INTRODUCTION MEXICANS OF AGRIBUSINESS

INTRODUCTION MEXICANS OF

AGRIBUSINESS

In the years after the 1960 Harvest of Shame revealed the struggles of

migrant farmworkers in the United States, Midwest communities, state

governments, farmworkers, growers, unions, and agribusinesses debated and

renegotiated the structure of the Midwest migrant stream.1 The decades from 1960

to 1990 were a critical period in the history of the migrant stream. Although the

Harvest of Shame focused on the experiences of African American migrants

along the East Coast, Midwest state governments and communities realized that

migrants lived and worked in similar horrible conditions in their region. This

awareness coincided with the advent of the Civil Rights, Chicano, Feminist and

United Farm Workers (UFW) movements of the 1960s and 1970s, creating a time

period where farmworkers and Midwesterners debated and challenged the power

structure of the Midwest stream. During the last half of the twentieth century,

individuals within and outside the migrant stream renegotiated power within the

home, the Catholic Church, society, and the agricultural system. The migrant

agricultural system, or as I call it, the food pyramid, focused power on a

decreasing amount of people and was structured so that few could see the

pyramid as a whole, but rather seeing only those that held power directly over

them. Based on the backs of migrant farmworkers, other groups in the middle of

the pyramid: growers, governments, and the public, were largely unaware of their

role in the pyramid as a whole, or the role of a few agricultural corporations on

the top. This food pyramid maintained a power structure that abused farmworkers

and left few in the agri-corporations and a handful of government leaders, on top.

The Midwest food pyramid at the last half of the twentieth century included the

growers who hired farmworkers, state and national governments that developed

policies that affected the model of the stream and the rights of migrants, the aid

organizations and unions that sought to better farmworkers’ lives, and migrant

farmworkers themselves; all of which helped to reshape the stream as each group

renegotiated their role in the field, the home, and society.

The Midwest migrant stream during the last half of the twentieth century

was a unique stream during a unique time. In contrast to the East Coast or the

Western stream, Midwest growers did not widely employ migrant workers until

the 1960s. By the 1960s, Mexican and Mexican Americans traveling from their

homes in Texas, Florida, or Mexico, came to dominate the fields of the Midwest,

working in a variety of crops including tomatoes, apples, sugar beets, cucumbers,

mushrooms, and much more. For rural Midwest communities largely devoid of

Latino residents, the sight of Mexican and Mexican American families traveling

up North to work in local fields created a major change to the status quo. While

the residents of the upper East Coast had seen African American men working in

nearby fields for years and communities in the West Coast regularly saw an influx

of additional Mexican Americans during the harvest season, most of the Midwest

had neither many Mexican American communities nor a long history of Mexican

American migrants. The newly formed Midwest migrant stream was a unique

departure from the formation and existence of the West and Eastern streams.

While previous scholars like Ernesto Galarza examine the long history of

Mexican and Mexican American agricultural workers in the West, and others like

Cindy Hahamovitch explore the changing nature of the East coast stream, few

scholars have analyzed the Midwest migrant stream.2 The Midwest’s distinctive

feature as a newer site for Mexican American and Mexican migrant families

positions the Midwest stream as a site of important analysis.

The influx of Mexican and Mexican Americans working and living in

poverty conditions in the Midwest came when social movements encouraged

Midwest locals to act on issues of poverty and minority rights. Midwesterners in

1960 saw the Harvest of Shame, which examined the struggles, discrimination,

and forces that shaped migrants’ lives that were experienced in fields and farm

towns or cities across the Midwest, despite the film’s association with the Eastern

coast. Inspired by the social movements of the period like the Chicano and

Feminist Movements and the struggles of the UFW, the Midwestern public and

farmworkers themselves were inspired to challenge relationships within the food

pyramid, organizations, and family units. Catholic organizations, farmworkers,

farmworker unions, the public, growers, and governments negotiated the roles

and rights of women and migrants, though they interpreted the issues differently.

These various ideas combined to a degree not seen before to create multiple

reimaginings of life for farmworkers and society as a whole. Yet the era of

activism came to a close as decreasing activism, the Farm Crisis, and the

ascendancy of neoliberalism started to enthrall the Midwest and the nation as the

1980s progressed. Though this time of activism in general only lasted two

decades, the reverberations of this moment of change reshaped the power

dynamics of the stream and society. An investigation of this period offers a

unique and important glimpse into the power structure and relationships of the

Midwest migrant stream at a time of change that previous scholars of

farmworkers and Midwest migrants have largely ignored.

By the time President Bill Clinton, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de

Gortari, and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney signed NAFTA in 1993,

the significant shift in international policies that affected immigration and

agriculture brought on by NAFTA, reshaped the Midwest food pyramid. Despite

the success of FLOC and the changes created by legislation and aid programs, the

Farm Crisis of the 1980s and the apathy of the 1980s, refocused the public on

issues other than farmworkers’ plight. National and Midwest migrant patterns

shifted during the 1980s and after, as growers avoided crops that required farm

laborers. In addition, agri-corporations moved to Southern areas and ultimately

drew a cheap Latino labor force to a region largely devoid of Latinos,

international changes resulted in the immigration of Central American workers to

the United States, and the United States government-supported policies ensured

growers’ employment of foreign workers through the H-2(A) programs. All these

changes altered the national and Midwest stream after the 1980s.

These shifts allow us to see the 1960s to the 1980s as a time of increased activism

and interest. The 1960s to the 1990s resulted in changes, as the time period

encouraged or forced the individuals and groups that made up the Midwest food

pyramid to action, revealing the power each had and the role each played in

shaping the Midwest migrant stream.

To understand the nature of the stream during this time, this dissertation

will explore the various groups that influenced the stream: national and state

governments, growers, Catholic aid organizations, farmworker unions, and

farmworkers themselves. These groups not only influenced the stream, but also

interacted with each other and altered the interpersonal dynamics within the

stream and within their own groups. The social movements of the era encouraged

women and Chicanos to demand change in the Catholic Church, in the home, in

unions, and in local communities, sparking debates about minorities’ roles in

society and the Church. The UFW inspired activism in Mexican Americans,

Chicana nuns and priests, Anglo college students, and more. Yet all these

advocates for farmworkers did not desire the same degree of transformation.

Some sought mild reforms, while others sought a band-aid approach that

privileged agriculture power over empowering farmworkers. Even in the Church

groups that sought to assist, there was no unified agreement on what allies should

advocate and how they could assist the migrants in the stream. The interplay of

these different forces framed Mexican and Mexican American migrants’

experience with attempts at reform in the Midwest, and in the Midwest food

pyramid.

To understand the arrangement of the Midwest food pyramid, the first

chapter examines the role of national and international policies that configured

the Midwest migrant stream and the resulting issues that farmworkers faced as

they lived transcultural lives in the stream. National and international relations

and policies, such as the Bracero Program, influenced who migrated to the United

States just as opportunities in the United States and the lack of opportunities in

Mexico also encouraged Mexican nationals to find work al Norte. In the

Midwest, the creation of a pliable, cheap, and transcultural labor force of Mexican

and Mexican Americans became the basis of the migrant stream in the last half of

the twentieth century. This chapter expands on the insights of Deborah Cohen’s

Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United

States and Mexico analysis of transnational lives created by the Bracero Program

and examines Mexican Americans’ similar transcultural experiences as migrants

from Latino communities in the South to rural Anglo-dominated communities of

the North.3 Extending beyond the Bracero Program’s effect on transcultural and

family dynamics in Mexico, this chapter will note the international decisions

since the 1940s that created the migrant stream and shaped the gender dimensions

of transcultural migration in the Midwest.

National policies reflected the United States government’s effort to placate

grower and agri-corporation demands, making migrant farmworkers an exploited

group at the bottom of the food pyramid, preventing farmworker’s right to

unionize, and developing an agricultural model that encouraged the growth of

agribusinesses and the subjugation of small growers. Katharine Mapes in Sweet

Tyranny: Migrant Labor, Industrial Agriculture, and Imperial Politics explores the

connection between national government policies and growers, specifically the

command of corporate sugar beet companies and their growers.4 Midwest growers

of the last half of the twentieth century influenced government decisions, but not

necessarily as a unified force. Instead, agribusinesses and growers did not exist on

the same level of the food pyramid, leading to different ideas about national

policy decisions, especially as the public pressured the government to better

farmworkers’ conditions and agri-corporations consolidated their control over the

entire agricultural system. Though public concern forced national regulations and

laws to better migrants’ conditions in the 1960s and 1970s, regulations and laws

regarding farmworkers offered little more than a show for publicity that

maintained the food pyramid that relegated farmworkers to the bottom, kept

agribusinesses at the top, with growers, pressured by the public, corporations, and

the government, in the middle.

Chapter two explores the role of state governments in the reform era that

was inaugurated in the 1960s. Midwest state governments were at the forefront of

migrants’ encounter with governments, caught between national policies and

public demands for change. As a result of the limits and approach to agricultural

policy at the national level after the New Deal, state agencies framed Midwest

migrants’ access to public aid and education through agencies’ policies and

configurations operated to enforce the pyramid. Examining Illinois as a case study

of a typical Midwest state, this chapter analyzes how Illinois state agencies’

programs, organization, and discrimination, as demonstrated by the language of

the people and texts used in Illinois, exemplified farmworker’s struggles to

survive in the Midwest stream. Mexican American migrants had to navigate

policies, programs, and educational institutions designed primarily for settled,

English-speaking residents. Even when state legislators altered laws or policies to

better migrants’ lives, state legislators failed to listen to migrants and resisted

attempts to alter the food pyramid. This finding reinforces Dennis Noldin Valdes’

Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the Great Lakes Region, 1917-1970 which

reviews the halfhearted national and state governments’ attempts to address

concern for migrants.5 This overarching examination of farmworkers in the

Midwest region focuses solely on laws and policies, but not the effect of these

laws and policies on migrants, nor on the role of the public in bringing about

these policies. For the many Mexican American migrants working and living in

poverty in Midwest fields, state programs largely offered aid that rendered only

meager assistance to migrants.

Chapter three examines the relationship of growers and farmworkers as

they encountered attempts at reform in the Midwest landscape. The food pyramid

placed migrants on the bottom, but also harmed the small and mid-sized growers

who made up Midwest agriculture. Growers faced pressure to reduce costs and

increase production to increase their meager profits, while at the same time

governments developed farmworker regulations that increased labor costs,

placing growers in a precarious situation. Though growers saw these pressures,

many refused to see farmworkers’ as potential allies, and viewed their position on

the bottom of the food pyramid as natural. Growers often decried the system, but

defended their employment of migrants at meager wages. The corporatization of

agriculture had been occurring throughout the United States, as Cary

McWilliams’ seminal Factories in the Fields: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor

in California demonstrates of California agriculture in the early twentieth

century.6 Yet the Midwest remained significantly less corporatized than

California, and even less so in the publics’ eye. Given the idealized image of

farmers in the Midwest, it was more difficult for farmworkers advocates to

pressure growers to remedy migrants’ conditions, or empower them. The idea of

family farmers continued to animate the public imagination in the Midwest, and

so when the 1980s Farm Crisis threatened small farmers, attention reverted to the

family farm, and not the migrant stream.

Government regulations, unionization, and public pressure to better

farmworkers’ lives altered growers and migrants’ interaction, ultimately

influencing how the farm looked; yet many in the public were unaware of this

dynamic. Mapes’ Sweet Tyranny and Jim Norris’

North for the Harvest: Mexican Workers, Growers, and the Sugar Beet Industry

analyze the sometimes paternalistic relationship between sugar beet growers and

Mexican American sugar beet workers.7 These works, though notable for

investigating how growers and locals viewed Mexican American laborers, take

place before the 1960s and focus on a specific crop where agribusinesses, rather

than growers, mediated farmworker and grower relationships. For the rest of the

Midwest, the post-1960 public decried the conditions of migrants, but failed to

clearly see the role of Midwest family farms or corporate agribusiness in the food

chain. The public failed to see that the poor conditions of farmworkers stemmed

from farmers, agribusinesses, and food corporations’ view of labor as an object

and not a product of an individual. Instead, some of the public supported aid to

farmworkers and the continuation of the family farm without understanding that

many family farms had a role in the conditions of migrants in the stream. This

interplay framed the way growers interacted with migrants, where migrants lived,

what farmers grew, what changes the public supported, where migrant families

went, and ultimately the Midwest landscape. As academics studied the role of

growers and agribusinesses in the West, South, and to a smaller degree, the

Midwest, few if any examine the role of farmworkers in the Farm Crisis of the

1980s and how this event impacted farm laborers on the heels of two decades of

social activism. For Midwest growers in the 1960s to the 1990s, public perception

of the Farm Crisis and migrants’ struggles altered how growers and migrants

interacted and thereby reshaped the Midwest landscape.

The public’s view of migrants’ struggles and their role in the food pyramid

is further explored in chapter four. Chapter four specifically studies the role of the

Catholic Church in creating aid programs and supporting change in the stream.

The Catholic Church had a strong tie to the predominately Catholic Mexican

American migrant farmworkers in the Midwest.

Influenced by changing Catholic Doctrine, Vatican II, as well as the Chicano,

Feminist, and UFW Movements, Hispanic and Anglo Catholic individuals and

groups created numerous organizations and programs to assist migrants. The

types of programs created by Catholic groups exemplified the different groups’

perceptions of the food pyramid and how social movements inspired these

organizations to create change. Numerous academic works investigate the

importance of Catholicism and aid in respect to the United Farm Workers, in

particular, Marco G. Prouty’s César Chávez, The Catholic Bishops, and the

Farmworkers’ Struggle for Social Justice.8 In contrast to the UFW in California,

the Midwest did not have such a well-known union movement, but

Midwesterners were still influenced by the UFW. Just as Prouty explains how the

UFW inspired Catholics to support the UFW union, the UFW also inspired

Catholics and Midwesterners to support the Midwest farmworker union Farm

Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) and to better all farmworkers’ lives in the

Midwest. This chapter will extend Dustin McLochlin’s American Catholicism

and Farm Labor Activism: The Farm Labor Aid Committee of Indiana As a Case

Study beyond his focus on one state and the influence of the UFW movement on

one aid organization to include the impact of the Chicano and Feminist

Movement and the existence of various Catholic organizations that developed

programs to change the status quo in the Midwest.9

In addition, this chapter draws on the general Midwest environment in

which these

Catholic groups thrived, including the Chicano and student populations that made

up the base of support for programs that demanded change in society. Faced with

different ideas about migrant and women’s rights, Chicano identity, and labor

unions, Catholic organizations, the Midwest public, and migrants negotiated the

type of programs created, with some promoting changing gender and power

relationships within the Church, society, and the fields, and others focusing solely

on minimal aid such as food and clothing for migrants. Similar to Cindy

Hahamovitch’s Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the

Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945, which analyzes the state and several

progressive groups in the Southern stream during the early 1900s, aid

organizations played a significant role in shaping the migrant experience.10

Groups’ interpretations of migrants’ issues and their own prejudices and opinions

shaped the types of programs created. In the Midwest this meant organizations

had different opinions regarding the acceptance of Mexican American culture,

farmworker rights, and changing the power structure of the Midwest food

pyramid. The interplay of gender, religion, and social rights interacted to

determine the types of programs Catholic groups created, ultimately influencing

farmworkers’ survival strategies in the migrant stream as they interacted with

different Catholic charities and support organizations.

Chapter five further examines the role of farmworkers, growers, and the

public in the food pyramid under the lens of the Farm Labor Organizing

Committee (FLOC). Inspired by the UFW, the Midwest union FLOC sought to

alter the migrant stream by forcing corporations to acknowledge their role in the

food pyramid through a three party deal with farmworkers and growers. While

numerous works study the well known UFW in California, only a few works

study FLOC, including W. K. Barger and Ernesto M. Reza’s The Farm Labor

Movement in the Midwest: Social Change and Adaptation Among Migrant

Farmworkers, which examines the creation of FLOC and their method of

organizing a successful union.11 In understanding the structure of the food

pyramid, FLOC empowered migrant farmworkers to better their own lives and

their families in the stream. FLOC employed the Midwest stream’s family

configuration as well as a popular tactic of the UFW, a boycott. Though Barger

and Reza’s work analyzes FLOC in terms of a social movement and how leaders

developed the union, this analysis does not consider the influence of UFW and the

overall effect FLOC had on gender relationships because of their family-based

organizational structure. FLOC embraced the family configuration of the Midwest

stream just as it embraced the boycott, taking advantage of a massive union base

and an era of activism to gain public support to change the stream. FLOC’s

revolutionary choice to seek a three party deal demonstrated an in-depth

understanding of the Midwest food pyramid, while embracing a boycott

exemplified their understanding of the public’s power in the food pyramid. In

addition, FLOC’s use of the Midwest stream’s family composition empowered

men and women in the stream to change the power dynamics of

Mexican American families and the Midwest stream. Social movements of the

period and FLOC leaders’ understanding of the food pyramid shaped FLOC’s

tactics, which in turn influenced farmworker relationships in their families, in

society, and in the field.

The last chapter, six, explores the roles of the Midwest, families, and

gender in shaping migrants’ experiences in the Midwest. Midwest migrant

farmworkers lived between two worlds, attempting to create a home either

temporarily or, in the case of farmworkers who outmigrated, permanently in the

Midwest. The Midwest was an area with a mixture of urban and rural and Anglo

and Mexican American communities. Traveling between the South and the North,

migrant communities brought their culture with them, including their traditional

familial relationships. Inspired by the social movements of the time, migrants’

interactions with certain individuals and groups, and the basic necessities of

survival in the Midwest stream, forced migrants to adapt familial roles to survive

in the stream. Gender and family roles had to adapt to suit migrants’ changing

lives in the stream as they moved from one location to another. This chapter

expands on Marc Simon Rodriguez’ dissertation, and later book, on how militant

Chicano activism and ideas moved from Texas to Wisconsin through the migrant

stream.12 The Tejano Diaspora: Mexican Americanism of Ethnic Politics in Texas

and Wisconsin explores how migrant communities and their locations were

critical to the understanding of migrants’ actions. Mexican American

farmworkers established migrating communities that maintained their own

cultural roots and traditions. The social ideas of the time, as well as farmworkers’

experiences in their homes in the South and their temporary homes in the North,

influenced how migrant families and communities adapted to their circumstances.

While Rodriguez studies this interaction in terms of the settled-out migrants’

connection to relatives in Texas, this chapter will expand on the experience of the

migrants still in the stream in addition to those who left the stream. Family

dynamics, the communities in which farmworkers worked and lived, and the

maintenance of Mexican American culture shaped migrants’ survival strategies

and experience in the Midwest, whether temporarily as migrants or permanently

as settled-out workers.

The Midwest migrant stream in the last half of the twentieth century

defined a significant moment in time. The increase in concern and awareness

about the struggles of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers brought

political, government, and religious attention. The social activism of the era

encouraged farmworkers and the public to seek reform and for some, radical

change in the structure and conditions of the Midwest stream. Yet this concern

was not universal, as groups had different interpretations about farmworkers’

struggles, unions’ roles in the stream, women’s rights, Chicano identity, and

altering power relationships in the food chain. Before national changes including,

but not limited to, NAFTA altered the migrant stream, the farmworkers in the

Midwest occupied a significant focus for discussion and debate. In examining the

roles of the various groups that made up and influenced the migrant stream within

the context of this era of change, this work will expand upon our understanding of

a unique space and time.

CHAPTER 1

GOVERNMENT POLICIES, MIGRANT FAMILIES AND BELONGING

IN THE MIDWEST MIGRANT STREAM

Sitting in the back of a crowded truck as it raced down the highway, Jesús

Zamarrón Rocha had high hopes of making decent money, as did the other

Bracero workers crouched around him. For years Jesús worked around the

country: Arizona, Michigan, Texas, Colorado, and California, in a multitude of

crops including corn, lettuce, strawberries, and cotton. Jesús was one of millions

of Mexicans that came to work in United States fields under the Bracero Program,

a bi-national agreement whereby United States growers contracted Mexican

nationals to work in agricultural fields. Jesús’ first trip on that crowded truck was

in 1957, twelve years after the end of World War II, despite the fact that the

United States and Mexican governments started the Bracero Program to meet

U.S. agricultural labor needs during the war. Agricultural interest groups

pressured the United States Congress to continue the Bracero Program that

allowed Jesús to work as a Bracero. When public pressure and the decreasing

need for Braceros resulted in the end of the Bracero Program in 1964, Jesús

continued to work in the United States, now illegally crossing the border. The

public pressured the United States government to deal with undocumented

immigrants and strikebreakers, while agricultural interest groups pressured the

government to not interfere significantly with growers’ demands for cheap

undocumented workers. Shortly before Jesús retired from working in the fields in

the 1990s, Jesús, like many undocumented Mexican farmworkers in the United

States, had an option to apply to be a United States citizen under the Special

Agricultural Worker (SAW) section of the Immigration Reform and Control Act

(IRCA) of 1986. Jesús would continue to live in the United States, finally

bringing his family in Mexico across the border. Together as a family, Jesús, his

wife, and children adjusted from a life of separation as they all tried to find their

place in a new home.

The story of Jesús Zamarrón Rocha is not one of a single man, but one of a

family navigating international and national policies to find work and to maintain

family and cultural ties through transculturalism and migrant communities as they

struggled to find their place in a constantly changing world. Jesús’ story

exemplifies the experience of Midwest migrant farmworkers who lived between

two worlds as they traveled from their homes in Mexico,

Texas, or Florida to their temporary homes in the Midwest fields. In constantly

migrating, farmworkers struggled to come to terms with separation from family

and/or being outsiders because of their poverty or their Mexican culture in

predominately Anglo Midwest rural towns. This isolation made migrants feel like

Esperanza in House on Mango Street, detached from the places where they

lived.13 In the early nineteenth century, Mexican and Mexican American

communities developed in large urban areas such as Chicago, Illinois and St.

Paul, Minnesota, or in sporadic locales like Davenport, Iowa where railroad work

brought a small but noticeable influx of Mexican and Mexican Americans.14 Yet

most small rural areas where farmworkers worked in the mid and late twentieth

century lacked the urban or railroad draw that brought early influxes of Mexicans,

making migrant workers a culturally isolated group in their temporary Midwest

homes. Sometimes these temporary homes became permanent as migrants settled-

out of the stream, yet the continued migration of other farmworkers and the

existence of a family back in Texas, Florida, or Mexico maintained ex-migrants’

ties to their former homes.15 Unlike the Eastern and Western migrant streams,

Midwest migrant farmworkers during the last half of the twentieth century largely

faced these issues as family units, with men, women, and children migrating

together.8 Like Tomás Rivera’s work …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him,

migrant workers constantly moved, “always arriving” at some new location.9

Children felt like outsiders at school, women struggled to get assistance in offices

where no one spoke Spanish, and men tried to understand a foreign medical

system.10 Struggling to survive and maintain their cultural and familial ties to

home in Mexico or the southern United States, migrant farmworkers navigated

the changing political and social landscape of the Midwest migrant stream.

Farmworkers struggled to live between two worlds as the United States and

Mexican governments’ policies and the cultural changes in society that shaped the

structure of the migrant stream affected the lives of migrants. The story of Jesús

Zamarrón Rocha and his family exemplified how United States and Mexican

societies and governments shaped the migrant experience and family relations, as

laws governed Jesús’ ability to cross national borders and as society demanded an

end to the exploitive Bracero Program. In the Midwest, governments and societal

changes shaped the demographics of the Midwest stream at the end

of the twentieth century from a community of migrant families to one where

growers avoided

Office of Program Economics (Washington, DC, 1991); Vicki L. Ruiz, Cannery

Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food

Processing Industry, 1930-1950. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,

1987).

changes in the last half of the twentieth century, as Mexican nationals flooded the

agricultural fields, social concern for migrant farmworkers increased, and

farmworkers demanded greater rights, brought major changes to the lives of

migrant farmworker families.

Antecedentes/Background

The migrants that came to the Midwest in the last half of the twentieth

century were characteristically different from farmworkers in other parts of the

nation. National and international events and policies developed to create a

different labor market in the Midwest. From the mid to late 1800s through the

early 1900s, Midwest vegetable and fruit growers relied on locals and transients

for harvest.16 People from nearby areas and male hobos, many white and

European immigrants, trekked within local circuits or across the country to

harvest crops for a few days in the year.17 As farming became more scientific,

mechanical, and output driven, fewer farmers could economically maintain their

small farms, resulting in fewer growers with larger fields.18 With the advent of

scientific and mechanical changes in farming, farmers no longer required constant

year-round help, replacing local and hobo labor with large numbers of

Mexican and Mexican American migrant families primarily during the harvest.19

Growers came to rely on various racial minorities for labor, employing

groups easily exploitable based on national and international events and local

agricultural developments. California’s massive “factories in the fields”

developed in the late 1800s, using a changing supply of immigrant labor that

migrated across the Pacific Ocean in addition to the Mexican and Mexican

Americans living and immigrating to the West.20 By the 1920s, Mexican and

Mexican Americans came to dominate California’s agricultural labor.21 These

laborers traveled short distances within California or from their homes in Texas to

work in California and the Western migrant stream.22 The dominance of Mexican

and Mexican American males in California agriculture continued the practice of

employing male workers while wives and mothers of farmworkers stayed home

or worked in local canning industries.23 In contrast, the migrant stream along the

East coast started with immigrant families, evolving into a primarily male work

force. Italian women and children labored in the fruit and vegetable fields of the

East Coast in the late 1800s and early 1900s.24 By the mid-1900s, African

American males

traveling without their families replaced Italian families as the primary labor force

of the East Coast migrant stream.25 Though the Midwest migrant stream initially

relied on transient male laborers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century,

growers came to rely on Mexican families by the mid-twentieth century. Unlike

the West and East migrant streams, Midwest growers, with their increasingly

large fruit and vegetable fields, saw Mexican and Mexican American families

25 Ibid.

from Mexico, Texas, and even Florida as a viable labor supply. Though single

men might strike or walk, Mexican and Mexican American families provided

Midwest growers a large labor force unwilling to leave a job that could provide

for their family.

The earliest massive employment of Mexican and Mexican Americans in

Midwest fields characterized the developing transcultural identity of migrant

farmworkers and the role of national and international politics. Seeking a cheap

labor force for the labor-intensive sugar beet fields, Michigan and Minnesota

sugar beet refineries had employed Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans

from Texas and Florida to work in growers’ fields since the 1920s.26

Mexicans became a viable labor force after the Mexican Revolution

destabilized the country, sending large numbers of Mexicans into United States

fields looking for work. The United States government encouraged even more

immigration during World War I to alleviate the labor shortage created by

agricultural workers entering the remunerative war industry.27 In addition,

mechanization decreased farm employment opportunities in Texas, also

encouraging large numbers of Mexicans and Mexican Americans to seek work

26 Dennis Nodin Valdes, Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the Great Lakes Region, 1917-1970 (Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1991), 190-192; Kathleen Mapes, Sweet Tyranny: Migrant Labor, Industrial

Agriculture, and Imperial Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Jim Norris, North for the Harvest:

Mexican Workers, Growers, and the Sugar Beet Industry (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2009).

27 Philip L. Martin, Importing Poverty?: Immigration and the Changing Face of Rural America (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2009), 23; Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 24-42.

elsewhere to survive.28 All these factors combined to make Mexican and Mexican

Americans from Texas and Mexico the main labor source for sugar beet growers

in the Midwest, beginning what would become the Midwest migrant stream.

Expanding vegetable and fruit fields in the Midwest eventually opened more

opportunities for Mexican and Mexican American migrant farmworker families

traveling up North. By the time World War II came to an end, the Midwest

migrant stream that would continue for the next half a century, was developing.

For the farmworkers who migrated up the Midwest stream, constant

migration created a sense of isolation from Midwestern locals as they developed a

transcultural migrant community. Deborah Boehm describes transcultural

migrants as seeing “…themselves as belonging to, divided between, and outside

of two nation-states: here and there,” they “…use decidedly spatial terms to

depict movement and their ‘place’ in the world-territorial locales as well as

symbolic spaces of membership and exclusion.”29 For many immigrants,

transculturalism occurred when men left their families to work in another country,

integrating themselves into the new country and culture, while still remaining tied

to their family and country. This connection could aptly characterize the Mexican

men, women, and children who traveled to the United States to work in the

28 Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers

(New York: Verso, 2011), 105; Valdes, Al Norte, 37, 45-46.

29 Deborah A. Boehm, Intimate Migrations: Gender, Family, and Illegality among Transnational Mexicans (New

York: New York University Press, 2012), 5-6.

Midwest fields, but transculturalism can also describe migration within the United

States. For Texas and Florida Mexican and Mexican Americans traveling up the

Midwest stream, migration created cultural connections. Migrant farmworkers

generally grew up with homes in largely Mexican and Mexican American areas

but migrated to small rural Midwest areas usually devoid of Mexican American

culture. Though living and even settling out in the Midwest, many still maintained

ties through kinship and the remaining migrant community to their former homes

in Mexico, Texas, or Florida.

Though the developing communities of Mexican Americans in the Midwest led

to what

Marc Simon Rodriguez describes as a “Tejano diaspora,” or the dispersion of

Texas Mexican American population and culture with a shared identity around

the nation, this “Tejano diaspora” cannot elucidate the experiences of all Midwest

migrant stream farmworkers.30 While Texas culture migrated with farmworkers as

they traveled the Midwest, Mexican Americans from Florida and Mexican

nationals and indigenous Mexicans in the Midwest migrant stream created a

complex web of various, but similar, cultural identities from the Midwest migrant

stream.31 Though not sharing a singular identity or culture, all migrant

farmworkers struggled to find a place or sense of belonging while using their

30 Rodriguez, The Tejano Diaspora.

31 David G Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Batriz Castillo, interview by Terry Shoptaugh, July 21, 1992,

transcript, 19, Red River Valley Sugar Beet Growers Association, Northwest Minnesota Historical Center,

Livingston Lord Library, Moorhead University, Moorhead, Minnesota.

home cultures and family connections in Florida, Texas, and Mexico to maintain

important ties to their base. Migrants lived between multiple worlds, living

between their home base with friends, their main school, extended family, and a

language and culture they understood and belonged to, and the current rural

community in which they worked. Unlike most traditional transcultural

immigrants, migrants did not live in two permanent worlds, but moved

constantly, rarely creating strong ties with the rural Midwest unless their family

out-migrated. The Midwest migrant stream and the culture and experience of

migrant farmworkers must be seen as a transcultural experience with one fixed

point and the others constantly moving. In understanding the changes in the

Midwest migrant stream through the policies of United States and Mexican

government and cultural changes of the last half of the twentieth century, it is also

important to understand the effects of these changes on migrants’ sense of

belonging, their transcultural identity, as policies and culture shifted their rights

and ability to mitigate and live between two worlds.

From the Grapes of Wrath to Harvest of Shame

Since the First World War, the United States government increasingly

influenced the creation of an agricultural system based on public pressure and

agricultural interests that abused Mexican and Mexican Americans and shaped

the migrant communities of the Midwest.

The government eased border regulations to allow Mexicans to work in the fields

during the First World War, but the federal government also helped to construct

an agricultural labor structure in the Midwest. During the Great Depression and

the New Deal, the United States government not only created the Agricultural

Adjustment Act which regulated the amount of crops grown to increase their cost

in the market, but also aided the Anglo “Okies” while deporting large numbers of

Mexican and Mexican Americans throughout the nation based on the argument

that they took jobs from United States citizens.32 Public pressure prompted the

United States and Mexican government to encourage or force Mexicans to

repatriate to Mexico.33 Without the large numbers of minority farmworkers,

growers in California employed “Okies,” farmers that lost their land because of

the Depression. The struggles of the Okies became the subject of public concern

as the photographs of Dorothea Lange and the novel The Grapes of Wrath

narrated the poverty of the Okies, but hidden in this narrative the United States

government also racially discriminated against some migrants.34 Camps

established to house farmworkers segregated and discriminated against housing

32 Linda C. Majka and Theo J. Majka, Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State (Philadelphia: Temple

University Press, 1982), 108; Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor, 147, 151.

33 Mapes, Sweet Tyranny, 141-142, 221; Valdes, Al Norte, 31.

34 Majka and Majka, Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State, 108; Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage, 48;

Valdes, Al Norte, 188.

non-Anglos.35 In addition, pressure from agricultural interest groups resulted in

the exclusion of farmworkers from the National Labor Relations Act that gave

almost every other worker in the nation the right to unionize.36 These decisions

started shaping the triangular pyramid of power, whereby the few corporate and

government leaders had extensive power based solely on the labor of the many

migrant farmworkers in the nation. The different ways the United States

government treated Mexican farmworkers versus others set the precedent for how

the United States government viewed and reacted to the Mexican American

farmworkers, negotiating with public and agricultural pressure groups, usually to

the detriment of farm laborers.

The repatriation of Mexicans during the Depression and their subsequent

employment in World War II encapsulated the United States government’s

contrasting views of farmworkers and the influence of agricultural interests in

shaping the Midwest stream. During the Depression, the United States

government expanded the right to unionize to all workers except for agricultural

workers.37 During World War II, the United States and Mexican government

created the Mexican Farm Labor Program, popularly known as the Bracero

35 Majka and Majka, Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State, 112; Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold:

California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 135.

36 Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor, 138. President Roosevelt exempted agricultural labor from the NLRA,

though the wording of who performed “agriculture labor” in contrast to cannery work, which was included under

NLRA, remained unclear for a while longer. Other workers exempted from the NLRA included domestic laborers.

37 Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor, 138.

Program, which was named for the rough Spanish term for “one who works with

their arms,” or hand laborers.38 The Bracero Program allowed farmers to contract

Mexican nationals to work in United States fields.39 Under the terms of the

program, a grower could not employ Braceros unless a labor shortage existed and

their employment did not decrease U.S. citizens’ wages.40

Neither happened. Instead, the Bracero Program offered cheap labor for United

States growers. While the Mexican government tried to establish certain rights for

Braceros, their inability to ensure basic conditions or rights exemplified the

United States government’s acceptance of deplorable working and living

conditions for international and national migrant farmworkers. Preferred by the

United States public that did not want a permanent Mexican labor force and by

the Mexican government who wanted technologically adept farmers, the

importation of male Braceros created a long-term imprint on the developing

migrant farmworkers who travelled to the Midwest.41 Immigration to the United

States for agricultural work became a male journey initially to the Western

migrant stream. Families continued to be the backbone of the Midwest migrant

stream, yet the male-dominated Bracero Program started a chain migration that,

38 Robert Joe Stout, Why Immigrants Come to America: Braceros, Indocumentados, and the Migra (Westport,

Connecticut: Praeger, 2008), 2.

39 Mize and Swords, Consuming Mexican Labor, xxii.

40 Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story, an Account of the Managed Migration of

Mexican Farm Workers in California, 1942-1960 (Charlotte: McNally & Loftin, Publishers, 1964), 16.

41 Cohen, Braceros; Ana Elizabeth Rosas, “Breaking the Silence: Mexican Children and Women’s Confrontation

of Bracero Family Separation, 1942-1964,” Gender & History 23:2 (August 2011).

while initially not influencing the Midwest, compounded with future changes in

the Midwest to create a male labor force.

The ultimate effect of repatriation during the Depression and the

government’s choice to exclude farmworkers from the right to unionize was to

frustrate a generation of migrant farmworker children raised in between the

Midwest and their homes in Texas, Florida, and Mexico. For the migrants raised

in the Midwest stream during and after World War II, their lack of rights and

discrimination were graphically apparent as they traveled to the Midwest. Jose

Martinez felt frustrated growing up in Texas and the Michigan fields. In Texas,

Jose had friends in his predominate Mexican neighborhood and school.42 He

belonged. In Michigan, he was always aware of his different status, aware that he

and his family struggled in a nearby field and lived in horrible housing while

growers’ children went to the same school with every opportunity and few

concerns.43 Other migrants described similar feelings as Martinez, feeling

detached from the Midwest where they worked. The future farmworker union

leader, Baldemar Velasquez, described similar feelings. Working as a migrant in

Ohio, he felt a disjunction between his life in the Midwest community and ideals

of “equality” and “justice for all” taught in Ohio schools.44 Though some migrant

42 Rothenberg, With These Hands, 272-276.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid, 268.

children felt making friends in a school where they only briefly attended was

useless, many also described prejudice as well as cultural and class differences as

reasons for why they felt like outsiders in Midwest towns.

For many migrant farmworker children raised on the roads, the Midwest

fields were a place of contradictions. In their homes in Florida, Texas, or Mexico,

they had communities that spoke their language, shared their culture, and

understood their struggles to survive. In the

Midwest, they felt the sting of discrimination, injustice, and the feeling of being

different in schools and cities where local children viewed them as unwanted

temporary visitors. Even when local Midwest communities offered assistance or

aid to migrant children in the form of broken toys for Christmas, migrant children

understood it was because they were different.45 In other streams, women and

children felt the sting of separation from husbands and fathers, where men

traveled to support their families; but, in the Midwest stream, children

experienced injustice and discrimination in their travels up North. Living in two

worlds, but never permanently being part of one, migrant children in the mid-

twentieth century Midwest stream understood they deserved more, and

understood that they had to fight for it.

“Arms” to Aid

45 Ibid, 291.

The Bracero Program came to a close in the 1960s during a time of social

movements and activism, when documentaries, books, and televisions aired the

struggles of migrant farmworkers in the nation. When it aired in 1960, Harvest of

Shame made Midwesterners aware of the abuse and horrible living and working

conditions of farmworkers.46 Viewers came to understand the reality, not only of

the African American workers on the East coast portrayed in Harvest of Shame,

but of migrant farmworkers everywhere as farmworkers protested and unionized

in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of this media attention. The United Farm

Workers (UFW) in California also gained more significant support around the

nation from college students, religious groups, and politicians.47 Only a few years

before the UFW, Michael

Harrington’s book The Other America offered a glimpse of poverty in the United

States, including migrant farmworkers, just as minorities demanded rights.48

Faced with these realities, the Midwest public demanded the national government

assist migrant farmworkers; but while the United States government negotiated

the demands of agricultural interest groups and the public, migrant farmworkers

campaigned for rights through their migrating and transcultural communities.

46 Norris, North for the Harvest, 148.

47 Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage.

48 Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1969).

Mounting pressure forced the United States government to address migrant

farmworker conditions, but government programs brokered between public,

farmworker, and grower interests, illustrating how the national government

understood the “migrant problem.” During the 1930s, the United States

government ignored the harsh reality that under the expanding new agricultural

system farmworkers could not eventually own their own farm as historically

occurred.49 By the 1960s, ignoring the issue became nearly impossible as the

public watched Harvest of Shame, read The Other America, and watched footage

of the UFW boycott on the news. The public became aware, at least partially, of

the agricultural power structure that was built on the backs of farmworkers.

Forced to address reality, some in Congress sought to create better child labor

laws, control crew leaders, and possibly give farmworkers the right to organize.50

However, powerful agricultural interest groups convinced government officials

and Congress that relief programs to ameliorate migrants’ problems was the

“best” solution.51 Instead of major changes, The United States government

created four main aid programs for migrant farmworkers: Migrant Education,

Migrant Health, the Job Training Partnership Act, and Migrant Head Start.52

Initially called the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA)

49 Philip L. Martin and David A. Martin, The Endless Quest: Helping America’s Farm Workers (Boulder:

Westview Press, 1994), 14.

50 Martin and Martin, The Endless Quest, 22.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid, 29.

program, the Job Training and Partnership Act (JTPA) replaced the CETA in

1982, though performing essentially the same function under a different

structure.53 While the JTPA provided education to help migrant workers leave the

stream through assistance in finding employment, Head Start offered early

childcare for migrant children before they entered school, Migrant Education tried

to close the gap in migrant children’s uneven education, and Migrant Health

provided medical services.54 To complicate matters, each program had its own

definition of a migrant farmworker, its own qualifications for receiving aid, its

own way of determining the number of farmworkers and therefore the need for

aid in a given area, and different financial means.55 Since the government’s four

specific migrant programs were separate entities, and local organizations that

received funding to enact these efforts rarely communicated, migrants received

sporadic assistance. Many towns and cities did not even have all four major aid

programs, making the national government’s reaction to the “farmworker

problem” uneven and limited.56

The federal government’s temporary solutions to the problems of the

migrant stream resulted in farmworkers and their allies seeking different, more

empowering routes to better their lives while the public debated the “farmworker

53 Ibid, 57.

54 Ibid, 53, 57.

55 Ibid, 31-50.

56 Ibid, 30-50, 93.

problem.” The UFW established boycott offices around the nation, eventually

gaining the support of various religious organizations and denominations in the

United States.57 Like the rest of the nation, Midwestern churches and the public

developed support networks for the UFW and statewide approaches to the

“migrant problem,” to the anger of some Midwest locals.58 Debates on various

private and government efforts and organizations characterized the viewpoints

about the role of religion, unions, and national government in farmworkers' lives.

Growers wrote angry letters to churches that supported farmworker boycotts,

local newspapers contained letters demanding the support of farmworker rights,

and growers and farmworkers alike marched on streets with their supporters as

each side demanded to be heard.59 Many in the public were concerned about the

horrific conditions of farmworkers though some would debate to what degree the

United States government should help farm laborers and how far farmworkers

themselves should go in bettering their own lives.

Angered by their difficult life growing up in the Midwest stream, Midwest

migrant children began to demand Midwest communities and growers provide

57 UFW, Michigan Boycott Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.

58 Ibid; DeKalb County Migrant Ministry Collection, Regional History Center, Founders Memorial Library,

DeKalb, Illinois; Michigan Farmworker Ministry Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University,

Detroit, Michigan.

59 Eillen Ogintz, “Hardships Pulling Farm Belt Together,” Chicago Tribune, March 11, 1985; Eric Harrison,

“Farm Workers’ Long Trek to Camden Reflects the Passion of a 5-Year Strike,” 5:14, Farm Labor Organizing

Committee Records, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan; Letter to Pat Whelan

from Frank I. Meinen, September 19, 1973, 1:15, UFW Wisconsin-Milwaukee Boycott Records, Walter P.

Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan; Patricia Ann Pogre, Letters, migrant workers, 2:54,

Wisconsin State Employment Service: Farm Placement, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin.

better living and working conditions, as well as assistance, as the 1960s and

1970s progressed. In Ohio and Wisconsin, migrant farmworker unions, Obreros

Unidos and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee

(FLOC), developed from Midwest migrants’ frustration.60 In addition, migrants

that settled-out in the Midwest created pockets of Mexican culture in rural

Midwest areas and established organizations to assist migrants and former

migrants by demanding better state government responses to migrants’ needs.61

One newspaper writer credited Latino and labor groups’ constant persistence for

over ten years and their use of the United States courts as the reason why the

Department of Labor and the Occupation Safety and Health Advisory (OSHA)

stopped bending to grower pressure and enforced laws that made safe drinking

water available to workers.62 With their new-found allies, migrants and settled-out

migrants endeavored to better farmworkers and Mexican Americans’ lives despite

the resounding contestation from some local Midwest towns.

