From the Jaws of Victory. Matthew Garcia

of their recruits from these “blighted areas” that existed in various stages of decay. The authors of the report gave the following description of Three Rocks, a typical fringe settlement: “Housing consists of tar-papered, very small shacks (condemned housing from labor camps) with outdoor privies, no water is available in the area where the housing is, must be carried from the grocery store which is on the road that borders the property.”¹² Six hundred people occupied this particular settlement, a majority of them Mexican American. Most settlements, however, consisted of black or ethnic Mexican residents, while poor whites made up as much as 10 percent of the total fringe area populations. Only 33 percent of the inhabitants owned their own home, although 75 percent owned a car, reflecting the importance of mobility in getting to and from job sites and recruitment centers.¹³ In areas where single men predominated, high levels of alcoholism, prostitution, and violence occurred, creating constant challenges for law enforcement officials. In settlements where families resided, county restrictions against public assistance for free and able-bodied men drove many unemployed fathers to “habitually seek to be jailed” so that their wives and children could secure food subsidies from the county. “In many cases,” researchers found, “the noon meal at school [was] the only full meal many of the children received.”¹⁴

      In the end, the authors depicted a view of rural poverty that differed in form if not severity from the one found in the southern deserts. The heavy employment of temporary Mexican guest workers and undocumented immigrants in the South undermined local wages, precipitating the migration of workers northward. In the San Joaquin Valley, local residents struggled against declining wages caused by a changing employment system in which growers increasingly externalized the cost of labor and placed a heavier burden on contractors and the county government. Fringe areas that served as the major source of labor swelled in the postwar era with the migration of undocumented Mexican immigrants and former braceros who had “skipped” their contracts. For the authors of the study, however, migration constituted a less important factor in the creation of rural poverty than the maintenance of a large pool of desperate workers living on the margins of society, whose conditions led them to accept whatever wages contractors offered. “Steps need to be taken immediately,” they concluded, “to bring about more equitable rates of pay, better housing, better educational opportunity, better police and fire protection, increased access to medical care, and all the other advantages which might be expected to accrue to citizens in our wealthy, productive economy.”¹⁵

FIGURE 1. A child stands in front of a derelict house in an undisclosed farm labor camp. ALUA, UFW Collection, 7118.

      Such studies confirmed what most on the ground understood: life for farm workers had gotten worse since World War II, despite massive government investments in irrigation projects and during a time when growers expanded their production. U.S. Secretary of Labor James F. Mitchell, speaking to a gathering of farm labor specialists in 1959, confirmed these losses, testifying, “There is very little evidence that the underemployed and unemployed farm worker is passing out of society.” The relative rootedness of workers in the San Joaquin Valley notwithstanding, Mitchell reported that the number of migratory farm workers in the United States had not decreased in a decade. Wages had declined over a seven-year period, leading Mitchell to remark, “We must remember that these workers not only do not have the protection of most of the social legislation which places a floor under the economic wellbeing of most Americans; but they are also deprived even of the ‘automatic’ action of a free labor market, in which a labor shortage tends to bring its own correction.”¹⁶ In spite of his observations, Mitchell possessed little power to alter the conditions undergirding this system. In the 1960s, local activists, community organizations, and workers themselves would be quicker to address these problems than government.

      Rural labor advocates did not sit idly by as growers’ profits increased and workers’ conditions worsened. In some cases, local activism rose organically from the righteous indignation of people who applied their own analysis to the injustices that they witnessed around them. In other cases, workers circulating in and out of rural areas carried with them knowledge of how to leverage the power of unions and initiate reform through labor organizing. Still others attempted to adapt an urban model of reform to rural areas. Whatever the approach, in the 1960s advocates increasingly took matters into their own hands.

      In the southern deserts, advocates for reform prioritized the goal of ending the bracero program, given the dramatic impact it had on the lives of farm workers in the area. The presence of Mexican nationals upset social relations in these rural communities, often pitting the guests against residents who felt entitled to local jobs. As I have described elsewhere, conflict occurred over employment as well as courtship, leading to violence and sometimes murder.¹⁷

      In 1960, a coalition of workers in the Imperial Valley tried to increase their wages by striking the lettuce fields. Two AFL-CIO representatives, Al Green and Clyde Knowles, had begun to organize local workers with an eye toward starting a new union, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC). Green and Knowles believed a new, statewide union movement could be built among migratory Mexican and Filipino workers who began their seasons in the southern deserts with the lettuce harvest. Growers’ importation of braceros, however, complicated this dream and led some organizers to take out their frustrations on Mexican nationals in the fields. Fights in bars between braceros and striking workers also erupted in vice districts on the outskirts of many rural towns, leading to a chaotic situation.¹⁸

      Two local activists, Miguel and Alfredo Figueroa, participated in these early attempts at unionization as a consequence of their upbringing. When the Figueroas were children, the family moved from Blythe, California, to nearby Oatman, Arizona, where their father took a job in the gold mines and joined the local mineworkers’ union. Although mineworkers and farm workers occasionally overlapped within working-class communities, their rights and expectations differed considerably. The success of the United Mine Workers union provided miners with the leverage to insist on fair pay and better social services. In contrast, the lack of collective bargaining rights for farm workers meant that they often suffered discrimination on and off the job and had relatively little faith in their ability to change their condition. Occasionally, however, families like the Figueroas worked in both mining and agriculture, leading to a cross-fertilization of cultures that benefited farm worker communities. As young men, the Figueroas assisted their father in the mines and the melon harvest in and around Blythe.

      During the early 1960s, Miguel and Alfredo threw themselves into farm worker activism across the desert region of southern California. Their trips to the Imperial Valley caught the attention of local law enforcement officials who maintained communication with their peers in Blythe. According to Miguel, the surveillance of Mexican Americans depended on a network of police officers, bankers, and deputized growers who kept tabs on anyone who tried to improve the lives of farm workers living in the Tri-Valley region. When Miguel and Alfredo returned home from working with AWOC in the Imperial Valley, town leaders called them to a meeting at the local bank and threatened them with violence. Miguel recalled their line of questioning: “What the hell [are] you guys doing down there? Do you know that those people have guns? Do you know that you Figueroa boys might get hurt?’” The town leaders eventually let them go, but other incidents of harassment followed. In 1963, for example, Blythe police officers dragged Alfredo from a local bar and publicly beat him, provoking a confrontation between his brother Gilbert and the police. Alfredo Figueroa won a case against the department, although a jury in Coachella awarded him a less than satisfactory settlement of $3,500. Investigators with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights later wrote that the incident epitomized the kind of intimidation and abuse Mexican Americans encountered in the rural Southwest.¹⁹

      Such threats and acts of violence did not deter everyone, least of all the Figueroas. The election of John F. Kennedy inspired hope that the federal government might intervene to improve conditions for farm workers in California. The newly formed Mexican American Political Association, led by the labor intellectual Bert Corona, organized “Viva Kennedy!” campaigns in the West, which sought to rally Mexican American voters and offset the