Mexican Consuls and Labor Organizing

by Gonzalez, Gilbert G.

• ISBN13: 9780292728240
• ISBN10: 0292728247
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of Texas Pr

Summary

"This is the most comprehensive extant study in a growing literature on the role of the Mexican consulate in the United States." --Dennis Nodiacute;n Valdeacute;s, author of Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the Great Lakes Region, 1917-1970 Chicano history, from the early decades of the twentieth century up to the present, cannot be explained without reference to the determined interventions of the Mexican government, asserts Gilbert G. Gonzaacute;lez. In this pathfinding study, he offers convincing evidence that Mexico aimed at nothing less than developing a loyal and politically dependent emigrant community among Mexican Americans, which would serve and replicate Mexico's political and economic subordination to the United States. Gonzaacute;lez centers his study around four major agricultural workers' strikes in Depression-era California. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, he documents how Mexican consuls worked with U.S. growers to break the strikes, undermining militants within union ranks and, in one case, successfully setting up a grower-approved union. Moreover, Gonzaacute;lez demonstrates that the Mexican government's intervention in the Chicano community did not end after the New Deal; rather, it continued as the Bracero Program of the 1940s and 1950s, as a patron of Chicano civil rights causes in the 1960s and 1970s, and as a prominent voice in the debates over NAFTA in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Author Biography

Gilbert G. Gonzalez is a Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Director of the Focused Research Program in Labor Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(10)
The 1910 Mexican Revolution, the United States and Mexico de afuera	11	(26)
Organizing Mexico de afuera in Southern California	37	(45)
The Los Angeles County Strike of 1933	82	(40)
The San Joaquin Valley Strike of 1933	122	(37)
The Imperial Valley Strikes of 1933--1934	159	(38)
Denouement and Renaissance	197	(31)
Notes	228	(33)
Bibliography	261	(10)
Index	271