The efforts of settled-out Mexican and Mexican Americans in the Midwest

often evinced the continued influence and role of migrant communities and

transculturalism. For farmworkers migrating between Texas and Wisconsin, the

60 Valdes, Al Norte, 190-192; W.K. Barger and Ernesto M. Reza, The Farm Labor Movement in the Midwest:

Social Change and Adaptation among Migrant Farmworkers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 55.

61 United Migrant Opportunity Service Inc., 1965-1985, 20th Anniversary Album, 1985, 1-9, United Migrant

Opportunity Services, Inc., Milwaukee Area Research Center, UW- Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

62 Dick Meister, “The 20th Century Comes to the Farm,” Christian Science Monitor, July 2, 1987, 23:5, Michigan

Farm Worker Ministry Coalition Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Detroit, Michigan.

“Tejano diaspora” connected the bourgeoning activism of Tejanos in Crystal City,

Texas with the frustration of former Texas migrants in Wisconsin. Many of the

ex-farmworkers that lived in Wisconsin came from Crystal City and still had

family or knew migrants who continued to work in the stream.63 When local

Mexican Americans fought for political representation in Crystal City and

developed La Raza Unida, Wisconsin residents learned from this new activism.64

Wisconsin-settled migrants took part in the formation of La Raza Unida and

developed their own efforts to improve Mexican

American and migrants’ lives, specifically demanding representation in the

United Migrant Opportunity Movement (UMOS).65 Even as migrant farmworkers

settled-out of the stream to establish pockets of Mexican American culture in

rural Midwest areas, the families and communities that bound migrants’ old

homes in the South with the fields of the North remained. For Sylvia Garcia and

her mother, family maintained ties between Texas, Mexico, and Minnesota.66

Sylvia used her family ties to maintain culturally traditional foods, getting her

family in Texas to mail chili peppers and jalapeños because she could not find

them in Minnesota.67 Sylvia worked to provide her mother medical treatment in

Minnesota when her mother came up north. Transmitting ideas, as migrants and

63 Rodriguez, The Tejano Diaspora.

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid.

66 Sylvia Garcia, interview by Abner Arauza, 29, 47.

67 Ibid.

former migrants actively worked to produce change in the South and North,

farmworkers continued to live between two worlds.

Power from Field to Table

Resistance to laws and regulations to better farmworkers’ lives and the

resulting effect on migrants occurred because of the changing nature of

agriculture in the United States and the national government’s role in this change.

Though the government’s agricultural policies during the Depression attempted to

control the market and limit production of goods, the decisions of Ezra Taft

Benson, former Farm Bureau President and the head of the Department of

Agriculture from 1953 until 1961, did the opposite.68 Benson promoted an open

market for agriculture and encouraged advancements in agricultural technology

that would eliminate some farm laborers’ jobs.69 Benson’s philosophies and

subsequent policies had repercussions on farming and farmworkers long after he

left the Department of Agriculture. Using taxpayers’ money, Benson encouraged

corporate power and the “get big or get out” mentality of agriculture in addition

to government financial support of mechanization, processed foods, and chemical

and genetic changes to crops. All these approaches affected farmworkers in the

Midwest and the nation, as mechanization and genetic engineering decreased the

need for farm labor and the use of chemicals made farm work more dangerous.70

In addition, the increasing power of corporations, aided by government financing

of agricultural research and the greater number of processed foods made by

corporations, meant farmworkers and growers had less power to negotiate pay as

more growers sold crops to large corporations.71 These fewer and larger growers

also faced economic hardship in the Farm Crisis of the 1980s, harming both

growers and the farmworkers who depended on them.72 In the Midwest and

throughout the nation, the actions of the Department of Agriculture affected the

lives of migrants in the farmworker stream.

By the 1970s, government officials, growers, agribusinesses, and even

farmworkers themselves conjectured that mechanization would eliminate the need

for farmworkers, especially because of the unionization of farmworkers.73 Federal

policy makers used this argument as a reason to provide temporary solutions to

the problems in the migrant stream, the federal government also facilitated and

underwrote efforts to mechanize. The Department of Agriculture, frequently

through their Land Grant Colleges, worked with corporations to create machines

as well as genetically alter fruits and vegetables to suit mechanical picking.74 In

contrast to the UFW, which tried to restrict advancing mechanization, Midwest’s

FLOC insisted that the corporations that benefitted from tax-supported research

and farmworkers’ hard work should either train and hire displaced farmworkers

as machine operators or pay to retrain workers for new employment.75 Accepting

machines as a means to alleviate the work, FLOC sought only to force

corporations to pay for the impact mechanization had on migrants’ lives since

corporations helped create a system based on migrant farm labor.

Despite Benson and agricultural corporations’ emphasis on mechanization,

growers and corporations never eliminated hand labor. Yet the implications of

mechanization were farreaching. In 1960, it took approximately 45,000 workers

to harvest 168,000 acres of tomatoes.74 In 1990, it took only 5,500 workers to

harvest 330,000 acres of tomatoes, which produced four times the number of

tomatoes as in 1960.76 The level of mechanization in the tomato fields was

unusual, as scientists could not successfully mechanize most crops. Instead, small

improvements rather than total mechanization affected farmworkers’ lives. Dwarf

trees and vines decreased the need for ladders and extra personnel needed to pick

fruit and vegetables on tall plants and trees.77 Precision planting and better

herbicides decreased the need for laborers to thin crops; and conveyor belts in the

fields changed harvesting methods, again decreasing the need for workers.78

These changes resulted not only in a decrease in the amount of laborers needed,

but altered gendered employment practices. Conveyor belts allowed for women

and the elderly to work in the fields, as conveyors eliminated the need to carry

heavy bags to the end of the rows.79 At the same time, pre-harvest work, which

traditionally employed men, women, and children, required fewer laborers

because of improvements as growers and farmworkers considered operating

mechanical equipment masculine work.80 FLOC leaders specifically argued that

operating machines was a primarily masculine job that gave men the ability to

provide for their families as individual workers.81 Farmworkers would grapple

with the issue in which the need to provide for their families set women and men

as potential adversaries. Though mechanization did not replace the need for

migrant farm laborers, technology in addition to biological improvements

ultimately shifted the number of farmworkers in the fields.

The United States government’s policies regarding foreign workers also

changed as agricultural advancements and labor change in the 1970s and 1980s

started to shift the gendered configuration of farm work. Instead of eliminating

the need for hand labor, the H-2 program after World War II, which allowed

foreign nationals to work in the primarily East Coast fields of the United States,

sought to appease growers’ demands for cheap labor. President Carter limited the

H-2 program and tried to limit the effect on citizen farmworkers’ wages during

his presidency from 1977 to 1981.82 Later, President Ronald Reagan reduced

regulation for the H-2 and expanded the program, now called H-2(A), to

numerous industries with agricultural labor under IRCA in 1986.83 Presidential

decisions and court rulings made the H-2(A) program increasingly more

compliant to growers’ demands: low minimum wages, American nationals had

only a month advantage for preferential hiring, and if an American citizen refused

a job that paid only the minimum, as most did, they surrendered their right to first

bids. Though initially used in the Southern United States, H-2(A) workers became

common throughout the nation, including the Midwest, by the end of the

twentieth century. The expanding nature of H-2(A) not only offered cheap,

deportable labor, but the foreignness and predominately male demographic of

H2(A) workers rarely drew sympathetic reformers in the United States. These

H2(A) workers coupled with undocumented workers to create a large

influx of cheap labor in the United States. Sometimes the influx of undocumented

workers came from growers’ inflated demands for workers, as happened in 1987

Washington where a radio advertisement heard all the way to Chicago and

Mexico promised jobs and even legal status for apple-picking workers.84 In

82.

reality, weather and inflated labor demands left thousands of abandoned United

States migrants and undocumented immigrants in Washington without money or

work. Living between two worlds, men like Heriberto Morales left his family in

La Cienaga, Mexico to work in Harvard, Illinois for eight months in a year,

sharing a trailer with other male migrants.85 Like other parts of the Midwest, the

number of men like Morales increased as entire cities in Mexico migrated to the

United States to work. Growers, corporations, and the United States government’s

preference for foreign males dated back to the Bracero Program and continued

with the implementation of the H-2(A) program. The male predominance of H-

2(A) workers, coupled with the changing demographics in the Midwest migrant

stream, only increased the changing gendered configuration of the Midwest

migrant stream.

Farmworkers established and strengthened transcultural and migrant ties to

combat and adjust to the changing political landscape as they dealt with the ever

increasing power of agribusinesses and corporations and the changing structure of

the Midwest migrant stream, due partly to the policies of the government.

FLOC’s leader, Baldemar Velasquez, initially saw growers as the enemy when he

created FLOC in 1967.86 However, Velasquez came to realize that corporations

abused both growers and farmworkers.87 Though growers themselves initially

refused to see their tie with farmworkers, FLOC successfully boycotted Campbell

Soup Company to create the first three-party negotiations between growers,

farmworkers, and corporations.88 FLOC’s success against Campbell and the

union’s continued efforts exemplified the importance of embracing transcultural

and migrant communities. In their initial boycott of Campbell, FLOC established

migrating organizers in addition to bases in Texas and Florida to organize

workers in their homes both before they traveled and while along the migrant

path.89 Employing men, women, and children in the migrant stream, FLOC

established a migrating family-based union within the already existing migrant

community.

Understanding the importance of using preexisting transcultural or migrating

communities, FLOC continued after their success with Campbell in 1986 to

expand their union network beyond the United States.90 FLOC formed ties with

the Mexican National Union of Salaried Field Workers (SNTOAC) because they

understood that Mexican nationals could be used to break the union and saw the

proliferation of H-2(A) workers in other fields.91 In addition, FLOC worked to

unionize H-2(A) workers in the 1980s and 1990s.92 Using the preexisting and

developing communities of migrants and international workers, FLOC established

a base of resistance against the government policies that subjugated farmworkers

in the changing migrant stream of the twentieth-century.

IRCA, NAFTA, and Maquiladoras

Partially a reflection of agribusinesses’ power and national concern about

undocumented immigration, the implementation of the North American Free

Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and IRCA, in addition to changes in the Mexican

economy, altered the makeup of Midwest farmworker families. From the 1980s to

the 1990s, national and international changes in agriculture, economic policies,

and immigration compounded on the historical precedent for undocumented male

migration to the United States. Altering the migrant streams throughout the

nation, the Midwest migrant stream specifically became increasingly male

dominated. Though families continued to migrate up the Midwest stream, the

proliferation of males traveling separated from their families left in Mexico,

Texas, or Florida, altered the structures of families as migrants became more

transcultural in nature.

The United States government’s decision to implement IRCA in 1986

profoundly affected immigrant farmworkers. Forced to deal with an ever-

increasing number of undocumented immigrants, IRCA not only legalized large

numbers of undocumented workers but also established specific provisions for

farmworkers. IRCA provided a way for immigrants who illegally entered or

stayed in the United States a way to become legal citizens, given certain

requirements.93 Congress passed the act as a way to legalize a small number of

undocumented immigrants, and, in the end, decrease the number of

undocumented immigrants that entered the United States. Under the SAW

provision of IRCA, undocumented immigrants who worked in agriculture for

three months could become a United States citizen.94 SAW eased immigrants’

ability to become legal citizens, leading to a high number of legalizations, many

of which were not necessarily farmworkers. The USDA estimated that there were

350,000 undocumented immigrant farmworkers in the United States, but over one

million applied for

SAW.95 The initial IRCA law allowed for the immigration and legalization of

primarily Mexican males, as men usually immigrated first. Later policies

emphasized family reunification, allowing the initial male immigrants to slowly

legalize their families.96 The nation, through SAW, created an immediate influx of

male immigrants leading transcultural lives, migrating between work in the

United States and family in Mexico. Only over time did some of these men

encourage the immigration of wives and children to the United States, though not

all immigrant males wanted their family to live in the United States.

The passage of IRCA entrenched earlier patterns of immigration that began

with the Bracero Program, as more Midwest migrants became males leading

transcultural lives. Given the financial hardships of many Mexicans, the Bracero

Program provided the means for Mexican males to provide monetarily for their

family, thereby maintaining their masculinity through the role of provider.97

Though Mexican masculinity would be tested and questioned in the United States,

as Braceros performed feminine chores and degrading work, Mexican men

maintained their masculinity in Mexico.98 The ability for Mexican males to

provide for their families in Mexico and the desire for goods, along with the

developing interpretation of migration to the United States as a masculine

adventure, shaped the immigration of Mexican nationals to the United States

since the Bracero Program.99 Masculinity encouraged Mexican males to come to

the United States in large numbers. This pattern, though relevant to the Western

migrant stream, would not influence Midwest or East migrant streams until

coupled with IRCA, H-2(A), the United States’ changing agriculture, and

Mexico’s maquiladora industry. With the increasing use of H-2(A) workers in the

Midwest, the gendered dimension of the Midwest stream changed. Martin

Mauricio in Illinois had worked to bring H-2(A) workers to the Eckert Apple

Orchard since 1990, after several years migrating from Mexico and Illinois as a

farmworker.100 Working primarily to bring H-2(A) men to Illinois, Martin, like

most of the workers he found to work at the Eckert farm, originally traveled

without his family.101 With family living back in Mexico, Martin, like other H-

2(A) workers, lived a transcultural life as he traveled between his labor in the

Midwest and his family in Mexico.102 Some employers switched to an all-male

workforce because of public pressure about the housing conditions of women and

children and the changing structure of agriculture. Over time, farmworkers in

places like Lake Mills, Wisconsin heard that employers would no longer hire

families because of the costs of housing families.103 With fewer growers willing to

employ families, the Midwest migrant stream changed to one where children

grew up only occasionally seeing fathers and women took on more duties playing

both male and female domestic and authoritative roles in their lives, all living

different transcultural lives.

Not only changing the gendered dimensions of the migrant stream, SAW

and the H2(A) program also Latinized agricultural work in new areas of the

100

101

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103

nation.104 SAW flooded the farmworker labor market as SAW legalized more

individuals than had previously worked in agriculture or had worked in

agriculture year round. In fact, SAW workers consisted of almost fifty percent of

all farmworkers in 1993, most of whom were Mexican.105 While Latinos worked

as farm laborers in large numbers before IRCA and SAW, the Southern shift of

the meatpacking industry led to the Latinization of agriculture. Latino immigrant

farmworkers flooded the East Coast and South as greater numbers of Mexican

national males also entered the Midwest stream.106 An increasing number of

Mexican nationals and individuals from Central America came to the United

States to work in a variety of agriculture-related jobs, including meatpacking.107

Along the East Coast especially, the increase in Latinos resulted in the

Latinization, not only of the South itself, but also the migrant stream. Instead of

African Americans migrating up the coast to work different crops, many African

Americans left the migrant stream in the 1970s and the 1980s, with Latinos,

Jamaicans, and Haitians replacing

African Americans.108

With greater numbers of foreign and newly legalized male workers in the

agricultural fields of the nation, conditions in the fields deteriorated. Farm

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108

contractors and middlemen played a bigger role in the employment of immigrants

in the Midwest and East, as the wave of new immigrants lacked the knowledge of,

or connection to, United States agriculture.109 Farm contractors and organizations

such as the North Carolina Growers Association (NCGA) became even more

powerful, as they became the middlemen for H-2(A) workers in the South.110 This

newer agricultural pattern created a predominately younger male immigrant labor

force in the Midwest, South, and East Coast, and a greater number of immigrant

farmworkers living in poverty, as opposed to the older established immigrant

communities of the West.111 SAW individuals made comparatively less money

than earlier migrant workers since SAW workers usually did not perform semi-

skilled work because of lack of contacts and experience.112 On the East coast,

SAW workers were more likely to lack toilets and drinking water than long term

U.S. resident farm laborers, possibly due to unreliable contractors and middlemen

who did little about sanitation issues. The Latino citizens, undocumented Latino

workers, and H-2(A) workers in the South had few existing rights or economic

opportunities, creating an impoverished group of workers.113 The predominately

male SAW immigrants, undocumented immigrants, and H-2(A) workers in the

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110

111

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113

Midwest and East Coast discouraged public attention on farm labor conditions.114

The role of migrants in the pyramid of power thus faded from public

consciousness. Not already a part of an established transcultural or migrant

community with ties to the Midwest or South, most H-2(A) and SAW workers

relied on contractors, growers, and companies. As the twentieth century came to a

close, United States growers and agricultural corporations depended on male

immigrant workers as their chief source of farm labor.

The cultural and economic policies of the United States and Mexico also

contributed to the proliferation of male workers. Employment in the United States

offered more pay and numerous job opportunities, but the poor economic

condition of workers in their home country perpetuated the economic pull.

Mexican Presidents Miguel de la Madrid (1982-1988) and

Carlos Salinas (1988-1994), in league with corporations and under pressure from

the World

Bank, encouraged foreign investment and dropped protective tariffs and crop

subsidies to open

Mexico’s market with reforms that allowed for the private distribution and lack of

protection for communal land.115 The maquiladora industry that relied so heavily

on cheap, nonunionized Mexican women’s labor, developed from Mexican

government and international efforts to open Mexico to the “free market.” 116

114

115.

116

Seeking to advance their economy similar to the free market ideal touted by the

Western World, the Mexican government opened the country to outside corporate

investments, establishing an economic system in Mexico that offered few

remunerative job opportunities for men and offered women only low paying

work.

Since the Border Industrialization Program in 1965, the Mexican

government encouraged the establishment of United States corporate factories, or

maquiladoras, in Mexico that offered employment for Mexican women.

Maquiladoras allowed corporations to ship material to manufacture and assemble

products in Mexico at cheaper, un-unionized rates, which were then shipped back

to the United States with little to no tariffs.117 Located originally near the United

States and Mexican border, these factories employed large numbers of Mexican

women in arguably “unskilled,” tiring, work with little chance for pay increases

or advancement.118 The strong sexual “naturalistic” division of labor kept

Mexican women degraded, while the maquiladora industry offered few Mexican

men opportunities.119 The devaluation of the Mexican peso in 1994, coupled with

the creation of NAFTA that same year, continued to harm Mexico’s economy and

encourage the movement of primarily Mexican

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118

119

males to the United States since few opportunities existed in Mexico.120 The

actions of the United States, in their efforts to control the progress of other Latin

American nations, usually for political and U.S. corporate’s benefit, in addition to

the power of the World Bank and IMF, detrimentally affected Mexican economic

stability, leading to an influx of male labor to the United States.

The opportunity for employers’ abuse of farmworkers only expanded after

NAFTA in

1994. Proponents of NAFTA argued it would open the borders between Canada,

the United

States, and Mexico, promoting laissez-faire trade and improving all three nations’

economies.

The results of NAFTA were quite different. In contrast to the increasing jobs in

the United States, companies opened factories in Mexico to employ the cheap

labor force.121 United States government subsides coupled with chemicals and

biotechnology to give United States growers a distinct advantage over small

Mexican growers. When NAFTA opened the tariff-free borders, it allowed United

States products, especially corn, to flood the Mexican market at prices cheaper

than those of small Mexican farmers.122 In contrast to the United States groups,

most Mexican farmers neither had the financial capital to grow biotech crops on

the same scale as United States growers, nor did they receive subsides like United

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122

States growers to produce cheap foods. Though some Mexican crops partially

benefited from the free market, such as tomatoes that benefitted from different

harvest timing, the United States investment in the

Mexican tomato crop since the 1980s, and the cheap labor demanded of Mexican

workers to compete with United States growers, continued to hurt Mexicans

economically.123 With few alternative jobs for Mexican farmers, urban centers

began to swell with people desperate for work in post-NAFTA Mexico.124 Unable

to find work in Mexico’s urban centers, many

Mexican males entered the United States without papers to find work.125

The surplus of male Mexican nationals entering the United States, both

legally and illegally, because of the changing political and economic landscape of

both countries created the demographic changes of Midwest migrant

farmworkers. Farmworkers became disproportionally male since the increase in

undocumented Mexicans in the United States since the 1970s. With limited

opportunities for Mexican men in maquiladoras and in Mexico, these men entered

the United States to work. Though women and children began joining husbands

and fathers al norte, men provided the transcultural link between Mexico and the

United States. In various Mexican areas, such as Tinaja de Coyote, almost the

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125

entire male population immigrated to towns and cities in the United States such as

Hartford, Michigan, leaving their families behind in Mexico.126 Returning

occasionally to see family, these immigrant populations invested in homes,

businesses, and their local ranchero Mexican community through electricity and

other improvements.127 Transcultural links between a rural community in the

Midwestern United States and a ranchero in Mexico started with a brave and

desperate immigrant who found work in the United States, and after returning to

the ranchero with new clothes and money, began to help friends and family

members find jobs in the United States.128 Eventually, most of the men in a city or

town migrated across the border to work in a particular field up North, though

families did continue to migrate together.129 Sometimes these transcultural

communities included entire families, but often the cost and danger of

undocumented immigration, in addition to farmworkers’ strong ties to Mexico,

made most immigrant males unwilling to transplant their family al norte. Migrant

children continued to travel up the Midwest stream with family, struggling to find

a place in a culturally and socially different Midwest, just like the additional men

who traveled up the stream away from their families in the later part of the

twentieth century.

126

127

128

129

Conclusion

After the passage of NAFTA in 1993, two interconnected but different

types of migrant farmworkers existed: individuals like Perla Sanchez in the

documentary The Harvest/La

Cosecha traveling up the Midwest with family members, and farmworkers like

Jesús Zamarrón Rocha who traveled al norte away from his family to support

them back in Mexico.130 Since the first farmworker migrated to the Midwest,

migrants lived between two worlds, trying to come to terms with family roles and

their place in the Midwest as they either lived away from family members, or

constantly moved to new, uninviting communities. Both types developed in the

Midwest migrant stream during the last half of the twentieth century because of

the decisions and policies of the United States and Mexican governments and the

influence of society on the government decisions that shaped the opportunities

and rights of migrants. Mexican and Mexican American migrant farmworkers

became part of established communities up North by the 1980s and 1990s,

fighting for greater rights and freedoms in the South and North, and struggled to

maintain their cultural and familial ties as they lived in two worlds, all while the

migrant population slowly shifted away from a family-oriented population. Both

transcultural and migrant communities were separated from their culturally

130

familiar settings and family, and both struggled to maintain ties to their culture as

they tried to create and find for themselves a new, temporary place in a foreign

society. As Deborah Boehm wrote of transnational immigrants:

Migrants understand themselves as belonging to, divided

between, and outside of two nation-states: here and there.

(Im)migrants are, in their own words, “de ambos lugares/from

both places” and “de ambos lados/ from both sides,” “mitad

allá, mitad aquí/half there, half here,” “del

otro lado/from the other side,” and tellingly, “ni de aquí, ni de allá/

from neither here nor there.

CHAPTER 2

YOU SAY TOMATO, I SAY TOMATE: SPANISH SPEAKERS, FAMILIA,

AND MIDWEST BUREAUCRACY; A CASE STUDY OF ILLINOIS

Manuel and Maria Guerra and their three children came to the Midwest to

work for years, but one year in the early 1970s a drought devastated the fields

along with their opportunity to work. Indebted to the Indiana farmer who paid

them to come up North, Maria,

Manuel and their children found themselves stuck in a state far from home with

no money.131 Desperate for work, Manuel went to the Indiana State Employment

Service, but with no available agricultural jobs the service offered no resolution to

Manuel and his family’s dilemma. Although non-agricultural jobs existed, the

employee at the Indiana State Employment Service failed to offer these positions

to Guerra.132 Desperate, the Guerras first went to the township for welfare

assistance, which immediately refused the family aid, forcing the Guerras to

request food stamps from the county.133 After a week of waiting for help from the

county, the Guerras again faced refusal, this time because the county estimated

their next month’s pay as too high to receive food stamps.134 Despite seeking aid

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from agencies created to assist, the Guerras found no help. Like other similar

stories depicting the failure of state systems, the Guerra’s story found its way into

a report, in this case a report written in English by the Indiana Advisory

Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights entitled “Indiana

Migrants: Blighted Hopes, Slighted Rights.”6 This report found its way to

government offices where numerous committee members probably read the report

as they debated migrants’ situation with the report eventually ending up in a

library. Yet the Guerras probably never saw this report. For other migrants who

were not fluent in English, the report was entirely inaccessible because of the

language barrier. For the migrant farmworkers who came to the Midwest like the

Guerra family, language, state bureaucracy, and prejudice would structure their

families’ experiences with the state bureaucracy.

Like most bureaucratic institutions, reports, studies, and committees

comprised most Midwest states’ efforts to understand and react to public concern

over migrant farmworkers’ plight. As the Guerra family story demonstrated, state

governments analyzed how state officials and departments failed to provide the

programs and aid migrants needed. Yet the report “Indiana Migrants: Blighted

Hopes, Slighted Rights” speaks to a larger issue: language, words and power.

Distributed primarily in English, state governments’ published reports were in a

language largely inaccessible to the Mexican and Mexican American migrant

farmworkers who came to the Midwest in the last half of the twentieth century.135

Legislators and committees’ use of English demonstrated that they cared little to

change or empower farmworkers but rather served only to pacify public concern.

For Illinois and other Midwest legislators, the “migrant problem” was believed to

be the public attention to the deplorable working and living conditions of

migrants that many viewed as temporary. Believing in the widespread argument

that the migrant stream would end in a couple of decades, Midwest officials and

legislators sought temporary solutions that fit their own gendered, social, and

racial conceptions.136 Illinois legislatures and state employees were no different,

as Illinois’ agricultural interest groups and the government’s reaction to public

concern exemplified the bureaucratic response to Spanishspeaking migrant

farmworkers throughout the Midwest. For many farmworkers in Illinois and

throughout the Midwest, words and language confined, controlled, and limited

them as various departments, agencies, and committees within the Illinois state

bureaucracy sought to define the farmworker problem as a temporary issue based

within bureaucratic members’ own gendered, social, and racial perception.

For the Guerra family, like many other Mexican and Mexican American

migrant farmworkers in Midwest, the migrant stream meant negotiating between

various state groups. Since the 1960s, large numbers of Mexican and Mexican

135

136

Americans traveled from their homes in Texas, Florida, and Mexico to work in

various Midwestern crops such as tomatoes, apples, and cucumbers.137 Though

the employment of migrants in the Minnesota and Michigan sugar

beet fields since the 1920s initiated state government regulations and committees

in the first half of the twentieth century, most Midwest states did not have large

enough migrant numbers to generate concern and state committees until the 1950s

and 1960s.138 Coinciding with public debates on the continuation of the Bracero

Program in the 1950s, the Harvest of Shame broadcast in 1960, and the United

Farm Workers grape boycott in the 1960s, farmworkers became a matter of public

concern.139 Each Midwest state’s agriculture was different, yet each state’s

government reacted similarly to the “migrant problem,” as prejudice and

agricultural interest groups pressured state officials to squash any major changes

to the agricultural system. Although Chicago’s large Latino population offered a

unique ability for Latinos to sway the state government and the public, the lack of

a strong Latino voting block, and the differing concerns between urban Latinos

and migrant farmworkers, meant Illinois’ leaders reacted to the “migrant

problem” in a similar way to other Midwest states.140 Illinois’ reaction to public

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140

interest in the plight of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in the

1960s and 1970s exemplified Midwest states’ reactions to the “migrant problem.”

La Cosecha y el gobierno de Illinois/The Harvest and Government in Illinois

Only with public pressure did state governments such as Illinois actively

address the situation of migrant farm laborers. Like Illinois, other Midwest states

began to address concerns about farmworkers when migrant numbers and public

interest forced a bureaucratic response. Though state governments were in many

ways constrained by national policies and decisions regarding migrants, they too

played a major role in the pyramid of power. Michigan and Minnesota’s early

employment of large numbers of Mexican and Mexican American migrants in the

sugar beet fields differed from other Midwest states, but studies of Michigan and

Minnesota’s early sugar beet industry suggest that both state’s legislators only

improved working and living conditions after labor, international, and national

pressure because of the Bracero Program. Initial concern with migrant children’s

education and the development of governor state committees became common

reactions to public pressure, whether initiated in the early twentieth century in

Michigan or the mid-twentieth century in Illinois.141 By the 1960s, every Midwest

state government had created a committee that investigated migrants’ issues after

141

and during initial efforts to better migrant education.142 Following similar

trajectories, Midwest states’ offices and governments established similar methods

to mitigate the concern for Mexican and Mexican American migrant farm

laborers.

While governor committees’ existence coincided with the increase of

Mexican migrant farmworkers in the Midwest, the national and local interest in

the migrant stream during the 1960s suggested a strong correlation between

public interest and government reaction. Local events added to the national story

as they increased political pressure for state legislators to act. Strikes by local

farmworker unions, such as Obreros Unidos in Wisconsin and the Farm Labor

Organizing Committee (FLOC) in Ohio, made the issues of farm laborers a public

concern that state legislators felt pressured to address.143 In addition, local stories

of migrant families unable to find shelter one night or a migrant child dying from

pesticide poisoning made local communities aware of migrants’ difficult lives.144

All these factors encouraged and sometimes informed Illinoisans and Illinois

politicians about the problems that Mexican migrant farmworkers faced in their

own state.

With the increasing interest of the national government in migrant affairs,

state governments used the finances provided by national programs and laws to

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create aid programs. National efforts to increase funding or establish better legal

standards included such national acts as the Elementary and Secondary Education

Act of 1965, which provided educational funding, the Farm Labor Contract

Regulation Act of 1974, the Migrant Health Act in 1962, which gave funding for

health clinics, and the Economic Opportunity Act in 1964, which among other

things, provided funding for job training.145 With national funding, state

governments enacted legislation to assist farmworkers, but legislation did not

always address all farmworkers’ issues as state bureaucracies curtailed and

defined the farmworkers’ problems and the solutions. Many in the Illinois state

government did not want to change the structure of the stream in ways that would

improve the lives of farmworkers. Employing national funding, state departments

and legislators established programs and enacted legislation that often failed to

consider migrants’ opinions, instead establishing laws and programs that created

only superficial change.

The domination of the English language in Illinois and other Midwest state

governments not only complicated Spanish speakers’ interaction with the state

bureaucracy but also characterized states’ anxiety with non-English speakers.

Unlike many Midwest states, Illinois had the distinction of establishing English as

the official state language in 1969, significantly earlier than the 1980s national

fervor to establish English as the official language throughout the nation.146

145

146

Originally declaring “American” as the state official language in a 1923 statute,

Illinois legislators eventually changed the statute to declare English the official

state language.147 In contrast to future state efforts in the 1980s, this statute did

not restrict the use of any other language by government officials or the printing

of state government materials, such as laws. Since the 1980s, other Midwest

states have declared English as their official language besides Illinois, with

Indiana in 1984 and Iowa in 2002.148 Illinois’ declaration of English as the official

language, though a symbolic act akin to declaring a state bird or mineral, came

when the nation was concerned with and aware of the Chicano movement,

bilingual education, and migrant farmworkers, suggesting a fundamental question

about the Illinois state government’s willingness to communicate with a multi-

lingual population. While the national government started to offer reports in

Spanish by the 1970s, the Illinois state government published only limited

reports, brochures, or informational pamphlets in Spanish.149 In cases where an

Illinois department published information in Spanish, the document, like its

English counterpart, was a cheaper reproduction not necessarily published by

normal Illinois state government publishers.23 A few academics argued that the

establishment of English as an official language in Illinois, although only

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149

symbolic, encouraged discrimination as businesses and individuals could

misunderstand the symbolic nature of the statute.24 Typical of many Midwest

states with migrant farmworkers, the Illinois government’s simple choices

obscured a developing linguistic issue within Illinois and the Midwest, as states

debated the role of language within the states’ growing multi-lingual population.

The history of Illinois’ reactions to Mexican and Mexican American

migrant farmworkers and the Spanish language hide an even greater complexity

to the language difficulties of farmworkers in the Midwest. Hidden beneath the

Spanish-English dichotomy were indigenous Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and by the

late twentieth century, an increasing number of Central and South Americans.

Academics and government agencies’ studies and statistics failed to note the

number of indigenous Mexicans migrating to the Midwest; however,

United States communities such as Cobden, Illinois received large influxes of

indigenous Mexicans in the 1960s.150 P’urépechas migrated from their homes in

Cherán, Michoacán to work in various fields along their migratory route,

including picking fruit in Cobden, Illinois where a small community of former

migrants eventually developed.151 Indigenous to Mexico, P’urépecha migrants

spoke their native tongue, and to some degree, Spanish.152 Though this study

focuses on the largest group of migrant farmworkers, Mexican and Mexican

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American, Midwest state governments actually faced different cultural groups

with various demands, who, in the case of indigenous Mexicans, did not

necessarily speak Spanish as their first language. The Illinois state government

struggled to recognize the linguistic and cultural needs of all Spanish speakers,

including Mexican and Mexican American migrants, almost never recognizing

the small numbers of indigenous Mexicans, and favored urban, voting Puerto

Ricans’ needs over the less vocal “Spanish-Speaking” groups. 29 Population

numbers, urban vs. rural, permanent vs. migrant, racism, and language often

influenced state policies, as Midwest state governments formed “Spanish

Speaking” committees that characterized the state’s unwillingness to address the

real needs of the heterogeneous farmworker familias.

The Illinois Committee on Agricultural Migrants

One of Illinois' first actions to address the growing migrant stream was to

create the Committee on Agricultural Migrants subcommittee of the Illinois

Commission on Children (ICC). Created in 1955, after several concerned

individuals came together to discuss the educational problems faced by migrant

children in 1954, the Committee on Agricultural Migrants was Illinois’ first major

state response to the “migrant problem.”30 Spurred to action by the increasing

number of struggling migrant children in schools and by the United States

President’s Committee on Migratory Labor, the Migrant Committee researched

the ordeals of Committee on Migratory Labor started in 1954.153 While the

Committee on Agricultural Migrants could address issues of education, nutrition,

or housing, its focus on children limited the committee’s ability to question the

basic structure of the migrant stream. Unlike the President’s Committee on

Migratory Labor, the Illinois Committee on Agricultural Migrants developed

153

from various educational and women groups’ concerns with migrant children’s

education, not with the overall issues of migrant farmworkers.154 Founded under

the ICC, the Committee on Agricultural Migrants had a narrow focus on migrant

children. The Illinois Governor’s choice to make a child-focused agency the

state’s sole migrant committee impeded questions of migrant farmworkers’ power

in the agricultural system. While the committee’s title suggested a broad

committee focus, a brief investigation into the bureaucratic structure of the

Committee highlighted the committee’s linguistically-defined focus and,

simultaneously, the Illinois Governor’s unwillingness to question the agricultural

system of power. Since its inception, the Committee on Agricultural Migrants,

named as if it was a committee with a broad mission, reflected the gendered and

racial beliefs of its creators and the societal changes of the time period. The

female members of the Committee represented the female dominated positions in

their fields of expertise and interests, while the men made up the experts in

stereotypically male fields.155 As the executive secretary of the Committee, Naomi

Hiett represented the ICC, while the other female members of the committee

represented the

American Association of University Women (AAUW), the United Women’s

Christian Association (UWCA), the Parent Teacher Association (PTA), nutrition

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155

committees, and numerous other organizations and state departments associated

with education and welfare.156 The rest of the members of the original committee

consisted of men representing growers, canneries, specialists in rural sociology,

members of the state medical society, chief division of preventative medicine, and

other science related fields.157 The proliferation of women on the Illinois

Committee on Agricultural Migrants suggested a gendered approach to farm

laborers, similar to other Midwest state’s initial foray into the lives of migrant

farm laborers. Initial organizations and committees, both private and state

government, that addressed farmworker issues often started with Anglo women

addressing health, housing, and children’s education.

The female dominion of education and charity coalesced into attempts to reform

1920s

Michigan child labor laws, one of the few early efforts by the Wisconsin State

Migrant

Committee where they experimented with migrant education, the Elizabeth S.

Magee Education and Research Foundation, and the United Church Women of

Ohio’s finance of an educational program in Ohio from 1958-1959.158 Potentially

improving the education of migrant children, committees such as Illinois’

Committee on Agricultural Migrants focused on issues of concern to Anglo

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women, namely the lack of education and poverty of migrant children so visible

to the public, but not the cause of children’s poverty or lack of education.

Focused on migrant children, the Committee on Agricultural Migrants and

its umbrella organization, the ICC, focused on mediating the negative aspects of

the migrant stream rather than changing the structure of an agricultural system

that used migrant families for cheap and transitory labor. Initially facing

resistance from the ICC, the Committee on Agricultural Migrants continued to

work under their umbrella organization. The Executive Secretary of the

committee, Naomi Hiett, argued in 1960, “Many member of the Illinois

Commission on Children have never been enthusiastic about our entrance into the

Agricultural migrant workers committee.”159 Hiett argued that some ICC

members felt that migrant children should not be the focus of the ICC or its

divisions.160 The Committee on Agricultural Migrants stayed tied, and therefore

restricted, to the Illinois Commission on Children despite the ICC’s negative view

of the Committee’s work. Only one year after Hiett argued that the ICC did not

support the Committee’s work, the Committee evaluated its success and the

direction it would take in 1961, ultimately shifting to a more active role while still

confining their activities to the ICC.161 Shifting their focus after 1961, the

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Committee offered not only information and encouragement to organizations, but

also initiated their own efforts in migrant health care in addition to promoting

legislation for congressional proposals.162 Yet the committee member’s wish to

maintain organizational and personal connections to the ICC restricted the

committee under the linguistic domain of “children,” dividing the concerns of

migrant children from the greater issues of migrant children’s familia. Though the

Committee on Agricultural Migrants maintained their tie to the ICC, the

narrowing of focus to children demonstrated a propensity for the Committee, like

most state organizations, to focus on temporary means to placate public concerns

about the migrant stream.

The Illinois Committee on Agricultural Migrants’ restrictive mission

reflected the Committee’s own restrictive membership, as the Committee

endeavored to create temporary solutions without radically changing the

agricultural structure. As noted earlier, the Committee consisted of several

women representing educational and welfare groups and agencies, while several

men offered scientific, agricultural, and medical guidance to the Committee. The

Committee sought growers’ perspectives on migrant children’s dilemma, yet they

never included a migrant farmworker or farmworker representative, instead

criticizing any effort by others to speak in the interest of migrants. Some

Committee members were outraged about newspaper articles that depicted the

162

racism and discrimination faced by migrants, arguing that the stories would not

properly motivate the public to support programs for migrants.163 As a field

consultant for the Department of Labor, Stanley M. Knebel stated in a letter to the

Committee’s Executive Secretary that negative stories on tragic events spurred

communities to action.164 Referring to the 1960 case in DuPage County where a

two-year-old migrant child,

Ernesto Perez, died from exposure to pesticides, both the DuPage County

government and the public pushed for changes to the housing and working

conditions of migrant farmworkers in the area.165 Despite such evidence,

agricultural representatives and Committee members demanded more restricted

language by newspapers to create the illusion that growers and canneries cared

about the welfare of migrant farmworkers and willingly could and would enact

any changes to better farmworkers’ lives.

The Committee on Agricultural Migrants’ illusion that growers could and

would willingly change the plight of migrants stemmed from the proliferation of

grower and cannery representatives on the Committee and their influence.

Growers and company representatives on the Committee argued that growers and

companies would willingly enact suggestions to better migrant housing, arguing

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mandatory regulations were unnecessary.166 In reaction, the Committee in 1958

encouraged voluntary improvements on a one to two-year trial basis to see the

results; however, many of these policies would become mandatory around 1961

as growers and canneries apparently failed to follow the recommendations.167

Growers failed to initiate the recommended changes because of some growers’

own prejudice against the racially and linguistically different migratory

farmworkers, as evidenced by growers’ complaints that migrants didn’t want or

know how to use nice housing facilities, as well as growers’ financial

restrictions.168 Carl Habenicht of H&E Sod Nursery in Illinois told a newspaper,

“We get our places all up to code, and they look real nice…then the Mexicans

come in and within a month it looks terrible.”169 The Committee’s focus on

pacifying growers and cannery operators through representation on the

Committee and discouraging negative speech only resulted in initial halfhearted

improvements as public and political pressure mounted for unmistakable

improvements to migrants’ position.

The Committee on Agricultural Migrants’ pacification of agricultural

concerns reflected their racial and linguistic choices. The Committee, like many

similar Midwest state committees, rarely listened to the concerns or opinions of

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farmworkers. The Committee never had a representative of migrant farmworkers

throughout its existence, but included growers and cannery operators. Only once,

in correspondence, did Executive Secretary Naomi Hiett suggest migrants should

have a representative; however, no migrant farmworker or ex-migrant farmworker

ever served on the Committee.170 Similarly, other Midwest state organizations

created specifically to investigate and assist farmworkers had corporate and

grower representatives but no farmworkers or ex-farmworker representatives. The

Ohio Governor’s Committee on Migratory Labor had no farmworker

representative from its start around 1960 until 1968, when a labor recruiter for a

canning company became a “farmworker representative.”171 The Illinois

Committee further compounded migrants’ lack of representation, as the

Committee failed to consistently communicate in Spanish. Many migrant

farmworker adults did not speak or read English fluently, sometimes relying on

their children for translations. For this reason alone, it would be difficult for

farmworker representatives to function on the committee if the Committee

operated solely in English. No records indicate that the Illinois Committee made

any effort to translate the Committee’s findings into Spanish or to even

disseminate information about their investigations or reports to migrant

farmworkers, making the Committee completely unaccountable to the migrant

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farmworkers they were supposed to help.172 The Committee on Agricultural

Migrants’ choice of language in communications and the lack of farmworker

representation on the Illinois Committee and other Midwest state committees

continued to linguistically and physically distance migrants from the state

programs designed to assist them.

Not only failing to represent and communicate with farmworker familias,

the Illinois

Committee on Agricultural Migrants’ use of language ignored migrants’ agency.

The Committee’s original mission was to be a “clearinghouse” of information on

migrant services; however, no records indicate that the committee offered any

information on migrant services in Spanish. Instead, churches and agencies

received information on how state services and state and national funding worked

to use for their migrant programs to aid.173 Like the entire state structure, the

Committee assumed only English-speaking Anglos permanently residing in the

state could affect any changes in the migrant stream.

Illinois State Employment Service

As a branch of the national United States Employment Service (USES), the

Illinois State Employment Service (ISES) became an important part of the

bureaucratic state response to migrant farmworkers in the last half of the

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twentieth century. The national government founded the USES during World War

I to manage employers’ labor needs, essentially becoming the Italian padrone

system so decried by social reformers on the East Coast in the early 1900s.174

Initially facing resistance from the Department of Agriculture, the USES, by the

end of World War I, became the government agency involved in agricultural job

placement.175 Connecting unemployed workers with employers’ labor demands,

the USES installed state offices all over the country, eventually transforming into

the State Employment Services used both by growers and farmworkers.176 This

state-focused structure developed after years of debate and experimentation

during the beginning of the twentieth century, eventually establishing a state

system by which the national USES office, under the Department of Labor,

oversaw only state offices.177 Individual SES worked by taking employer

estimated farm labor needs and then referring migrants who contacted the state

office.178 Each Midwest state’s employment service office worked similarly,

ultimately revealing a state’s interaction with migrants and growers.

