves with little other options in terms of employment either due to their citizenship and/or language abilities. And there remain those who continue to migrate northward. They may be aging and receding in numbers, or unable to migrate because of legal status, but many who continue to find themselves slipping through the economic cracks of the region because of low-paying jobs and a highly competitive labor market will continue to migrate so long as the Valley does not resolve its poverty problem. Housing some of the poorest counties in the nation with a history and an infrastructure still loosely in place to facilitate intra and inter-state migration for farm labor means that the Valley will continue to be considered as a migrant farmworker sending region even if its significance has been greatly reduced since the mid-twentieth century. So even though places like Michigan are now getting more of their workers from the migrant 240 and checkpoint-free hub that is Florida and from Mexico increasingly via the H-2A visa program, many of the marginalized, working poor in the Valley are still trickling northward. If the interior immigration checkpoints in South Texas were ever removed it is easy to see the region playing a larger role in supplying migrant farmworkers to Michigan and beyond. It is difficult to assess at this point, however, which is likelier to be eradicated sooner: the region’s overwhelming poverty that drives migration or the entrapping interior inspection stations.

Nicknamed the “Valley of Tears” by organizers of the Texas Farm Workers’ Union, the Rio Grande Valley has simply been a brutal place to do farm labor now for generations.

While many in the community might lament the decline of agriculture over the years, others may feel that ultimately it is for the better as it represents a fairly dark time for thousands of Texas Mexicans. The problem is that many in the Valley today are still living through dark times as problems of wage theft, worker abuse, and poor housing exist across various industries in the area as even those with the privilege of legal status struggle to survive and are victims of some of the nation’s most stagnant wages. My brother who used to work in the local citrus industry for a short period of time remembers when a large group of processing plant workers were elated in July of 2009 when the federal minimum wage was raised from $5.15 per hour to $7.25 per hour as these workers, many of whom had worked for the company for long stretches of time up to over 20 years, had never received a raise.

He recalls how they walked around gleefully on payday at work discussing with each other all of the new possibilities now that they had been given a “raise.” What we have seen in the Valley is that workers are treated with some of the lowest possible regard in the country 241 with sparse moments of federal intervention that provide some type of relief to those at the bottom end of this stratified economy. “Economic development” here means venture capitalist explorations for international power brokers while the depression of wages due to the perpetual availability of Mexican workers is built into business models. Whatever industry emerges, wages remain suppressed and workers remain with little options but to leave, and so they do.

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