For months, there seemed to be no chance for the farm unions to win the strike, but in the summer of 1966 they began to win a series of brilliant victories as Chavez built a coalition of labor unions, church groups, student activists, minorities, and consumers. When another fledgling labor organization, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, began a September, 1965 strike against 33 grape growers around Delano, California, the NFWA joined in. It was difficult to disguise, however, that the program depressed worker wages, destroyed their bargaining power, led to terrible living conditions, and drove away local workers.Ĭhavez and Huerte organized the National Farm Workers Association.
Thousands of workers were imported, and an even larger number of illegal "undocumented workers" crisscrossed the border to work the fields of California and the Southwest.Ĭongress granted a variety of extensions to the program, which existed until 1964. World War II created a labor shortage on the homefront and Congress responded by enacting the Emergency Labor, or Bracero, progam (bracero meaning "the strong-armed ones"). Growers prevailed in Congress to not include Mexico in the postwar immigration restrictions that were placed on most other nations, so as to maintain the labor supply. During World War I, for example, labor contractors supplied California growers with seasonal workers from Mexico. Mexican workers had been imported into the state since the 1880s, first to work on the railroads and in factories, and later to work the fields. California agribusiness had become "a coerced cornucopia," as geographer Grey Brechin wrote. In California, growers had political muscle that they could bring to bear in both Sacramento and in the nation's capital. Rich farmlands and a long growing season were factors in that success, as were government-produced ingredients, including torrents of inexpensive irrigation water from massive, publicly financed systems such as the Central Valley project, and a cheap, dependable labor supply, made up largely of Mexican itinerant workers.Ĭalifornia farming increasingly was characterized as "agribusiness," since the industry was not made up of family farms -as was the norm in many other areas of the country-but of vast land holdings operated by major corporations.
This 1960s poster promotes the United Farm Workers, an organization founded primarily by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to improve the deplorable wages and working conditions that many migrant farm workers experienced in California fields.īy the 1960s, California had been the nation's leading agricultural producer for several decades.
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