Used by both growers and farmworkers, ISES was not, however, a neutral

party navigating between grower and migrant needs. Debates on the role of the

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USES between employees and employers occurred since the beginning of the

USES, as individuals questioned how best to maintain a “neutral” position.179 The

role of the ISES can best be understood by the language used by Illinois

government officials and ISES employees during a meeting when the minutes

noted, “Dr. Brooks paid tribute to the outstanding progress that has been made by

the ISES… in regulating the flow and direction of migrants. He pointed to the

great value of having the workers where they are needed, when they are needed,

in the numbers which are needed.”180 For many ISES employees, farmworkers

were statistics, pawns to move and control to meet Illinois growers’ labor

demands. The purpose of the ISES and other SES was to ensure the efficient

production of crops by securing growers’ labor needs, not to guarantee equitable

deals between migrants and employers. ISES reports did not address the working

or living conditions of migrant farmworkers or the failure of employers to follow

state and national labor and housing laws. Instead, State Employment Services

served as a controlling agency designed to serve the needs of growers and canners

instead of migrant familias.

In negotiating the state bureaucratic network of assistance and regulations,

gender norms and family structure among Mexican and Mexican American

migrants shaped who interacted with different state offices. For many migrant

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familias, cultural and family structures in the migrant stream dictated family

members’ involvement with the ISES and other Midwest State Employment

Services. Often traveling and working as family units or within crews, Mexican

and Mexican American migrant families usually worked under the name of one or

more adult males.60 Men with families usually served as the contact for the family

and the only individual on the payroll with additional family members working

under his name.61 This system allowed growers and contractors to pay one

individual for a whole family’s accumulated labor, which also allowed for the

employment of minors in agricultural fields. As such, men likely had the most

contact with the ISES, as they served not only as the head of the household in

most traditional Mexican and Mexican American migrant families, but also as the

sole official employee. ISES statistics in 1977 showed large numbers of

references made to male workers and few to women.62 Though statistics indicated

primarily male migrants used the ISES system, in reality gender and migrant

family norms hid the employment of entire families in the fields.

Working through ISES, Mexican and Mexican American men and their

familias had to navigate the linguistic and bureaucratic barriers constructed in part

by the SES. Comprised of English speakers, the ISES and other Midwest SES

often failed to break down the language barriers necessary to serve migrants.181

181

The ISES rarely offered information, in person or in print, in Spanish.182 A

Chicago Sun-Times undercover investigation indicated a SpanishSpeaking

employee sought a bribe for a work referral.183 In an undercover investigation of

life as a migrant worker in 1978, the Chicago ISES office referred a Chicago Sun-

Times reporter to the only Chicago Job Service Spanish-speaking employee, who

then offered a job referral through her brother for a fee.184 An illegal action, the

newspaper confronted the ISES employee and her supervisor, but both claimed

she tried to help “the migrant” because few jobs were available.67 A state

employee assisting her brother, along with the general lack of Spanishspeaking

employees, exemplifies how state employment services did not always serve the

interests of farmworker families. Despite state and national laws, ISES and other

SES departments and employees ignored whether or not growers provided the pay

and work promised or the housing legally required.185 Not only an Illinois issue,

the Alton Evening

Telegraph reported that Mexican farmworkers avoided the ISES and other state

employment services because of the tight collusion between growers and the

agency.186 A 1971 lawsuit filed by individual farmworkers, their representatives,

and migrant advocates claimed that the United States Department of Labor's

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186

USES offices were “grower staffed and oriented.”187 The case claimed, and

subsequent studies noted, that the USES provided referrals to growers that broke

housing and other laws and preferred giving referrals to alien workers who

worked for less money.188 The court mandated a thirteen-point alteration to the

USES program.189 By 1977, state offices finally started to comply with the court

order to make the USES program more accountable to farmworkers, with slow

and questionable results.190

The ISES and other Midwest SES’ shift away from a “grower staffed”

organization resulted in a shifting patchwork of usage that exasperated SES

efforts to control the agricultural labor system. A questionnaire about the

employing practices of growers in Illinois found that few smaller growers actually

acquired employees through the ISES, with the exception of asparagus growers.191

Primarily larger grower operations, usually associated with canneries and

corporations, used the ISES.192 The various degrees of use of ISES reflected

differences by state, as Ohio growers extensively used the Ohio State

Employment System, only half the migrants who came to Wisconsin used the

WSES in 1973, and, in a study of over three hundred migrant farmworkers in

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192

Michigan, eight used the Michigan State Employment Service.193 The different

uses reflected not only regional differences, such as Ohio’s larger tomato and

pickle canning industry and the OSES’ long successful history, but also changes

over time.194 After the Farm Labor Contract and Regulation Act of 1974, Ohio

growers specifically avoided the previously grower-friendly Ohio Bureau of

Employment Service (OSES) because the OSES attempted to ensure crew leaders

complied with the act.195 Used to the OSES overlooking illegal acts, growers

circumvented the OSES so they could not be held liable if crew leaders failed to

comply with the law.196 State agriculture, history, and compliance with state and

federal regulations all influenced and changed the use of the Midwest’s State

Employment Services. Exasperated by the changing patterns of use, the ISES

agency blamed “free-wheeler” farmworkers for the agency’s inability to control

the migrant stream. Ignoring growers and canneries’ own usage of the system,

ISES and national SES employees blamed “freewheelers,” individuals who drove

around in their own vehicles and negotiated their own contracts outside the USES

structure, for the migrant stream’s chaotic nature.197198 Viewing their

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job as controllers of the migrant agricultural network within their state, the ISES

made little attempt to provide an easy, usable service that growers and

farmworkers would use. Despite their negative portrayal by the ISES, “free-

wheelers” were just migrants who learned about jobs by word-of-mouth from

relatives and other Spanish-speakers aside from other well-established tactics.199

Working together as a migrating community, many migrant farmworkers

navigated the national USES system, understanding when to circumvent or use

the organization. In 1977, ISES reports indicated that the service provided many

referrals for agricultural employment, but made significantly fewer job

placements.200 This suggests that either the ISES made referrals to jobs already

filled by “free-wheelers,” or farmworkers used the agency to obtain information

about possible jobs, but carefully chose which referral to accept. Even more

telling, poor weather and harvests in other states led to a reportedly “urgent”

situation in Illinois, as farmworkers desperate for money diverted their usual

route to enter Illinois for work in 1977.201 While the influx of workers who

commonly did not come to Illinois likely increased the use of the ISES, these

workers carefully made decisions and did not always take any employment

referral offered by the ISES. Though demanding the right to control migrant

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201

farmworkers as pawns in the agricultural state structure, many migrant

farmworkers, through ‘free-wheeling’ and other methods, traversed the Midwest

migrant stream outside the efforts of the State Employment Services. Ultimately

the ISES, like the Committee on Agricultural Migrants, discounted the voice

of migrant farmworkers in their effort to control the migrant stream. In defining

their charge as solely ensuring the labor needs of state growers and canners, SES

services ignored the unequal power relationship between agricultural employees

and employers. Lumping uncooperative and independent migrant workers under

the term “free-wheelers,” the ISES defined what they deemed good migrant

workers, those who allowed the ISES to control their movements, and bad

migrant workers, those who refused to be completely dictated by the bureaucratic

agency. Though the Committee on Agricultural Migrants’ use of English instead

of Spanish and English suggested half-hearted attempts to placate public concern

and racial bias, the ISES made no claim that they served migrants. Rather, the

State Employment Services’ few Spanish speaking staff represented the groups’

unwillingness to address unequal power relationships between the employees and

employers. Blatant disregard for the migrant men seeking decent jobs for their

families, and the violation of state and national laws, only led to the decreasing

and uneven use of the State Employment Services as employers and migrants

sought more ideal conditions.

Illinois Departments

Successfully finding employment in Midwest agricultural fields, migrant

farmworkers faced poverty conditions that necessitated their navigation of the

Illinois state bureaucracy and welfare agencies. Illinois legislators estimated that

migrant farmworkers made an average of $1,580 in a year in 1970, significantly

less than the $1,732 a year in 1969.202 Even the $1,732 high remained well below

the poverty index for a farm residence in 1969 where the government defined a

female-headed household with one child making less than $2,117, in poverty.203

With such meager wages, and usually lacking health insurance, many migrant

farmworkers in the Midwest needed state government assistance to survive.

However, as the story of the Guerra family in the introduction suggests, language,

residency, and racism restricted farmworkers’ use of state services. Unlike

committees such as the Committee on Agricultural Migrants, various Illinois state

departments had pre-existing programs based on English-speaking permanent

residency. The state departments’ failure to provide meaningful programs for

Spanish-speaking migrant farmworker families, as language and residency

restricted aid to farmworker familias, evinced the state of Illinois’ continued view

of farmworkers as a temporary concern of the public.

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203

Faced with public pressure, the Illinois state government, along with other

Midwest states in the 1960s, tried to mitigate negative publicity regarding

farmworkers’ housing plight. Newspaper articles, organizations, and legislators

commonly used “hovels” and “sprawling ghettos” as descriptors of the housing

that growers provided migrants.204 Housing could lack anything from toilet

facilities and running water to stoves and air conditioning.205 Like most Midwest

states, Illinois law enacted regulations for farmworker housing well below the

standards for permanent residences, accepting outside water supplies and toilet

facilities. Not only relegating migrant housing well below non-migrants, most

Midwest states’ migrant housing regulations failed to cover a majority of growers

and thus lacked enforcement. Illinois law only established housing regulations for

growers employing at least ten migrants or four migrant families, allowing

numerous growers who employed only a few migrant families to legally provide

“hovels” for their workers.206 In the 1960s, the investigation of two-year-old

Ernesto Perez’ death because of pesticide exposure in DuPage County drew

public attention to the Panaglotaros’ farm where Ernesto died, leading to

newspaper articles and public outrage over migrant housing.207 Under the Illinois

Department of Public Health, the Illinois state government attempted to appease

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the public’s concern for migrants’ appalling living conditions through limited

legislative actions.

For migrant farmworker familias, language barriers and policies that

discriminated against migrant farmworkers marred the Illinois Department of

Public Health’s efforts to investigate and improve migrant housing. Although

laws established specific housing regulations, the Illinois Department of Public

Health rarely inspected housing and provided only a limited avenue for migrants

to report housing problems.208 Due to a shortage of staff, the Department of Public

Health claimed it could not see all the facilities multiple times or when migrants

worked during weekdays, which restricted investigators’ access to housing due to

privacy issues.209 This issue occurred throughout the Midwest, as Michigan’s

Department of Public Health rarely checked facilities twice, even if they had

violations, even though sixty percent of migrant camps in Michigan had six

violations per camp.210 In addition, few of the Department of Public Health’s

migrant housing investigators were bilingual.211 Language barriers made Health

Department inspections ineffective, as migrants could not report unseen

problems. Even with a rare Spanish-speaking staff member, inspectors failed to

report or note problems resulting from the Illinois government and Department of

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211

Public Health’s unwillingness to inconvenience growers. In a booklet designed to

tell growers and canners about the housing regulation of Illinois, the Department

of Public Health consistently assured the employer that the policies and laws

would be followed under “reasonable” guidelines, arguing that regulations would

not be systematically followed in a way that would cause hardship for

employers.212 In another booklet, the Department tried to describe themselves as

reasonable individuals who could ensure migrants, and by extension the Illinois

public’s health, while also ensuring that the regulations did not negatively affect

the agricultural economy. The Department’s desire to not inconvenience growers

apparently extended to ignoring rat holes in mattresses, leaks in roofs, and

flooding during their inspections.213 Preference for growers, lack of funding, lack

of bilingual staff, and racism characterized the Illinois Department of Public

Health’s role as housing regulators.

Not only did the Department of Public Health fail to properly investigate

housing violations, but also the Department of Public Health’s system failed to

accommodate nonpermanent or Spanish speaking residents. The Illinois

Department of Public Health made it difficult (if not impossible) for migrants to

file complaints about their housing, with limited office hours and a long process

that usually lasted well after a migrant had left Illinois.214 Although the expansion

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of the Voting Rights Act in the 1970s and 1980s ensured non-English speakers

received access to certain rights, such as election ballots in their language,

legislation, and court decisions, it did not ensure that all state departments could

adequately speak with its non-English speaking residence.215 The Department of

Public Health’s inflexible programs reflected not only a bureaucratic but also a

class and racial propensity to ignore the facts on the ground. The Department

designed their policies and forms for stationary English-speaking residents.

Although not intended by the creation of the policies, the department’s policies

reflected an anti-foreign, anti-migrant mentality. In creating a lengthy and

complicated process for English speakers, the Illinois Department of Public

Health provided limited assistance to migrants to placate public concern for

farmworkers.

The dangerous nature of migratory farm work: pesticides, inadequate

housing and water, working with knives at a hurried pace, and dangerous

machinery, complicated farm laborers’ already inadequate access to medical help.

Migrant familias often made poverty wages that made nutritional food and doctor

visits almost impossible. Only large company growers and canneries offered any

health insurance, though it was still inadequate.216 Illinois legislators could do

little to aid workers until significant financial backing from the national

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government came in 1962.217 With national funds, Midwest states created and co-

funded a variety of programs to provide medical assistance and food provisions to

migrant workers. National legislation allowed for the creation of migrant health

centers in “high-impact” areas, where a large number of migrants went, and

migrant health projects in “low-impact” areas, where migrants could receive

limited medical resources in the areas that employed fewer migrant workers.218

Illinois founded the Migrant Medical Program in 1977 to provide financial

medical assistance to migrants; however, a newspaper claimed that of the fifty-

three applications for help within the first year, the Migrant Medical Program

denied twenty-two, suggesting the restricted nature of state assistance.219

Hospitals’ limited funding and lack of translators restricted migrants’ ability to

seek medical assistance in the Midwest.220

Like the Illinois Department of Public Health’s involvement in migrant

housing, racism and residency requirements restricted state and county programs

that provided food and medical assistance to migrant farmworkers. In Illinois and

throughout the Midwest, residency restrictions excluded migrants from receiving

aid. Migrants who did not regularly reside in a community were ineligible for

Medicaid, food stamps and welfare, all of which were of vital aid to migrants.221

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221

Several 1976 pamphlets from the Illinois Department of Public Aid noted that the

state required aid recipients to live in the state or expect to remain in the state,

which was certainly an issue for migrant farmworkers.222 In some cases, state and

local officials inaccurately denied migrants aid. An organization, Food and

Nutrition Services, insisted in 1980 that the United States Department of

Agriculture investigate local and state failures to provide bilingual services and

occurrences of offices refusing migrants assistance because of inaccurate

calculations of income and “misinterpretations” of citizenship requirements.223

The Food and Nutrition Service claimed local and state offices around the nation

often harassed migrants about their citizenship, insisted on using uncertain future

income in calculating need, and used confusing and “misleading” forms.224

Whether due to racial discrimination or residency requirements, farmworkers

struggled to receive assistance from state governments because of the migratory

nature of their life.

As migrants navigated the linguistic and residency barriers in food and

medical aid, most migrants’ first encounter Illinois bureaucracy through the

migrant educational programs, offering the opportunity to bridge the language

gap for the next generation. For Illinois and most of the Midwest states, programs

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for migrant farmworker children often started before programs focused on adults.

By 1968, the federal Bilingual Education Act (BEA) offered financial assistance

to school districts to promote and establish bilingual educational programs.225 In

the Midwest, summer educational programs created by local communities and

funded through state and national monies offered bilingual and ESL programs.

Funding came from a variety of sources, with two Illinois migrant educational

programs receiving funding from at least three government sources: HEW,

Illinois Department of Children and Family

Services, and CETA.108 In DeKalb, Illinois, the Children’s Learning Center, and

in Kankakee, Illinois, the Little Star Migrant Center, offered summer educational

opportunities to migrant children in the hopes of bridging the gap between their

education in the Midwest and in their Southern homes of Texas, Florida, or

Mexico.109 In addition, the DeKalb school district established a program for

Spanish speakers. Though not a bilingual program, as the Director John Cassani

strongly insisted to the local newspaper, the DeKalb School District program

focused on teaching children English while also respecting Mexican culture.110 As

one of the initial forms of state involvement, migrant education offered the

opportunity to break the linguistic and cultural barriers that divided migrant

children from others, and, for some educators and migrant parents, the hope that

the next migrant generation would permanently

225

settle.

Language within education played a divisive role, as state offices did not

always respect parents’ language difficulties, and state agencies and the public

debated the role of bilingual education and special programs for migrant children.

Some Illinois departments, such as the State Board of Education, at least partial

accepted the importance of breaking down language barriers between state

institutions and parents as they published a Directory of Services for Migrant

Families in 1977 in Spanish.226 Yet not all state governments and local

communities accepted bilingual education. By 1979, members of the Spanish

Speaking Peoples Study Commission (SSPSC) feared House Bill 169, as initiated

by Representative Donald E. Deuster, would set bilingual education “…back ten

years if not more.”227228 In Wautoma, Wisconsin, the local community failed to

create an education program for migrant children, ignoring the problems of

migrant children and the national and state funding available to assist migrants.229

Controversy regarding bilingual education divided the nation. Few Midwest

school districts offered BEA-funded bilingual education, with four programs each

in Illinois and Michigan, two in Indiana, and only one in Wisconsin and Ohio

during the 1973-1974 school year.230 The limited bilingual programs in the

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Midwest reflected the tension between pacifying public concern for migrant

farmworker children and public resistance to non-English languages. As programs

such as the Children’s Learning Center in DeKalb sought parental involvement,

linguistic barriers between parents and teachers meant that, in the case of

education, farmworker children themselves had to maneuver through the

opportunities and restrictions of state and nationally funded educational programs.

In migrant farmworkers’ interactions with state and state-funded local

agencies, migrant families negotiated the state bureaucracy within their own

gendered and family ideology and structures. State funded programs in Illinois

and other Midwest states often failed to provide the assistance they were

supposed to provide. As previously noted, migrant men often handled any

interaction with the State Employment Services; but all family members

interacted with state agencies, as families went to the hospital for medical

treatment or agency offices for food assistance. With different family members

interacting with different groups and different programs, migrant familias debated

within their own cultural and gendered norms how best to handle state and local

programs that often discriminated against them. While a migrant woman felt

comfortable going to a local Michigan hospital to deliver her baby because of the

available translators, a farmworker in Michigan did not want his wife to go to a

local hospital because of rumors the local hospital discriminated against

migrants.231 The occasional lack of translators at hospitals discouraged yet another

migrant male, this time in Illinois, from seeking medical help; instead, he avoided

medical treatment until he returned to Mexico.232 Different migrant familias

rejected and accepted assistance based on perception, fear and their role in the

family.

Though one migrant male dictated his wife’s interaction with state and

local services, many other migrant women had to negotiate state and local

programs, such as food stamps, education, and medical assistance, by themselves.

Gloria Ortega went to a health service office in Ottawa, Ohio alone with her

children to receive powdered milk.233 Unfamiliar with the system and possibly

dealing with a language barrier, Gloria Ortega waited for two days at the Putnam

Regional Health Services as the office’s employee racially insulted Gloria.234

Office staff continually ignored Ortega throughout the two days and the manager

criticized her for the mess her children caused. The manager of the facility

commented that the facility was “not just for the Mexicans.” In reaction to the

treatment she received, Gloria Ortega responded by writing a letter to the editor of

the Nuestra Lucha, a Chicano community newspaper in Ohio.119 In some

families, men dictated family members’ interaction with state organizations, yet

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in other families women dealt with state agencies. In either case, whether women

faced discrimination and language barriers in fulfilling traditional female

caretaker roles or men protected their families from discriminating organizations,

all migrants had to decide how best to handle language barriers and

discrimination, whether through avoidance or confrontation.

Spanish Speaking Peoples Study Commission

With increased public concern for minorities throughout the 1960s, Illinois

in 1971 established the Illinois Spanish Speaking People’s Study Commission

(SSPSC), which investigated all Spanish speakers’ concerns, including those of

migrant farmworkers.235 Created only a few years after Illinois made English the

official language of the state, the SSPSC’s goal was to ensure the rights of

“Spanish speakers.” Similar to the committees created by other Midwest states,

the SSPSC, like the Committee on Agricultural Migrants, investigated and

suggested new and improved legislation to better conditions in the migrant stream

and throughout the state.236 However, the SSPSC and similar Midwest

committees remained largely ineffective because much of the legislation did little

to better migrants’ lives. Instead of bettering migrants’ lives, SSPSC members

worked to placate agricultural interest groups while providing little to no avenue

for migrant involvement.

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Outside pressure from agricultural interest groups, and legislator’s racial

and gendered perceptions of migrant farmworkers, influenced the effectiveness of

the SSPSC and similar Midwest groups. Agricultural influence manifested itself

sometimes in the brazen coalition between growers and government committees

on migrant farmworkers. The Governor’s

Committee on Migratory Labor in Indiana included the president of the Indiana

Canners Association, a person who had a vested interest in maintaining the

agricultural system of power.237 Though the Illinois SSPSC did not consist of

known canner or grower affiliates, SSPSC members faced pressure to appease

public concern by assisting migrant farmworkers without actually creating any

real change that would anger powerful agricultural interest groups.238 For some

committee members, legislation and investigations simply quelled protest and

outrage over farmworkers’ plight until the entire migrant system ended.

Created in 1963, the SSPSC investigated and suggested solutions to issues

faced by Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and other “Spanish-speakers” in their

everyday lives, both in rural and urban Illinois.239 The committee formed several

subcommittees: Employment, Housing, Consumer Protection, Education,

Agricultural Migrants, Political Representation, Justice and Police, Health and

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Welfare, and a subcommittee on the “Implementation of existing legislation.”240

The main committee consisted primarily of state congressmen while the SSPSC

encouraged subcommittees to include persons who were experienced in the area

of the subcommittee and were persons of Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Cuban

backgrounds. Records on the SSPSC committee members included numerous

persons of Puerto Rican descent, and several others with Spanish surnames,

which comprised the non-congressional members of the committee.241 Some of

the Latino members actively took part in ethnic organizations, such as the League

of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the Puerto Rican Political

Committee, with a few who had union backgrounds.242 Biographies described no

one as a migrant or former migrant, and although the committee sought to

represent the state of Illinois, almost all the committee members came from the

Chicago/Northern Illinois area. The makeup of the SSPSC and its subcommittees

suggested that the SSPSC focused primarily on urban areas, improving the life of

“Spanish speakers” in the main center of Illinois’ permanent Latino population,

Chicago.243

240

241

242

243 "Illinois - Race and Hispanic Origin for Selected Large Cities and Other Places: Earliest Census to 1990,"

prepared by the U.S. Census Bureau (Washington, DC), accessed May 4, 2009,

http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0076/ILtab.pdf. By the 1970s, the Chicago

population was 14 percent Hispanic.

The Northern, urban focus, and the failure of the Agricultural Migrants

subcommittee to provide a migrant or former migrant representative, continued to

subjugate migrant farmworkers’ issues. By creating a subcommittee under a large

umbrella committee called the Spanish Speaking People’s Study Commission, the

Illinois government allowed the complicated issues of the migrant stream to

become secondary to the general issues faced by all, but most importantly to the

SSPSC, urban “Spanish-speakers.” Unlike the other issues addressed by the

SSPSC, such as police relations and urban housing, migrant farmworkers were a

part of a national structure shaped not only by racism, but also by powerful

corporations on a local and national level. In treating the problems of the migrant

stream under general issues represented by the SSPSC and in failing to give

farmworkers a voice, the SSPSC could not accomplish real change in the

agricultural system.

The type of change the SSPSC members sought partially reflected their

gender.

Between the Committee on Agricultural Migrants and the SSPSC, the Committee

Agricultural Migrants consisted of large numbers of women concerned with

children, while the SSPSC consisted of legislators and representatives from

organizations and activists, most of whom were men. The SSPSC’s gendered

makeup influenced the type of efforts they focused on, as they offered little

comment in the way of migrant education; rather, they left early women-

dominated groups to deal with migrant education and focused solely on general

migrant problems. Although the SSPSC’s mission did not restrict the committee

to children like the ICC subcommittee, its male and urban composition, in

combination with a lack of migrant farmworker’s involvement and broad scope of

concern, shaped SSPSC efforts.

Tempering public criticisms of the migrant stream, Illinois politicians and

the SSPSC addressed migrants’ problems, sometimes with benevolent intentions,

but never through empowerment. SSPSC efforts to fix the “migrant problem” in

the 1970s and 1980s happened in a time period where farmworkers’ issues

intersected with the movements for change at the national level, as consciousness

of issues influenced political agendas that promised change. State legislators and

organizations tried to end the problems inherent in migrant work when public

forums and the press raised the daily difficulties migrants faced in the stream. The

Illinois government/SSPSC viewed migrant farmworkers along two

interconnected frameworks, describing migrant workers as both helpless victims

in an agricultural power structure and defenseless minorities who could not better

their own lives. The SSPSC, as an institution, acknowledged the racial aspect of

the agricultural power structure, but they ignored the state government’s own

collusion through legislation and committee structure. The Illinois government,

like the rest of the Midwest, founded legislation and committees based on a

racialized interconnected framework that safeguarded legislators’ authority to

shape farmworkers’ fates with minimal input from farmworkers themselves.

Migrant farmworkers had limited opportunities to influence the SSPSC.

One time came when the SSPSC committee visited a migrant camp, and another

when they held hearings in different locations throughout Illinois where locals

spoke about issues of concern.244 The last opportunity came when the SSPSC sent

out a questionnaire in both English and Spanish.245 The speakers at the hearings

included Latinos and non-Latinos on issues ranging from police harassment, to

housing discrimination, to migrant farm labor. At the hearings, people offered

their varied opinions ranging from those speaking on behalf of ending racism and

discrimination, to migrant farmworkers, to grower representatives defending

unfair practices, as seen in the case of a Stokely Van Camp representative from

Hoopeston.246 Yet the subcommittee on migrants, feeling that previous studies

adequately covered the basic information, did not establish or create any new

studies on migrants.247 Instead, the migrant subcommittee members visited

migrant camps as best they could and spoke with workers during those visits.248

244

245

246

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Unlike the earlier Committee on Agricultural Migrants under the ICC, the SSPSC

did provide farmworkers with an avenue to voice their concerns to the committee

at local hearings. Yet again, language would restrict farmworkers’ access to

representation, as the SSPSC offered limited translation services to non-English

speakers.134 While migrants could fill out a questionnaire or speak at one of the

hearings, access and language barriers complicated their ability to make their

opinions heard; yet when they did, they had to voice their frustrations with state

bureaucracies that limited the migrants’ rights.

When the SSPSC examined migrants’ problems, they used gendered

language that depicted the migrants as incapable of helping themselves. In a

section of the SSPSC’s report entitled “The Visit,” the subcommittee described a

migrant camp as follows:

From the road we could see in the distance the farms with their small

white houses. It was one of those views that had made famous the

fields of Illinois. Suddenly, amidst this natural beauty, a fence, a

graveled road and a crowded view of shacks on top of a small hill as

they were on top on one another. They brought to the memory the

concentration camps that one has seen in so many documentaries…

On the very top of the hill, women shivering with cold were

washing dishes and clothes. The clean shacks with flowers here and

there helped to disguise their ugliness. The room with a partition as

a kitchen, without sink, only with a small stove in which coffee and

bacon were being cooked…Outside, young men walk on the dusty

road toward the cold looking common showers. As we drive away an

old lady sweeping in front of her shack smiled at us…A feeling of

hopelessness invaded us as we drove away from a Migrant Camp.135

The SSPSC described migrants’ problems in hopeless terms and the migrants

themselves appeared not as agents, but as individuals unable to change their

living and working conditions. The SSPSC also described migrants in gendered

language, as seen in the above paragraph. The SSPSC described the women as

cooking and cleaning as the male migrants walked outside to the showers. Yet the

paragraph makes no suggestions as to what the men just did as everything in this

paragraph depicted either an inactive person or an activity overshadowed by a

miserable predicament and gendered as “inactive.” Sweeping, cooking, and

cleaning are rarely viewed as active, instead they are usually degraded as

feminine actions. The paragraph never depicted the migrants as laborers in fields

or canneries, or as capable and willing to change a degrading system. Like their

other reports, the SSPSC’s “visit” publication was not available in Spanish,

making the committee unaccountable for their biased view of migrants’

helplessness. The language used by the SSPSC to describe migrants, and the

failure of the SSPSC to establish open linguistic communications with non-

English speakers, portrayed farmworkers as passive, despite evidence to the

contrary. By the time of the SSPSC “visit” to the camp in 1971, farmworkers had

already created several farmworker unions and organizations, even achieving

some success; the most widely known case being the United Farm Workers in

California, a union of primarily Mexicans who organized themselves and gained

national attention and support throughout the 1960s.249 More local geographically

speaking to Illinois, the Obreros Unidos (OU) in Wisconsin and FLOC in Ohio

both originally organized in the late 1960s by farmworkers and ex-farmworkers to

better the lives of migrants.250 While the OU failed to achieve their objectives in

1968, and FLOC had only brief success in the 1960s, FLOC’s strike initiated in

1978 and OU’s efforts still demonstrated the possibility of farmworkers actively

changing their situation.251 Like their brethren in other Midwestern states,

farmworkers in

Illinois made small efforts to gain a certain level of control over their lives.

Farmworkers spoke at SSPSC meetings about the issues they faced, avoided or

partially used the ISES to their benefit, reported housing violations to authorities,

and refused to work for growers with horrendous conditions; all of which

demonstrated migrant farmworkers’ agency. Not all SSPSC members necessarily

knew about farmworkers’ activism, yet several of the members must have been

aware of these unions and organizations, making the committee’s view of helpless

farmworkers unrealistic and unfortunate.

Without the power to change existing laws or provide greater funding to

enforce existing laws, the SSPSC’s legislative efforts merely provided temporary

249 Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers

(New York: Verso, 2011).

250 Valdes, Al Norte, 190-191; Barger and Reza, The Farm Labor Movement in the Midwest.

251 Valdes, Al Norte, 188-190. FLOC’s strike is further described in Chapter 5.

solutions to the “migrant problem.” The SSPSC recommended several laws,

which the Illinois government passed in 1975, including an amendment to the

Child Labor Law to include agricultural workers and raise the working age to

twelve years old for non-family members of farmers.252 In addition, the Illinois

state government passed a law that forced employment and private agencies to

provide the work recruitment paperwork to the individual in English and the

language the worker spoke, as well as increased the violation from a Class C to a

Class A misdemeanor for private employment offices.253 The state also passed the

Illinois Farm Labor Contractor Certification Act that required crew leaders to

recommendations to include agricultural workers in the Unemployment

Compensation Act and for the addition of farmworkers in the

Workman’s Occupational Disease Act and the Fair Employment Practice Act in

1975.255 Other acts killed included requiring educational and recreational facilities

as well as first aid stations in migrant camps, and providing $25,000 to the

Department of Public Health so they could hire bilingual migrant camp

inspectors.256 SSPSC legislative suggestions failed to radically change the system

252

253

254

255

256

of power, as they focused on creating minor changes that only supported faulty

state aid systems.

The Conclusion or the Continuación of the Migrant Stream?

Facing mounting public pressure to address the appalling situation of

migrant farmworkers throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Midwest state

governments, like Illinois, established committees, agencies, and legislation.

Despite public pressure, state government responses characterized a resistance to

radically altering or investigating the problems inherent within the migrant

stream, instead subsuming migrant problems under other issues and ignoring the

language barriers that divided many migrant farmworkers in the nation from the

permanent, English-speaking public and government of Illinois. As Mexican and

Mexican American migrant farmworker familias navigated the various Midwest

state groups and legislation meant to better their lives, linguistic barriers allowed

governments to ignore the voices of migrants in favor of English-speaking, white,

permanent residents. Throughout the Midwest during the last half of the twentieth

century, permanent, English-speaking residents manned the agencies and

committees created to assist migrants, defining the “migrant problem.”

Just as public pressure initiated apathetic Midwest state government efforts

in the 1960s and 1970s, so too did the dissolution of this interest lead to the

disbandment of committees and legislative efforts in the 1980s and 1990s.

Shifting migrant streams and cultural changes within the nation diverted public

sympathy and attention away from migrant farmworkers. The 1980s backlash

against welfare efforts, minority concerns, and unions created an atmosphere that

slowly extinguished the public outcry and compassion over migrant farmworkers’

plight.257 The SSPSC ended in 1984 because migrant numbers decreased enough

that the public could easily forget and ignore migrant issues.258 These changes

characterized shifting patterns in the migrant stream rather than the increase in

mechanization that many argued would totally replace farmworkers.

Mechanization did increase in the 1960s and 1970s, but land issues and increasing

undocumented workers in the late 1970s decreased grower compulsion to totally

replace farm laborers with machines.259 The shifting migrant route meant that the

disappearance of migrants in some areas of the Midwest occurred at the same

time as public concern and aid committees disappeared from the Midwest social

and physical landscape.260

With shifting migrant streams and changing social concerns came changes

in state government efforts. Like Illinois, many of the Midwest state committees

focused on farmworkers eventually disappeared as farmworker numbers and

public interest decreased, and as fewer groups and individuals debated legislation

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258

259

260

and the actions of state departments. Largely rural populations, influence of

growers and large canneries, the power of urban versus rural interest, and farm

labor unions impacted public sympathy and, as a result, state efforts. The Illinois

government’s concern for migrants diminished significantly in the 1980s, but the

farmworker union FLOC made migrant farmworkers a prevalent issue in Ohio

throughout the 1980s.261 Started in 1977, Ohio’s Commission on Hispanic/Latino

Affairs addressed a broad range of “Spanish Speaker” concerns.262 With declining

and varied public interest came different state responses, as some Midwest states

continued commissions focused on “Spanish-

Speakers” and others dissolved similar committees.

The disintegration of public concern in the Midwest 1980s and 1990s

mirrored the intensifying language debate in the United States. Despite the failure

of groups such as US English to make English the official language of the United

States in the 1980s, statewide efforts to restrict the use of languages other than

English, in addition to a backlash against bilingual education, became common

throughout the nation and the Midwest.263 Mexican

Americans fought for linguistic rights within the Midwest and the nation during

this backlash. In Illinois, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational

Fund (MALDEF) investigated and sued the Illinois Board of Education for their

261

262

263

failure to enforce and provide directions on how to analyze Mexican American

students’ English proficiency.264 Onarga, Illinois in Iroquois County schools’

perfunctory examination of students led to a low estimate of Limited English

Proficiency (LEP) students that ultimately meant the school district could avoid a

state law requiring a bilingual program, jeopardizing children’s education.265

Gomez vs. Illinois Board of Education forced the state of Illinois to provide a

standard by which testing would determine LEP and enforce the 1971 state law

that legislated a bilingual program for twenty or more LEP students in a school

and fulfilling the national Equal Educational Opportunities Act (EEOA) of 1974

to provide “appropriate action to overcome language barriers” in education.266 In

1988, bilingual education came under attack nationally as

President Ronald Reagan decreased federal funding and legislators weakened the

BEA in the

1980s and 1990s while state and national organizations tried to enact English only

laws.267 Mexican and Mexican Americans’ rights to bilingual education,

citizenship status, affirmative action, and basic rights and services came under

attack and criticism. In the Midwest and the nation, language continues to be a

point of contention, with the ability to either empower and facilitate, or repudiate

264

265

266

267

and disparage, the rights and culture of transitory and settled Mexican and

Mexican Americans. The Midwest migrant stream has continued to this day

despite estimates to the contrary. In reality, Mexican migrants like the Guerra

family still travel from their homes in Texas, Florida, or Mexico to the northern

states, finding jobs through agencies like the State Employment Service,

financially scraping by as weather conditions destroy or delay work, and facing

the constant threat of injury or poisoning. And, as before, linguistic barriers

continue to shape migrant familias’ interaction with Midwest state services and

governments. Though state committees such as the SSPSC ceased meeting, and

although legislation increased and state departments still dispense aid,

farmworkers in the Midwest still struggle. As The Chicago SunTimes stated in

1978 about their investigation on migrants, “…peering behind the honeysuckle

curtain to see what life there is like. And what they found should prick the

conscious of the comfortable to greater compassion and stir bureaucracies toward

more resolute dedication to their obligations. What’s there is shameful.”268 And it

still is

268

CHAPTER 3

AGRICULTURE, GENDER, AND GROWER-FARMWORKER

Marching along the cold paved streets in 1985 Iowa, men and women held

signs demanding change in the agricultural system of the nation. As one protester

argued, “It’s a big change…People here are getting tired of getting stepped on.

We’re learning how to fight back…This is the only way to get what we

deserve.”269 The angry protesters were not alone. Labor unions and clergy

throughout the nation supported the protests.270 Television crews and journalists

stood nearby watching the spectacle and interviewing the protesters, noting the

people’s anger and frustration at the current agricultural system and the

momentous nature of the protest.271 Two years before the Iowa march, another

group of individuals marched, this time from Toledo, Ohio to Camden, New

Jersey protesting the role of corporations in the agricultural system.272 This group

specifically protested Campbell Soups’ ability to control the system of production

in their region.273 As a core group traveled with tired feet across the landscape,

269 Eillen Ogintz, “Hardships Pulling Farm Belt Together,” Chicago Tribune, March 11, 1985.

270 Laurie Cohen and Christopher Drew, “Farmer Protests Gaining Steam as Crisis Worsens,” Chicago Tribune,

January 27, 1985; Ogintz, “Hardships Pulling Farm Belt Together.”

271 Ibid.

272 Eric Harrison, “Farm Workers’ Long Trek to Camden Reflects the Passion of a 5-Year Strike,” 5:14, Farm

Labor Organizing Committee Records, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.

273

members of the public, clergy, and labor unions joined the protesters’ demands

for change.274 The media wrote about the protesters tired journey like they did

about the protest two years later.275 .However, there existed major differences

between the two protests; the Iowa protest consisted of angry growers and the

second of farmworkers boycotting and striking both the Campbell Soup

Corporation and the growers in Ohio that sold tomatoes to the company.276 Like

the Joads in Grapes of Wrath, the agricultural structure trapped growers and

farmworkers in a system much larger than themselves, a system where corporate

interests created divisions between growers and migrants while sanctioning

growers’ abuse of farmworkers. Though the similarities in protests and the shared

support network suggested ties between the two different groups, growers and

farmworkers remained divided within public perception and often, within their

own viewpoints.

Despite the similarities between both marches, migrants and growers rarely

understood their common position within the agricultural system while public

perception contained farmworker’s struggles for a better life and the Farm Crisis,

as two distinct stories. The 1960s and 1970s were a time where farmworkers

unionized and gained the attention of the public, government officials, and church

leaders. For growers, the 1970s was a time of prosperity, especially for grain

274

275

276

growers, as land values and crop prices rose.277 Encouraged by the economy, the

government, and banks, growers bought more land and more machinery.278 When

the economy faltered in the late 1970s and throughout most of the 1980s, growers

struggled to maintain ownership of their farms.279 Though a vast majority of

farmers did not employ farmworkers, the narrative of Midwest growers in the

1980s ignored the limited, but important vegetable and fruit growers and the

farmworkers they employed. For the public, the 1960s and 1970s emphasized the

role of migrants in the agricultural system, while the 1980s Farm Crisis

highlighted corporate and government power over growers, but many in the

public failed to see the entire pyramid of power to understand the complicated

role of growers, farmworkers, corporations, and governments in the system.

Despite the connection between growers and farmworkers and the intimate

association between the economic situation of growers and the migrants that

worked in the fields, the Farm Crisis narrative remained disconnected from the

farmworker narrative.

Growers, migrants, and the public separated the narrative of farmworkers

and growers from each other, and in so doing overshadowed the role of the

landscape as a factor that shaped and was shaped by the interaction between

migrant farmworkers and growers. The Midwest landscape shaped the crops

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278

279

grown, the work performed by farmworkers, farmworkers’ route through the

Midwest, and growers’ financial situation. At the same time, the facade of the

Midwest, specifically of Midwest family farms and the agrarian ideal, influenced

growers’ perception of themselves, their interactions with farmworkers, and the

public understanding of growers’ troubles during the economic crisis of the

1980s. The Farm Crisis of the 1980s narrative focused on the loss of family farms

in the nation, especially in the Midwest where the mythos of the small, male-led,

family-labor centered farm still pervaded public and even grower imaginations.14

In fact, family farms had previously changed from the envisioned ideal as many

vegetable and fruit family farms in the Midwest employed Mexican and Mexican

American migrant farmworkers. The narrative of farmworkers in the Midwest

became largely separate from the narrative of Midwest family farms, ignoring the

reality of the land. In the Midwest, the land connected the disparate

migrant and farmer narratives. Migrant farmworkers moved across the land,

toiling on land with their families as they struggled sometimes against growers

and corporations. For growers, the land was what they struggled to produce

enough on to survive in an environment where corporations increasingly gained

power and government and banks pushed growers to risk more. The imagining of

the landscape also shaped growers understanding of their place in the agricultural

system, and as a result, their perception of migrant farmworker’s place and the

gender dimension of agricultural labor.

Similarly, the Midwest agrarian ideal shaped public perception of what Midwest

farms were,

family-oriented institutions threatened by corporate interests and not also

employers that defended the agricultural system’s abuse of migrant farmworker

families. The landscape not only influenced the interaction between growers,

migrant farmworkers, and the public, but migrant farmworkers and growers also

shaped the land. Farmworkers provided the means through with growers could

expand acreage, necessitating the creation of migrant camps to house

farmworkers. With migrant camps came negotiations between growers and

migrants over the meaning of private property when migrants demanded the right

to organize a union in their migrant homes owned by growers. Land determined

the type of crops, which in turn influenced the gender composition of workers and

therefore the housing provided by growers as single men could be housed in a

large bunker and families could not. In analyzing the landscape of the

Midwest, both the real and the imagined, the narratives of growers and

farmworkers in the Midwest comes into focus and allows for a greater

understanding of their interaction and provides an analysis of how migrant

farmworkers became so disconnected from the agricultural narrative of the

Midwest in the late twentieth century.

