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Very engrossing text on the history of migrant workers and their role in creating America, the revulsion, racism and injustices they endured. The main focus is on Mexicans who found after the Mexican American War found that the border had move hundreds of miles south of them, and while now within the boundaries of the United States were stripped of all rights, their properties confiscated, driven off their land and had laws passed that stripped them of all rights to any justice or citizenship.
While the misuse of immigrants lowering each group to an indentured status with no protections, and the use of political dialog that described them as less than human deserving nothing better than the exploitation that was their due. This whole period that ran through slavery, and the first large migrations up to the 2000s was indeed a very ugly period both for migrants and the white working poor. It is hard to read the racist and disgusting statements of well known politicians who tried to justify white nationalism and pitted each immigrant group against each other for the sake of large growers and corporations whose profits were built on the sweat and blood of the workers who suffered under them.
Much of this was known to me to some extent as my Grandfather was a ranch foreman in the Santa Barbara area from the 30s until he retired in the mid 70s. He ran a large Mexican crew, most of them who worked under him for generations. He would drive me out to meet them when I was a toddler, after his second breakfast, this would often be repeated each time I made a return visit...workers remembering me from my last visit. He had a ground crew of 20 who took care of his boss' garden landscaping and a larger crew who tended the polo grounds and the golf course and the grand drives of this exclusive residential sub-division, and an even larger crew who tended the lemon groves that surrounded the residential area. I have to assume that he was a good foreman, as he showed them a lot of respect and it was returned. He knew their families and their children...and they always remarked at how I had grown. That is how I knew they weren't braceros who had to return back to Mexico as soon as the crops were harvested. I knew that this was not the way most Mexican migrants were treated, I knew that most were exploited especially in the horticultural crops like were found in the Salinas Valley and up and down the coast. My grandparents who earlier had lived in Naples by the Sea (which eventually became part of Goleta) had farm neighbors who were Japanese, and Filipino and Mexican. Grams had run the General Store during the depression and residents were judged on their worth as people, not whether they had money or were white: neighbors helped neighbors. I know it tore at her when her Japanese neighbors were driven off of their property and interned, which happened before I was born, but the stories about them survived.
My Dad was stationed in the Philippines before the war broke out and had a deep respect for Filipinos...I don't think he knew how poorly the Filipino migrants were treated in California, even worse than any other group of farm workers. He returned to the Pacific as a bomber co-pilot and was surprised on an emergency leave back to Santa Barbara to walk into a bar where no black, or Mexican or Filipino would have even been allowed to enter to find a group of guys with arm bands sitting at the bar...on inquiry he found out that they were German POWs who worked as field hands, but could in their white privileged bodies after their labors, come downtown for a few beers. That they had these freedoms when men my father fought along side of would not be welcome in the same facility was something he never forgot.
In fourth grade we were stationed in Texas, and lived in a community who hated military officers, hated Papists more, and Mexicans just as much. I went to a Catholic school which was integrated with Mexicans, which I think was perceived as even worse than being Papist as I actually sat in the same room as non-whites. It was the first time I encountered overt racism. Texas in the 50s made no bones about how they felt about Mexicans and Blacks and Catholics.
Returning to California in the late 50s I belonged to a parish that had Mexican families, Portuguese and Hawaiian families, shunned by some parishioners, but not by my family. I had no idea of what was happening in the Ag fields surrounding Sacramento, or in the canneries downtown. I could sense the racism but as a child had no idea about the vigilantes and institutional violence in the fields.
One of our neighbors, a doctor had a son my younger brothers age...a soft very white Pillsbury dough type of teen, who spent one summer working in the fields with undocumented workers, stoop labor, sharing their living conditions. He returned a totally changed person, speaking Spanish, lean and tan with a different perspective on the world.
You could not live in California and be blind to the living conditions of migrant field hands, though the work camps were not on highly traveled roads. You knew though because in small towns farm workers kept their distance, eyes down, knowing where they would be welcome and where not.
It was not until the UFW organized the grape boycott that I became aware of what the plight of farm workers and what they dealt with up and down the valleys of my home state. The violence they encountered was covered in some papers, other papers made it sound as though they were subversives here to destroy all social order and our very peace and security.
I found this text moving and at times emotionally difficult, because at some level I had been sheltered from the terror and violence that I had thought was restricted to the Jim Crow south. This is a text that requires you to have a deep love of your country and its ideals, otherwise you would be shattered by the way large groups of people supported by sheriffs and police and militarized border enforcers have behaved as extra judicial thugs no better than the neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan that bolstered their ranks. It is a face to face encounter of how we can behave when messages of fear of 'others' and racism, hatred and violence are drummed up by anti-immigrant politicians and the corporations that benefit from undocumented workers who sponsor this divisiveness. A real eye opener about a subject that divides our country even today.