Sowing the “Bitter Harvest”

The public imagining of Midwest agriculture had long been at odds with

reality. The idyllic public perception of rural society and farmers in the United

States as moral, stronger, family oriented, male, and inherently possessing the

democratic ideals of the nation, had a long history.280 Thomas Jefferson praised

and envisioned the United States as a nation of small farmers, with the male

farmer working with his entire family on the land and where male hired farm

hands could eventually realize their own desire of land ownership.281 This

idealism quickly faced different agricultural realities as national racism against

Asians, African Americans, and

Eastern Europeans restricted land ownership and led to large-scale abuse of farm

laborers in the East Coast, West, and South, and as large scale, industrial farms

created “factories in the field.”282 In addition, the realities that women labored in

the fields and provided much needed income through chicken, egg, and milking

operations countered the classification of farmer as “male.”283 Yet the male ideal

became strengthened through the corporatization of farming as women became

marginalized in agriculture operations.284 While slavery, racism, and “factories in

280

281

282

283

284

the fields” marked other parts of the nation, the Midwest agrarian ideal remained

largely intact into the twentieth century despite the eventual shift from family and

community labor, to reliance on male transitory hobo labor at the end of the

nineteenth century.285 Despite relying on outsiders, first Anglo hobos and by the

early to mid-twentieth century, Mexican and Mexican Americans, the Midwest

maintained its idyllic rural image.

Though the imagined Midwest fields consisted of grains, the nature of the

Midwest landscape determined the crops grown and therefore the type of work

and the structure of the migrant stream that developed in the twentieth century.

Most Midwest growers grew corn and soybeans for large powerful processing

corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, crops that rarely

required migrant labor.21 Though grain crops required little in the way of hand

labor, agribusinesses and processing corporations like Cargill could dictate prices

and products just like the corporations that bough fruit and vegetable crops. For

this reason, all farmers in the Midwest worked within an agricultural system

dominated by corporate interests. In addition to grain crops, Northern Ohio and

Southern Indiana contained large numbers of tomato and cucumber fields, while

Southern Illinois and Northern Michigan land successfully produced fruits.22

Growers produced various other vegetables in central parts of Ohio, Northern

Illinois, and Wisconsin, as Minnesota and Michigan growers grew sugar beets.23

285

These different types of crops determined the migration stream for farmworkers

and the role of agribusinesses. The growth and harvesting of cucumbers and

tomatoes around Ohio offered migrants the ability to switch between the two

crops with ease. At the same time, sugar beet companies as well as tomato and

pickling companies, usually sold the seed to a contracted grower and processed

the products after harvest.24 Yet the types of crops also influenced the gender

dimensions of work. For one migrant family that worked the cucumber and

tomato.

By the mid-twentieth century, the increasing numbers of Mexican and

Mexican American migrant farmworker families working in the Midwest brought

government, church, and journalist’s scrutiny of the system. Between 1960

through the 1970s, this fervor reached its peak with state and national regulations

on migrant farmworker housing, pay, insurance, social security, and crew

leaders.286 In the Midwest and throughout the nation, the public reacted to the

horrible conditions of migrant families in the nation as reports such as the

nationally televised Edward R. Murrow special Harvest of Shame depicted the

struggles of men, women, and children.287 In the Midwest, Churches and a few

Latino groups created organizations and programs to provide assistance to

farmworkers through legislation, negotiating between growers and farmworkers,

286

287

and through programs that assisted farmworkers with leaving the stream.288

Simultaneously, farmworkers themselves fought the agricultural system by

unionizing and striking, with the two most well known Midwest unions being the

short-lived Wisconsin’s Obreros Unidos and Ohio’s Farm Labor Organizing

Committee (FLOC).30 In the case of FLOC, the union drew on the cooperation

and strength of entire farmworker families to not only strike, but also convince

the public of the powerful role of corporations such as Campbell. Yet despite

some public awareness about the role of corporations in the agricultural system,

growers remained the focus of public and government policies and regulations

regarding the treatment of migrant farmworkers. With more regulations, public

scrutiny, and farmworker unionization came grower’s frustration with migrants as

they struggled to survive. Growers’ frustration over increased public scrutiny and

farmworker unions became to some growers, an obstacle to stay on the land that

had been in their family for generations. For some growers, national regulations

and public support of farmworker unions restricted the independence so inherent

to the agrarian ideal. To these growers, state and national regulations proved that

the nation ignored the struggle of family farmers by supporting costly policies

that benefitted migrants to the detriment of small growers.31 Federal regulations

such as the Crew

288

Leader Registration Act that required crew leaders to register, the Migrant and

Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, Child Labor Laws, state laws that

provided certain requirements for migrant housing including the registration of

migrant housing; and state workman comp laws all established complex rules

governing policies regarding migrant Employment. Mechanization brought relief

from unions and public scrutiny of farmworker conditions, yet scientists and

corporations failed to totally mechanize fruit and vegetables crops, and existing

mechanization required expanding acreage and increased debt for growers.289 For

fruit and vegetable growers that also grew grains during the early to mid-1970s,

the increase in grain crop value in addition to the increase in farmland value in the

1970s made expansion easier.290 Yet the land dictated what could be grown,

restricting many growers to grain crops when grain prices fell in the late 1970s.291

No matter what crops growers grew, all growers struggled to survive when land

and grain prices fell in the late 1970s.292 Many small grain growers had to sell or

foreclose on farms in their family for generations as larger, corporate, growers

with capital survived the 1980s “Farm Crisis.”293 Growers that combined grain

with fruits and vegetables found a slight reprieve in the 1980s as fruit and

289

290

291

292

293

vegetable prices did not plummet, yet these growers faced costly regulations that

made the family farm’s survival difficult.

Growers not only faced more farmworker regulations, but also laws

concerning undocumented immigrant in the 1970s and 1980s. Public outrage at

the increasing number of undocumented Mexican immigrants resulted in greater

regulation, more stringent border enforcement, and Immigration Naturalization

Service (INS) raids. Although the United States government did not know the

number of undocumented migrants who worked in Midwest agricultural fields in

the latter half of the twentieth century, the public’s anti-immigrant sentiment in

the 1980s and 1990s had a profound effect on Midwest agriculture.

Undocumented workers provided growers, canneries, and meatpacking plants a

cheap source of labor that greater border enforcement and regulation

threatened.294 Though Midwest agriculture continued to employ undocumented

immigrants, public concern altered the power relationship between growers and

farmworkers. Employers could contact INS to counter unionization while

simultaneously regulations that demanded proof of citizenship before

employment encouraged some growers to work through crew leaders to avoid

legal responsibility.295 For family farm growers of the mid-twentieth century,

294

295

regulations and laws concerning undocumented immigrants restricted grower’s

freedom regarding employment practices.

As some in the nation feared undocumented workers took jobs from

citizens and used benefits paid for by taxpayers, others demanded undocumented

immigrants be given rights, and all the while growers demanded the continuation

of cheap labor. As a solution, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in

1986 provided an avenue for citizenship to undocumented immigrants already in

the country, though simultaneously creating stricter regulations and a stronger

border system.296 To pacify growers, Congress added the Special Agricultural

Worker (SAW) provision that allowed for an easier path to citizenship for

workers employed briefly in U.S. agriculture while the Replenishment

Agricultural Worker (RAW) allowed the importation of foreign workers under a

documented labor shortage in the fields.297 Though the government never

implemented the RAW provision, SAW allowed for the legalization of millions of

previously undocumented immigrants who saw brief agricultural employment as

an easy means to permanently live in the United States.41 Despite initial grower

fears, many SAW immigrants remained workers in the agricultural fields of the

United States and many more came because of SAW, essentially flooding the

agricultural labor market.298 The employment of Mexican and Mexican American

296

297

298

migrant farmworkers in the Midwest began to alter the construction of the

Midwest agricultural landscape and public perception of farming as growers and

the public struggled to find a place for farmworker hovels within the envisioned

agrarian ideal.

Jefferson’s Agrarian Ideal and the Harvest of Shame

The involvement and influence of growers in the national policies of the

United States government demonstrated growers’ power over the migrant

farmworker streams, but the notion of the Midwest family farm would continue to

cloud public acknowledgement of Midwest growers’ role in farmworkers’ lives.

The 1980s Farm Crisis added an existential crisis to the agrarian ideal with the

new threat to the family farm. Many envisioned parents and children forced off

land that had been in their family for generations.299 Hidden within public

imagining of the Midwest rolling fields were grower’s tomato, cherry, apple,

cucumber, mushroom, and other numerous fruit and vegetable fields grown and

harvested in the Midwest. Though many fruit and vegetable growers operated

family farms, they also employed migrant farmworkers that traveled from their

homes in Texas, Florida, or Mexico to work in various northern fields.300 As

1960s Midwesterners came to realize that the Harvest of Shame happened in their

own backyards, the agrarian ideal that envisioned small, noble, traditional family

299

300

Midwestern growers, clouded the public’s ability to see the Harvest of Shame

happened in family farmers fields. Though some Midwesterners would come to

realize that the violence and oppression of farmworkers in California happened to

a degree in the Midwest, the vision of the small family farm would forever shape

the public vision of the Midwest landscape as one free from the divisions and

racism.

The social, racial, and economic divisions inherent in the migrant stream

affected the relationship between growers and Mexican and Mexican American

migrant farmworkers and shaped the layout of the rural Midwest. Scattered

throughout the Midwest were rural communities made up of growers, canneries,

and small local businesses. Most growers housed migrants on their land or in

facilities built by several growers, usually far from the community’s center.301 For

growers Steve and Nancy Turnow in Ohio, they housed fifty individuals in

several cramped houses that lacked running water.302 While most women became

increasingly disconnected from farming operations, Nancy managed the migrant

camp located far from the local community of Lindsey, Ohio, making her an

important contact for farmworkers and an integral part of the farm operation.303

Physically separate from towns and living on grower land or in housing paid for

by growers, growers could dictate not only the living conditions of farmworkers,

301

302

303

but also their contact with local communities and other migrants and ex-migrants.

Claiming ownership of the land, growers barred, sometimes violently, both

farmworker unions such as FLOC and even individuals trying to offer aid to

farmworkers.304

Yet the farming landscape’s inclusion of farmworker housing sometimes

established familial ties between growers, farm families, and migrant families.

While the controlling, paternalistic relationship between growers and

farmworkers did occur, other growers attempted to treat farmworkers more like

family. Correspondence between a DeKalb County Illinois grower, Joe Lanan,

and migrant workers like Severa Fraga, suggested a fairly cordial relationship

where they asked about each other’s health and Severa Fraga referenced inside

jokes for the name of Lanan’s car or a migrant worker talked about a birth of a

baby.305 Though Lanan might have felt close to some of the migrants he

employed, other growers specifically noted feeling close to some of the

farmworkers that came to their fields. The existence of farmworker families on

family farms offered more ties between farmworkers and farmers as women and

children could initiate friendships between women and children. Karen Dawson

of Hartford, Michigan felt close to the migrant family, the Avilas, she and her

husband employed

304

305

while Irene McGuire described a close relationship with the wife of the migrant

family who worked on their farm, noting that she insisted the migrant wife call

her by Irene not Mrs. McGuire.306 Dawson and other growers respected the

migrants’ family relationship, specifically male-headed households and respect

for parents.307 Yet one grower that called the migrants he employed “his kids”

because they “were like family” suggests even when growers compared

farmworkers to family, they did not necessarily view their employees as equals.308

In addition, cordial and family-like relationships did not lead to changes to the

physical landscape of most family farms or a significant financial benefit for

farmworkers, resulting in a strained relationship as migrants lived and worked in

poverty conditions next to their employer “friends.”

Housed on farms away from local cities and towns, farmworkers became

outsiders to rural communities. Rural small towns and cities depended on the

canneries, growers, and large businesses for the community’s survival and

community members felt a strong desire to maintain the status quo.309 Many rural

communities considered the migrant farmworkers that came to the Midwest as

outsiders not only because migrants were racially, linguistically, and culturally

separate, but also physically separate from the community center. Though the

306

307

308

309

Turnow family farm accepted migrants’ right to determine the visitors in their

“home,” migrants remained separate from the local community.310 Nancy Turnow

argued to the Catholic Chronicle that local perceptions of migrants changed since

her husband grew up on a farm, in that their children played with migrant

children, yet she also emphasized how the FLOC strike would hurt the permanent

local community far more than farmworkers, distancing migrant issues from the

concerns of the local community.55 For migrant farmworkers, “Private Property”

signage provided a psychological signal that they were outsiders to the local

community and that growers controlled their temporary homes.

Any efforts by reporters, unions, churches, or a few community members to

address the poor housing and working conditions of migrant farmworkers met

with general anger as growers and other community members fought for the

continuation of their picturesque land and psychologically distanced “do gooders”

from the community.311 When some locals or nearby community members noted

the conditions of farmworkers, grower and even the local community depicted

them as “do-gooders” and more importantly “outsiders.” Growers especially

argued that individuals outside the community riled up migrants and that churches

and reporters failed to speak with growers about their struggles, instead these

“outsiders” just agitated state and national officials to create more regulations.312

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Growers argued these regulations in turn forced them to cease growing the fruits

and vegetables that employed farmworkers, hurting farmworkers.313 In Putnam

County, Ohio where FLOC initiated a strike against the Campbell Corporation so

central to the community, the entire community reacted with rage and supported

the local violent sheriff Robert Beutler.314 In declaring “do gooders” as outsiders,

some rural communities maintained a peaceful, idyllic image of rural society and

family farms, ignoring how the beautiful vegetable and fruit fields hid shacks and

stooping migrants.

Though opposition to outsider “do gooders” characterized numerous

Midwestern cities and towns, other communities displayed a more complex

dynamic to the insider/outsider division. With the fervor of public concern for

migrants generated in the 1960s, some local community members actively

analyzed the living and working conditions of migrant farmworkers. However,

the involvement of various growers and cannery businessmen on some of these

committees resulted in a complex understanding of migrants’ role in

communities. In Michigan, Malivina Holvorsen who, with her husband, ran a

farm argued that migrant aid committees had to address grower concern when

considering farmworker problems.315 Both Holvorsen and another Michigan fruit

grower in Grand Junction, both held positions in organizations concerned with

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migrant farmworker conditions.316 In arguing that growers struggled to provide

adequate housing when they lacked the money, both the Holvorsen and the fruit

grower described migrants as disrespectful, dirty individuals who did not respect

or understand the housing and facilities provided.317 In doing so, these rural

residents differentiated farmworkers from the rest of the clean rural community

by blaming the dirty blight of migrant camps on the migrants. The residence of

some cities and towns, like the local communities in Putnam County, Ohio where

the FLOC strike started, resisted efforts to radically better farmworkers’ lives,

especially when it threatened to modify their economic base. For various Midwest

areas, “helping” migrants meant minor assistance that ensured the maintenance of

the racially based agricultural system.

Growers and rural residents not only categorized migrant supporters as

“outsiders” and “insiders,” but farmworkers as well. As an Illinois report of a

Study Committee on the Church and Agriculture exclaimed: “The public

acknowledges the existence of migrant workers, but it declines to accept them as

member of the community. As soon as crops ripen, farmers anxiously await their

coming; when the harvest closes, the community with equal anxiety awaits their

going.”318 Local growers and entire cannery communities labeled individuals like

ex-farmworker and FLOC leader Baldemar Velasquez, an outsider because he

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raised public interest and concern on farmworker conditions.319 Yet, Velasquez

grew up in the local fields and his transitory life made him no more or no less an

outsider than every other migrant farmworker.320 Similarly, California growers

labeled United Farm Worker members as outsiders in comparison with “our

workers” who refused to unionize.321 Northern Ohio communities saw FLOC

migrant families who worked in the area as outside agitators, yet they viewed

Campbell as a part of the local community. Though Campbells’ cannery in

Napoleon, Ohio employed many in the local community; locals defended the

company over individuals who constantly migrated to the area and sought better

conditions.322 One grower described migrant farmworkers that worked and never

pushed for unionization or better conditions as “kids” or “our workers,” reflecting

a paternal relationship with migrants he viewed as acceptable.323 Some growers

spoke of unionization as a threat to happy worker’s lives, differentiating

farmworkers that agitated for change with farmworkers that refused to speak out,

creating an “insider” “outsider” dynamic even among migrants.324

Grower’s relationship with farmworkers, though paternalistic at times, did

not necessarily reflect rural communities’ portrayal of migrants. If farmworkers

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tried to leave the migrant stream and live in local towns or cities, they met rural

residents hostility as many viewed migrants as a blot on their ideal community

with their dilapidated housing and uncultured life. In Walworth County,

Wisconsin, the vegetable fields brought an influx of workers, but over time, the

Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers came to settle in the area in the late

1960s as food processors and factories offered more remunerative

opportunities.325 The Milwaukee Journal’s description of the influx of

farmworkers in the city of

Delavan in Walworth County depicts the physical change of Delavan’s landscape.

“Dark faces of [migrants’] children dot the classrooms, Singsong Spanish is heard

on the streets. Pinto beans and tortillas are on grocers’ shelves. Old, dilapidated

houses are crammed with these families…”326 The description of physical

changes within Delavan all leading to dilapidated housing suggests the disturbing

physical changes that locals believed social and cultural outsiders, or migrants,

brought to the landscape.

Though fearing the sight of dilapidated housing on their street, only some

Midwest communities had issues with dilapidated housing when it existed far in

the outskirts of town, hidden from the community and the picturesque image of

the rural scene. The death of a young migrant child, Ernesto Perez, in DuPage

County, Illinois and the public scrutiny of the horrible living conditions by the

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investigation that ensued, brought attention to this blot on the local area and

resulted in newly built housing facilities created by local growers.327 The negative

publicity from the event forced the local community and growers to deal with the

shame and negative publicity, forcing growers and other community members to

repair their damaged public image. Not all communities reacted negatively to

farmworkers, as one rural town offered a celebration for the local migrant

farmworkers for their hard work and some other communities had members that

truly desired to better farmworkers’ lives in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet in

numerous Midwest communities, residents viewed migrants as unwanted

“outsiders” that forced residents to acknowledge that the agrarian ideal rang

hollow.328

Midwestern communities' concerns that migrant farmworkers lived too

close for comfort reflected the changing physical and psychological distance

between growers and migrant farmworkers in the Midwest. The late nineteenth

century practices of male farm hands sleeping in the main house and laborers

eating supper with the farm family suggested a sense of comfort between worker

and employee.329 Over time, the more migratory and “outsider” the labor, the

more likely farm laborers slept, ate, and worked away from the family home. By

the 1960s, laborers became minority migrant families who lived and ate outside

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the farm house as female farmers successfully negotiated farm laborers out of the

farmhouse where farm women previously cooked and or cleaned for workers.330

The continued separation between the farm family and the migrant family, as in

the case of Steve Turnow who rarely played or interacted with migrants as a child

growing up on a farm, demonstrated social separation.76 By the 1950s and 1960s

when Mexican and Mexican American migrant farmworkers worked in the

vegetable and fruit fields of the Midwest, growers’ relationships with

farmworkers was categorized by separate physical spheres within the physical

landscape of the family farm. Housed away from the family farm home and

characterized as children and socially inept, some growers ensured migrants

remained distanced both psychologically and physically from growers’ ideal

family farm.

“You Can Only Push the Farmer So Far”

“You can only push the farmer so far,” argued the cucumber grower Rosendale to

the FLOC leader Baldemar Velasquez, “Things’re marginal now.”331 These two

sentences summarize the struggles of growers during the start of the Farm Crisis

in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. However, growers struggled not only with the

crisis, but also changes pushed by farmworker unions, new regulations and laws

regarding farmworkers and undocumented immigrants, and the shattering of the

independent agrarian farmer image. Most growers vehemently opposed greater

regulations on migrant housing and strict enforcement of employment of

undocumented immigrants because it raised their costs during a time where they

were barely surviving due to the increasing cost of seed, machines, and chemicals

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and their decreasing income from products.332 Many growers strongly opposed the

influence and power of agricultural corporations, in so far as they influenced and

controlled grower’s fate, yet growers failed to see farmworkers’ common struggle

versus agricultural corporations or their own complacency in migrants’ struggles.

As opposition to FLOC demonstrated, growers also feared their increasing

lack of independence that was so pivotal to the agrarian image. FLOC wanted to

work with growers to ensure the Campbell Company paid for increased migrant

expenses while providing growers a better price for their product, yet most

growers strongly resisted working with farmworkers.333 As Baldemar Velasquez

argued, “Unfortunately, the farmer considers himself an independent businessman

protecting his petty-profit margins…Committed to a misguided notion of ‘rugged

individualism’ sadly enough, he superexploits our people and what he cannot get

from the multinational he gets it from the sweat of our back.”334 Growers resisted

any threats to their independence, as loss of power threatened the primarily male

growers’ ability to control their land that was so important to the growers’ self-

image and masculine identity.335 The agricultural system relied on abusive labor

practices by growers to maintain the illusion of grower independence, and in the

process, hide the role of stooped laborers and agricultural corporations in the

fields. With the advent of Mexican and Mexican American migrant families

working in Midwest fields came public criticism and questions about the

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picturesque image of the family farm long characterized by a hardy work ethic

and the moral and physical strengthening of family members. Farmers argued that

children especially benefitted from working on farms, building muscle and

character. In a short educational video from the 1960s, city children visited

relatives on a farm for a summer where they became stronger, had fun, but also

developed a strong work ethic.336 Growers argued that living and working on

farmland benefitted children and they used this argument to fight against the

inclusion of agriculture in child labor laws.337 One Wisconsin article about child

labor legislation affecting cherry pickers described the “dogooders” concerned

about migrants and demanding child labor laws as lazy individuals unaccustomed

to a little hard work and was responsible for destroying family togetherness by

stopping children from working with their families.338 The author’s portrayal of

cherry picking as a means for family fellowship and a way to instill good hard

work ethic into children ignored the basic problem that children of migrants

sometimes missed school to assist their family in the fields all day.86

The family farm ideal not only glorified the value of children’s labor but

also the value of hard labor in farming culture. Arguing that modern society

devalued hard work, Karen Dawson of Hartford, Michigan, argued that the public

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felt sorry for growers and migrants who worked all day on the land and got

dirty.339 Dawson felt that people in the United States did not respect hard labor,

implying public concern for migrant farmworkers lay in lack of respect for

growers’ hard work, not the deplorable living and working conditions of migrant

farmworkers.340 This argument expounded the virtues of working the land but

ignored the fact that most farmworker families had to work in the migrant stream

to survive. Various congressional members extoled the virtue of the family farm,

specifically their importance to the nation, equating family farms with American

values.341 These arguments ignored the changing and gendered nature of

agriculture, as corporatization and crop centralization pushed women out of

agriculture and led to farmworkers, rather than farm families, working on the

farm. Support for the agricultural ideal failed to acknowledge farming’s male

dominance and that the only familial aspect of farming left was the migrant men,

women, and children working in the fields to survive.

As growers defended the agricultural ideal, their relationship with the land

changed, and some growers remained blind to their own changing relationship

with the land. Corporations and banks pressured growers to “get big, or get out,”

and to grow limited types of crops on massive scales, usually year after year. To

do so, growers used chemicals to enrich soil depleted from producing the same

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crop constantly, while fruit and vegetable growers employed larger numbers of

farmworkers or bought machinery to harvest their expansive fields.342 The family

farm grew from a small family operation to a large operation that increasingly

required outsiders, which also led to growers continuously poisoning the land and

the people on it.343 At the same time, these efforts failed to provide for farm

families, forcing family members to find waged work. Instead of growers relying

on the labor of their family for survival, they relied on migrant farmworker who

in turn relied on their own families for survival. Meanwhile, the changing

demographics in the field paralleled the changing demographics in the family

farmhouse. With the beginning of the Farm Crisis of the 1980s, male and

women’s relationship with farming, the land, and farmworkers changed. The

farming ideal focused specifically on men as farmers while women remained

“helpers.” With the corporatizing of farming, women’s roles in poultry, dairying,

gardens, and egg production became marginalized as farming operations became

large, masculine endeavors.344 By the 1980s, some women became arguably

disenchanted with farming, with many seeking off-farm employment for both

financial and personal reasons.345 More and more farms survived because of off-

farm employment, occasionally by men, but more often by women. Women’s

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employment outside the farm represented the professionalization of farming

within the confines of the family farm narrative, making men the sole “farmers,”

an occupation that required an increasing amount of capital and debt subsidized in

part by women’s off-farm employment. With the gendered professionalization of

family farms, family farms became industrial centers. The farming landscape

became a masculine center of science and industry and no longer a small, family-

focused operation. These changes shaped grower relations with farmworkers as

the relationship became one of a man managing a large operation with employees,

not a man working with family and friends. The male industrial nature of farming

emotionally distanced growers from farmworkers as migrant and farm families no

longer had an opportunity to interact daily. In addition, the employment of men

and women outside the farm weakened the family farm myth as farmland no

longer provided all that a family required. Instead, farm families expanded their

reality to include waged labor in towns and cities, not only among their family

members, but also those employed on their farm. Expanding the farming

landscape to include waged labor also shattered part of the farming ideal as

waged labor meant the inability of growers to provide for their family. This

inability shattered the traditional male and farming idealism that positioned men

and farms as providers, and as such

encouraged growers to resist regulations, laws, and policies that diminished their

other powers in regards to farmworkers. Grower strategies to resist farmworker

regulations within the farmworker/grower relationship became an ever-important

part of many growers’ lives in the last half of the twentieth century.

The effect of the modern family farms ultimately damaged the land and

people. The public image of the family farm centered on the assumption that it

brought a family together and that each generation passed the land down to future

generations. However, the massive scale of farming usually involved more than a

single family, economic times forced family members to find jobs off the farm,

continuously expansive acreage offered less opportunity for the children of

farmers, and the poisoning of the land and water only made it less likely that

future generations could profitably use the land.346 All the while, pesticide

poisoned growers and farmworkers and thousands of individuals moved around

every year to live in shacks with little pay.347 Growers fought for a stretch of land,

arguing that regulations imposed on them jeopardized the family farm, as

farmworkers not tied to a piece of land had the mobility to leave the area for

work.348 Unlike growers who lived on the land they owned, migrants were not tied

to one piece of land; yet migrants depended on the land, and the methods of

production affected their survival. In reality, the family farm that growers fought

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for had long since disappeared, and the agricultural industry’s ideal of a scientific,

business utopia rang hollow to the people in the fields and in the farmhouse.

The popular “Old MacDonald” song with verses containing various

animals represented the diversity of family farms so prevalent in the pre and early

twentieth century. By the midtwentieth century, “Old MacDonald” grew only a

few types of produce and/or raised only a couple types of animals. For vegetable

and fruit growers in the mid twentieth century, the farm also contained migrant

farmworkers and migrant camps with outhouses and outside shower facilities,

adding several unsavory additions to the Midwest’s “MacDonald” farm. The

increasing number of regulations, the farmworker union FLOC in Ohio, and the

implementation of IRCA all led to shifts in the landscape of the Midwest family

farm. A more realistic song for fruit and vegetable “MacDonald’s” farms in the

1960s would contain verses for migrant houses, communal showers, and migrant

farmworkers; but only a couple of decades later, national policies and agricultural

changes would permanently alter “Old MacDonald’s” farm.

With the onset of FLOC’s strike and boycott campaign against Campbell

and their Ohio growers in 1978 and 1979, some Midwest growers faced pressure

to mechanize or abandon planting fruit and vegetable crops while, concurrently,

the Farm Crisis of the 1980s offered few alternatives to growers.349 Campbell

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tried to avoid unions by forcing growers to replace farmworkers with machines,

refusing contracts to growers who continued to use hand labor.350 Many growers

also sought to fill their fields with machines instead of farmworkers to avoid

unionization and regulations; yet with the decreasing land value and financial

difficulties of

most growers in the 1980s, most growers faced difficulty mechanizing. Aside

from the

financial hardship, the Midwest landscape itself also restricted growers’ use of

machines because frequent rain and the Midwest soil often made it almost

impossible to use the machines sometimes.351 Both FLOC and growers

acknowledged that unlike California, another major tomato producing area of the

time, Ohio soil could easily clog machines when wet.101 For this reason, tomato

growers in Ohio could not reliably replace farmworkers with machines.

Ultimately, few growers could totally avoid farmworkers through mechanization

as machines did not always work on Midwest soil and most growers’ finances

severely restricted their ability to purchase machines.

As mechanization proved only partially successful for Midwest growers

trying to avoid the issues inherent in employing migrant farmworkers, the other

alternative, switching crops, proved even less successful. The financial Farm

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Crisis hit popular Midwest crops such as corn, wheat, and soybeans, offering little

alternatives to vegetable and fruit growers wishing to avoid farmworker

regulations. In addition, numerous vegetable and fruit growers, such as the

Turnows, already planted these other staple crops alongside their vegetables.352

For many Ohio tomato growers affected by the FLOC strike and boycott,

tomatoes and cucumbers, though not very remunerative, buoyed farms’ other

failing crops, soybeans and corn.353 For Midwest growers, land and the economy

affected their ability to reshape their land from fields with Mexican and Mexican

Americans migrants working in vegetable and fruit fields to rolling fields of grain

and corn.

For growers who could not successfully switch crops or mechanize to avoid

farmworker regulations, changing the physical landscape of the farm established

greater physical and psychological distance between the farm and farmworkers.

To avoid government oversight on farmworkers, numerous growers stopped

providing housing to migrants.354 Since state and national governments highly

regulated migrant housing, some growers simply informed farmworkers that they

would no longer provide housing. This forced migrants to use their meager

earnings to find their own housing, usually in local towns. A few migrants, such

as Jesus Sanchez Jr. in Minnesota, argued that he and his father in the late 1960s

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and 1970s did not complain about the poor housing since they were there to work

and they understood the financial hardship of growers.355 However, many

migrants condemned housing conditions, and the presence of women and children

in dilapidated housing only brought negative public attention to farmers’ fields. In

reaction to public attention, some growers diverted housing off the farm,

sometimes becoming an in-town landlord who catered to migrant farmworkers.

The Minnesota sugar beet grower Larry LaHaise switched from housing twelve to

thirteen farmworkers in dilapidated houses built for laborers in the 1950s near his

farm, to a fourbedroom apartment in town by 1990.356 Even grain corporations

that directly hired and paid a few farmworkers refused to pay for housing by the

end of the 1990s.357 In the end, grower and corporate changes regarding housing

at the end of the twentieth century helped draw public attention away from the

dilapidated shacks in the fields.

For growers who altered their migrant housing during the 1980s and 1990s,

they could recondition the ideal family farming landscape, free from migrant

housing, while also reinstating greater freedom from state and national

regulations. This change altered grower, farmworker, and community relations, as

the physical distance between migrants and growers meant local communities

adjusted to a greater migrant presence in town. In physically distancing migrants

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from the farming landscape, growers psychologically distanced themselves from

any responsibility for migrants’ conditions and from socially interacting with

migrants or seeing them as anything more than laborers. Yet in reshaping the

physical land formation to reinforce the agrarian ideals, migrant housing changes

adjusted relationships in rural societies and farmworkers’ survival strategies,

forcing rural communities to deal with temporary influxes of poor migrants,

reinforcing an employer/employee relationship between growers and

farmworkers, and forcing migrants to pay rent from their limited income. Forced

into the rural towns and cities, new migrants in the 1980s faced a different

relationship with growers and the local community.

For growers still employing farmworkers, the decreasing number of

migrants also changed growers’ relationships with migrants and the gender

composition of the stream. Though mechanization failed to totally replace

farmworkers, minor genetic changes to crops such as dwarf trees, in addition to

small mechanical changes in the fields, reduced the numbers of migrant

farmworkers needed.358 Jesus Sanchez Jr., who had worked in Minnesota sugar

beet fields since he was a child, noted how plant spacing technology and

chemicals reduced the need for migrants to thin the fields; ultimately, this reduced

the number of migrants needed, but it also provided some migrants with the

ability to negotiate pay based on the level of thinning required.359 Not all

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farmworkers willingly worked in fields where growers used fewer chemicals and

therefore had more weeds, allowing willing workers to ask for greater pay.

Changes in work not only reduced farmworker numbers, but also impacted the

gender dimensions of the Midwest stream. Various growers in Illinois and in

Lake Mills, Wisconsin vegetable fields refused to hire families because of the

cost of and likely the public attention to family housing.360 In addition, the

increasing use of the H-2(A) program in the 1980s and 1990s decreased the

likelihood of migrant families working and living together as the program

primarily employed men.361 In restricting family housing, men left their families

in their homes of Texas, Florida, or Mexico to travel up North for work.362 To

avoid family housing which attracted public inquiries into the living conditions of

women and children, growers or grower organizations provided cheap barrack

housing for men.363 The changing gender composition and number of migrants

thus altered farmworkers’ interaction with growers.

Though publicity, regulation, unionization, and costs encouraged growers

to partially

mechanize fields, major changes happened in the 1970s and 1980s to counter this

shift.

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Through the implementation of SAW, and to a lesser degree the foreign

importation program H-2(A), the demographics of Midwest farmworkers and the

rural landscape changed.364 The government legalized a significantly larger

number of undocumented individuals through the SAW program than the

government estimated worked in United States agriculture, as SAW’s only

requirement was a brief note from a grower.365 In addition, mostly males applied

for SAW and despite fears of growers that newly documented SAW individuals

would find better jobs with their citizenship, many SAW workers worked the

agricultural fields, essentially flooding the labor market.366 Though Midwest

growers did not extensively use the H-2(A) program, both the H-2(A) program

and SAW, coupled with growers’ desire to avoid public attention to family labor,

slowly altered the Midwest farmworker demographics as more men labored in

Midwest fields without families.367 By the late 1990s, the Eckert’s apple and

peach farm in Illinois employed only H-2(A) workers from Mexico, with only a

few of these H-2(A) workers being women. The H-2(A) program, along with the

physical demands of carrying baskets weighing forty pounds up and down

ladders, restricted the employment of women in the Eckert field.368 The shift to a

more predominately male labor force in the 1980s and 1990s, at a time when

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Churches and organizations struggled to even generate concern for women and

children in poverty and when the beloved “Old MacDonald’s” farm went

bankrupt, drew attention away from the disparity between the ideal family farm

and its reality.369

With the alteration of the physical landscape and the gendered composition

of migrants distancing “Old MacDonald’s” farm from the regulations and public

scrutiny of migrant family housing came a different relationship between

growers, farmworkers, and rural areas. With some migrant farmworkers no longer

isolated on grower land, migrants could become members of the rural community;

but as previously noted, local residents did not always accept farmworkers.370 In

addition, shifting housing off the growers’ lands or shifting the labor force to an

all-male group changed the farm dynamics and growers’ interactions with

migrants. In so doing, grower families and farmworkers would no longer interact

as much. Several growers respected migrant family structures and came to know

migrant families within familial terms as fathers, mothers, and children. A

cucumber, corn, and soybean grower in Hartford, Michigan, Karen Dawson,

respected how the Avilas migrant family, who had worked on her family’s field

for years, had “rural values” that emphasized the family and respect for parents,

especially the father.371 She saw the male head of the Avila family, Gustavo,

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almost as a son, though acknowledging he and his wife were her age.372 In another

example, Irene McGuire of Illinois and her husband visited with the migrant

couple who worked on their farm for ten years, even after they retired.373 Without

migrant families living on grower land, grower and migrant wives could not

socialize with each other as occasionally happened, and growers had fewer

opportunities to see farmworkers’ family and social values.374 The intersection of

shifting migrant housing, H-2(A) labor, and changing labor demographics, both in

the fields and in the farmhouses, preserved the ideal family farm in the minds of

the public as growers further distanced themselves from farmworkers.

The Other America: Farmworkers or Growers?

When Michael Harrington’s work The Other America: Poverty in the

United States came out in 1962, the United States public came out of the

complacency that permeated the 1950s, which had made the poor, as Harrington

argued, invisible.375 In Harrington’s added Introduction to the 1969 version, he

argued that the political fervor of the 1960s to confront poverty had faded and

portended a grim future for the poor.376 Almost ten years after the release of his

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added introduction, a Farm Crisis forced scores of growers off the land and added

to the poverty already noted by Harrington twenty years earlier. As the successes

of the United Farm Workers’ boycotts in California faded from public memory,

the 1980s Hollywood portrayals of the struggles of family operated farms

endeavoring to survive against the cold, calculating agricultural system replaced

the concern for farmworkers generated by the UFW’s efforts, newspaper articles,

and specials like the Harvest of Shame.377 Hollywood portrayed family farms in

crisis as struggling families with strong wives and mothers, working with

husbands and children to save the farm.378 The portrayal of the idyllic family farm

in jeopardy on movie screens throughout the nation, concerts put on by famous

country musicians, and newspaper articles about the loss of the family farm, all

competed with the voices of FLOC members and supporters who understood that

the “family farm” also hurt farmworkers.379 Public focus centered on the

importance of family to the farm; all the while, growers argued they were at the

bottom of the food triangle, ignoring the reality that the agricultural system and

growers abused farmworker families.380 The 1980s Farm Crisis, which shaped and

was shaped by the agrarian ideal of the family farm, influenced the public’s

understanding of the farm landscape, and ultimately, the role of farmworkers in

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the agrarian narrative. “Victimized,” unable “to control their own destinies,”

“feeling of injustice,” “losing…their whole way of life,” and “independent-

minded farmers” were just a few phrases and quotes used by journalists to

describe Midwest growers and their impressions of the Farm Crisis in the

1980s.381 For many Midwest growers, these descriptions aptly described how,

despite their view of themselves as independent toilers of the land working

alongside their family members in a job that defined their whole way of life,

growers were in fact increasingly male-dominated and controlled by powerful

government, economic, and corporate forces that destroyed the family farm.

Though Hollywood films such as Country established a strong woman’s role in

the farm, public imagination continued to characterize “Old MacDonald” as a

man working alongside his family members.382 In reality, by the 1980s, women

and sometimes men worked outside the farm, and expanding vegetable and fruit

farms often employed migrant families. However, the public continued to

envision the family farm as a male-dominated and family-centric operation, as

they ignored the many families who did work in the fields. The large corporate

farms, common in California, replaced the family farms in the Midwest as

growers and the public began to contrast the perceived independence of growers

with the reality of growers’ helplessness against economic and corporate forces.383

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Though most Midwest growers might have described the 1960s and 1970s as a

time of increased and unwanted government involvement and regulations that

restricted their freedoms, growers could characterize the 1980s as a time when

they demanded the government did something about the economic crisis that

destroyed independent small growers and left massive, corporate growers as the

sole survivors.384 To combat government, corporate, and economic forces, both

male and female farmers stopped viewing themselves as independent islands and

joined farm coalitions, help groups, rural churches and businessmen, and even

labor unions in protests and direct actions to protect the family farm.385

Hollywood films and concerts focused on the loss of the family farm in addition

to new protest and aid farmer groups contrasted with past emphasis on individual

grower’s independence, helping to bring public focus to the rural “other

America” during the 1980s.

Hidden within this 1980s rural “Other America,” seen by the public in

movies and concerts, was the “Other America” that contained farmworkers,

unsanitary housing, pesticides, and degenerated soil commonly found on fruit and

vegetable family farms, destroying the agrarian mythos so ingrained within

society. The Grapes of Wrath tied the narrative of migrants with growers, just as

the special Harvest of Shame and the UFW in California also destroyed the

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agrarian myth that ignored farmworkers; yet, as the 1980s Farm Crisis

progressed, few growers acknowledged farmworkers’ struggles. How after the

UFW and Harvest of Shame raised public awareness in the 1960s could the Other

America that shattered the agrarian ideal be so forgotten in public memory? Long

before the UFW unionized farmworkers in California, Cary McWilliams

described 1930s California farms as “factories in the fields” that destroyed the

land and abused people.386 Grapes of Wrath and Harvest of Shame also presented

abusive growers as large or under the control of large, agricultural groups.387 The

description of growers in Grapes of Wrath and the UFW as large or cooperative

farming organizations, allowed the public to envision Midwest family farms as

free from corruption and farmworker abuse. Instead, Hollywood films in the

1980s presented Midwest farms as small family operations, in sharp contrast to

the corporate farming long depicted in the Eastern and

Western United States.388 As Hollywood and news channels reported the struggles

of Midwest family farms, the most public examples of migrant farmworkers’

struggles took place outside the Midwest, maintaining the Midwest family farm’s

image.389

386

387

388

389

Though the 1960s social activism and the farmworker unions of the 1970s

and 1980s brought limited attention to farmworkers in the Midwest, the public

differentiated the Midwest from the rest of the nation. Despite FLOC’s efforts, the

cries of growers and the retaliation against aid programs in the 1980s resulted in a

limited support network for the concerns of farmworkers. In addition, rural

communities and growers, already threatened and powerless against the Farm

Crisis, vehemently opposed any unionization or negotiating efforts by FLOC,

arguing that corporations would never negotiate and any attempt would destroy

growers and communities’ ties to the land.390 Though some Ohio tomato and

pickle growers eventually learned the value of cooperation with farmworker

unions, most growers in the Midwest remained hostile to organized efforts to

better migrants’ lives, especially since it meant spending more money. In the end,

public focus lay on the survival of the family farm.391

The public and grower focus during the Farm Crisis not only ignored

the struggles of farmworkers and the effect of the crisis on them, but public

imagining reshaped the agricultural landscape into a historical, agrarian myth. As

the Midwest grower Karen Dawson argued, the changes in agriculture propelled

by the Farm Crisis brought irresponsible tenants to agriculture who answered to

no one since the corporate agricultural system offered no real responsible party,

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391

similar to the argument made in Grapes of Wrath about the system involved in

farm foreclosure.392 Dawson blamed these outsiders for the poisoning and overuse

of the land and the lack of concern for the local community, in so doing

describing the better family farm as one concerned about the community and

concerned for the land.393 Yet this ideal ignored the fact that most growers

operated large farms and that the concern for community specifically excluded

farmworkers, as growers and local residents depicted farmworkers as “outsiders.”

As growers, the public, and even political individuals decried corporate farms,

their ideal farm harkened back to a historical and fictitious ideal long since

dead.394

For a few people, the “for sale” signs among rolling fields depicted in

movies and on television in the 1980s did not overshadow the dilapidated housing

near the fields, but rather the housing became a part of the rolling fields and “for

sale” signs. Decrying the agricultural system supported by the United States

government that benefitted large, polluting, corporate farms that destroyed the

family farm, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times, a report by the Agribusiness

Accountability Project Task Force on the Land Grant College Complex,

investigated the role of the United States government.395 Unlike many written

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accounts of the Farm Crisis, Jim Hightower in Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times noted

the struggles of farmworkers in the abusive agricultural system, focusing

primarily on how mechanization slowly replaced migrant workers and how the

Extension Service, created to help the rural area, should provide training

programs to farmworkers forced out of the stream.396 In focusing on

mechanization and retraining, Hightower avoided some of the problems inherent

in the “us vs. them” relationship between growers and migrants, as growers and

grower organizations understood that migrants lived in horrible conditions and

lost jobs because of mechanization, but refused to see their own complacency in

accepting the converted chicken coops, stooped laborers, and inadequate outdoor

toilets, as a natural extension of the system and land. Though written before the

Farm Crisis, Hightower’s mention of migrant farmworkers within the overall

agricultural system, brought migrants out of the shadows and into the light, at

least for a brief moment.

Puncturing the agrarian myth that separated the Midwest farm from

farmworkers’ struggles, church organizations that supported FLOC in the 1980s

also occasionally described the struggles of migrants in relation to the Farm

Crisis. Though growers and migrants hinted at the importance of the Farm Crisis

in grower-migrant relations, few described the FLOC strike directly in relation to

the Farm Crisis. In one case, the Turnows noted how the success of their tomato

396

and cucumber crops were vital to their survival as the grain crop prices

plummeted in value; and Baldemar Velasquez, leader of FLOC, similarly noted

the importance of tomato and cucumber crops because of the poor value of

popular grain crops.397 However, few others noted the intersection between

growers and migrants’ consciousness of the agricultural system that entangled

both groups. In one rare instance, the National Farm Worker Ministry, an

interdenominational religious organization that assisted migrants, sent out a

position statement arguing that the public should be sure to keep farmworkers in

mind in their concern for the family farm.398 It also noted that religious attention

to migrants’ issues led to religious groups awareness of farmers’ problems, and

that three-way deals, as demanded by FLOC, benefitted all.399 As the statement

noted, “Consumers benefit from the fruits of cheap labor and the risks of marginal

farmers. The same economic forces that squeeze small growers also squeeze farm

workers.”400 The National Farm Worker Ministry understood that only when the

migrant farmworker and Farm Crisis stories lived in the same narrative could the

agricultural system change.

Though barriers still continued to divide the Farm Crisis from the

farmworker narrative in the UFW and FLOC’s “other America,” numerous

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400

growers did change their vision of agriculture. Despite growers’ inability to pay

for better migrant housing and pay or negotiate better deals with the Campbell

Corporation, growers refused to work with FLOC in 1978 to provide growers and

farmworkers an avenue to negotiate together with a major corporation.401 Some

growers, such as the Turnow family growing tomatoes and cucumbers, argued

Campbell would not negotiate.402 Other growers, such as Frank Meinen, saw

organized farmworkers and their supporters as a threat to their survival, arguing

they were “anti-farmer and antibusiness.”403 After FLOC’s success in numerous

tomato and pickle fields in Northern Ohio during the late 1980s, growers who

contracted with Campbell and Vlasic entered into threeparty negotiations with

farmworkers and the companies Campbell and Vlasic. Initially resisting the

intrusion of migrant influence and farmworker unions on their agricultural

practices, the three-party negotiations eventually reshaped grower/farmworker

relationships. Some Northern Ohio farmers eventually realized the financial

benefits of negotiating within grower organizations and alongside farmworkers.

Seeing greater profits and experiencing a less controlling relationship with

companies, many Northern Ohio growers realized the freedom that came with

seeing their world beyond their personal fields, where they had merely imagined

power, and instead worked alongside farmworkers to reshape the farming

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403

landscape. Yet for most of the public, the Farm Crisis and farmworkers’

struggles were two separate stories. In the 1980s Other America, Harrington

depicted the Midwest family farm as the rural “other America,” that is, the Anglo

individuals in rural communities struggling to survive against a heartless

government and agricultural system. In another chapter, Mexican and Mexican

American migrant farmworkers traveled to the Midwest, organizing with growers

against corporations, refusing to live in dilapidated houses and scratching a

meager living on land owned by growers. Two chapters. Two separate narratives.

Yet, migrant farmworkers were rural; they lived, though disconnected, in these

rural communities and made it possible for growers to make an income. Even in

the 1960s, the public struggled to come to terms with the role of the family farm

in migrant farmworkers’ lives, a struggle which became even more difficult when

so many saw the American agrarian ideal, which was so important to United

States mythos, “for sale.” Though family farms in the Midwest had long become

more industrial, growing fewer types of crops on more land using farmworkers’

labor instead of the family, the family farm continued to capture the imagination

of the public in film, books, and television, forever hiding the realities of migrant

farmworkers crouched in the fields. Instead, the families who worked the fields

and took part in the rural community on a transitory, limited basis remained

disconnected from the public imagination of farm and rural society made up of

male farmers and hardworking family members.

Concluding “Reflections on Food, Farmers, and Farmworkers”404

Though public perception did not define the 1980s as a time of protest in

regards to agriculture, the 1980s was a time of marches and tractorcades as people

demanded changes to the structure of the agricultural system.405 When FLOC

members and supporters marched from Toledo, Ohio to Camden, New Jersey in

1983, and Iowa growers and supporters marched in 1985, they joined the

agricultural revolt. However, public focus on the agricultural upheaval of the

1980s largely ignored the tie between farmworker and grower struggles against an

agricultural system that benefited only a few. Unlike the 1930s, the 1980s United

States public did not awaken to the struggles of both small growers in a system

that benefitted only large and powerful growers and corporations and the

struggles of the workers in the fields. The story of the Joad family’s struggle to

keep their farm against the power of corporations, government, and banks became

the focus of the 1980s public, instead of the Grapes of Wrath’s additional

depiction of the Joad’s struggles as farmworkers. Though shaken by the protests

and conscious raising events of the 1960s and 1970s, Midwest growers and public

404

405

support reinvigorated the agrarian mythos of the wholesome, American family

farm, which encouraged the public to ignore the role of Midwest farmworkers.

Spurred to protect the loss of the family farm against uncompassionate, unethical,

and distant grower corporations; rural communities, growers, churches, and even

labor unions, fought for the family farms’ survival. Yet hidden beneath the

picturesque image of rolling fields so important to the Midwest agrarian myth

were the racism and inhuman conditions of migrant farmworkers living on family

farms that employed the use of pesticides and the industrial reasoning so

prominent in large farms. Grower protests and concern for the welfare of the

family farm drew public attention away from the interconnected lives of Mexican

and Mexican American migrant farmworker families and the family farm.

Though still an important part of United States agriculture and rural

communities, the ideal family farm envisioned in films and public imagination

had ceased to exist, replaced by fruit and vegetable family farms developed

through the negotiations between growers and migrant farmworkers. For growers

and the public, land and the perception of the land, was an important part of the

agrarian mythos. For many vegetable and fruit Midwest growers, their landscape

reflected negotiations and conflicts over land ownership, human rights, public

perception, economics, and independence. The existence or lack of existence of

housing and bathroom facilities, the gender makeup of growers and migrant

communities, the presence of FLOC officials in migrant camps, the type of crops

grown, and the presence of children in the fields, all represented struggles

between growers, migrant farmworkers, and even government officials over the

structure of the family farm landscape. Changes in farmworker regulations,

economics, and immigration policy also contributed to the negotiating process, as

rural residents and growers came to terms with rural insiders and outsiders and

growers’ perceptions of their own independence. Though these negotiations over

the nature of the landscape established a tie between migrant farmworkers and

growers’ struggles, the narrative of migrant farmworkers in the 1980s remained

largely separate from the narrative of growers during the Farm Crisis.

Three decades after the Farm Crisis, books and documentaries now decry

pesticides in food, unhealthy diets in the United States and the world, the poverty

conditions of small growers, and the large industrial growth, harvest, and

slaughter of agricultural goods.406 Hidden beneath these narratives are the laborers

in the fields, slaughterhouses, and canneries.407 Current works and documentaries

highlight the upper echelon of the food pyramid of power, realizing the role of the

national government, corporations and international power structures in

controlling growers and, therefore, what the public eats. Few currently tie these

issues together into a cohesive story about the use and abuse of land and people,

406

407

specifically migrant farmworkers. In one of the few exceptions since FLOC’s

success with Ohio growers in the mid-1980s, the United States Conference of

Catholic Bishops specifically tied the family farm, migrants, and the land

together. The 2003 booklet, “For I was Hungry & You Gave Me Food: Catholic

Reflections on Food, Farmers, and Farmworkers,” noted that small growers

around the world deserved the right to sell their products for a fair, livable price,

the land should be treated with respect and not abused in an attempt to

industrialize agriculture, and farmworkers deserved the right to be paid livable

wages and provided decent housing.408 Despite the small voices in the wilderness

arguing for the commonality between growers and farmworkers, most growers

and farmworkers in the Midwest and the nation at-large still struggle against each

other to shape the land as the public remains oblivious to the farmworkers in the

fields.

408

CHAPTER 4

CATHOLICISM, GENDER AND AID IN THE ERA OF ACTIVISM

In 1968, Cesar Chavez ended a twenty-five day fast by taking Communion

in a massive outdoor Catholic service. Bringing attention to the striking United

Farm Workers (UFW) and their grape boycott, Chavez and the UFW made

national news after his fast and the subsequent communion that included

presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy.409 Religious leaders, including Catholic

priests, served communion to workers and politicians, marking a social and

religious change in the nation.410 The United States and Midwest public

previously saw the intersection of Catholicism, unions, Mexican and Mexican

Americans, and farmworkers with the former unionizing struggles of the

Depression, but the combination of all these elements in 1968 was notable. The

historic ties between Catholicism, Mexican Americans, and unions built the

foundation for Chavez and the UFW’s relationship with the church. Though the

United States Catholic Church’s rocky association with Mexican Americans and

unions continued even after the Church offered its support to the UFW, the

publicized tie between the Church and the Mexican American farmworker union

marked an important transition not only in California, but the Midwest.411 With

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411

Midwest Catholics, farmworker unions, and Chicanos demanding changes in the

church and in the fields, the historic ties and ideas that manifested into the

publicized endeavors of the UFW grape boycott and the Catholic Church’s

support, spread through the grape vine to the Midwest.

Realizing that the farmworker conditions in California’s grape fields

happened in their own backyards and spurred to action by new social movements,

church officials and laypersons in Midwest cities and universities became active

participants and advocates for local migrant farmworkers.412 Though numerous

churches created aid programs for migrant farmworkers, the connection between

Mexican Americans and Catholicism and the important role the Catholic Church

played in the UFW and the Midwest’s Farm Labor Organizing Committee

(FLOC), made the United States Catholic Church a key factor in the development

of services for Midwest migrants. The effects of Vatican II in Catholicism, the

Chicano Movement which generated Latino pride, the farmworker rights

movement initiated by the public attention to the UFW grape fields of California,

and the Feminist Movement in the United States, all induced

the Church to assist Mexican and Mexican American migrant farmworkers in the

Midwest. The Midwest rural landscape and urban centers became sites of

negotiation between the general public, religious organizations and individuals,

and farmworkers as each side had various opinions about the role of aid societies,

412

women, and the rights and ability of migrants to affect radical change in the

stream. Although the Midwest lay outside the Chicano and UFW centers of power

in the Southwest, these movements in addition to the Feminist Movement and

Vatican II motivated Midwesterners, especially women, to develop support

networks to empower farmworkers within the food pyramid of the Midwest. The

movements of the 1960s and 1970s brought attention to minority farmworkers

while also shaping and transforming over time religious efforts to better

farmworkers’ lives as the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s forced

negotiations over gender, ethnicity, and human rights. As farmworkers came to

the forefront of public discourse at a time of social change, Midwest Catholic

Church members’ religious beliefs, social concepts, and gender ideals shaped and

changed their understanding of the “migrant problem,” ultimately influencing the

assistance offered to farmworkers and its effect on migrants.

Vines and Signs

The 1960s and 1970s was a time of radical ideas, as men and women of

different colors and religions marched down streets with protest signs demanding

changes within the nation. In the 1960s and 1970s, minorities demanded the

freedoms and rights of the American dream denied to them because of their sex

and color. Of the various social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the Feminist

Movement encouraged women to subvert the gender norms of society while

Latinos in the Chicano Movement called for an end to inequality and proudly

identified with their cultural heritage.413 Both groups demanded change not only

within society, but also within the laws and systems of power entrenched in the

procedures of the nation and religious institutions. At the same time farmworkers

rose up to demand changes in the power structure of the agricultural system that

forced migrants to live and work in poverty conditions.414 With the popularity of

the UFW grape boycott in California spreading “through the grape vine,”

farmworkers’ living and working conditions became an issue of national concern

and debate.

Midwesterners already learned about migrants in their nearby fields after the

airing of The Harvest of Shame in 1960, but farmworker unions like the UFW

and FLOC brought farmworkers’ demands and activism to Midwesterners’

televisions, newspapers, grocery stores, and even churches.415 Due to their

concern for farmworkers, Catholics and young Chicanos in Midwest urban cities

and universities established relief efforts in the late 1950s and early

413

414.

415

1960s, and eventually took part in the UFW and FLOC boycotts in the 1960s,

1970s, and 1980s. Meanwhile, Midwest cities and entire states developed boycott

support groups as happened in 1975 Chicago when almost 700 Chicago residents

marched three miles to a Jewel grocery store to entreat the store to support the

UFW’s boycott.416 The women inspired by the Chicano and Feminist movements

to alter power relationships in the Church and society also gravitated towards

empowering farmworkers. The intersection of the UFW, Chicano, and

Feminist movements coupled with the changes of Vatican II in the Catholic

Church, altered the power structures of society as women, Mexican Americans,

Midwesterners, and migrant farmworkers protested up and down streets, on

campuses, and in front of grocery stores, demanding change in the Church, the

fields, and in society.

The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s intersected with events within the

Church to create a time of contestation and change in the United States Catholic

Church. Vatican II alongside the Feminist, UFW, and Chicano Movements

inspired various Catholic minorities to demand ideological changes in society and

the Church. Social movements encouraged students, nuns, and priests to pressure

the Church to back farmworker unions while all debated the role of gender

equality within the farmworker and Chicano struggles.417 While social movements

in the United States spurred these demands, doctrinal changes decided by Vatican

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417

leaders fueled these larger demands as the changes altered the United States

Catholic Church’s relationship with parishioners. Vatican II was an international

meeting of Catholic hierarchy that discussed and edited Catholic policy and

doctrine to make Catholicism more relevant in modern times. Some of the most

doctrinal innovations of Vatican II included Lumen Gentium, which encouraged

lay participation and involvement in mass and the church.418 Other changes

included Sacrosanctum Concilium which accepted local and ethnic practices of

Catholicism and allowed mass to be conducted in a language other than Latin, and

Guadium et Spes and Pacem in Terris which encouraged Catholics to speak out

for the basic rights of all individuals, especially the poor and abused.419 These

changes had a profound effect on women like Yolanda Tarango, who eventually

helped start Las Hermanas and extended her radicalism regarding women and

Chicano’s rights, to farmworkers’ rights. Joining a convent in the 1960s, Yolanda

experienced the changes of Vatican II, including her new-found freedom to read

about national events in Time and Newsweek. No longer secluded from the

outside world, nuns like Yolanda learned about Cesar Chavez and attended

college. For Yolanda, this meant attending Chicago’s radical Jesuit Theologate at

Loyola University.420 These changes in the Catholic Church combined with

existing and developing social movements such as the Chicano Movement, Civil

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Rights Movement, Feminist Movement, and the UFW in California, to create a

time of contesting power relationships as Chicana women and Mexican

Americans sought to empower Chicanos in the Church, Latinos in the field, and

women in society.

Church laypersons, nuns, priests, and the public’s involvement in migrant

aid programs built on the publics’ awareness of migrant farmworkers. With the

advent of the Harvest of Shame in 1960, Midwest nuns, priests, Mexican

Americans, and the general public developed programs and supported union

boycotts, all of which addressed the Midwest power structure that placed

farmworkers on the bottom. The Migrant Ministry relied on religious individuals

to provide food, clothes, and religious guidance to the families in nearby migrant

camps. A national organization, the Migrant Ministries’ state and local chapters

developed in the 1960s throughout the semi-rural Midwest communities. In

Michigan, the Migrant Ministry offered services as early as the 1920s because of

the state’s early sugar beet industry, but like other parts of the Midwest,

Michigan’s early efforts did not extend beyond food and shelter.421 Many

Midwesterners’ early efforts focused primarily on the issues that The Harvest of

Shame presented: poverty, dangerous working conditions, and migrants’ separate

living and working conditions, not the structure of the migrant stream that was the

cause of the farmworkers’ problems.

421

Pre-1970s programs offered basic assistance to farmworkers, but when the

Chicano, UFW, and Feminist Movements combined with Vatican II to partially

radicalize some Midwesterners, the Catholic Church faced public pressure to shift

their understanding of “the migrant problem,” women’s roles in the church and

society, and the rights of Chicanos. Drawing on earlier aid services for

farmworkers and on some Hispanic priests and nuns’ personal experiences in the

fields, nuns, laymen, priests, and the public attempted to alter the food pyramid.

Faced with intersecting external pressures from the largely Catholic Mexican

American farmworkers unionizing in the Midwest and in California, and internal

pressure from Chicanos and women in the church, the United States Catholic

Church had to address the poverty conditions of the predominately Catholic

farmworker population and the treatment of Mexican American and women

within the Church.422 Numerous Christian churches already offered support for

the UFW in the early 1960s, making the Catholic Churches’ hesitation to stand

alongside predominately Catholic workers as they used communion, Catholic

mass, and the Virgin of Guadalupe in marches, difficult for some in the Church to

understand.423 The general public pressured Catholic leaders to react to

farmworkers’ issues, resulting in Catholic male leaders’ taking on roles as

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negotiators or supporters of the UFW and FLOC unions while those not in

positions of authority, including women, provided more direct assistance to local

migrants. Simultaneously, the Catholic Church faced internal pressure to promote

some Mexican priests to Bishops and to ordain women.424 While early efforts

characterized concern for surface level issues, Midwest Catholics radicalized by

the social movements of the time felt Vatican II justified the church’s greater role

in farmworker unions and Chicanos’ greater role in the Catholic Church. As

Caesar Chavez’ massive outdoor communion and the Chicano movement

combined with women’s demands, Midwest Catholics developed more services to

better Midwest migrant farmworkers.

Inspired by the movements of the time, nuns in NAWR and Chicanos in

PADRES and Las Hermanas, as well as the Midwest public, all pressured the

Catholic hierarchy to change its relationship with migrant farmworkers, Mexican

Americans, and women in the church, with varying success. Change stemmed

from the time period, where people increasingly turned to activism to address

issues instead of providing assistance to deal with the symptoms of the problem.

As Raymond J. Spatti of the National Catholic Reporter aptly described, food and

clothes addressed only the symptoms, not the basic issues of migrant poverty.425

Nuns, priests, and the general public often became involved in migrant activism

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425

due to their involvement in the UFW’s Midwest boycott support groups. In

Detroit, Michigan, police arrested Reverend Joseph Melton, Sister Rose, Ricardo

Guzman, a Brown Beret, and the Michigan boycott director, Hijinio Rangel, and

his family, along with several other adults and children when they took products

off a grocery store shelf after the store owner refused to support the grape

boycott.426 The ideas of the 1970s inspired some Catholics to rethink the church’s

obligation to assist Latinos in the church and the Mexican American farmworkers

that labored in the Midwest. Priests like former migrant Patrick F. Flores became

Latino Bishops who supported farmworker rights while women like Consuelo

Covarrubias and Dolorita Martinez in the Midwest joined Las Hermanas to

demand a role for Latina nuns in the Church.427 All the while Flores, Covarrubias,

and Martinez assisted farmworker boycotts.428 Freed in some religious orders

from wearing traditional habits and staying secluded in convents, some nuns

found themselves drawn to public issues and influenced by notions of

empowerment for women, Chicanos, and the poor, translating these ideas to

farmworkers’ issues. Women in the Sisters of Humility of Mary in the Midwest

and Las Hermanas members became involved in the UFW and FLOC boycotts

because of radicalized Chicana members who extended their notions of changing

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gender and racial power dynamics to the farm power structure.429 Yet, local

Bishops and Vatican did not always consent to nuns’ greater freedoms as not all

within the Catholic Church sought changing gender power relationships within

society and the Church. The Immaculate Heart of Mary resisted their own

Archbishop James McIntyre’s control when he required they keep their strict

clothing, bedtimes, and other traditional rules that many nuns in the United States

changed after Vatican II.430 The Vatican backed the Archbishop, demanding the

nuns obey the Archbishop or leave the Church.431 Similarly, not all priests and

nuns believed unions or secondary boycotts solved farmworkers’ problems,

disagreeing with a major avenue to effect change. As the social movements of the

1960s and 1970s mobilized Catholics to support farmworker services and unions,

not everyone shared the same ideas about men, women, and migrants’ rights.

Nuns, Priests, and Tomatoes

As farmworkers came to the Midwest to work in the tomato, cucumber,

onion, and fruit fields of the 1950s and 1960s, religious and non-religious groups

developed programs to address what each group perceived as the “migrant

problem.” Catholic concern over the “migrant problem” stemmed from public

interest and characterized Midwesterners’ changing perspective of society. In

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431

Wisconsin, the once religious United Migrant Opportunity Service (UMOS) in

Milwaukee, Wisconsin became a Latino-lead organization in 1969 after local

Mexican Americans protested the lack of Latinos or former migrants in a group

created to assist Latinos and migrants.432 UMOS’ change exemplified changes in

Midwest universities as school groups in the 1950s and 1960s initially offered

basic assistance, hosting Christmas parties or providing educational assistance for

migrant children, while later programs provided Hispanics with a college or

vocational education and students organized boycott support groups. Supporting

farmworker boycotts and efforts to better Latinos’ lives characterized many

Midwesterners’ changing views of society. Newspapers like The Chicago Sun-

Times published a multi-part series in the summer of 1978 about farmworkers in

the Chicago vicinity, and state legislators started investigating and changing the

laws that dictated farmworkers’ living and working conditions, while some

religious organizations shifted focus away from clothes, food, and church

services.433 At the same time at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, young

and old occupied Chancellor J. Martin Klotsche’s office to demand Hispanic’s

right to a higher education.434 Likewise, CHANCE at Northern Illinois University

assisted minority students seeking a college education.435 At the same time,

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students began to back farmworker unions, calling for universities to stop buying

grapes, lettuce, and Campbell products. The increased concern and involvement

of the public and students in the lives of Latinos and farmworkers in the Midwest

developed from the public awareness of migrants’ conditions and the activism of

the UFW’s grape and FLOC’s Campbell boycotts.

As word of the UFW spread “through the grape vine” during the 1960s and

1970s, boycotters and the general public pressured the Catholic Church to address

farmworker issues beyond providing basic goods to migrant families. Spurred by

the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and concerned with local issues,

most Catholic migrant aid programs started in the 1960s. The Migrant Ministry

was a notable exception as the national and interdenominational Migrant Ministry

started in the 1920s in reaction to the conditions of Italian immigrant family

farmworkers on the East Coast.436 Though not a Catholic organization, the

massive and important nature of the Migrant Ministry in the UFW and FLOC

boycotts made the Migrant Ministry another important part of the Midwest tale

worth noting. The influx of Mexican American migrant workers in the Midwest

sugar beet fields spurred the creation of the statewide Michigan Migrant Ministry

in the 1920s, yet other local Midwest churches would not create state divisions

and local chapters until the 1950s and 1960s when migrant farmworkers started

436

working in other Midwest fields in large numbers.437 Like the Catholic Church,

the Migrant Ministry’s early support of the UFW in California developed into

general support for all farmworkers and farmworker unions in the Midwest.

Public support for migrant unions and farmworker services often led to the

Information of Catholic aid efforts or organizations. Traveling to the Midwest

states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana, the

large number of family units in the Midwest migrant stream contrasted sharply

with migrant streams along the West and East coasts.438 These Midwest migrant

families eventually compelled local Churches and laypersons to action as

consciousness-raising local and national events such as the UFW union and the

local FLOC and Obreros Unidos unions, encouraged groups to develop services

for the men, women, and children who labored in the fields. Religious groups

eventually offered vocational training for men and women, educational services

for children, and health and welfare assistance for the entire family. UFW boycott

networks not only radicalized Midwest locals and brought awareness to the

national struggles of farmworkers, but also resulted in support for local

farmworkers. In Indiana, the Saint Joseph County Grape Boycott Committee and

the Fort Wayne Grape Boycott Committee combined around 1970 to create the

Farm Labor Aid Committee that not only assisted farmworker boycotts, but also

437.

438

attempted to organize local workers.439 Catholic individuals developed both

Indiana boycott support groups because of local support for the UFW boycott, but

like other Midwest UFW support networks, Catholic organizations expanded their

understanding of migrants’ plight to include local farmworker’s struggle to

unionize.

Concern for migrants occurred at the same time as religious and non-

religious groups’ addressed labor, race, and gender issues, often intersecting

within the Church as Latino and women’s groups called for both outward support

for farmworkers, and internal support for Latino culture and/or women’s rights.

Numerous religious organizations developed to support Latino and women’s

issues during the 1960s and 1970s. Two Latino Catholic organizations, PADRES,

an organization of Latino priests, and Las Hermanas, an organization of Latina

lay persons and nuns, began in 1969 and 1971 respectively.440 Aside from the

Latino/a organizations, the Catholic nun organization, NARW, and the nun

organization, Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ, also began to assist farmworkers in

the late 1960s and early

1970s.441 While the Poor Handmaids did not agitate for a different relationship

between the

439

440

441

Catholic Church and women, NARW women addressed women’s lack of power

within the church and farmworker’s lack of power in the stream. Not only

national organizations in the Midwest, numerous local Catholic programs also

developed during the late 1960s and early

1970s to address the problems faced by Midwest migrant farm laborers, including

St. Paul Minnesota’s Guadalupe Area Project (GAP).36 In the Midwest religious,

social, and labor issues collided, as PADRES priests like Alberto Galagos

struggled with a racist Anglo priest in Chicago’s Holy Rosary Parish while

assisting farmworker unions, and as Tess Browne worked as a UFW boycott

organizer in Wisconsin while working with Las Hermanas to better women’s’

rights in the Catholic Church and society.37 Developing organizations to work for

betterment of society, Latino men and women saw the Church as an avenue for

change, not just for farmworkers, but for Latinos and women. Extending beyond

the Catholic Church, the Midwest public took part in religious and

Chicano organizations becoming active participants in farmworker unions,

programs targeting Latinos’ concerns, and gender equality efforts. Students not

only protested the conditions of local Latino workers in their universities, as

Notre Dame El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MeCHA) students

and local activists like Olga Villa Parra and Ricardo Parra did in reaction to the

poor pay of the largely Latino university groundskeepers and cafeteria workers

Midwest Chicano university students often went on to assist farmworker unions

and Latino community organizing, tying together the various movements as the

Midwest public, like Catholic men and women, were radicalized to change power

dynamics in society. One such interconnected example was that of José Gamaliel

González who helped start MeCHA in Notre Dame, worked as a Northwest

Indiana coordinator for the UFW boycott, and eventually formed a neighborhood

organization in Lake County.442 Outside the Church, youth often served as radical

agents of change, sometimes connecting the efforts of the Catholic Church to

other social movements.

Yet students, churches, and the general publics’ reaction to boycotts

publicized on TV and farmworkers in the field often reflected people’s gendered

perspectives as each interpreted the “migrant problem” and developed services

accordingly. Although the nationally televised UFW boycott forced Midwest

locals to acknowledge the degrading and dangerous working and living conditions

in the Midwest migrant stream, church members did not agree on the ultimate

cause of these conditions. Catholic and other Church programs in the 1950s and

1960s especially, focused on poverty conditions: providing food, clothes,

education, and medical help, often provided by women’s groups that usually were

not major members of other radical social movements of the time period. The

442

Migrant Ministry in DeKalb, Illinois arranged to provide migrants with clothing

and food.443 Similarly, seven church members in Chicago, Illinois aided

the Hermosillo family with food, clothing, and housing when an incoming

highway threatened to leave the family homeless.444 While these groups focused

on lack of food and clothes, other groups in the church and public saw the

“migrant problem” in terms of isolation. Migrants’ isolation coupled with poverty

compelled groups like the Migrant Ministry to provide movies, games, and

religious guidance, while NIU university students hosted a Christmas party for

local migrant children sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, and the Handmaids of

Jesus Christ provided medical assistance.445 Midwest service organizations’

diverse programing exemplified early groups’ understanding of the “migrant

problem.”

As social movements radicalized some churches, students, and the public’s

understanding of power relationships for minorities and women, so too did

individuals’ involvement or lack of involvement shape people’s perception of

“the migrant problem.” Womens changing role in the Migrant Ministry from its

founding in the 1920s to the Ministry’s shift to male leadership in the 1960s, led

to significant variations in the goals and services. The Migrant Ministry, though a

national organization, had statewide Migrant Ministries with local chapters made

443

444

445

up of local individuals.446 Women’s important position in the early Migrant

Ministry, starting with the Ministry’s creation by women in the 1920s to the local

women like Olga Sanchez in 1977 Edgington, Illinois and the 1970 League of

Catholic Women in Alpine County, Michigan, started to change in the 1960s.44

While the lack of overarching leadership on the national level meant that efforts

could vary significantly by state, many services initially focused on the

educational, health, and religious needs of farmworkers, essentially perceiving the

migrant problem in terms of isolation from religious institutions and abject

poverty. While the Illinois Migrant Ministry, which started no later than 1959,

had several clearly defined social programs by the mid 1960s, Illinois’ DeKalb

County Migrant Ministry initially focused in 1964 on Christian education, church

services, and family nights where volunteers provided religious and recreational

programs.45 Women served as important leaders of the Migrant Ministry’s early

aid programs in time periods largely before the era of activism.

After men came to dominate the leadership of the national Migrant

Ministry in the 1960s, Migrant Ministry programs and policies shifted to

legislation, job training, and union support.46 The switch from religious, health,

and educational services to programs that promoted changing the food pyramid

signified the changing public idea of the “migrant problem” and women’s role.

As the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s called for action and change, the

446

Migrant Ministry like other religious groups, shifted to become more active,

seeking to change the migrant stream. Yet, with public interest also came

increasing male membership as active change apparently required male leadership

while women continued to serve on the ground.447 Though women proved capable

of demanding change within other religious organizations, the changing

perception of the “migrant problem” reshaped and masculinized the Migrant

Ministry.

Not just within the interdenominational Migrant Ministry, some other

Catholic groups also assisted instead of empowering farmworkers with their

charity services. The Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ established numerous

health and educational programs including the El Centro Day Care in South Bend,

Indiana in 1969; nursing services in Marshall County, Indiana from 1968 to at

least 1977; and summer volunteer programs in Ohio and Michigan where

participants made crafts with farmworkers unable to work in the fields.448 Many

Handmaids were registered nurses, which resulted in strong attention to health

services.449 Besides doctors and professors, women’s predominance in health and

education in the twentieth century fits comfortably within traditional gender

norms, both within society and the Catholic Church. The continued focus on

education and health remained within the confines of women’s gendered roles

447

448

449

while also safely addressing outward symptoms of poverty, but never the cause.

Though the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ’s efforts continued throughout the

1960s and 1970s, no Handmaid notes or reports indicated an involvement in

farmworker unions or programs that encouraged farmworker agency, instead

accepting existing power relationships in the field, the temple, and society. While

other Catholic women’s organizations moved beyond the welfare relief, the Poor

Handmaids remained focused on addressing some of the basic symptoms of

poverty instead of migrants’ lack of power within the agricultural system.

Praying and Marching over Sour Grapes and Rotten Tomatoes

As the social movements of the era shaped the men and women of the

Midwest, assistance programs for local farmworkers began to change. Though the

social movements of the last half of the twentieth century failed to radically shape

some organizations, several other religious organizations came to understand the

“migrant problem” within the contours of gender and power norms. These groups

helped change the Midwest’s food pyramid just as they sought to alter power

relationships in society and the church in regards to gender and race. The new

ideas that encouraged change and activism in Vatican II, the Chicano Movement,

the Feminist Movement, and the UFW Movement inspired nuns, priests, students,

and laypersons to demand change within their own organizations and societies as

well as for farmworkers. Women like Olga Villa Parra and priests like Juan

Romero described moments where they heard a speaker, met a group, or read a

book that inspired them to push for change.450 Maria Elena felt a religious call to

help fellow farmworkers, first creating a dance group as a means to educate

people about farmworkers’ plight and Mexican culture; but she soon became

more active in farmworkers’ struggles, creating a UFW Service Center in Onagra,

Illinois, boycotting

Illinois grocery stores, and eventually organizing for FLOC as the 1970s and

1980s progressed.451 Maria Elena sited Olgha Sierra Sandman, the director of the

Illinois Farm Worker

Ministry, as a guide to her activism, encouraging her and even getting her

involved in FLOC.452 Like Yolanda Tarango, who went from being inspired by

articles to becoming an activist encouraged by fellow radical women, men and

women inspired the individuals they came in contact with in the fields, the

classroom, and the Church. Personal experience, in addition to religious ideology,

especially Guadium et Spes and Pacem in Terris, served as a guiding point for

Church groups, students, and laypersons’ religious involvement in the

farmworker movement; but the Chicano and Feminist Movements in addition to

farmworker unions, forced these groups to adjust their understanding of “the

migrant problem.” Inspired by the times and learning from their Midwest

450

451

452

experiences, Catholic groups like PADRES offered more than food or clothing.

PADRES, an organization of Spanish Speaking Catholic priests, provided written

support of FLOC through resolutions while also providing vocal and

organizational assistance to the UFW by arranging meetings with interested

parties to garner support for the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act.453454

PADRES also worked to improve undocumented farmworkers’ lives through

legislation.455 While PADRES’ primary goal remained providing Latinos with a

voice in the Catholic Church, the group also viewed assisting the UFW and

FLOC as critical to improving the lives of Mexican Americans within the nation,

extending their desire to change power relationships in the Church to

farmworkers.456 Father Gallegos, who worked in Chicago in the 1960s, realized

how important organizing for social justice was because of his experience

witnessing Chicago’s Civil Rights Movement.457 For other priests in the PADRES

movement, the Midwest region proved to be a source for empowerment, as

Chicago’s Saul Alinsky provided the important training for social movement

activism, which was accepted by numerous PADRES, Chicanos, and union

farmworkers like

453

454

455

456

457

UFW’s Chavez.458 While many PADRES members served in parishes outside the

Midwest, the

Midwest served as a place to gain important skills necessary to assist the

farmworkers and

Chicanos of the Midwest and nation.

PADRES’ ideology encouraged members to support farmworker unions

and Chicanos, but did not always support other ideas regarding power. As

PADRES member Reverend Juan Romero stated in an article in 1974, the church

should not just stop immorality, but seek

“authentic liberation” and end “oppressive situations.”58 For some members of

PADRES, “authentic liberation” came from their experiences meeting UFW

leader Cesar Chavez and learning about the struggles of farmworkers, ultimately

radicalizing these Latino priests.459 Despite PADRES’ progressive stance on the

“migrant problem,” the PADRES organization failed to always support gender

changes within the Church as some Catholic men disagreed with Chicanas who

saw renegotiating gendered power structures as important to society.

PADRES, while working alongside Las Hermanas for similar goals, never had a

permanent association with Las Hermanas because PADRES remained an all-

clerical and, therefore, all male group that sometimes rejected women’s rights.460

While unions and the Chicano

458

459

460

Movement motivated PADRES to demand changes in the agricultural system,

their all-clerical, all-male structure demonstrated their restricted acceptance of

changing power structures.

Seeing the stooped laborers in the fields of the United States, different

religious groups debated how best to respond to the “migrant problem,” but

consistently within the dialectic of gender and power. Organizations became more

aware of farmworker unions and altered their understanding of the “migrant

problem” because of Vatican II and the radical social movements of the 1960s

and 1970s. In providing nursing services, the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ

noted farmworkers’ desire to independently control their own medical care, pick

their doctor, pay medical bills themselves without using free vouchers, and decide

whether they could afford time off from work for a medical visit.461 Despite

recognizing this desire, some RNs took individuals to dentists and other medical

appointments to ensure they went and sometimes insisted that farmworkers follow

their dictates, essentially refusing to let farmworkers make their own

judgments.462 Similarly, the Handmaids’ El Centro Day Care in Indiana taught

citizenship and English while also celebrating the Fourth of July.463 These groups

contrasted with Catholic groups and programs such as PADRES, Las Hermanas,

and GAP that

461.

462

463

were inspired to renegotiate power for minorities or women as well as

farmworkers. While the Handmaids offered much needed medical and day care

assistance that fit within women’s gendered norms, their focus on medical and

day care help and their failure to respect farmworkers’ choices and culture

suggests they perceived the “migrant problem” as solely an issue of poverty, not a

racialized lack of power.

The patriarchal and racially based aid that assumed farmworkers’

dependency on Anglo outsiders contrasted with church efforts under PADRES,

Las Hermanas, NAWR, the national Migrant Ministry, and even Mexican

American led movements with religious ties. Initially focused on the religious

needs of farmworkers, the DeKalb County Migrant Ministry shifted to social and

economic services as the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s shaped public

perceptions of power structures.464 One of the first programs developed by the

Migrant Ministry was Family Night, which provided entertainment and religious

instructions to migrants, but later programs included job training, assistance

finding housing and jobs for migrants who wanted to leave the stream, legal

assistance for farmworkers who were cheated out of their pay, and medical and

educational help for farmworkers.465 By 1972, the DeKalb County Migrant

Ministry’s programs included: Health Services, Settling Out, Family Night,

464

465

Legislation, Child and Adult Education, Legal Aid, and a Vocational Scholarship

Fund.466 Statewide, the Illinois Migrant Ministry supported a mushroom workers’

union in Princeton, Illinois after workers initiated a strike in 1989.67 National and

local Migrant Ministries also supported the UFW and FLOC boycott.68 As the

Migrant Ministry, nationally, state-wide, and locally, supported programs meant

to better migrants’ lives, Migrant Ministry members became increasingly more

radical, assisting farmworker unions.

In addition to the interdenominational Migrant Ministry, PADRES, Las

Hermanas, and NAWR provided help to address union struggles and feminist and

Latino issues. PADRES supported UFW legislative efforts and Las Hermanas

support programs that brought Latino women together to deal with Latina female

issues such as sexuality.69 In addition, PADRES, Las Hermanas, and NAWR

continued to assist farmworker unions, including UFW and Midwest’s FLOC.

NAWR programs directly supported farmworker women’s agency and

empowerment while simultaneously assisting farmworker unions fighting the

agricultural system. Sr. Pat Drydyk, a nun paid by NAWR to directly assist the

UFW in their boycott, exemplified some NAWR members’ endorsement of

farmworkers’ self-sufficiency. Drydyk believed the agricultural system of power

should be changed, and questioned California nuns who preferred to donate and

provide temporary solutions to farmworkers’ living conditions rather than “think

466

in terms of changing the system.” Sister Drydyk, PADRES, Las Hermanas, and

some local and statewide Migrant Ministries understood the “migrant problem” in

terms of farmworkers’ lack of power, ultimately refusing temporary solutions and

instead seeking more meaningful change.

As national and regional programs and organizations provided much

needed support, locally developed efforts also provided avenues for farmworker

agency. Sister Mary Giovanni, SSND, with the assistance of other local nuns,

created the GAP in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1965.467 GAP sought “to serve people

of Mexican American ancestry who struggle to preserve their cultural heritage

while assimilating into a new culture (and) all people in need whose education

and training do not prepare them for an equal opportunity in society.”468 Sister

Giovanni acted as an important local supporter of farmworkers and argued for the

continuation and respect of Mexican culture. Contacted by other nuns, Sister

Giovanni arranged for a migrant farmworker to receive necessary medical surgery

in Minnesota and a non-agricultural job in the area that did not threaten the

woman’s recovery.469 A respected Anglo within the Latino community of St. Paul,

Sister Giovanni’s emphasis on respecting Mexican culture exemplified the

467

468

469

changes in the Catholic Church, as Latinos demanded the Church respect their

different cultures and as Vatican II provided an avenue by which the international

Church could adapt to ethnic practices.470 Sister Giovanni questioned the

hierarchy that relegated Mexican Americans and migrant farmworkers to the

bottom of the food pyramid by creating relief services that supported farmworkers

and Latino culture. Encouraging self-determination and pride in one’s culture, the

female-led GAP program, like other Catholic women’s organizations, reflected

the changes that occurred due to Vatican II, the Chicano Movement, and the

farmworker unions of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Religious groups and individuals worked both within and outside religious

organizations designed to assist migrants. Olga Villa Para, a member of Las

Hermanas, took part in both religious and non-religiously based organizations.

Parra worked as the director of the Institute for Urban Studies for the Midwest

Council of La Raza in Notre Dame University. Although Parra worked to better

all Latinos lives, she specifically continued to be actively concerned with

farmworkers, even being arrested around 1970 for refusing to leave with her

Sisters of Kalamazoo friends when they protested the local food stamp office for

refusing assistance to farmworkers who traveled to Michigan to work for a

grower that over-estimated his labor needs.471 Similarly to Parra, who labored in

470

471

Michigan and Indiana to better all farmworkers and Latinos’ lives, Tess Browne,

a Franciscan, worked in the Milwaukee UFW boycott office until she became the

Wisconsin state director of the boycott. At the same time, she worked with the

Milwaukee Justice and Peace Center, a Catholic based group in the

Milwaukee diocese.472 Browne, like Parra, worked within the worlds of the

Church and Chicano

Movement to create change for Latinos and farmworkers. The interplay of

religion, unions, the Chicano Movement, and social activism played out in a

variety of individuals’ lives from the

1960s through the 1980s, just as it had at the UFW communion rally in 1968.

While members’ involvement in the UFW, FLOC, and the Chicano or

Feminist Movements’ radicalization of some religious organizations, not all

sought to change the agricultural, social, or gender system of power. Some

groups, including NAWR, PADRES, and Las Hermanas, gave no pretense for

impartiality between farmworkers’ and growers, yet other religious groups argued

that religion should instead encourage mediation and peace. On a national scale,

the Catholic Church by way of the Bishops Ad Hoc Committee fostered

negotiations between the UFW and grape growers in the 1960s, but eventually

supported the UFW fully in the UFW’s struggle with the Teamsters Union by

1973.473 In the Midwest, the interdenominational National Council of Churches

tried to bring FLOC, growers, and Campbell’s soup, the major focus of FLOC’s

472

473

boycott, to the negotiating table.474 In reaction to this effort by the National

Council of Churches, the Catholic bishops in Ohio initially refused to support

FLOC’s boycott until negotiations failed.475 In contrast, other Churches did not

limit their role to mediators of strikes and boycotts. The interdenominational

DeKalb Migrant Ministry, one year after its creation in 1964, noted its goal was

“to create an atmosphere of friendship” between growers and farmworkers.476

Although some religious groups became staunch advocates of farmworkers’

rights to unionize, the Catholic hierarchy and other

religious groups, on both a national scale and within states, resisted early attempts

to support farmworker unions over local religious individuals.

The Catholic Church’s role as peacemaker and negotiator indicated not

only a possible lack of radicalization within the Catholic hierarchy, but also

contestation over the role of the Church in labor issues. Church leaders

understood that growers in their community were church members who did not

appreciate criticism and showed their anger by not attending church, complaining

to church leaders about local priests and nuns, and, most importantly, refusing to

donate money.477 One local priest in Napoleon, Ohio, where a Campbell Soup

factory was the “lifeblood” of the community, feared local Catholics’ reaction to

474

475

476

477

the Ohio Catholic Bishops’ recognition of FLOC’s boycott of Campbell Soup.478

Father Fred Duschl tried to mediate between the two sides, arguing that the Ohio

Bishops were correct to be concerned about farmworkers, but wrong to support

the boycott because of its effect on other Catholics.479 This priest felt caught

between powerful forces: the wealthy donations and complaints of permanent

locals; the conditions of transient, Catholic minority farmworkers; and the public

outcry for churches to help the poor.480 The division between some within the

Catholic hierarchy and the priests, nuns, and laypersons on the ground meant that,

while the church male hierarchy acted as public mediators or as verbal advocates

for unions, individuals in the

Midwest either acted as staunch migrant advocates or resisted support for local

farmworkers.