While the misuse of immigrants lowering each group to an indentured status with no protections, and the use of political dialog that described them as less than human deserving nothing better than the exploitation that was their due. This whole period that ran through slavery, and the first large migrations up to the 2000s was indeed a very ugly period both for migrants and the white working poor. It is hard to read the racist and disgusting statements of well known politicians who tried to justify white nationalism and pitted each immigrant group against each other for the sake of large growers and corporations whose profits were built on the sweat and blood of the workers who suffered under them.
Much of this was known to me to some extent as my Grandfather was a ranch foreman in the Santa Barbara area from the 30s until he retired in the mid 70s. He ran a large Mexican crew, most of them who worked under him for generations. He would drive me out to meet them when I was a toddler, after his second breakfast, this would often be repeated each time I made a return visit...workers remembering me from my last visit. He had a ground crew of 20 who took care of his boss' garden landscaping and a larger crew who tended the polo grounds and the golf course and the grand drives of this exclusive residential sub-division, and an even larger crew who tended the lemon groves that surrounded the residential area. I have to assume that he was a good foreman, as he showed them a lot of respect and it was returned. He knew their families and their children...and they always remarked at how I had grown. That is how I knew they weren't braceros who had to return back to Mexico as soon as the crops were harvested. I knew that this was not the way most Mexican migrants were treated, I knew that most were exploited especially in the horticultural crops like were found in the Salinas Valley and up and down the coast. My grandparents who earlier had lived in Naples by the Sea (which eventually became part of Goleta) had farm neighbors who were Japanese, and Filipino and Mexican. Grams had run the General Store during the depression and residents were judged on their worth as people, not whether they had money or were white: neighbors helped neighbors. I know it tore at her when her Japanese neighbors were driven off of their property and interned, which happened before I was born, but the stories about them survived.
My Dad was stationed in the Philippines before the war broke out and had a deep respect for Filipinos...I don't think he knew how poorly the Filipino migrants were treated in California, even worse than any other group of farm workers. He returned to the Pacific as a bomber co-pilot and was surprised on an emergency leave back to Santa Barbara to walk into a bar where no black, or Mexican or Filipino would have even been allowed to enter to find a group of guys with arm bands sitting at the bar...on inquiry he found out that they were German POWs who worked as field hands, but could in their white privileged bodies after their labors, come downtown for a few beers. That they had these freedoms when men my father fought along side of would not be welcome in the same facility was something he never forgot.
In fourth grade we were stationed in Texas, and lived in a community who hated military officers, hated Papists more, and Mexicans just as much. I went to a Catholic school which was integrated with Mexicans, which I think was perceived as even worse than being Papist as I actually sat in the same room as non-whites. It was the first time I encountered overt racism. Texas in the 50s made no bones about how they felt about Mexicans and Blacks and Catholics.
Returning to California in the late 50s I belonged to a parish that had Mexican families, Portuguese and Hawaiian families, shunned by some parishioners, but not by my family. I had no idea of what was happening in the Ag fields surrounding Sacramento, or in the canneries downtown. I could sense the racism but as a child had no idea about the vigilantes and institutional violence in the fields.
One of our neighbors, a doctor had a son my younger brothers age...a soft very white Pillsbury dough type of teen, who spent one summer working in the fields with undocumented workers, stoop labor, sharing their living conditions. He returned a totally changed person, speaking Spanish, lean and tan with a different perspective on the world.
You could not live in California and be blind to the living conditions of migrant field hands, though the work camps were not on highly traveled roads. You knew though because in small towns farm workers kept their distance, eyes down, knowing where they would be welcome and where not.
It was not until the UFW organized the grape boycott that I became aware of what the plight of farm workers and what they dealt with up and down the valleys of my home state. The violence they encountered was covered in some papers, other papers made it sound as though they were subversives here to destroy all social order and our very peace and security.
I found this text moving and at times emotionally difficult, because at some level I had been sheltered from the terror and violence that I had thought was restricted to the Jim Crow south. This is a text that requires you to have a deep love of your country and its ideals, otherwise you would be shattered by the way large groups of people supported by sheriffs and police and militarized border enforcers have behaved as extra judicial thugs no better than the neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan that bolstered their ranks. It is a face to face encounter of how we can behave when messages of fear of 'others' and racism, hatred and violence are drummed up by anti-immigrant politicians and the corporations that benefit from undocumented workers who sponsor this divisiveness. A real eye opener about a subject that divides our country even today.