Inspired by the Chicano movement and sometimes faced with public

pressure, religious and non-religious groups by the 1970s began to listen to the

concerns and opinions of local

Latinos and migrants by having them participate in organizations. In Milwaukee,

locals pressed Chancellor Klotsche of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to

create a group to encourage and promote Latino enrollment.481 Similarly, students

478

479

480

481

in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and St. Paul, Minnesota demanded administrators listen

to Latino concerns.482 Outside schools, Madison, Wisconsin leaders faced

pressure from local Latinos and the farmworker group UMOS, when farmworkers

and Latinos took over a Wisconsin governor’s session in 1972 to demand the

governor listen to the concerns and issues of migrants and promote direct change

to the food pyramid rather than working through his ineffective Committee on

Migratory Labor.483 Father James Groppi endorsed UMOS’ strategy, though

radical, to pressure the Governor to give migrants a voice in a system that

controlled their lives, which Father Groppi argued was important.484 Interestingly,

Anglo religious individuals initially formed UMOS, ignoring local Latinos’

concerns until local Latinos demanded a voice in the organization in 1969.485

Throughout the Midwest, the surge of Midwest Latino activism forced some state

and religious organizations to address the actual problems faced by farmworkers

and Latinos, not an outsiders’ perception of the problems.

Though pressure forced some to acknowledge the voice of migrants and

Latinos, other organizations willingly accepted migrants’ ability to change their

own lives. The Illinois Migrant Council initiated within their constitution a

482

483

484

485

position for local migrants to participate in the programs meant to assist them.

The Illinois Migrant Council (IMC) began in 1966 after the

Bishop’s Committee for the Spanish Speaking, the Catholic Council of Working

Life, the Illinois Council of Churches, and the Church Federation of Greater

Chicago created the organization.486 The IMC’s by-laws provided migrants and

former-migrants a percentage of representative seats on local and state

committees.487 The IMC’s acceptance of migrants’ role in the organization proved

abnormal as most religious groups failed to provide farmworkers a voice in

organizations designed to assist them, categorizing the “migrant problem” as best

understood and solved by outsiders. Few Catholic groups included farmworkers

in their organizations with the exception of some ex-farmworker PADRES and

Las Hermanas members. Non-Catholic groups also ignored farmworkers, such as

the early UMOS organization and the DeKalb County Migrant Ministry, which in

1972 had only a few members with Spanish surnames.488 The inclusion or

exclusion of migrants or migrant representatives in religious groups exemplified

the extent of religious organizations’ radicalization.

For one organization, the Migrant Ministry, the lack of farmworker

representation and the relative autonomy of locals led to significant difference of

opinion between locals and the national organization. Although the national

486

487

488

Migrant Ministry established goals in 1960 that included increased education and

vocational training, putting an end to the Bracero Program, and maintaining

“responsible and democratic organizations for economic and self help,” the

Migrant Ministry had no overarching control on local ministries.489 An example of

local ministries’ ability to counter national Migrant Ministry policy occurred in

Van Buren County, Michigan when the local Ministry denied farmworkers the

use of the Migrant Ministry building for labor organizing purposes.490 After

changing their minds several times, the state-level Michigan Migrant Ministry

criticized the Van Buren County Ministry for failing to assist farmworker

unions.491 While the social movements of the time period influenced the DeKalb,

Illinois Migrant Ministry members to support FLOC and the UFW, Van Buren

members refused to support farmworker unions. Van Buren members’ lack of

concern for farmworker power mirrored the lack of farmworker representatives in

Van Buren’s Migrant Ministry. Contesting ideas on the “migrant problem”

coupled with the lack of migrant farmworker representation in aid societies

limited the reach of services and revealed the inconsistencies of the 1960s and

1970s, as social movements motivated individuals to better migrants’ conditions,

but not to change society.

489

490

491

Midwesterners’ complicated understanding of the “migrant problem”

meant that even when organizations accepted farmworkers’ right to have a voice,

not all understood Latinos and farmworkers’ pre-existing agency in their own

lives. In the Conference of Major Superiors of Women in 1970, individual nuns

offered various prayers; while some called for Bible classes or the UFW’s

success, others prayed “that Anglos will help develop leadership programs for the

Spanish speaking and the migrant,” or “that the migrant will be helped to take a

greater share in his development.”492 Considering that the existence of the UFW,

FLOC, the little known and short lived Obreros Unidos union in Wisconsin, and

random strikes in Illinois and elsewhere in the nation were all started by former

and current migrant farmworkers, Mexican and Mexican American migrants

proved capable leaders without Anglos’ guidance.493 In addition, PADRES and

Las Hermanas helped to develop Latino/a leadership through programs that

instituted cultural pride while groups like MeCHA developed programs at Notre

Dame on Chicanos’ identity and Latinos in Milwaukee and Minneapolis

demanded universities make efforts to increase Latino enrollment and establish

Latino Studies programs, all exemplifying Latinos’ leadership and organizational

skills.494 The blatant perception of migrant farmworkers as being in need of Anglo

guidance characterized the lack of farmworker representation in organizations

492

493

494

created to assist farmworkers and the continued racism that limited change in the

Catholic

Church and society.

Equality in the Temple and the Fields

The Feminist Movement, the Chicano Movement, and the UFW and FLOC

impelled some religious women to question agricultural power structures just as

they questioned patriarchal power structures. Vatican II and the Chicano

Movement brought increasing questions about the structure of power within the

church and society at large. For the women in and outside the Catholic Church,

these questions extended to women’s position within the Church, the fields, and

the social movements of the era. The variety of migrant services from female-

dominated or female led organizations exemplified the variety of opinions

regarding women’s traditional roles as nurturers or women’s new position as

agents of change. Earlier women’s aid societies, such as the Migrant Ministry and

Handmaids of Jesus Christ, were largely uninfluenced by the social movements of

the time, working within gendered norms and existing power structures. Based on

women’s position as caretakers, the women who established the Migrant Ministry

and the nuns in Handmaids of Jesus Christ provided basic assistance to migrant

farmworkers. Though based within traditional gendered norms, the Handmaids of

Jesus Christ’s successfully offered farmworkers aid because of their gendered

positions as nurses and teachers. Many Handmaids trained as registered nurses, a

largely female occupation, allowing handmaids to provide medical assistance as

they embraced the gendered depiction of women as caregivers. Not just in

Churches, the UFW and FLOC boycotts relied on women protesting outside

grocery stores and refusing to buy grapes, lettuce, and Campbell’s products.495

Employing women’s reproductive labor as family caretakers and cooks, women

organizers and protesters tried to connect with local women shopping in grocery

stores to encourage them to join the boycott. Inside and outside the temple,

gender influenced the type of assistance offered to migrant farmworkers as

charity organizations and unions capitalized on women’s gendered roles and their

ties to other women.

Employing women’s “natural” position as caregiver, the Migrant Ministry

served as an example of employing women’s natural role to solve the “migrant

problem,” yet numerous other women’s groups worked within and outside these

caregiver ideals to improve migrants’ lives. Women who believed it was

important to empower migrants just as they themselves felt empowered by social

movements, had no official power within the Catholic Church to provide the

vocal and written recognition so desired by the UFW and FLOC, instead focusing

495

on handson active participation to effect change.496 Similarly to Sister Mary

Giovanni starting GAP in

St. Paul, Minnesota to help local Latinos and farmworkers, other women like

Irene and Molly

Muñoz successfully got their local sisters to back farmworker unions.497 Women

like Olga Villa Parra in Michigan and Tess Browne in Wisconsin tied their farm

labor activism in with their preexisting activism. Tying together their work in

Indiana and Wisconsin respectively, Olga Villa Parra and Tess Browne, both

members of Las Hermanas, also assisted farmworker unions by serving in the

Midwest Council of La Raza and working as a leader of the Milwaukee and

Wisconsin state boycott offices, respectively.498 Working within women’s

traditional roles as nurturers, both women also exemplified their growing personal

strength as women and the ideals of the Chicana and Feminist movement as they

led organizations.

Mobilized by the movements of the time to change the patriarchal power

structure, Las Hermanas, a national organization of Latino nuns and laywomen,

also demanded greater equality for women and Latinos in the Catholic Church

and in society at large. The Chicano

496

497

498

Movement, farmworker boycotts, and Vatican II radicalized Chicana religious

women in the 1960s and 1970s. Yolanda Tarango began to learn about the

Chicano movement and the UFW from newspaper and journal articles she read

while she was a novice. Already thrilled by what she read, she met more radical

and inspiring ideas and individuals when she went to school in Chicago.

Motivated by the new yet fringe theological ideas that encouraged equality for

women and Chicanos in the church and society, Yolanda helped start Las

Hermanas, supported farmworker boycotts, and took part in protests during

ordinations to challenge women’s lack of power in the Church.499 Las Hermanas

members like Yolanda fought to better Catholic

Mexican American women’s experience in the Catholic Church, including

arguing that the Church should respect and properly pay Mexican nuns who were

forced to work as domestics in rectories.500 Las Hermanas members tied together

the ideals of feminism, Chicano identity, and the labor rights ideals developed by

farmworker unions to demand a better life for

Chicanos, women, and migrants.

Not just radicalized to better women’s position in the church and society,

Las Hermanas assisted farmworker unions, using their newsletter Informes to

inform and update other Las Hermanas members of FLOC and the UFW.501 Many

499

500

501

Las Hermanas members consistently appealed to the Catholic Church and

Catholic groups to respect farmworker unions by protesting, walking out, and

demanding non-union foods be banned from various religious women’s

conferences.502 Two members, Irene and Molly Muñoz, convinced their local

sisters to take an active stance in the farmworker boycotts. Irene and Molly,

sisters who both entered the Sisters of Humility of Mary in the Midwest,

struggled to convince all their Catholic sisters to take a stand on farmworker

unions and not be concerned about disturbing the “status quo.”503 Members like

the Muñoz sisters even demanded the removal of a Campbell Soup ad in the

Catholic Directory in 1981.504 Influenced by the Feminist and Chicano

Movements of the time, and encouraged by the changes enacted in Vatican II, Las

Hermanas members demonstrated alternate ideas of power, demanding the

Church listen to women and the migrants in the fields.

The women of Las Hermanas combined the ideologies of migrant

farmworkers’ struggles, Catholic Mexican Americans, and women into a cohesive

set of ideals that empowered farmworkers, Latinos, men, and women. They called

for an end to racism within the Catholic Church and specifically within their

religious institute, but they did so by not only addressing lack of representation or

programs for Mexican Catholics, but also by addressing the labor rights of

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504

Mexican American Catholic nuns, the rights of women in general, and the

struggles of the Church’s Mexican American constituents: striking farmworkers.

Combining issues of gender, labor, and power, Las Hermanas members refused to

be subjugated by Catholic men, including PADRES members. In a letter sent to

PADRES, Las Hermanas members argued in 1973 that they would continue

“peaceful co-existence” with PADRES as long as PADRES did not interfere with

Las Hermanas’ efforts to help their people.505 A debate at Las Hermanas’ National

Encuentro revealed that some Las Hermanas members felt held back by PADRES

members, that PADRES did not support the “struggle of [their] people,”

PADRES failed to work cooperatively with Las Hermanas, and PADRES

members failed to place themselves within any major Catholic group that could

influence national religious politics.506 Las Hermanas’ empowerment of women

and Latinas in the Church extended to their work with farmworkers as Tess

Browne became one of the few female UFW boycott leaders to manage an entire

state boycott and Olga Villa Parra labored in the Midwest Council of La Raza in

Indiana. The ideas that developed out of social movements inspired the women of

Las

Hermanas to demand the Church and society listen to the issues of Chicana

women.

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506

Working alongside Las Hermanas, NAWR members in the Midwest and

the nation at large, in addition to other non-Latino religious women, worked to

change the agricultural, gender, and social power structures that relegated

minorities, women, and farmworkers to poverty. Nuns and laywomen became

involved in the UFW and FLOC boycotts because of their increasing awareness

of the farmworker cause, encouraging others to see the issues of farmworkers.

NAWR encouraged the activism of nuns and other religious women in

farmworker issues, establishing a committee totally focused on farmworkers, as

well as having a paid staff member, Sister Pat Drydyk.507 Drydyk worked full-

time to promote and work on the UFW boycott and encouraged other nuns to also

support farmworkers, not just in the way of food and used clothes, but in

changing the food pyramid. Like numerous Las Hermanas members and the

Illinois and Michigan Migrant Ministry, Pat Drydyk and some of her NAWR

allies realized that the early charity efforts to feed and clothe migrants did not

address the real problem. While migrant unions like UFW and FLOC petitioned

for religious support, women like Pat Drydyk believed women had the power to

support farmworkers’ unionizing efforts.

NAWR leaders desired “to challenge and mobilize sisters to live out the gospel

values they espouse through active participation in the struggle of the

farmworkers in this county.”508

507

508

Similarly, Sister Giovanni of St. Paul, Minnesota saw empowerment as important

for Latinos. Likely influenced by her labor-organizing father, Sister Giovanni

encouraged pride in Mexican culture and provided assistance to farmworkers in

the St. Paul, Minnesota area through GAP.509 Though outside the Chicano

Movement, some of the women of NAWR and Sister Giovanni understood their

religious charge in terms of changing an unjust system by mobilizing religious

and public support for Chicano culture and agency.

NAWR, Las Hermanas, and GAP’s efforts to alter the agricultural system

of power often tied directly or indirectly to gender roles and Chicano identity,

exemplifying the influence and intersection of various social movements of the

last half of the twentieth century. Vatican II, the Chicano Movement, and the

Feminist Movement led NAWR members to stand by Las Hermanas and demand

the Catholic Church ordain women and give minority women a greater position in

the church.114 Though unsuccessful in getting the Catholic Church to accept

women’s leadership roles, NAWR empowered farmworkers not just through

unionizing, but also by expanding the rights and freedoms of farmworkers

through female migrants’ empowerment. Sister Drydyk, like the Las Hermanas

members, Irene and Molly Muñoz, criticized nuns and laywomen who focused

solely on “band-aid” solutions, food and clothing.

509

To do more than “band-aid” programs, the Camp Health Aid Program

(CHAP), established in 1985, instituted medical training for farmworker women

to become health counselors who

provided non-emergency medical care and guidance to farmworkers traveling

between Texas and Michigan.510 This program encouraged female farmworker

agency by giving some women the training to better farmworkers’ lives and even

ultimately “empowering” these farmworker women to continue their own medical

education.511 The CHAP program gave women the means to potentially leave the

migrant stream, if they desired, or stay within the stream and act as a respected

and important member within the migrant community. The CHAP program also

provided some traveling migrant communities with the ability to help themselves

as these traveling communities no longer had to rely on the dictates and ideas of

Anglo charity. The CHAP program especially characterized some Catholic

women’s efforts to support Chicanos’ struggles to gain respect and equality in

society.

Religious women’s groups consistently pushed religious women to

confront the agricultural system as radical women sought to empower all

minorities and Catholics, especially women, through unions and other avenues of

empowerment. Sister Giovanni in St. Paul, Minnesota, while not focused solely

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on women or farmworker issues, established along with fellow nuns, services that

encouraged agency and activism for Latinos. The program she established,

Guadalupe Area Project or GAP, helped farmworkers like Mrs. Fields find

nonagricultural jobs and local housing when her health did not permit her to

continue working in the fields.512 In addition, GAP built on the Guadium et Spes

and Pacem in Terri’s teachings of Vatican II and the Chicano Movement by

encouraging respect for Latino culture and fighting society’s attempts to

“Americanize” Latinos. GAP did not offer specific programs that

addressed gender rights and roles, yet Sister Giovanni’s approach in GAP went

well beyond the traditional woman’s role, encouraging and taking a stance to

promote activism and agency among farmworkers and Latinos. The ideological

stance of some religious women’s organizations meant having programs that

empowered women and farmworkers to change the system of power.

Not only within the Catholic Church, gender and social movements also

influenced Midwestern youth. The social movements of the era fueled student

activism in universities with organizations, conferences, protests, and centers

established to investigate, discuss, educate, and demand change. In Catholic

universities such as Notre Dame, students like Gilbert Cardenas and Jose

Gamaliel Gonzalez and Olga Villa Parra started MeCHA.513 At the University of

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513

Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Chicanos in the area protested the university’s lack of

Mexican students in the school.514 Programs such as the week long Chicano Week

at Notre Dame also included a pre-event entitled “Las Mujer Chicana” focused

specifically on women’s issues in society and the Chicano Movement.515 The

efforts of college students in universities around the Midwest demonstrated the

influence of social movements on the youth of the

Midwest.

While priests and nuns at Notre Dame University encouraged Chicano and

non-Chicano students to get involved in the Chicano Movement and union

boycotts, social activism tied with religious ideology to shape other students’

lives.516 Chicano students reacted to the combination of their religious background

and the vibrant activism they encountered in the Midwest, as individuals became

involved in groups like MeCHA, Brown Berets, and OLAS. Magda Ramírez-

Castañeda of Chicago noted a priest, Father Jim, who provided support for

undocumented immigrants, was arrested for working with local unionists

alongside several nuns. This priest's activism and his argument that women could

change the system of power encouraged Magda’s personal feminist ideology.517

For Yolanda Tarango, the Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago connected her

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517

with more radical ideologies and individuals. During her time at the Jesuit School,

Yolanda met Etna Kennedy, the first president of NAWR, and Sister Marjorie

Tuite, a future activist for social justice issues, all the while attending a Jesuit

school so radical that the local Catholic leaders hid the Jesuits from the Pope when

he came to the city.518 Universities and churches became sites to spark youth to

action, questioning religious and gender norms.

However, not all religious groups and student groups acknowledged

farmworkers’ power struggles or the role of gender, church hierarchy, and race

relations in Latino’s struggles. Chicano youth at the University of Minnesota, like

other universities around the nation, became involved in groups like the Brown

Berets or MeCHA in Notre Dame where students supported farmworker boycotts,

demanded the University of Minnesota’s administrators create a Chicano Studies

Program, and supported Latino university groundskeepers’ demands for better

pay. Yet for some women like Yenelli Flores of Chicago, Illinois, the Chicano

Movement ignored Latina women’s concerns because not all those radicalized by

social movements believed in focusing on women’s rights.519 Flores described her

and her friend Magda’s dislike for some of the macho attitudes of some Chicano

members in the Midwest and the nation. Flores recalled female Chicana students

confined to cooking tacos in the University of Chicago’s Organization of Latin

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519

American Students (OLAS) group.520 In the Church, Las Hermanas members met

hesitation by PADRES members to financially assist Hermanas member’s

participation in the Women’s Ordination Conference, likely due to some

PADRES members’ disinterest in women’s ordination.521 The different

experiences of activist religious women and youth characterized the contested

understanding of hierarchy, rights, patriarchy, and gender in the churches,

schools, fields, and general public of the Midwest.

While organizations like NAWR and Las Hermanas and individual

Chicanas in the Midwest consistently questioned the role of migrant farmworkers

and women in society, many continually met resistance. Las Hermanas and

NAWR, like several other Catholic women’s groups in the 1960s and 1970s,

questioned gendered division of labor, women’s subordination, and the position

of the Catholic Church in social movements. Las Hermanas members’ refused to

be subjugated to the kitchen by some PADRES members who relegated them to

traditional gender norms instead of treating them as equals in the fight for

Chicano rights in the Church and in the fields. In demanding PADRES accept

them as equals and insisting on women’s rights in the stream and in the Church,

Las Hermanas and NAWR members questioned the male hierarchy and insisted

that women’s rights be part of both the fight for farmworkers and minorities. In

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521

1972, Las Hermanas worked alongside PADRES to create the Mexican American

Cultural Center (MACC) that educated priests and laypersons about Hispanic

culture and faith and sought to empower the Chicano poor to “direct their own

destinies.”522 PADRES and Las Hermanas’ MACC relationship was strained as

early as the late 1970s, but by 1980 Las Hermanas board members considered

boycotting MACC because of some of PADRES’ actions, including choosing Las

Hermanas’ representative on the MACC board instead of allowing Hermanas to

choose their own representative.523 Later on, PADRES forced out the

Las Hermanas representative on the MACC board of directors and forced out or

fired other Las Hermanas members who taught at MACC because of the their

strong feminist ideologies.524 A future attempt to work in MACC in 1983 by a

strong feminist Las Hermanas member, Yolanda Tarango, had a similar ending.525

Though sharing similar concerns and ideologies regarding the agricultural power

structure, Catholic women still faced resistance from the patriarchal structure of

the Catholic Church.

As several PADRES members relegated women to supporting roles based

on gender norms, they demonstrated not only a set of ideologies within the

Catholic Church, but also Mexican and Mexican American society. The Cursillo

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525

Movement was a Mexican American male-centric religious revival where

Mexican American men, who were traditionally less religious than women,

became closer to the Catholic faith by focusing on a more masculine type of

Catholicism.526 Many went through this program, including some PADRES

members and the UFW’s leader, Cesar Chavez.527 The emphasis on masculine

religion arguably compounded masculine ideas that ignored women’s role in the

Catholic Church. PADRES’ acceptance of an all male structure of power in the

church exemplified their approach to farmworkers as they supported efforts to

empower farmworkers through official structures usually dominated by men, such

as unions, and failed to work with feminist nuns demanding greater equality in the

Catholic Church. Some Las Hermanas members noted that in joint meetings with

PADRES some PADRES members insisted that Las Hermanas members cook

and clean.528 PADRES’ support for hierarchical and gendered structures was also

exemplified by the inclusion of only clerical persons. While Las Hermanas

allowed laywomen to be in the Las Hermanas leadership in 1976, PADRES

remained an all-clerical group, maintaining men’s influence and power as women

could not be ordained.529 While PADRES sought to empower farmworkers and

Mexicans in the Catholic Church, they reaffirmed traditional gender norms and

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527

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power structures based within Catholic and Mexican American social structures

and religious ideology.

The traditional gender norms within the farmworker movement, the

Catholic Church, and even the Chicano Movement within the Midwest influenced

the involvement of men and women in the farmworker movement as some

excelled beyond traditional gender norms while others felt trapped. For women in

Las Hermanas, Notre Dame or UW-Madison’s MeCHA group, or for NAWR

members, gendered norms motivated their activism and involvement within the

UFW or FLOC boycott.530 While Tess Browne and Olga Villa Parra had certain

leadership positions, most other women struggled to be respected. Maria Elena

Ortega argued that she felt mistrusted by FLOC leader Baldemar Velasquez when

she organized with FLOC in the mid 1980s, making her feel unwelcome in the

organization despite believing in the union’s efforts.531 Ortega also argued that

she felt discouraged by Chavez and Velasquez from organizing Illinois

mushroom workers, essentially discouraging her from taking a major organizing

role.532 In contrast to Ortega’s experience that discouraged women’s active

position, some female Mexican American were encouraged to vocalize women’s

rights and women’s experiences. A two-week “Chicano Week” event in 1975

occurred after a Chicana week entitled “Las Mujer Chicana,” sponsored by the

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531

532

student group MeCHA at Notre Dame.533 Women’s experiences in the last half of

the twentieth century illustrated the different forces that discouraged and

encouraged women’s participation within the Chicano Movement, FLOC, the

Catholic Church, and the general public. Different perceptions of women’s power

and the Catholic Church’s refusal to ordain women perpetuated public and

farmworker unions’ underappreciated view of women as the UFW and FLOC

focused on gaining recognition from the official church hierarchy, ignoring

women’s positions as educators and respected Catholics.534

While organizations like Las Hermanas, NAWR, Handmaids of Jesus

Christ, and the Sisters of Humility of Mary in the Midwest supported

farmworkers in the fields and in the picket line, women’s lack of authority and

power in the Catholic Church meant women did not have the authority

farmworker unions sought. Authority meant unions could legitimate their cause

with the backing of local, state, and national religious groups that spoke on behalf

of their church. As Chavez once noted: “I go to unions for publicity and money;

to the Church for respectability; to students for bodies.”535 Religious women like

Dolorita Martinez of Las Hermanas, though important, did not provide the

legitimacy or respectability that UFW and FLOC publically sought, especially

since religious women’s groups like Las Hermanas worked outside the Catholic

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bureaucracy because women had no official position in the male dominated

church. As farmworker unions sought public support from Catholic leaders sitting

in committee rooms, Catholic women who wanted to support migrants changing

the power structure of society, used their hands and voices to enact radical change

on the ground just as they did in other social movements. The structure of the

Catholic hierarchy coupled with unions’ use of boycotts that emphasized public

support, encouraged the subjugated women’s public roles in affecting change.

Planting and Reaping the Seeds of Change

The 1960s to 1970s era of activism influenced the logistical, financial, and

moral support farmworkers received. The interdenominational Migrant Ministry,

especially, offered much needed financial and logistical assistance to farmworker

unions, while the Catholic Church offered moral support for migrants.536 The

Catholic Church and its members offered legitimacy to the union cause.

University students radicalized by the Chicano, Civil Rights, and Feminist

Movements created an army of farmworker union allies. At Notre Dame, a

Catholic University, a student boycott group convinced enough students to vote

for the university to boycott Campbell products.537 In addition, the university

encouraged discussions on social issues, creating among other things a class that

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537

included guest speakers such as Jesus Salas, the leader of the Wisconsin

farmworker union, Obreros Unidos.538 Catholic grade schools, not just

universities, also played an important part in the FLOC boycott. The support of

Catholic nuns resulted in grade schools’ refusal to take part in the Campbell’s

“Labels for Education” financial program, as schools refused to accept money

from a company that exploited its workers.539 Catholic assistance also lifted the

spirits of strikers as both FLOC and UFW marches and events included prayers,

Lady of Guadalupe banners, and communion.540 Migrants and Campbell felt that

Catholics’ support was so important that Campbell desperately tried to receive

Catholic recognition and publicized any Catholic group or individual that spoke

out against unionization.541 With the moral and boycott assistance of the Catholic

Church and nuns, FLOC successfully created the first three-party negotiations

between growers, farmworkers, and a company; while at the same time the UFW

successfully unionized

California grape workers and educated the public about farmworker conditions.

In addition to providing moral support, female members of the Catholic

Church also served as a point of contact for migrants’ interactions with the

feminist movement as religious women often worked on the ground to enact

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541

change. Radical Latinas in Las Hermanas, boycott leaders like Tess Browne, and

other strong-willed women in Catholic groups like NAWR offered Mexican and

Mexican American migrant women examples of women who defied gender

norms. These ideas dovetailed into the type of union created by farmworkers, as

FLOC encouraged all family members to take part in the union and as one of the

most well known leaders of the UFW was a woman, Dolores Huerta.542 Las

Hermanas, though originally led by a president and vice-president, shifted to a

more egalitarian organization with three voted to colead the organization,

including in 1972 Consuela Covvarubias from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.543

Notions of empowerment and egalitarianism empowered some farmworker

women, such as Maria Elena Ortega, as they became active members of the union

and adopted some feminist ideology.544 Maria remembered a nun who worked

with FLOC and fought for women to be treated with respect and humanely within

the union, fighting in one instance for Maria’s need to miss a meeting for health

reasons.545 Olgha Sandman, the female leader of the Illinois Farm Worker

Ministry, inspired Maria to actively take part in farmworker unions.546 These

inspirations led Maria Elena to push gender boundaries by organizing in the fields

for FLOC. At the same time women also used their traditional gendered roles to

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support organizing, such as Maria Elena making tamales, tostadas, and taquitos to

help draw people to meetings demanding the Catholic Church provide the

Mexican American residents of Onarga with a church of their own.153 Latina

farmworkers encountered feminist ideology through Las Hermanas, other

Catholic women’s organizations, and even farmworker unions that were

influenced by the social movements of the era.547

Despite Catholic and farmworker women’s attempts to effect change in the

fields and the Church, women met with resistance as power structures continued

to support masculine power and gender norms. While some religious orders and

bishops accepted women’s position in social movements, such as Tess Browne’s

role as the UFW boycott director in Wisconsin, other local Bishops forced women

like Sister Rosa Martha Zárate, who created a religious selfdetermined

community in San Diego, to resign and leave the church.548 In the Midwest, Maria

Elena felt Baldemar Velasquez, the leader of FLOC, did not have confidence in

female organizers’ abilities, and Maria also met resistance by her local priest for

trying to organize and better her fellow farmworkers’ lives.549 Similarly, Yolanda

Tarango met resistance from the Catholic Church in Chicago when her and her

fellow female activists stood up during men’s ordination ceremonies to shout “I

am ready and willing” when the men being ordained were to say the words,

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549

disrupting the service to protest the Church’s refusal to ordain women.550 Local

officials eventually made the ceremonies private and hired police to block the

nuns from handing out fliers and protesting outside the private chapels, but local

officials faced public scrutiny for arresting women who were peacefully

protesting outside a church.551 Women like Tess Browne who had leadership roles

and the prominent position of Dolores Huerta in the UFW offered migrants

examples of changing gender dynamics. However, migrants also had examples of

women facing resistance to their activism as people within the Church, public,

and migrant stream negotiated how notions of women’s power and Chicano rights

fit within farmworker rights. Female activist youths faced resistance as Chicano

student movements often silenced female dissent, arguing that Chicana arguments

were an Anglo-inspired divisive strategy, essentially pushing Chicana feminists to

either ignore women’s issues or be considered by some male and female Chicanos

as a destructive force within the organization. Yet, the silencing of Chicana

feminists in Las Hermanas and universities meant that migrants had few such

examples of women in leadership, instead most of the women in aid programs and

within Midwest unions struggled to gain respect and sometimes left programs,

unions, or religious groups after continued problems. Other women in the field

and in the temple continued to face resistance to their feminist ideology, though

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many continued to persevere and inspire others. For migrant women in the field,

the experiences of female leaders in the Church and union exemplified the

tenuous rights of women who resisted the hierarchical male power structures in

the union, in the Catholic Church, and in society.

While some of the assistance programs developed in the Midwest

characterized developing notions of feminism, labor rights, and civil rights,

farmworker aid also characterized conflicting notions of agency and power.

While several groups supported labor organizing, many still relegated migrants to

the secondary role when it came to decisions. Limited migrant input in Migrant

Ministries in Michigan and Illinois, as well as the prayer for Anglo guidance to

struggling Latinos, indicated a general perception that Anglo outsiders had to

enact change.552 The use of boycotts by Midwest and national unions only

strengthened the image of Anglos as agents of change and migrants as passive

subjects seeking Anglo assistance. Very few farmworkers or ex-farmworkers had

leadership roles in organizations meant to assist them. This meant that while

programs provided important services their methods did not always benefit

migrants, as was the case with the El Centro Day Care Poor Handmaid’s daycare

service where migrant children learned to become good Americans.

Farmworkers needed to have input on services to ensure that programs truly

helped. In one example, Wisconsin’s La Raza established an English language

552

program that few ex-migrants attended. Only after talking with the migrants did

they learn that migrants preferred to learn English, since this was a skill that

would help them leave the stream.553 No such encounter or discussion exists in

other program records. The hierarchical and racial based power structure of some

organizations meant leaders made the decisions on how to define and solve “the

migrant problem,” ultimately failing to work with migrants to provide some of the

assistance farmworkers actually needed.

Social movements of the 1960s and 1970s shaped the religious, gendered,

and social perspectives of organization members, influencing the variety of

programs Mexican and Mexican American migrant farmworkers found in the

Midwest. While 1950s and early 1960s organizations such as the Migrant

Ministry focused on providing needed basics and religious services, future

Migrant Ministry programs and services by organizations, such as NAWR and

Las Hermanas, empowered farmworkers to change their lives. The social

movements of the 1960s and 1970s radicalized the public’s understanding of

power, gender, and ethnicity. Yet the different composition of organizations, the

changing influence of various social movements, and the different gendered and

ethnic composition of organizations led to a variety of services that exemplified

the beliefs of the organizations’ members rather than the actual needs of

farmworkers in the area. The Handmaids’ medical assistance to farmworkers

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exemplified their interest in providing assistance to farmworkers using their

medical knowledge. While the Handmaids’ efforts helped farmworkers, other

groups like NAWR’s CHAP gave basic medical training to farmworker women to

specifically empower female farmworkers so they could

assist each other without the assistance of Anglo outside groups. The

organizations of the 1960s through the 1980s, though influenced by the social

movements of the mid twentieth century, were still influenced by traditional,

racial, and gendered interpretations of society, resulting in services that

sometimes offered minimal assistance to farmworkers.

Dead Vines and the End of Aid

Aid programs in and outside the Catholic Church developed during an era

of activism and awareness. Various groups within the Catholic Church reacted

differently to the struggles of migrants, viewing the struggle of migrants in terms

of the Harvest of Shame with its issues of poverty or the UFW which attacked

migrants’ lack of power within the system. For those influenced by the notion of

empowering migrants, especially women, the social movements of the era also

tied notions of women’s rights and Chicano rights to the notion of changing the

power structure of the migrant stream. Yet not all within the Catholic Church or

society accepted the combination of these social movements with the movement

for change in the stream, resulting in negotiations about how much the issues of

women and Chicanos interacted with migrants’ position in the stream. As

members of the Catholic Church interacted with the Midwest public and social

movements of the era, each aid group decide whether they would offer basic aid

that failed to address migrants’ position on the bottom of the food pyramid, or aid

that supported farmworkers’ empowerment. The form of aid often characterized

the makeup of the organizations, as groups that ignored the voices of migrants

often ignored migrants’ position at the bottom of the food pyramid, while groups

involved in social movements, especially women’s groups interested in gender

equality, often wanted to restructure power dynamics for farmworkers, Chicanos,

and even women. Yet the public activism and awareness that resulted in this time

of aid, no matter the form, made aid tied to public sympathy. As public interest

and sympathy for migrants, women, and Chicanos faded away in the 1980s and

1990s, so too did the momentum for change. The ultimate result was a moment of

major assistance in the form of food, shelter, clothing, and empowerment that had

important ramification, but did not continue to leave a lasting impact on migrants

in the stream.

As the twentieth century drew to a close, the social movements that shaped

Midwesterners, Latinos, farmworkers, and Catholics’ perceptions of society came

to end just as the geography of the Midwest stream shifted. The fervor of concern

for workers that started in the 1960s, alongside unions and civil rights movements

dissipated in the 1980s and 1990s. The tomato growers who drew migrant

laborers to DeKalb, Illinois for several months throughout the 1960s and 1970s

decreased in number as farmworker regulations and economics encouraged

growers to switch to corn.554 In Ohio, some growers changed to crops that

required almost no laborers to avoid the FLOC union.555 Lack of apathy forced the

DeKalb Migrant Ministry to close in the 1980s as fewer farmworkers came to the

region by the 1980s. Similarly, local efforts to provide minimal help to

farmworker children through summer education programs or donations of food

and clothing, as in DeKalb, Illinois, ceased. Throughout much of the Midwest,

fewer growers grew the vegetables and fruits typically harvested by migrants

while mechanization reduced migrant numbers, compounding the decreasing

interest and concern for migrant farmworkers.556 All the while, the general public

became apathetic to the farmworkers’ plight just as the social movements faded

into the background. While GAP still existed by 1991 and Las Hermanas existed

into the twenty-first century, Las Hermanas founding members noted a greater

conservatism within the organization and a struggle to survive.557 The Catholic

activism that started with Vatican II and coincided with 1960s and 1970s social

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movements, shifted away from a focus on social activism. The conservatism and

the union and minority backlash of the 1980s reduced national and Midwest

interest in minorities and farmworkers’ struggles while feminists faced a backlash

in the 1980s.

Midwest public support for boycotts and unions, in addition to Mexican

American concerns, began to fade from the public conversation. Though student

activism flared briefly in the 1980s to support FLOC and the end of Apartheid in

South Africa, and although Latino academic programs and organizations still

existed in Universities like Notre Dame, the University of Minnesota, and other

Midwest schools, universities ceased to be sites of activism by the 1990s.558 Part

of this decreasing activism came from the success, and thereby the public

disappearance, of farmworker boycotts. Midwest boycott groups existed to

advocate for the

UFW or FLOC, so when unions’ boycotts came to a close, so too did these groups

that brought

Midwest attention to migrants’ issues. Many organizations that supported Latino

and farmworker rights either ceased to operate or disappeared from the public’s

attention; for example, PADRES ceased to meet after 1989.559 Though both the

UFW and FLOC still exist today, the UFW eventually lost their original

contracts, and FLOC shifted focus to the pickle industry in North Carolina in the

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1990s, leaving the Midwest.560 The public’s increasing lack of apathy coupled

with the decreasing interest in farmworker unions meant that the Midwest and

Churches were no longer sites of activism.

The disappearance of organizations and programs at the end of the

twentieth century made it so that the “migrant problem” appeared solved, or at

least no longer an issue worth attention as migrants’ role in the food pyramid

faded from public memory. Yet the “migrant problem,” no matter how defined,

remains. The general disinterest in farmworkers’ living conditions in the 1980s

weakened pressure on the government and industry to change the system just as

the United States leadership displayed strong anti-union sentiment.561 Instead of

solving the “migrant problem,” decreasing concern for migrants in the 1980s only

let the “migrant problem” disappear from public view while simultaneously

making it more difficult for farmworkers to solve their problems through unions.

By the 1990s, the public did not view the “migrant problem” as solved so much as

they simply saw no migrants and thus no “migrant problem.” Just as Vatican II,

the Chicano Movement, the Feminist Movement, the UFW, and

FLOC inspired religious organizations and the Midwest public’s interest in “the

migrant problem,” so too did the decreasing influence of these movements mean

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Mexican and Mexican American migrant farmworkers faded from

Midwesterners’ memories.

CHAPTER 5

" AGRIBUSINESS, THE FOOD CHAIN

AND FARMWORKER AGENCY IN THE CASE OF FLOC

Walking into the migrant camp, Maria Elena Ortega felt nervous. This was

the first time she had come alone to talk about the Farm Labor Organizing

Committee (FLOC) to farmworkers; and though she had met some opposition in

the past, she continued. Maria knew organizing the pickle workers in Ohio was

the right thing to do. Only organizing and obtaining more power in the migrant

stream and in the field would help the migrants. Maria Elena knew this from

personal experience. She grew up a migrant worker and continued to occasionally

work in the fields as an adult.562 She knew the struggle, and she knew

farmworkers needed a voice in the farmworker system. That’s why she supported

the United Farm Workers (UFW) in California and why she started organizing for

FLOC in the summer of 1985. That’s why she walked into this camp, to get the

pickle workers to sign cards making FLOC their representative.563 But she also

knew some had already heard of FLOC, as many pickle workers also worked the

tomato fields that FLOC had been organizing since 1975. So while she knew

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there would be some opposition, she had hope that a majority of this camp would

vote to make FLOC their representative and that, with one more camp, FLOC

would be able to push companies like Campbell and Vlasic to negotiate with both

FLOC and the growers. Only then could farmworkers obtain a voice in the

process and push for better working and living conditions, and growers continue

to survive and get an even better deal with the companies. Maria Elena knew this

was the best way for workers; that’s why, despite her nervousness, she

confidently walked up to the first migrant family she saw standing outside their

home. Maria Elena’s endorsement of the United Farm Workers and FLOC

exemplified the activism of migrants in the last half of the twentieth century.

Individual Midwest farmworkers like Maria Elena and farmworker organizations

like FLOC both adapted to, but also questioned, the structure of the Midwest

migrant stream. Developed during an era of social protests, FLOC’s construction

and choices reflected an awareness of power relations in agriculture and the

changing and contested gender and patriarchal dynamics both inside and outside

the migrant stream. Empowering the farmworkers who came to the Midwest,

FLOC focused on organizing tomato and pickle workers in Ohio, not just against

growers, but also against the large corporations that dictated the agricultural

structure. In questioning certain power structures, FLOC helped reshape the

migrant stream in the Midwest by pushing for three-party negotiations between

growers, workers, and corporations while also developing an organization that

empowered migrant families to defend their rights. FLOC’s strike and boycott

against Campbell Soup, the subsequent inclusion of the pickling company Vlasic

and its pickle fields, and the development of a migrant, family-centered, union

provide a glimpse of the various parties and roles within the food chain and the

agency that farmworker men, women, and children displayed. Examining the

organizational formation of FLOC and the strategic choices of FLOC and its

members provides a key to understanding gender, agency, and the organizational

structure of the Midwest agricultural system within the last half of the twentieth

century.

Condensed Power

The pyramidal agricultural structure in the pickle and tomato fields in

Ohio, and partially in Michigan, developed after years of negotiation between the

different forces of the system. The story of FLOC’s struggle with tomato canning

and pickling companies began in the 1940s and 1950s with the growth of canning

corporations. Already a tomato producing region by the 1930s, major canning

corporations opened facilities in Northwest Ohio in the 1940s.564 With the

introduction of large canning facilities in Northwest Ohio by companies like

Heinz; Campbell; Libby, McNeil and Libby (Libby); Stockley; Green Giant; and

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California Packing Corporation (Del Monte), Ohio became a major agricultural

center not just for tomatoes, but for a variety of crops.565 After the introduction of

large canning facilities, companies took greater control of the various levels of

agricultural production, contracting with growers for a fixed price per acre or

bushel and thereby controlling through these set prices the rate of farmworkers’

pay.566 In addition, corporations extended their power to the fields themselves,

providing seed and strict guidelines to grow the product.8 Corporations enticed

growers with a guaranteed price, and controlled every aspect of the growth and

harvest of the product at no cost to themselves. With fertile soil and numerous

canning corporations, Ohio became second only to California in tomato

production by the 1950s, compelling growers to find a large, cheap labor force to

work in the fields.567

With the increasing amount of tomatoes grown, harvested, and canned in

Ohio, canneries and growers’ labor needs shifted to include Mexican and

Mexican American migrants. Originally employing poor Southerners, African

Americans, locals, and Eastern Europeans, Ohio growers and canneries did not

start employing Latinos in large numbers until the second half of the twentieth

century.568 Instead, most Mexican and Mexican Americans who came to the

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Midwest for agricultural labor from the 1930s to the 1950s worked in the sugar

beet fields of Michigan and Minnesota.569 As various crops increased in

production in the 1940s and 1950s while sugar beet production simultaneously

decreased, Mexican and Mexican Americans from Florida and Texas became the

primary labor force for most Midwestern crops.570 Usually migrating and working

in family units, Mexican American migrant workers travelled along a variety of

migrant routes through the Midwest, working in various fields including: apples,

cherries, sugar beets, tomatoes, pickles, mushrooms, and onions.571 Although

routes varied, tomato laborers also commonly worked the pickle fields because

the tomato harvest in the summer coincided with pickle harvests shortly before.572

As Midwest growers employed more Mexican and Mexican American migrant

families in the tomato and pickle fields, the formation of the Midwest migrant

stream during the last half of the twentieth century began to take shape.

The familial nature of the Midwest stream and the tie between the tomato

and pickle fields shaped the development of FLOC. Pickle fields’ geographic

closeness to tomato fields and the overlapping nature of the pickle and tomato

growth and harvest cycles, coupled with the familial nature of pickle and tomato

work, meant many tomato workers organized by FLOC also worked in the pickle

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fields. Tomato and pickle fields were so connected that FLOC, though initially

focused on tomato fields in Ohio, expanded to include the pickle fields of

Michigan and Northwestern Ohio around 1983.573 Yet unlike tomato fields, pickle

growers signed a contract with pickle companies, but gave sections of land to

migrant families to sharecrop.574 Based on Mexican migrants’ family

construction, farmworker families tended sections or rows of pickles collectively,

with the male head of a household receiving a paycheck for the family’s work,

usually forty to fifty percent of the profits split with the grower.575 Growers paid

farmworkers for the amount of pickles harvested, but migrants also graded the

pickles by size and weight and loaded the produce onto trucks, which were tasks

farmworkers lost harvesting time and money performing.576 FLOC’s decision to

include pickle workers in the strike and boycott meant expanding their

understanding of power relations within Midwest agriculture.

For tomatoes, the agricultural structure included canneries, growers, and

farmworkers in a system of diminishing power, yet the pickle industry further

complicated power relations. The agricultural pyramid of power was based on the

backs of migrant farmworkers. Although pickle workers remained at the bottom

of the food chain along with tomato pickers, their role as sharecroppers

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significantly altered their relationship to power in terms of the law. Agricultural

interest groups, legislatures, and courts continually negotiated and debated the

roles of growers, crew leaders, and farmworkers to determine the “employer” and

therefore the person(s) legally liable to follow legislation.577 The pickle industry’s

use of sharecropping allowed companies and growers to obscure power relations

by giving corporations actual power and redefining farmworkers’ power on paper.

In an Ohio federal court in 1976, a judge decided that under the sharecropping

system, growers did not pay the Federal Insurance Contribution Act (FICA) taxes

for workers.578 Later, in a U.S. district Court in 1985, a judge argued that because

of the sharecropping structure farmworkers were independent contractors, making

growers not liable to follow child labor laws or pay social security.579 Based on

this decision, the government and the IRS classified pickle workers as self-

employed individuals contracting out their personal and family’s labor to

growers. Unfortunately, since many farmworkers did not understand this labor

and legal construction, they eventually found they owed back taxes as tax laws

required them to pay their own taxes as self-employed individuals.580 Affecting

not only taxes, the 1985 court decision also excused child labor as it could now be

classified as similar to performing farm chores for your parents. The

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configuration of the pickle fields and the legal ramifications of the 1985 decision

confused workers so much that FLOC created pamphlets to help farmworkers

determine if they were sharecroppers and how that affected their lives.581 The

tomato canning and pickling corporations depended on an arrangement that

manipulated power as well as used leverage against growers and the family labor

of Mexican and Mexican

American migrants to increase agricultural corporations profits.

Corporate Alphabet Soup

Countering migrant protesters’ claims that Campbell helped create and

shape the dilapidated houses and poverty conditions of migrant farmworkers in

Ohio’s tomato fields, the director of Campbell’s Community Relations stated,

“We’re just sitting around trying to sell soup…and they are picking on us.”582

The simple claim of “just selling soup” exemplified the hidden power of

corporations such as Campbell and Vlasic as commercials, labels, and fully

stocked grocery shelves hid the true power of agricultural corporations. The story

of FLOC and the migrant workers of Ohio’s tomato and pickle fields spoke to the

construction of the migrant stream and the power of agri-corporations in the food

pyramid. When FLOC struck, they sought to change the very structure of the food

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chain, thereby rearranging the system’s use of their lives for their profits.

Influenced by the social and union movements of the time, FLOC’s efforts to

rearrange the food pyramid of power exemplified their intimate understanding of

the system and provided a radical reimagining of the food pyramid. The FLOC

union encouraged and empowered Mexican migrant farmworkers and the

Latino community since FLOC began in 1967. Velasquez started FLOC in the

fields of Ohio in 1967 when he organized workers against growers.583 Quickly

realizing growers’ limited power, Velasquez shifted FLOC’s attention to

empowering urban Chicanos in the Toledo, Ohio area. Embolden by the Chicano

Movement, FLOC initiated co-ops and pushed for a Hispanic voice in the

organizations created to assist Toledo Hispanics.584 This idea of empowering

Mexicans to better their own lives continued when FLOC re-focused on

organizing Mexican migrant farmworkers again in 1975.585 Realizing the

agricultural framework pitted growers and farmworkers against each other as

corporations dictated the conditions, FLOC focused on providing both growers

and migrants with a place at the negotiating table with corporations. Originally

trying to organize alongside growers, FLOC leaders eventually initiated a strike

against growers and corporations when growers failed to understand their

common position with farmworkers. Lacking the support of growers, FLOC

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initially organized farmworkers to picket the canneries and fields of two of the

larger tomato processors in the Toledo, Ohio area:

Libby and Campbell Soup.586

FLOC initially targeted two canning corporations in the Toledo, Ohio area

to draw on members’ knowledge of tomatoes and the agricultural system in order

to ultimately shift power in the food pyramid. FLOC leaders understood that

winning a three-party deal with one or two major companies in the tomato

industry would provide monumental and life-altering change for

migrant farmworkers. Though targeting only one crop and a couple of companies,

FLOC’s initial efforts held the possibility of significant change in the larger

tomato industry and the food chain because a three-party deal would force

corporations to take responsibility for their role in the agricultural power

structure. FLOC initially boycotted Campbell and Libby, because they were

major companies that contracted with growers in FLOC’s area of support and also

because FLOC leaders and early members were familiar with tomato fields.587

Unlike other crops, the few companies that canned tomatoes could set low rates

for tomato growers who risked an uncertain market by selling their product

independently.588 Though FLOC leaders eventually shifted their focus to the

Campbell Corporation and the Vlasic pickle company, FLOC’s targets

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represented an understanding of the Midwest agricultural system of power by

local Ohio workers.

Not only organizing farmworkers against the power of corporations in the

fields, FLOC also educated migrants and the public about canning companies’

extensive power in the grocery store and with public opinion. In canning tomatoes

and processing them into soups and other products, Campbell created “value

added products,” making the item more expensive.589 For tomatoes, the price of

“value added products” increased 150% from 1959 to 1979 with canneries and

retail outlets receiving eighty-three percent of the money, growers nine percent,

and farmworkers and cannery workers a mere four percent.590 Canneries’ profits

also came from the employment of cheap, usually female, workers in the

canneries, again increasing companies’ profits without sharing the extra profits

with their workers and also forcing the general public to pay higher prices.591

These factors remained largely hidden from public view. By focusing on

Campbell’s hidden power in the fields, canneries, and stores, FLOC sought to

educate the public about the agricultural structure in order to empower

farmworkers in the stream.

Campbell and Vlasic’s power lay in the many layers of the food chain that

hid the power and influence of corporations. Campbell tried to sway the public

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with claims that they played no role in the “private” labor negotiations of their

growers and refused to “force” growers to create an organization to negotiate with

workers.592 Campbell’s argument presented growers and fellow corporations as

independent parties not tied to each other through the food chain system. Yet

within the agricultural framework of the Midwest, Campbell had power over

growers, and therefore over farmworkers, a fact exemplified by Campbell’s

refusal to sign contracts with growers who did not mechanize, thereby cutting

farmworker jobs. FLOC successfully argued that Campbell’s power to force

mechanization on growers demonstrated their power in the system, and thus over

farmworkers.593 Later, Campbell tried to confuse the public’s perception of power

by offering assistance to the migrant community. Using policies that harkened

back to their canning factories elsewhere in the 1960s, Campbell avoided the

issues of worker power by giving money to programs that aided migrant

farmworkers.594

Campbell offered money to Central Valley Opportunity Center and Clinicas

Migrantes Regional, in addition to donating food to the Ohio Migrant Rest Center

and the Texas Migrant council, which gave out food to the farmworkers who

tended the land but could not afford food for their families.595 Yet FLOC

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convinced the Clinicas Migrantes Regional to refuse Campbell’s aid because

Campbell’s assistance alleviated the symptoms of poverty but not its cause,

farmworkers’ lack of power.596 Aid allowed Campbell to not only retain power

over growers and farmworkers through the agricultural system, but gain even

more power as migrants would come to depend on the financial assistance of

Campbell’s generosity for survival. To restructure the stream, FLOC members

had to bring to light Campbell’s various means of maintaining power over

migrants and growers in the Midwest tomato fields.

In order for farmworkers and the public to understand the food pyramid,

they had to understand growers’ power and lack of power. Many farmworkers

directly saw growers’ power over migrants’ lives, but hidden beneath this display

of power and control growers struggled to survive in an agricultural system

dominated by powerful corporations. FLOC tried to work with growers in the

1970s, but growers refused out of a combination of fear and pride. Some growers

viewed unionized farmworkers as either a threat to their livelihood or a foolish

group that would anger powerful corporations that could certainly squash both

growers and migrants.

Other growers held on to their fictitious masculine power and independence, so

pivotal to the grower self-image, refusing to accept their common position with

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migrants.597 Independence drove growers to resist government interference in

their labor relations with migrants in various ways, from ex-growers and their

children trucking agricultural goods outside government regulation and control to

refusing cooperating with farmworkers.598 Despite the ever-present interference

and control of agri-corporations on their operations, growers had a degree of

independence dealing with farm laborers on their farm, but the growers held all

financial liability to pay for farmworker housing or comply with government

regulations. FLOC wanted to make companies more liable for farmworkers’

conditions because of their major role in the system, but some growers continued

to view themselves as private businessmen, thus refusing to work with

farmworkers.599 FLOC leader, Baldemar Velasquez, reflected this idea when he

stated:

Unfortunately, the farmer considers himself an independent

businessman protecting his petty-profit margin not seeing the

potential power of his unity including his collaboration with the

farmworker against the company. Committed to a misguided notion

of ‘rugged individualism’ sadly enough, he superexploits our people

Initially failing to educate and convince growers of their common position with

farmworkers, FLOC members continued to educate other farmworkers and the

public about the expansive power of corporations “just trying to make soup.”

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FLOC’s efforts and knowledge extended beyond the basic structure of the

stream consisting of farmworkers, growers, and canning corporations, into the

larger food chain that included consumers, banks, and stockholders. Canning

companies like Campbell not only shaped how growers and farmworkers worked

in the tomato fields, but food corporations had ties in financial industries and

power in grocery stores with “value added products” that easily sold to an

expanding number of busy women cooking for their families after a hard day of

work. In addition, subsidiaries allowed corporations to extend their influence into

different crops and products, such as Campbell’s subsidiary, Vlasic pickles, yet

another tie between the tomato and pickle fields of Ohio.600 In order for FLOC

members to understand and fight corporate agriculture power, they had to

understand the larger food chain that involved Board of Directors members all the

way down to women buying a can of tomatoes and a jar of pickles for dinner.

Corporations like Campbell extended their power through stock ownership

and Board of Directors that often connected different corporations to each other.

Utilizing the corporate campaign union strategy that attacked financial ties due to

board membership and stock ownership, FLOC targeted Philadelphia National

Bank, Equitable Life, and Prudential Insurance for protest.601 Starting in 1984,

FLOC worked with Roy Rogers and Ed Allen, who established the corporate

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method, to attack Campbell through stock ownership, board members, and

loans.602 By understanding the corporate framework, FLOC members targeted

individuals like John T. Dorrance, who owned two million shares of Campbell

stock, served as chairman for Campbell, and was associated through family and

business to Philadelphia National Bank, and the President of Campbell, Gordon

McGovern, who served on the Board of Directors for Philadelphia National

Bank.603 FLOC noted these ties in the hope that public pressure on those involved

with Campbell, could influence the company. As FLOC argued,

The FLOC Corporate Campaign program is based on the premise that farm

workers are not simply being challenged by Campbell or any single

corporation. Their struggle is with the interlocked web of powerful banks,

insurance companies and other large corporations who form the power

structure behind a company such as Campbell Soup. These institutions, by

virtue of their financial ties and position on the

Campbell Soup board of directors, represent the corporate decision

maker controlling the lives of farm workers.604

In utilizing the relatively new corporate campaign strategy, FLOC members

encouraged the public to pressure Campbell and the individuals and companies

financially associated with and benefitting from Campbell’s power in the

Midwest agricultural system.

FLOC not only employed a boycott, strike, and the corporate campaign, but

established public support for itself from within the Campbell company. FLOC

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encouraged supporters and owners of Campbell stock to voice their concerns

about migrant farmworkers at Campbell’s stockholders meeting between 1983

and 1986.605 In addition, stock owners who backed FLOC allowed migrant union

members to represent them at the meeting which led to picketers outside

Campbell’s annual stockholder meetings, protesters in the meetings, and even a

nominated resolution to endorse FLOC’s goals at the 1983 meeting.606 FLOC

members understood and utilized strategies that targeted Campbell and later

Vlasic’s entire power structure, from stockholders all the way down to the men

and women buying pickles and tomatoes at the grocery store.

Changing the Tomato and Pickle Pyramids

To succeed, FLOC drew on their association with other farmworker unions,

specifically the UFW, as well as current social movements, to establish FLOC’s

configuration and to develop the tactics they used to alter farmworkers’ power.

The success of UFW’s grape boycott and the general success of the UFW to

unionize farmworkers, which many considered impossible, was an important

influence on FLOC tactics. Baldemar Velasquez’ choice to use the boycott played

to the success of UFW and allowed FLOC to engage the UFW advocates for

FLOC’s cause. A boycott to better farmworkers lives drew on the already existent

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consciousraising efforts of the UFW and the social movements of the era. At the

same time, FLOC drew on the feminist movement by engaging and empowering

both men and women to participate in the union and encouraging whole families

to work in the union together. Not only drawing on the Feminist movement in the

1960s and 1970s, the inclusion of women also drew on old union tactics used in

changing the mining industry that employed families.607 FLOC’s demands for

social justice were closely linked to the Civil Rights and Chicano Movements of

the 1960s and 1970s, drawing on the social movements’ ideologies and public

networks. Drawing on social movements and successful union tactics as a basis

for FLOC’s social union movement,

Midwest tomato and pickle farmworkers campaigned for change.

Initially starting with a strike campaign, FLOC drew on the men, women,

and children who worked in the fields and adapted strike strategies to the wide

geographic landscape of the scattered farms and canneries. Since strike locations

existed across vast spaces and in different settings, FLOC used various strategies

to address the different settings of the strike: fields and canneries. Factory unions

would usually position strikers near the few access points to a factory, but farms’

wide-open spaces forced unions to adopt different methods of protest. FLOC

members drew on past agricultural union practices by adapting their strategies to

fit their specific situation. FLOC transported workers and their families to farms

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and the canneries that processed the tomatoes and pickles.608 Men, women, and

children traveled to various growers’ farms to encourage other farmworkers to

leave the fields, staking out near field entrances and near the edges of fields

where migrants worked. These workers and their families formed picket lines to

block tomatoes from getting to the canneries and shouted information to workers

in the fields encouraging them to join the strike.609 At the same time, FLOC drew

on and altered gendered roles as FLOC women prepared food for the workers on

strike as well as caravanned and protested at different fields.610 Midwest Mexican

migrant farmworkers thus adapted gender norms and union strategies to the

physical landscape of the strike.

While FLOC’s strike against Campbell and Vlasic technically continued

until 1986, the focus of FLOCs efforts shifted in 1979 to a boycott, shifting

FLOC’s tactics.611 Using consumer power, FLOC’s members sought greater

control over the migrant system and the food chain. Though FLOC initially struck

Libby, the international boycott of Nestle products and their subsidiaries, which

included Libby, pushed Libby to leave the cannery business.612 This left FLOC to

608 "One Day of the 1980 Strike," Nuestra Lucha, 1980, 5:20, Farm Labor Organizing Committee Records, Walter

P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.

609 James W. Parker, "2 Worlds Collide," The Plain Dealer, September 23, 1979, 5:13, Farm Labor Organizing

Committee Records, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.

610 “One Day of the 1980 Strike.”

611 Barger and Reza, The Farm Labor Movement in the Midwest, 57-58.

612 Ibid, 68. Nestle faced an international boycott because the company encouraged women in poorer nations to

use their instant baby formula, which had negative economic and health effects. With Nestle’s additional problem,

Libby ceased their involvement in tomatoes.

focus on Campbell and eventually Vlasic pickles in their strike and boycott

campaigns. The boycott ultimately meant a reorganization of FLOC as members

began to educate the public about the living and working conditions of migrant

farmworkers and the role of the tomato canning industry in the stream. FLOC’s

boycott campaign meant a focus in part on women who shopped for groceries and

schools that used the Campbell’s “Labels for Education” program.613 To this end,

FLOC focused on portraying women and children’s helplessness and poverty,

appealing to the public’s sympathy for helpless workers and using gender norms

and union networks to target possible boycott supporters.

To combat the Campbell Corporation and educate the public about the

pyramid of power in Midwest agriculture, FLOC established a public presence by

attacking iconic images of Campbell and highlighting the poverty of migrant

families. Posters with the well-known image of Campbell’s basic soup label,

altered by FLOC to read “Cream of Exploitation,” became commonplace among

strike and boycotting unions.614 In addition, the “Campbell soup kids” and

Campbell’s “Labels for Education” became prime targets for attack. Similar to a

1968 strike by United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) Local 80 in

Campbell’s Camden, New Jersey plant, FLOC adorned the iconic “Campbell

613 Rev. Juan Romero, “Ministry to Farmworkers: Experience in Advocacy,” May 15, 1974, 8:25, PADRES

Collection, University of Notre Dame Archives, Hesburgh Library, University of Notre Dame, South Bend,

Indiana.

614.

kids” with pro-union clothes and signs.615 However, FLOC took this tactic further

by also educating the public about migrant farmworker children. FLOC described

the hypocrisy of Campbell for using the figures of children as their mascots while

migrant children worked in the fields to harvest produce for their products. In

addition, FLOC attacked the Campbell “Labels for Education” program, by which

Campbell provided supplies for schools based on how many Campbell labels

schools saved.616 FLOC contrasted the “Labels for Education” program with the

farmworker children who went to school without a good meal and/or missed

school to work in the fields that provided Campbell’s products.617 FLOC refused

to accept Campbell’s argument that they played no role in the migrant stream.

They actively encouraged schools, especially Catholic schools with whom FLOC

had a close connection with due to Mexican Americans’ ties to the Catholic

Church, to end their participation in the “Labels for Education” program.618 FLOC

was relatively successful, especially among Catholic schools, as twenty Indiana

schools agreed to stop the program by 1980 with several others contemplating

ending their Campbell association.619 FLOC effectively manipulated Campbell’s

visual symbols to their benefit by manipulating Campbell’s likeable children

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mascots into FLOC protesters, demonstrating the poverty of migrant children and

drawing on the compassion and sympathy of teachers and mothers.

FLOC leaders’ choice to use a boycott exemplified the conflicting message

of farmworker power and agency. Turning to tactics successfully used by the

United Farm Workers in California, FLOC used boycotts, placing greater

emphasis on the public’s support than farmworkers’ perseverance. The boycott

depended on portraying farmworkers as victims instead of activists. Boycott

success came from garnering sympathy for migrants, which drew on images of

children, poverty, and helplessness, directly contrasting with strikes that

demonstrated men, women, and children marching, protesting, and demanding a

voice. Many news articles from and about FLOC often presented saddened

families or children clad in rags with protest signs, conflating migrants’ self-

determination and agency with their vulnerability.620 As FLOC leaders and

members stressed farmworker demands and agency, they simultaneously

portrayed farmworkers as weak and in need of public endorsement.

Though public sympathy developed from FLOC’s depiction of

farmworkers’ poverty and helplessness, FLOC also empowered farmworkers

within their own ranks. The public image of farmworker helplessness often

conflicted with migrants’ own empowerment. FLOC offered men, women and

children opportunities to effect change in their own lives, working as organizers,

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strikers, and even public speakers, all working to the success of FLOC’s

campaign to empower migrants in the Midwest. Organizers like Maria Elena

Ortega felt empowered, not just in her personal life to become strong and

independent woman working as an organizer, but also as a farmworker fighting

for a voice in the agricultural structure. Yet the experience of migrants like Maria

Elena or FLOC Vice President Cuevas’ entire family, who worked as picketers,

strikers, organizers, and even public speakers, often occurred at the same time as

the public viewed migrants as helpless victims.621 The young Fernando Cuevas,

Jr. toured the nation telling others about his experiences in the migrant stream and

encouraging assistance for farmworkers’ rights as FLOC circulated an image of a

child in tattered clothes holding a FLOC sign.622 Sympathetic images of helpless

women and children, used by FLOC to garner public sympathy, coexisted

alongside migrants’ own experience of activism that positively contributed to

FLOC’s goals of empowerment.

The empowerment of Midwest tomato and pickle workers came from

FLOC’s efforts to change the food pyramid despite FLOC’s emphasis on creating

a sympathetic image of farmworkers for the boycott. FLOC’s insistence on

farmworkers having a voice in the food chain, which a three party negotiation

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would create, remained a firm commitment of FLOC as they encouraged

farmworkers to organize and strike:

If what we are doing sounds outlandish or somewhat radical, it is

only because the tomato industry and the public has become

accustomed to literally a peonage system to harvest its tomato crop.

It is institutionalized…it not only deals with us as second-class

citizens but also as subservient Mexican, Puerto Rican, black and

others who cannot do anything for ourselves. Well those days are

long gone because we no longer fear prevailing mentalities and no

longer accept the role prescribed to for us by economic, political

and social institutions…This is, not to be controlled and consumed

by our environment and through simple organized we seek to take

control of our destiny.623

Despite using the boycott to generate public endorsement, FLOC and Midwest

migrants did not want to rely on public sympathy forever, but rather to use the

public to temporarily give a voice and empower farmworkers in the agricultural

system. As Maria Elena stated, “This is what we have to learn: We can be on

welfare forever, we can receive handouts forever…but that’s not going to solve

our problems. The problem will be solved when we deal with the growers, and

they pay better wages, and we have political power.”624 FLOC’s employment of a

boycott stressed to the public farmworkers’ subjugated role in the food chain, but

the individual experiences of migrants and FLOC’s goal of a three-way deal

empowered the Mexican and Mexican American migrant farmworkers in the

Midwest stream.

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FLOC not only gave migrants a place at the negotiating table, but also a

place in the union. Past unions that struggled to unionize farmworkers claimed the

changing and migratory nature of farm work made unionization impossible; but in

establishing a malleable structure, FLOC leaders were able to establish a union

for migrant farmworkers. Although influenced by the UFW in many ways, FLOC

differed from the United Farm Workers. The UFW’s emphasis on the boycott and

public support, coupled with Chavez’ demands for ‘sacrificial’ union members,

distanced many farmworkers from leadership roles in the UFW.625 Although

FLOC and the UFW had single charismatic leaders for a long time, FLOC

eventually developed a participatory union with traditional union structures such

as local committees.626 FLOC initially relied heavily on union farmworkers and

the public to sacrifice their time for the boycott, but FLOC leaders also

established an organization that eventually allowed for a participatory union.

Union leaders communicated with workers through summer organizers, who

traveled around to different camps, camp representatives, who looked out for the

interest of FLOC workers in a particular camp, and through meetings in different

camps, as well as the FLOC national conventions where farmworker

representatives voted on issues.627 Although Chavez resisted camp committees,

FLOC’s use of camp representatives who migrated and worked alongside

625

626

627

farmworkers gave Midwest farmworkers and their families a level of agency and

involvement in the union that represented them.628 FLOC’s structure gave

farmworkers several avenues to voice their concerns, contrasting with the

sacrificial mentality of the UFW that separated farmworkers from the union

leadership.629

FLOC’s organizational structure not only provided avenues for migrants to

voice their ideas and concerns within the union, but also ensured a sense of

community that encouraged all to work together to better Midwest migrants’

lives. FLOC leaders accepted that union organizers and representatives had to

continue working in the stream to survive since the union could not afford to pay

them. Manuel Moreno, executive board member, continued to migrate up and

down the Midwest working in non-tomato and pickle fields to support his

family.630 FLOC leaders also did not require dues from union members until they

succeeded in gaining a three-party contract, ensuring more individuals could take

part in the union.631 In addition, most of the union protests and strike activities

occurred solely around the harvest season. After harvest, workers moved on to

other crops, eventually returning to their homes in Texas and Florida.632 This

allowed migrant families to survive by making up some of the money lost striking

628

629

630

631

632

tomatoes as they continued to migrate and work in other crops.633 In the off-

season, FLOC regrouped, organizing migrant workers in their home bases of

Texas and Florida so that union members and future tomato and pickle workers

knew about the strike effort before heading back North.634 This configuration

helped integrate the strike effort into the lives of migrant farmworkers. Focusing

on strike and picketing efforts during the tomato and pickle season not only saved

the union money, but this strategic choice, along with the lack of dues and efforts

to organize in Texas and Florida, also encouraged a strong sense of community

among farmworkers and allowed for the involvement of all the migrants in the

union.

The Public’s Power in the Food Chain

As FLOC created a participatory union that drew on the men, women, and

children working in the tomato and pickle fields of Northwest Ohio, the

employment of the boycott also meant integrating the public and outside

organizations into the construction and decisions of the union. FLOC relied on

public endorsement by political, union, and religious individuals and groups as

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634

the boycott drew power from outsiders’ influence and purchasing power. Seeking

public aid meant drawing on important national and local figures and

organizations to carry

FLOC’s message and encourage assistance. FLOC successfully received

endorsement from

Jesse Jackson during his presidential bid in 1984 in addition to various union

organizations: UFW; American Federation of Teachers in Toledo, Ohio;

Communication Workers of America in Cleveland, Ohio; West Coast

International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union in

San Francisco, California; and many others.635 Yet not all unions assisted FLOC,

including the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) that

represented many Campbell cannery employees.636 Support for FLOC varied

within and among unions and religious institutions, but FLOC successfully

garnered enough public endorsement to pressure Campbell and Vlasic.

FLOC needed union endorsement because it provided important financial

assistance and legitimacy amongst the working class. Though a conservative

backlash in the 1980s hindered unions, FLOC pushed for union assistance to gain

working class support for the farmworker cause.637 Union assistance to the

635 Velasquez and Robinson, The Farmworker Struggle: A Debate by Letter; “Rainbow Coalition” photo.

636 "Campbell Employees Regret Boycott Backing," Catholic Chronicle, June 28, 1985, 24:58, Farm Labor

Organizing Committee Records, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan; "UFCW

Says FLOC Move Is Harmful," The Crescent-News, August 10, 1982, 24:41, Farm Labor Organizing Committee

Records, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.

637 Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage, 663.

farmworkers’ cause gave FLOC legitimacy as a real union champion for hard

working individuals abused by a corporate system. Because of the legitimacy

unions provided, Campbell emphasized the UFCW’s dismissal of FLOC’s

campaign as Campbell tried to convince the general public to question whether

FLOC was a real union.638 Separating the interests of migrant farmworkers from

the working class cannery workers, Campbell and the UFCW tried to diminish

FLOC’s power by diminishing FLOC’s base of support. Understanding the power

and influence of the working class consumers in grocery stores, FLOC and

Campbell competed for the hearts and minds of the public.

To reach more of the public important to FLOC’s boycott, FLOC leaders

and members shaped their tactics and decisions to effectively encourage and

influence financially powerful organizations. To garner public support, FLOC

members presented themselves in sympathetic terms that often focused on

migrants’ helplessness and the numerous women and children who labored in the

fields, instead of migrant families organizing farmworkers in order to better

everyone’s lives. FLOC understood the need for sympathy as well as the

endorsement of religious and secular organizations with prominence and

networks. FLOC used its connections with the UFW and the Farm Worker

638 Fiction v. Fact: A Message from Campbell Soup Company ad, New York Times, January 1, 1984, 24:1, Farm

Labor Organizing Committee Records, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.

Ministry, as well as their own FLOC groups throughout the nation, to establish a

network of aid and information. FLOC’s common goal with the UFW,

a popular union with a charismatic public figure, gave FLOC a well-established

infrastructure

of communications. The commonality between FLOC and the UFW allowed

FLOC to use the public success and interest generated by the UFW.82 In addition,

FLOC members also availed themselves of UFW training.83 FLOC’s aid network

built upon the UFW’s own small boycott groups in cities across the nation,

including Chicago.84 Allying with Chavez’ union provided FLOC members with

an infrastructure of aid while simultaneously demonstrating the importance of

farmworkers working together across state, crop, and union boundaries.

For both the UFW and FLOC, the United Farm Worker Ministry became

the key to obtaining the logistical aid and manpower necessary to reach and

influence the public; yet unlike the UFW, FLOC sometimes struggled to gain the

Ministry’s attention.85 As an interdenominational religious organization focused

on bettering farmworkers’ lives, the UFWM had the finances, manpower, and

connections to make a significant difference in FLOC’s boycott campaign. Yet

the Migrant Ministry, like other national groups, paid considerably more attention

to the UFW than FLOC. Except for the Ministry’s vocal and written endorsement,

the Migrant Ministry did nothing to initially assist FLOC, yet they provided the

UFW with paid personnel. This contrast spoke to FLOC members’ struggles to

make people and organizations respect their efforts with the same zeal as they did

the UFW. Though the UFW provided inspiration to the FLOC boycott, it also

overshadowed FLOC’s efforts. Local organizations and churches proved crucial

to FLOC’s campaign, yet national organizations’ resources remained largely tied

to the UFW’s campaign. The result of this disparate assistance arguably

accentuated farmworker helplessness, as FLOC used more marches, fasts, and

other measures similar to those of the UFW to create the kind of sympathy,

attention, and ultimately resources FLOC needed to succeed with the boycott.

When the Ministry did offer more manpower in the early 1980s, it came curiously

after a long fast by Baldemar Velasquez, a tactic popularly done by Chavez.639 In

addition, the Ministry offered manpower assistance only after the UFW arguably

no longer needed significant assistance and after Velasquez demonstrated his

sincerity and piousness in a fashion similar to Chavez.640 Though FLOC members

did not make every decision based on how to gain public support, the need for

public and organizations’ aid shaped the way FLOC leaders interacted with the

public it so desperately needed. In relying on other organizations to get the public

endorsement critical to a boycott, FLOC had to shape their tactics to compete for

the attention of groups like the Migrant Ministry.

639

640

FLOC leaders and members focused on gaining religious support because

of the financial assistance religious group could offer and because of the impact

religious organizations had on union members and public endorsement. Religious

organizations and unions shared a tenuous history of aid, opposition, and

indifference, but the religious nature of Mexican and Mexican American culture,

along with the religious symbolism in FLOC’s marches and Baldemar Velasquez’

fasts, pressured religious organizations to react to the FLOC boycott. Set within a

time period of social awareness and activism, many Churches reacted to UFW

and FLOC farmworkers’ demands for a better life and equality.641 Not only

drawing upon Christian faith, FLOC also specifically drew on Mexican

Americans’ strong tie to Catholicism.

For the Catholic Church, institutional aid did not come until public pressure arose

from the UFW and FLOC’s continued use of religious symbolism in their strikes

and boycotts. FLOC and the UFW’s choice to use religious symbols, whether

solely tactical, sincere, or both, strengthened the resolve of striking farmworkers

and encouraged the involvement of churches that could see the poverty and faith

of farmworkers.

Marching with the image of the Lady of Guadalupe, fasts, Church services,

and other religious symbolic acts provided inspiration and strength to the largely

religious FLOC and UFW farmworkers, encouraging religious organizations to

641

assist the farmworkers’ cause. FLOC and the UFW’s use of religious symbols in

their protests and demonstrations made public the faith of farmworkers and the

poverty and injustice they faced in the food chain. For Churches to ignore

farmworkers’ cries for justice as they paraded with crosses would reflect

negatively upon the religious institution, especially in the case of the Catholic

Church as many

migrant farmworkers were Catholic. Being FLOC’s leader, Baldemar Velasquez’

fast not only drew parallels between himself and Chavez, but more importantly it

drew on religious symbolism that provided an air of sincerity, piety, and

conviction that encouraged public approval and strengthened migrants’ resolve.

The importance of FLOC’s Catholic ties can be seen by Catholic schools’ boycott

of Campbell.642 Even the student population of Notre Dame University, a Catholic

university, voted for the university to boycott Campbell products.643 Religious

symbols like the Virgin of Guadalupe brought hope to many farmworkers, but it

also maintained a tie to a powerful and financially fluent institution that could

bring legitimacy to FLOC’s struggles and influence the masses.

Not only working to garner aid from the Catholic Church, religious

organizations, and unions, FLOC also sought support from the population

primarily responsible for grocery shopping and education: women. Women

642

643

played key roles in the food chain as they often served as the individuals who

bought and cooked food for their families.644 In addition, women traditionally

served as teachers, influencing children and possibly school policies regarding

Campbell’s “Labels for Education” program.645 In encouraging farmworker

women’s involvement and demanding Catholic endorsement, FLOC established a

group of women farmworkers, ex-farmworkers, nuns, and Mexican Americans

who became strong supporters and influential leaders for the FLOC movement. In

addition, FLOC and its supporters targeted grocery shoppers by providing them

with an “un-shopping list,” a list of Campbell’s brands to avoid purchasing, and

even a recipe for cream of tomato soup.646 Targeting women because of their

roles as educators, mothers, and homemakers, FLOC sought public support for

the union cause.

Families, Food, and FLOC

FLOC made men, women, and children an integral part of its boycott

efforts, organizational structure, and overall campaign against Campbell. Since

migrant farmworkers in the Midwest traveled together as family units, FLOC

leaders understood families had to be the backbone of the union. FLOC’s

construction supported and drew upon the rhetoric of family involvement, yet it

644

645

646

would be individual migrant farmworkers who negotiated the role of men,

women, and children in the Midwest workers’ struggles for change.

Based in the Midwest where most farmworkers migrated in family units,

FLOC made families a pivotal part of their strike and boycott efforts. FLOC

members encouraged men, women, and children to participate in strikes, protests,

and marches, with much success. Since the beginning of FLOC, FLOC materials

and local newspaper articles depicted migrant families as active participants in the

union. Men, women, and children took part in marches, told strikebreakers about

FLOC, and educated the public about farmworkers’ lives. In one of FLOC’s three

marches, a migrant mother and her children marched five-hundred-sixty miles

from Toledo, Ohio to Camden, New Jersey, the home of Campbell Soup in 1983,

to bring attention to the demands of farmworkers.647 The women of FLOC, in

addition to other FLOC members, pushed for the involvement of farmworkers of

all ages and the ability of all members to participate in FLOC to better their lives.

FLOC had skit teams that gave creative FLOC members the ability to educate

others about farmworkers in addition to Spanish and English classes.648 At least

one child, Fernando Cuevas Jr., the son of FLOC’s vice- president, toured the

country speaking with different groups about his experience growing up as a

farmworker.97 Influenced by the feminist movement of the time and reflective of

647

648

FLOC’s push for women’s involvement, FLOC women also demanded greater

training and empowerment. As some female FLOC members watched Salt of the

Earth to learn about past women’s role in a farm union, another FLOC woman,

Sara Rios, wrote and received a grant to engage more women in the strike.98

Understanding that Midwest farmworkers migrated and worked as a family unit,

FLOC leaders encouraged the involvement of all family members to empower

and change the migrant stream.

For FLOC members and leaders, migrant families served not only as the

union’s foundation, but also played a key role in the union ideology and rhetoric

on farmworker rights. FLOC leaders often placed families visibly on the front

lines of FLOC protests and marches. In one incident, men, women, and children

physically blocked machines from harvesting in the fields of Napoleon, Ohio.649

The familial nature of the Midwest migrant stream meant FLOC leaders often

argued and described the financial struggles of farmworkers in terms of the

family. FLOC described wages in rhetoric similar to the idea of the “family

wage,” noting that farmworker men and women should make enough as parents

to raise their family. Though some FLOC members suggested that both parents

should be able to provide for a family, at other times, FLOC rhetoric hinted to a

more traditional “family wage,” men making enough to provide for the entire

family. In one of FLOC’s convention resolutions, FLOC called for farmworkers

649

to be trained and receive jobs working mechanical harvesters, receiving a family

wage for their labor.650 Yet in arguing for a family wage, FLOC members also

stated that this would mean that the elderly, children, pregnant women, and

mothers of young children would not need to work.651 FLOC’s inclusion of

mothers in the list of those that should not have to work suggests that under the

ideal of a family wage, mothers would stay at home to raise the children. The

resolution did not state specifically that women’s roles lay in the home and it did

not define “young children,” yet the resolution suggested a somewhat traditional

role for women. A newspaper article on FLOC reflected this idea when it stated

of FLOC’s position on mechanization and a family wage, “…with adequate

wages, women and children would be freed to establish a permanent home. The

men could travel to where the work is; the children

650

651

would be home to attend school year-round.”652 It is unknown how accurately the

author reflected FLOC’s stance, but the similarity between this statement and the

FLOC resolution suggests the complicated nature of gender and family roles.

Though FLOC often used the struggle of migrant families in their rhetoric, not all

FLOC members shared the same interpretation or goals regarding farmworker

families.

Family provided not only the foundation for the FLOC movement, but also

a rhetorical tool for FLOC leaders to use in the boycott. Velasquez noted several

times that children worked in the fields. Velasquez promulgated FLOC’s ability

to better the lives of farmworker children and argued that Campbell’s success

came on the backs of migrant children.653 Velasquez commented,

The tomato industry is the last industry in which the government

(through inaction) and the public (through not caring) has

accepted child labor, low wages, no benefits, bad housing, and no

enforcement of protective legislation. We as farmworkers have

put our meager resources, whatever little security we have, our

families, and our lives on the line to win this struggle and

rearrange the tomato industry into a system that will give us

justice. All we ask is that if you are concerned with quality

education, please do not attempt to obtain it for your school

children at the expense of farmworker children. We are asking

you to be concerned for one of the most violently exploited

groups of workers in this country, whole life expectancy is 49

years, whose infant mortality is double the national average,

652

653

whose wages are the lowest of any group of workers. We ask you

not to patronize the Campbell Soup company.104

FLOC leaders and members argued that family was important, not just because

families served as the backbone of the union, but because families represented

the very reason for FLOC members’ struggles and provided a sympathetic image

for the public to rally around. FLOC members and leaders could emphasize the

importance of better wages to improve the conditions of all farmworkers or

highlight children working in the fields or migrant children going to school

hungry, as both created a sympathetic image that could not easily be ignored by

the public. FLOC members stressed the poverty of migrant children by using

images of farmworker children protesting in tattered clothes or drawings of the

Campbell Soup Kids holding a sign publicizing child labor in the field.654

FLOC’s rhetorical emphasis on migrant children not only drew on farmworkers’

desires for a better life for their children, but was also a tactical decision to draw

on the sympathy of the public to generate boycott support. FLOC’s

emphasis on children and family coincided with the union’s efforts to include

farmworker women as active organizers and members, as individual FLOC

members mediated the role of women in the union and families. Since the

beginning, FLOC encouraged women’s involvement, creating a woman’s

654

committee to spur farmworker women’s involvement. Some of the first women

involved in the women’s committee understood that they had to encourage

women to speak out and participate because many women felt timid around

men.655 Not only encouraging women’s voice in the FLOC union, FLOC women

also demanded opportunities to attend meetings as men often expected women to

raise children and perform household chores.656 The gendered construction of

Mexican and Mexican American farmworker families in the migrant stream was

such that, though economics necessitated women working in the fields, there

remained a gendered division of labor at home. As some younger farmworker

families shifted to a more egalitarian family unit, there remained gender divisions

of labor within most migrant families.657 As Lucy Duran, a FLOC organizer,

stated, “but if you are a woman farmworker, your work doesn’t end at sun down.

You have to prepare dinner, do the laundry, get the children ready for bed, fix

lunches for the next day, do the dishes, and all of the other things that need to be

done.”109 She went on to note women’s difficulty talking about labor issues

around men, but stressed the need for change and women’s participation in

FLOC.658 FLOC women did not necessarily push for a change in gendered roles,

655

656

657

658

but rather a loosening of these roles and alternate organizing avenues so women

could comfortably participate. Lucy Duran’s comment reflected the negotiation

within FLOC and Mexican and Mexican American society during the 1960s and

afterwards as the Feminist and Chicano Movements encouraged activism and

changing notions of freedoms, rights, and roles. FLOC leaders did not encourage

and demand radical changes in family units or within the union, yet the call for

female organizers created an avenue for negotiation and discussion about gender

roles in both the home and the union.

The resulting gender negotiation occasionally led to dramatic changes

within family structures and norms. As vice-president of FLOC, Fernando Cuevas

noted how he used to make the decision in his family as the male head-of-the-

household.659 After his family became involved with FLOC, with all family

members picketing, organizing, and marching, the family dynamic changed.112

FLOC sought to give farmworkers a voice in the system that controlled their lives

by giving farmworkers the ability to vote on individuals to represent them in

FLOC conventions. These types of democratic ideals influenced the Cuevas

family, encouraging family members to demand a voice in the decisions that

659

affected the family, resulting in family votes on major issues. Of the various

issues the Cuevas family voted on was who in the family would go on tour to

speak about the migrant stream, with the family voting on Fernando Cuevas, Jr. to

speak to the public.660 FLOC encouraged men and women to work together, with

women like Berna Romero becoming coordinator for Field Operations.661 For

some, the result of FLOC’s inclusive organization created massive changes to

family dynamics. Yet, for most FLOC members change was not so dramatic as

union leaders and individual migrant farmworkers negotiating gender, family, and

union roles. For Maria Elena, who organized pickle workers in the 1980s for

FLOC, not all union leaders fully endorsed women’s roles in the union. She felt

that, when interacting with Baldemar Velasquez, he seemed “dictatorial” and

almost untrusting of women organizers because he did not want women

organizers to talk to one another after a day of solo organizing.662 In contrast,

other women such as Amelia Nava, Alicia Patino, and Berna Romero made no

mention of their gendered struggles in the union.663 Migrant women’s different

experiences reflected women’s different gender expectations and the dynamics

660

661

662

663

within their families and the union as they experienced them.664 Maria Elena

contrasted her feelings on FLOC with her brief experiences working with the

UFW, which had at least one notable Chicana in a leadership role, Dolores

Huerta.665 The UFW embraced organizing women, in direct contrast to its

predecessor,

Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), a primarily Filipino

union.666 Though FLOC encouraged women and children to take part in the

union, many women had to negotiate their involvement with family members,

such as Gloria Chiquita who had to ask her husband for permission to train to be

an organizer and brought her children to the training.667 FLOC and UFW leaders

encouraged women to become organizers, yet women had a variety of

experiences as they mediated gender roles with union leadership.

For both the UFW and FLOC, encouraging women to become organizers

did not mean a large-scale acceptance of feminist ideology or a radical change in

664

665

666

667

migrant families and traditional gender norms. Traditional Mexican American

culture did not necessarily embrace the more radical Chicana or Feminist

ideology of the 1960s and 1970s. The inclusion of women in union organizing

often meant the alteration of gender norms, but without totally changing women’s

traditional gender role in the home. Despite the inclusion of all ages and sexes,

FLOC women struggled with finding the time to organize alongside their

domestic responsibilities.121

For this reason, FLOC women insisted on the creation of day care facilities and

TV rooms for children, giving women the freedom to attend meetings.668 Yet,

within FLOC, farmworker women acted within both geographic spaces: the

house in addition to the public spaces of union organizing and protest. FLOC

provided a space and avenue for women’s involvement, but did not necessarily

seek to radically change gender norms within families or Mexican American

cultures. Instead, migrant families negotiated gender roles as men, women, and

children debated the roles that family members should have within the home and

in the union.

Family and union negotiations of gender roles often meant FLOC members

had to reshape union strategies. As noted by Maria Elena and other FLOC

668

women, women had to work together to draw on each other’s strengths.669 For

some Midwest farmworker women, such as one friend of Maria Elena, they

required permission from a male relative to become an organizer.670 In other

cases, entire families voted equally on issues that affected the family, providing

men, women, and children equal shares in family decisions.671 These differences

represented the variety of personal experiences of migrants and their experience

and connection with feminist and democratic ideology and traditional gender

norms. The Cuevas family’s involvement in FLOC through the father’s role in

the union, influenced the family to adapt a democratic ideal that gave all family

members a voice.672 In contrast, other farmworkers remained largely divorced

from these ideologies. Even the UFW’s leader, Cesar Chavez, though

encouraging women’s involvement, took part in the very male-centric and

gendered Cursillo Movement that emphasized traditional masculinity.673 The

different experiences and beliefs of FLOC members and leaders meant that,

though FLOC encouraged men, women, and children’s involvement, leaders did

not put any emphasis on gender equality or Feminist ideology. Instead union

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673

leaders encouraged women’s participation, but usually within safe confines. As

Maria Elena and other farmworker women came to realize, they had to negotiate

the varied interpretations of gender roles in migrant families and unions within

the changing social landscape of the nation.

Ending the “Cream of Exploitation”

In early 1986, FLOC won a three-way deal with Campbell and grower

associations, ultimately establishing a commission, the Dunlap Commission, to

regulate and enact threeparty agricultural deals.674 As a separate deal in 1987,

Vlasic pickle growers in Ohio signed a deal, several months after another

company, Heinz, signed a deal with FLOC.675 In the tomato and pickle fields,

workers won set wages, a paid holiday on Labor Day, a grievance procedure, and

promises to investigate health care options, better housing, and numerous other

674

675

issues.676 While FLOC did not immediately eliminate the pickle sharecropping

system, the different sides agreed to conduct studies on how to better organize

pickle harvests.131 In 1987, FLOC represented over three thousand workers in the

pickle and tomato fields of Ohio and Michigan.677 Afterwards, FLOC expanded

the geographic space of the tomato and pickle industry by talking with a Mexican

agricultural worker union, the Mexican National Union of Salaried Field

Workers (SNTOAC), as well moved to Florida pickle workers in the 1990s.678 In

addition, other farmworker unions adapted FLOC’s technique of attacking

corporations within the larger power structure as other migrants throughout the

nation attempted to alter the power system of the migrant system. The

geographic expansion of FLOC’s coverage and their tie to SNTOAC allowed

FLOC to expand their success in Midwest fields to other farmworkers in the

nation, demonstrating FLOC’s understanding of the international and national

structure of agriculture.

The success of FLOC at the negotiating table empowered and shaped

farmworkers like Maria Elena Ortega not only in her experience in the fields but

also in her life. In integrating the family framework into the FLOC organization,

FLOC notions of family and gender roles influenced the migrants in FLOC.

676

677

678

Social movements of the last half of the twentieth century in addition to the

gender norms within families and unions influenced farmworkers’ perceptions of

gender and family. The negotiations between these different forces and ideas led

to a variety of results. As some families gave adults and children of all sexes a

vote on family issues, other FLOC women had to demand childcare to be able to

participate in organizing, and some women had to request permission from their

husbands to become a FLOC organizer. For Maria

Elena and other migrant farmworkers, family participation in the union did not

necessarily mean a radical change in gender equality, but rather a way to

encourage families and individuals to negotiate gender roles. Though FLOC

members did not agree on gender roles, the activism of FLOC, coupled with the

social movements of the time, transformed the Midwest migrants in the tomato

and pickle fields. For Maria Elena, the UFW and FLOC movements encouraged

her to organize Illinois mushroom workers. Neither FLOC nor the UFW initially

agreed to organize Illinois mushroom workers in Princeton, but farmworkers like

Maria Elena propelled Princeton mushroom workers to go on strike in 1989.679

Encouraged by the unionizing efforts of FLOC and the social movements of the

time, Midwest farmworkers like Maria Elena and some Illinois mushroom

workers organized themselves against other agricultural corporations, asking

afterwards for FLOC’s assistance.680 In addition, other farmworkers outside the

Midwest adapted FLOC’s strategies to force corporations involved in the food

pyramid to negotiate with growers and farmworkers, drastically changing power

dynamics in other parts of the nation.681 The FLOC union, coupled with other

social and union movements of the time, empowered workers in the Midwest and

throughout the nation to rethink labor and power structures.

FLOC depended on a foundation of empowered farmworker families, but the

union’s strategic choice to use a boycott made the union dependent on the

public’s capricious support. When Campbell signed the deal with growers and

FLOC, the 1980s backlash against welfare programs and unions had started.682 In

other Midwest states, social organizations created to aid migrant farmworkers

and Mexican Americans declined in numbers. St. Paul, Minnesota’s thriving

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680

681

682

community of organizations created to assist migrants and Mexican Americans

disappeared by 1981, when only one still appeared in the phonebook.683 Some of

the decline reflected the shifts in agriculture as growers changed to crops that

required little or no farmworkers, as mechanization eliminated the need for larger

numbers of farmworkers, or as growers left the farming business altogether.684

Yet, the wider trend represented the backlash of the 1980s with even the UFW

fading from public memory, as the UFW faced anti-union pressure and as the uni

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684

unraveled internally.685 With the changes in 1980s United States society, FLOC

faced a greater challenge in employing a boycott campaign that depended on

public endorsement.

The three-party deals between FLOC, growers, and the Campbell and

Vlasic companies were significant to the Midwest migrant stream. Despite

FLOC’s boycott, which gave significant power to the public during a time of

significant social changes in society, FLOC successfully garnered enough public

aid to succeed. FLOC used members’ understanding of the food chain and

agricultural system to achieve their goal of a three-party deal and a voice for

farmworkers. After their success in the late 1980s, FLOC continued to learn and

adapt to the changing food pyramid of power, shifting their focus to the pickle

fields of Florida. FLOC’s intimate understanding of the agricultural system of

power, and their success in changing the food pyramid, encouraged future farm

unions to attack the higher echelon of the food pyramid as FLOC itself organized

workers elsewhere in the nation. FLOC later organized not just Mexican and

Mexican American farmworkers but also the predominately male H-2(A) foreign

workers.686 FLOC's focus on H-2(A) workers meant a shift away from a family-

centered framework, but FLOC’s focus in the 1990s continued to demonstrate

685

686

their understanding of the power relations in the agricultural system. Using a

greater understanding of the power of corporations in the food pyramid, FLOC

provided avenues for the empowerment of Mexican and Mexican American

migrant farmworkers in the Midwest.

CHAPTER 6

FAMILY, HOME AND THE

MIDWEST IN MIGRANT FARMWORKERS' LIVES

“…I always will call home Texas though, even though I’ve been here longer than

there.”687

-Sylvia Garcia

“Migratory farm laborers move restlessly over the face of the land…They

pass through community after community, but they neither claim the

community as home nor does the community claim them.”688

- U.S. Migrant Problem Study Commission

For most of their lives, both John Ortega and Sylvia Garcia were migrants.

Though born in different generations, both experienced similar struggles within

the Midwest migrant stream. Traveling from Texas to the Midwest in 1920s and

1930s and 1960s and 1970s respectively, the Midwest was the place that offered

both generations the financial security needed for their family’s survival. Despite

the necessity for migrating, both felt the label of “migrant” and felt culturally

isolated. Even when Sylvia was an adult with her own family, this sense of

isolation still defined her identity and resonated across time. Racism, the lack of

culturally relevant food, as well as separation from extended family made it

difficult for some migrants to feel comfortable in the Midwest. Some urban areas

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688

of the Midwest offered non-agricultural employment and some cultural comforts,

like Mexican grocery stores, but migrants in smaller cities sometimes felt more at

home in Texas than the small Midwest communities where they settled. Though

John and Sylvia eventually settled in Iowa and Minnesota respectively, John felt

out of place in the Midwest throughout his childhood while only Sylvia’s children

felt at home in Moorhead, Minnesota. Feeling isolated in the smaller Midwest

cities and towns where they worked or settled, migrants like Sylvia and John

relied on their immediate family for basic and cultural survival, cooking

traditional Mexican dishes to retain their culture in their new permanent home or

adapting traditional gender norms to survive in the Midwest migrant stream.689

Though cooking traditional Mexican food helped maintain Mexican culture in the

North, some children still felt ashamed and different because of their Mexican

lunches like John Ortega did as a child. For these reasons, some migrants and

former migrants, like Sylvia and her husband, continued to call the South, instead

of the North, home.

For farmworkers like Sylvia Garcia and John Ortega who traveled between

their homes in the South to the fields of the North and for the families

permanently settled in Northern communities, home shaped their experiences as

migrants. For some, home was a physical space, where you lived throughout the

year, or a feeling of safety and belonging, a place where the family resided. Home

689

was the place where family relationships developed and where family defined

gender roles within the house and as a result, outside the confines of the physical

house. Home, whether as a physical space, a place of belonging, or a place for

family, defined the gender and family dynamics within the Midwest farmworker

community. While the 1963 Migrant Study quoted at the beginning depicted all

farmworkers as unbound to any community and without any sense of home, most

Midwest migrants felt aimless and unwanted in the communities in which they

traveled, but not from where they started. Like the growers that argued that the

migrant stream fit workers natural transient nature, so too did this writer suggest

migrants were incapable of creating a home.690 Yet, finances drove Midwest

migrants to leave as family units to work in the Midwest. In contrast to the West

coast or Eastern stream, Midwest migrants traveled as a family unit with pre-

designed gender norms, to a region that did not support Mexican culture. In

contrast to other parts of the nation, the Mexican American migrant and ex-

migrant farmworkers men, women, and children struggled to establish a sense of

home in a region largely devoid of Mexican culture and Mexican Americans,

adapting gender roles in the migrant stream and emphasizing Mexican culture to

create both temporary and permanent homes in the Midwest.

Background

690

Since almost the beginning of the Midwest migrant stream, Mexican and Mexican

Americans worked and travelled alongside their family members. Though some

areas of Minnesota and Michigan employed Mexican migrants in sugar beet fields

since World War I, most Mexican migrant families did not start their migrate

treks until after the Second World War.691 Forced to migrate to survive when few

employment opportunities existed in their

Southern cities, farmworker families left their homes in Texas as well as Florida

and Mexico,

as early as April, to travel to the Midwest to harvest a variety of crops until

November when they returned to their Southern homes.692 Southern homes acted

as migrants’ home base, the place migrants consistently returned to after traveling

to the Midwest. Though traditionally traveling with immediate family members,

migrating meant farmworkers traveled away from extended family members and

familiar communities to travel North with crew leaders or as a family unit.

Working for a variety of growers along the different migrant routes of the

Midwest stream meant farmworker families lived in numerous dwellings owned

by growers, and children attended a variety of schools, whether migrant summer

schools or regular schools for a few months in a year. Previous experience shaped

the individual migrant group’s routes, allowing a degree of regularity in migrants’

lives and temporary Northern homes, though weather, changing crop patterns, and

691

692

financial opportunities often led to slight alterations.693 Aside from working in the

fields, farmworkers occasionally worked in canning factories or other agricultural

jobs for brief periods, such as Christmas tree harvesting in the North.694 In the

case of the Delgado migrant family in 1970s Ohio, the wife and some of the

children continued to work in the tomato fields during the summer as the husband

worked in the nearby canning factory, combining field and cannery work into

their migrant route.695 No matter the fields they harvested, Mexican and Mexican

American migrant farmworkers labored and migrated alongside their family

members, traveling and in some cases, leaving the migrant stream as family units.

The Midwest migrant stream was historically distinguished from other

migrant streams because of the large numbers of women in the stream and the

role of families. According to a report conducted between 1988-1990, while many

families in the migrant stream had young children, the majority (as much as fifty

percent) of migrants in the stream were between the ages of eighteen and thirty-

four years old; with only a small percentage (around four percent) under

seventeen years old.696 This means that although most Midwest migrant families

had young children, migrant families were less likely to have numerous young

children in the stream. In contrast, the Western and Southern migrant streams had

693

694

695

696

significantly more single males and reflected Western Mexican American’s

ability to work in local fields instead of migrating long distances.697 In fact, a

1989 report from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) found that

the Midwest had a higher number of female to males than other areas of the

country.698 This study coincided with another study on the Southern stream which

noted not only how African Americans dominated the stream, but the

significantly higher numbers of men in the stream, both married with their

spouses back home and unmarried.699 Eastern migrant men adjusted gender norms

to survive as single men in the stream, sometimes joining with one of the few

migrant women in the stream to divide reproductive labor along traditional lines,

with women cooking and cleaning and men working for wages.700 Like migrants

in the Midwest, Eastern male farmworkers, when they could pair with women,

used gender norms as a basis for their survival strategies in the stream. For

Midwest migrants, family was a resource that with reproductive and waged labor

patterns, created the basis for maintaining a place they could call home.

Mexican and Mexican American families’ struggle for acceptance

amplified the Midwest region’s peculiarity as a region; an aspect of experience

long ignored by scholars and the public.701 Mexican American families travelling

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698

699

700

701

up the Midwest stream entered a region viewed by the general United States

public, and even by some Mexican Americans, as outside the Mexican cultural

sphere despite generations of Mexican American communities in some Midwest

urban centers. The immigration of Mexican nationals to the Midwest in the early

1900s and the Bracero immigration in the 1940s and 1950s created rich Mexican

American communities in some Midwest cities, while other areas of the Midwest

were almost totally devoid of Mexicans. However, recent scholars argue that the

continued focus on the Southwest region by academics, and even some Mexican

Americans, forever reduces Mexican Americans in the Midwest to the role of

outsider and “immigrant.”702 Maria Elena, who was a migrant and eventually

became a union organizer, argued a pilot sprayed her with pesticide because he

likely believed her to be an undocumented worker because of her visible

“otherness.”703 Although she clearly parked on the side of the road, she argued the

pilot probably saw no issue with spraying dangerous chemicals on top of her.

Though migrant workers in the Western stream had the comfort of living in a

region with a large Mexican and Mexican American population, migrants

working in the Midwest were publically perceived to be outsiders. For Maria

Elena and other migrants, home provided a place of comfort and acceptance,

something at least partially lacking in the Midwest where some of the public

702

703

started to view even families that lived in the region for generations, as

“immigrants” and “outsiders.”

With a predominance of families in the Midwest migrant stream, women

and children provided their families critical assistance as families survived and

negotiated familial roles and labor in the migrant stream. The reproductive labor

of women and children and the allocation of paid and unpaid labor for survival,

intersected with the needs of growers for a cheap labor force. Mexican American

culture provided a framework of sacrifice that migrants based their paid and

unpaid labor patterns. Migrant families struggled not just with exploitive and

poverty conditions in work and in their temporary Northern homes, but from

these conditions came migrants’ needs for established familial roles to financially

maintain the family and to perform the reproductive labor complicated by

constantly moving. In the West, women often had opportunities to work as wage

earners outside the fields, although they often worked as secondary waged earners

and still within the confines of gender roles, accepting husband and father’s

decision on their right to work.704 In the Midwest stream, women usually

followed traditional gender norms that gave men greater authority in the family as

they worked in the fields as well as performed reproductive labor.

Adjusting the need for a house and the necessary hands in the fields was a

balancing act for many migrants. Irene Fávila’s mother cooked lunches for her

704

husband and children every night and labored in the fields during the day as her

eldest daughter, Irene, reheated the precooked lunches for her younger siblings.

Not only reheating food, Irene also looked after her siblings while her parents

worked in the fields.705 In contrast, Lupe Serna remembered working in the fields

while her two younger brothers helped in the house.706 At the same time, women

could be the prime individual in a family to maintain important ties with others

including extended family members and establishing necessary networks of

mutual assistance.707 One woman’s kindness to offer food to a family in need or

nurturing an ill neighbor, could easily result in that person reciprocating with food

for her family when they were in need, or sharing important information about a

job opportunity, making women’s reproductive roles a powerful component to

migrants’ lives.708 Migrants’ different choices regarding who labored in the fields

and who performed household chores reflected the intersection of individual

family’s composition with Mexican American cultural norms and gender changes

in United States society. Various migrants established different reproductive and

paid labor familial roles, yet family consistently remained pivotal to migrants’

survival strategy as they migrated away from their Southern homes and

communities to the numerous fields of the North.

705

706

707

708

Set within the backdrop of the last half of the twentieth century, migration

in the Midwest stream meant the interaction between farmworker families and the

social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the racially charged backlash

against “illegal immigrants” in the

1980s and 1990s. Migrant families traveled to the Midwest during a time of

radical challenge in United States society. The United Farm Workers (UFW) in

California brought the plight of farmworkers to public attention at the same time

that the Chicano, Civil Rights, and Feminist Movements brought public attention

to the problems faced by minorities and issues in gender relations. Social

movements exposed farmworkers and the public at large to avenues for

empowerment and change in gender, labor, and social relations. With these new

ideas, social perceptions of Mexican American identity, farmworker power, and

gender roles became negotiable rather than pre-defined. Yet the backlash of the

1980s and the 1990s brought criticism of Feminism, government support for

equality and anti-poverty legislation and programs, in addition to a growing fear

of “illegal” Mexican immigrants. For migrants, this meant decreasing support for

programs that benefitted migrants and the increasing categorization of all ethnic

Mexicans as “illegal” and therefore “outsiders.”709 Though Mexican American

communities could partially shield some Mexicans Americans from the constant

outside label of “illegal,” migrants who traveled to rural Midwest regions often

709

faced the racially-based label of “illegal,” making migrants even more of an

outsider to the local cities and towns.710 Traveling from their homes in the South

to the fields of the Midwest during the last half of the twentieth century,

farmworkers experienced changing social norms and backlash.

“A donde el corazon se inclina, el pie camina”711

Since the beginning, farmworker’s Southern homes and towns influenced

those who traveled up the Midwest stream and the cultural and family adaption

strategies used to survive. Texas, Florida, and Mexico served as Midwest

migrants’ home base, usually located in the center of a Mexican community and

near extended family networks. Extended family, festivals, and school friends

made up the migrants’ local Southern communities, making migrants call the

South home. From Jose Martinez in the mid-twentieth century to Zulema Lopez

and Perla Sanchez in the recent documentary The Harvest/La Cosecha, friends

and the Mexican American community made migrant children more comfortable

in their Southern schools and homes than the migrant schools and fields of the

North.712 Though differences could make farmworkers feel out of place even in

the South, such as Beatriz Castillo who was born in Mexico but moved with her

family to Texas in the 1970s where she felt out of place in high school because of

710

711

712

her accent, most farmworkers described feeling comfortable and accepted in their

native Southern homes.713 Farmworkers’ financial success in the North provided

funding to make improvements to migrants’ stable Southern homes, especially for

Mexican nationals.714 The culturally similar environment meant migrants felt at

home in the South as similar language, experiences, food, and culture brought the

community together and made the physical space where they lived, home.

Within Mexican and Mexican American dominated cities and towns,

farmworkers could easily take part in significant events and daily activities

centered on the home and the local community. Quinceañeras, Day of the Dead,

Spanish mass, and even traditional Mexican food, created a sense of community

in the Texas, Florida, and Mexican migrant communities. Family, including

immediate and extended family members, played important roles in these events,

as migrants also forged and maintained ties within the local and extended

community. Food itself proved a notable expression of culture, with Sylvia’s

parents sending spices and ingredients essential to traditional Mexican dishes to

her when she moved up North.715 Southern homes and communities served as a

safe place that sheltered and maintained Mexican

American culture. Even for migrants who traveled up the Western stream, the

existence of Mexican American culture in the Southwest eased migrants ability to

713

714

715

find and cook traditional food as well as take part in traditionally cultural events.

As a child in the migrant stream in his family of ten, Jose Martinez remembered

being happier in his Texas home because of the significant number of Mexican

and Mexican Americans in Texas, especially as people in the Michigan area

where his family migrated to yearly, treated him “differently.”716 He stated,

“When I went back to Texas, I had no problems making friends. In Texas it’s

like ninety percent raw Mexicans and Mexican Americans. I formed my group of

kids... If they weren’t migrant kids, then they’d been migrants. They’d all

worked in the fields. Michigan and Texas were two totally different worlds.

Every time I went back to Texas, I felt like I was going home.”717 Traditional

meals as well as the ability to share in common cultural events, such as a

daughter’s Quinceañera, made some farmworkers feel more comfortable and at

home in Mexico, Texas, or Florida than in the Midwest.

It is within the comfortable physical space of farmworker’s Southern

homes that farmworker family and gender norms developed. Mexican and

Mexican American culture often provided a cultural basis for the division of

labor within migrant families. Mexican culture emphasized kinship and the

importance of family and sacrifice.718 Helping each other and the inculcation of

individual sacrifice for the family’s welfare proved even more relevant to

716

717

718

migrant farmworkers who had little money and labored together as a family to

survive. Migrant families depended on members following gender and familial

roles as family members performed both paid and unpaid labor. Based on the

idea that many hands made farm labor easier, the average Mexican migrant

family during the 1960s to the 1970s consisted of six to seven individuals.719

Those old enough to work in the fields, which could be almost half of the family,

ensured greater earnings for the family unit.720 In addition, childcare and other

household chores done by family members freed older persons to perform waged

labor. For all members of the traditional Mexican family, familial loyalty was

critical to the family’s survival in the migrant stream as they traveled without a

“home” for a large portion of the year. The sacrificial nature of the

Mexican American migrant culture provided a framework for the gender division

of labor for migrants in the stream. Traditionally, women and girls provided

reproductive labor and men provided financially for the family and controlled the

sexuality of women.721 As migrants, this meant women occasionally worked in

the fields, but consistently performed reproductive labor. For example, Adelle

Martinez remembered girls and mothers left the fields to make lunch as the men

719

720

721

continued to work.722 This division of responsibilities extended to children as

many parents raised young boys to eventually be the head of the household with

the responsibility of providing for the family and protecting sisters,

simultaneously sheltering girls to protect their valued virginity.723 For Silvia and

Israel Garcia, this meant restricting dances and dates for their daughters.724 For

Lidia Curiel, boys who wanted to take her to a dance had to ask her brother for

permission.725 Despite this broad depiction of Mexican machismo, the reality of

Mexican culture and the lives of migrant farmworkers meant a degree of

adjustment. Economic necessity meant women usually had to work in the fields,

though some husbands avoided this if possible. Yet the traditional gender norms

did not leave Mexican women without power; women at least partially controlled

finances in the family, managing family resources to save money and using

reproductive labor, like cooking or providing medical assistance to neighbors, to

create ties and support their family.726 Gender relations in migrants’ Southern

homes established the structure for the gender division of labor that would be

722 Adella Martinez, interview by Janet Weaver, October 10, 2006, Iowa Women's Archives, University of Iowa

Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.

723 Power, “An Analysis of the Family System,” 12, 14.

724 Sylvia Garcia, interview by Abner Arauza.

725 , 43.

726

employed, and even altered, within the temporary homes of the Midwest migrant

stream.

Despite Mexican and Mexican Americans’ sense of home in Texas,

Florida, or Mexico, economic necessity, driven by decreasing financial

opportunities in the South and racially limited opportunities in the North, forced

many to migrate al Norte year after year. Many Mexican and Mexican

Americans, especially those with less education, lacked job opportunities in

Texas, Mexico, and Florida. Migrants who grew up in Mexico or Texas

remembered their parents owning small stores, growing crops, picking cotton and

performing a variety of other jobs in their home towns, but they also remember

being poor. Since childhood, Mary Ramos recalled working in the cotton fields

to help her family survive, but after her family started migrating to the field up

North, her family was able to buy a radio, a record player, soda, and meat, things

her family could not afford before entering the migrant stream.727 Mechanization

and changing economies in farmworkers’ Southern homes left many without

year-round employment. Families like Mary Ramos’ heard and saw migrants’

success as migrant farmworkers returned to their Southern homes. In reality,

migrant families worked long and hard hours, lived in shacks, experienced

727

discrimination, made meager wages, and often had to save their Northern money

to survive Southern winters, yet migrants’ apparent success encouraged future

migration. Tales of individual migrant families’ success in Northern fields

combined with former migrants visible success living al Norte, made the

Midwest an appealing option for struggling Mexican Americans. As some

migrants found year-round factory or other employment up North, some migrants

even left the stream, frequently between the 1960s and 1980s, with the assistance

of local agencies in the Midwest. Despite Mexican and Mexican Americans’

established homes in the South, many families found themselves migrating al

Norte for work.

Migrating al Norte

Though migrants’ homes in Texas, Florida, or Mexico could hardly be

considered luxurious, they were often better equipped than the dilapidated

temporary housing they resided in within the Midwest. Growers provided

migrants’ temporary northern homes and most growers faced limited, if any,

housing regulations.42 Growers from the 1950s to the 1970s usually converted

barns, shacks, or trailers to house large families or several families. For the Perez

family who worked in a Roselle, Illinois field, the family of twelve lived in a

converted chicken coup located near the grower’s unsecured pesticide. In

addition, housing usually lacked basic facilities like running water or toilets. An

Indiana state report on migrants took note that the Guerra family lived in a

toolshed converted to a house for a few families with no indoor.Because of the

camps poor location and the lack of proper facilities, disease and animal or insect

infestations became common problems in some migrant camps.728 From as early

as the 1930s when John Ortega grew up as a migrant traveling to the Midwest, to

the 1960s when the Perez family came to Illinois, Midwest growers provided

migrants with unsuitable housing that sometimes caused deaths. In the case of the

Perez family, two year-old

728

Ernesto Perez died from exposure to unsecured pesticide stored next to the Perez’

shack, while John Ortega blamed his baby sister’s death on a drafty migrant

house.729 The farmworkers unstable life as they traveled to various shacks along

their migrant route, made it difficult for farmworkers to establish a sense of

“home” in the Midwest stream. For Jose Martinez who migrated as a child to

Michigan, housing was part of a constellation of factors that made him feel as if

he did not belong in Michigan, choosing to not make friends in the area. Home

was a mindset of an imagined destination, and he knew he would leave shortly.46

Whether a single family in a converted barn or a small camp of migrant families

in trailers, the poor conditions of migrants’ Northern houses left farmworkers

lacking a sense of home in the North.

Family played an important role in how migrants faced the deplorable

conditions of migrant housing and made the migrant camps a home away from

home. Migrant families tried to create some sense of home in migrant camps,

working to clean the dirt in the house and bringing some of the essentials of their

Southern house to create a temporary home in the Northern fields. For

farmworkers with children, developing a sense of “home” meant recreating

family structures that allowed all family members to eat, drink, find warmth, and

other basic functions. Family members cooked, found wood to burn in stoves,

cleaned the house, and raised children as each housing structure had to serve as a

729

home for a few months in a year.730 Yet for others, establishing a temporary home

was barely a necessity, as Mary Ramos intentionally worked in the fields because

she hated tending a shack to make it a temporary “home.”731 As some

farmworkers sought to clean the dirt and create some kind of “home away from

home” for their family members, others, especially the few single migrants

traveling up the Midwest stream, found it easier to view the Northern fields as a

temporary stop.732 Migrants like Jesus Sanchez and his father argued they did not

need pleasant housing because they were there to work, accepting a field or the

back of a car to sleep.733 Midwest migrants’ family structure in the stream shaped

whether migrants’ viewed Northern housing accommodations as only a place to

sleep until the next work day, or as a place to care for the health, safety, and

nutrition of multiple people, especially children. Family meant migrants had to

create a place, even if only for a few months in a year, for their children to grow-

up, eat, work on homework, and play. Even in the early 2000s, the Lopez and

Sanchez families came with their pots and pans and a few basic personal items

and started cleaning and arranging their temporary home in

730

731

732

733

Northern fields.734 Though single adults could easily view the North as a place

only for work and sleep, migrant families had to wrestle with dilapidated

Northern housing to establish a temporary home for their children.

To survive in the Midwest stream, farmworker families sacrificed in the

fields and in their temporary homes, adapting traditional gender norms to perform

necessary reproductive and waged labor. Within the private sphere of the home

and the public sphere of waged labor, migrants of all ages faced gendered

expectations of men, women, and children’s roles. Families depended on each

members’ sacrifice to survive. As one boy recalled of himself and his siblings

working in Michigan fields, “We just did it. Working was what we did to

survive.”735 When children reached the age of seven or eight, they performed

labor equal to adults in the fields.736 For children in the early twentieth century

like John Ortega, children rarely attended school since local officials ignored

existing truancy laws.737 Similarly, an Indiana report on migrants in 1974 noted

that the state did not even legally require migrant children attend school as late as

the 1970s.738 For Perla Sanchez who migrated with her family to Indiana and

Ohio, she missed part of the beginning and end of the school year so she could

734

735

736

737

738

travel and work with her family.739 Even when parents did not employ their

children in the field because they were too young, children played or slept on

nearby blankets because few migrant parents had cheap or free childcare.740 For

many Mexican and Mexican Americans working in the Midwest, the entire family

either worked or played in the fields.

Since migrants first started coming north to work in the fields, family

members expected the entire family to perform some type of labor. For early

migrants like Amelia Nava who started working in the fields with her parents

during the 1940s when she turned eleven, work in the fields meant she could not

attend school or play with kids, receiving only four years of public school

education.741 As some migrant parents pushed for their children to receive an

education, many children still worked in the fields for most of their life. Beatriz

Castillo labored in the fields throughout the 1970s and 1980s, migrating with her

family after the school year finished and even working with her family during

breaks in college.7427439 Beatriz stopped migrating only when she found full-time

employment, yet even at the time of her interview in 1992, Beatriz still worked in

the fields some weekends.744 Family expectations extended beyond young

739

740

741

742

743

744

children, with Lidia Curiel taking care of her elderly mother who migrated with

her daughter.745 At the same time, Lidia’s elderly mother occasionally worked in

the fields, picking a row or two to help her daughter’s family.746 The sacrificial

nature of Mexican American culture and life in the stream meant that migrant

family members had to support the family, which for many men, women, and

children in the stream, meant working in the fields or the home.

Though all family members often labored in the fields regardless of sex, the

gender division of labor played a more significant role in the reproductive labor

of the home. The gender and even age division of labor provided farmworkers

with a way to manage their lives in the stream. Parents expected older children to

help out and be a good example for younger siblings.747 Young girls took on the

domestic role of mother to allow their own mother to work in the field, with older

girls taking on roles with greater responsibility, like cooking and taking care of

their younger siblings. One woman in the Western stream, Irene Fávila, recalled

her mother cooked and prepared items each day for all the children to eat, and that

she, at the age of six, had to feed her younger siblings as her mother worked in

the field.748 Some women cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which they brought

out to the workers in the field, allowing field workers to take a much needed meal

745

746

747

748

break before going back to work.749 Women who grew up as migrants remember

girls helping more around the house than boys: cooking, cleaning, and baking,

while boys did other chores such as collecting firewood. However, all older

children cared for younger siblings.750 In addition, migrants remember older boys

taking caring of younger sisters as guardians and protectors of sisters’ sexuality as

older girls often took on motherly roles looking after younger sibling.751 Gendered

roles became so engrained that one migrant woman, Mercedes, remembered

feeling like an adult woman at the young age of twelve because she could

accomplish many of the tasks adult women performed such as washing, cooking,

and taking care of children.752 Migrants partially established a “home” in the

temporary houses of the North by maintaining their family structure through the

maintenance of the gender division of labor, using norms as a basis for their

adaptation to work and housing demands.

For the women that raised their children, cooked, and cleaned the shacks

they temporarily called home, the fields were either an added chore or a freedom

from the frustrations of maintaining a shack. A much younger migrant, Mary,

stated, “I’ve always worked in the fields, too. A woman doesn’t have to, just if

she wants to, but she usually does.”753 Hating to only tend to a house in the shacks

749

750

751

752

753

provided by growers and raise two children, Mary figured it better to help her

family financially by working with her husband in the fields.754 Another migrant

woman, much older than Mary who eventually settled in Michigan, willingly

labored in the fields though her husband felt that as a man he should be the main

worker.755 Both Mary and the older migrant woman showed a willingness to work

outside the confines of the home, in the fields, even when their husbands did not

feel it necessary. These women understood that their family’s survival, especially

when their family returned to their Southern homes, depended on the income

made in the fields. Migrant women’s desire to financially support their families,

notably in the case of Mary, demonstrated a consciousness to work outside the

reproductive labor roles assigned to women. Mary specifically saw herself not

only in terms of her role in the house, performing reproductive labor, but also as a

paid worker. In addition, Mary disregarded her Northern shack as a home worth

caring for, instead seeking to support her family through other means. Whether

supporting the family through paid labor in the fields or reproductive labor in the

home, farmworker women worked to establish a home for their family.

Struggling to create a physical “home” in the Midwest, farmworkers also

struggled with cultural and physical isolation in some Midwest towns and cities,

relying on any local migrant community to establish a sense of belonging. For the

754

755

many migrants who traveled within crews, lack of automobiles left migrants

dependent on growers and crew leaders for transportation into local cities. This

physical isolation, though confining migrants to a small area with other Mexican

American migrants, also meant that they could not integrate themselves in the

local community or create the necessary ties to leave the stream and establish

local acceptance of a culturally different population. In contrast to the Western

stream where farmworkers likely migrated to areas with nearby Mexican

American communities, Midwest migrant workers were often culturally different

in many of the rural fields of the Midwest. When reaching local cities and towns,

migrants often felt out of place, and sometimes, unwanted. Like the example of

Jose Martinez, migrant children were outsiders in Midwest communities, facing

indifference from the school system, if not hostility from teachers and fellow

students. Mexican American groups like La Raza in Wisconsin, pressured schools

to do more than place migrants’ education in the hands of one overworked

Mexican American teacher. Yet schools did not always listen, with one

Wisconsin principal arguing she did not need to solve the fact that the migrant

stream left many migrant students behind on their education.756 For John Ortega,

growing up in the stream meant language, culture, and money made him feel

different from other local children, leading him to avoid eating his traditional

756

Mexican lunch around his classmates.757 Yet, some migrants and Northern

residents tried to create better ties between the farmworkers and local community.

In Redwood Falls, Minnesota, the Migrant Parent Council organized a celebration

with Mexican musicians, a large piñata, and traditional Mexican dishes like

frijoles and enchiladas to share Mexican American culture with the Anglo

residents of Redwood Falls.758 These cultural exchange events, with migrant

women using their reproductive role of food preparation to create important

community ties, provided rural Midwest towns that had no strong Mexican

community with an avenue to learn about Mexican American culture. Few rural

areas had preexisting Mexican communities as previous immigrants went to

larger cities such as Chicago, Illinois or St. Paul, Minnesota, or slightly smaller

cities such as Cooks Point, Iowa, where railroad and industrial opportunities drew

early Mexican and Mexican American immigrants.759 For the many migrants who

followed the Midwest stream to the fields of small farming towns, migrants

struggled against cultural and physical isolation.

Cultural differences made Mexican American migrants’ cultural isolation

in the Midwest communities where they worked, more pronounced. For the

migrants outside urban cultural havens like Chicago or St. Paul where large

numbers of Mexican Americans lived, simple things like food proved difficult.

757

758

759

Sylvia Garcia noted that when leaving the migrant stream to live in Moorhead,

Minnesota, her family in Texas would mail chili peppers, jalapeños, and other

ingredients because she could not find them in local stores.760 Sylvia mentioned

food several times as an important component of Mexican culture that she tried to

maintain for her children growing up in a culturally different community.761

Though Moorhead, Minnesota became her family’s new home, Silvia, who was

born and raised in Crystal City, Texas, and her husband, Israel, a native of

Mexico, struggled with the notion of Moorhead, Minnesota as their home, even

though their children who were raised in the area felt comfortable.762 Similarly for

John Ortega’s father, who came to the United States in the early twentieth

century, a Mexican radio station provided an important tie to his old home in

Mexico.763 As some younger generations created a place for themselves al Norte,

many migrants and ex-migrants like Silvia, Israel, and Ortega’s father remained

tied to their Southern homes because of extended family and Mexican American

culture.

As some farmworkers dreamed of the South, other migrants sought out

Mexican American culture in the Midwest. John Ortega’s family always took

their day off of work to visit any other Mexican Americans in the area, curbing

760

761

762

763

their cultural isolation while living in the stream.764 For migrant farmworkers

living near larger cities, local Mexicans provided a cultural haven, especially in

the 1960s and 1970s when the Civil Rights and Chicano

Movements encouraged the establishments of numerous cultural organizations.

The Mexican American community of St. Paul, Minnesota created a Mexican

American Cultural Center by the 1970s which provided any nearby migrants or

ex-migrants with an important tie to Mexican American culture. Smaller cities

like DeKalb, Illinois, where only a few Mexican Americans resided after leaving

the stream in the 1970s, had no cultural centers to support the Mexican American

community of local and ex-migrants.765 Some of these smaller cities eventually

provided some cultural havens after some farmworkers left the stream, such as

when the Balli family established a Mexican restaurant in DeKalb, Illinois.766 Few

Midwest cities and towns provided a sense of “home” for migrants since they

lacked the Mexican American culture, community, and sense of belonging

important for establishing a home.

Barrios and Migrants

The farmworkers who migrated between their Southern homes and the

temporary shacks of the North or who established homes in the North, had to

764

765

766

negotiate between their sense of home in the South and the opportunities of the

North. Farmworkers’ Southern colonias and barrios, though usually located

within Anglo-controlled cities, still provided a cultural haven for migrants. The

Mexican American residents of Crystal City, Texas organized to win council

seats in the late 1960s and early 1970s because of Mexican Americans lack of

representation in a city with a large Mexican population.767 Despite facing racism

and discrimination in their Southern homes, farmworkers from Crystal City still

had the advantage of a large Mexican American population to organize for

change. Though racism and the growing public fear of undocumented

immigration brought backlash even in the Southern and Western parts of the

United States, the existence of Southern and Western colonias and barrios still

provided a cultural refuge for Mexican American.

In contrast to Southern barrios’ homogeneous population, the Midwest

contained anything from rural communities with limited opportunities and no

Hispanic residents to urban areas with a Mexican American barrio and numerous

job opportunities. The mixture of old and new, colonias and barrios, and Mexican

American and Anglo communities within the North made the farmworker

experience in the Midwest stream markedly different than in Southern and even

Western cities where larger and more historical Mexican American and Mexican

communities existed. Migrants who left the stream to live in the Midwest often

767

did so because of the support of local organizations that offered assistance with

housing and jobs, like in DeKalb, Illinois and St. Paul, Minnesota. Yet these aid

groups did not always exist in cities with a preexisting Mexican American

communities. The first few farmworkers who left the stream with the assistance

of some local agencies, created a home in an Anglo-dominated community,

ultimately encouraging others to live in the area. In the case of DeKalb, Illinois,

this meant a bourgeoning community after Luis Balli and Benito Alamia’s

families left the stream in 1967 and 1968. These pioneers were some of the first

Mexican American migrants to live in the area, and through their

entrepreneurship they developed a few cultural institutions including restaurants

and eventually a grocery store that served future Mexican Americans that came to

live in the city.768 In contrast, other Midwest cities such as St. Paul, had extensive

Mexican American communities that supported each other, including day care

centers and even organizations that came out of the social movements of the

1960s and 1970s like the Brown Berets.769 The variety of environments in the

Midwest meant migrants could either create for their families a home in the

Midwest, or struggle to not feel isolated from Midwest culture, land, and people.

Activists during the 1960s and 1970s and scholars of Mexican American

and Chicano culture, focused heavily on the Southwest region as the heart of

768

769

Mexican and Mexican American culture, ultimately ignoring the Midwest region

where pockets of Mexican Americans resided. Though the Southwest region of

the United States had the distinction of continual Mexican presence before the

current United States borders were established, the Midwest did not have any

significant Mexican immigrants until the early 20th century. Despite the early

waves of immigrants, the early Mexican and Mexican American residents of the

Midwest remained patchy and centered in urban centers. The overall perception

of the Midwest as non-Hispanic meant that the local and national community saw

Midwest Mexican Americans as immigrant outsiders even if families lived in the

Midwest for generations.770 The influx and subsequent media attention on

undocumented Mexicans encouraged the perception that all Mexican Americans

in the Midwest were outsiders. The public notion that Mexicans outside the

Southwest were foreign, thwarted farmworkers’ efforts to comfortably create a

home for themselves in the Midwest as they traveled in the stream and sometimes

left the stream to live in the North.771

Outside the pockets of Mexican Americans in the Midwest, out-migrating

farmworkers also blended into small and large Northern urban centers. The

Midwest often drew migrant farmworkers to the area for agricultural

770

771

employment, but Midwest urban centers also served as a draw to the region

especially for migrants that sought to leave the stream. St. Paul,

Minnesota; Chicago, Illinois; and Madison, Wisconsin offered industrial

employment. In

Chicago, various industrial employment opportunities existed, including railroad

work earlier in the twentieth century and steel work in the later half of the

twentieth century.772 In Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, large numbers of

migrants from Crystal City, Texas left the stream to live in Wisconsin. The

transmission of culture and ideas to Wisconsin, including the activist ideology of

Crystal City residents, came from the continuation of the migrant stream from

Crystal City to Wisconsin.773 In this case, the continuation of the migrant stream

between these two points encouraged Mexican American activism in both Crystal

City, Texas and Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In contrast, large and small

urban centers with early Mexican populations provided migrants and new

Mexicans residents with cultural institutions, with St. Paul having Mexican

American cultural centers and Mexican American day care centers, and Chicago

had grocers and neighborhood communities.774 Yet, the existence of cultural

centers in larger urban cities and industrial employment options did not prevent

migrants from leaving the stream and landing in urban ghettos. Northern Mexican

772

773

774

Americans and Anglos feared that migrants who left the stream would become

another member of the Midwest urban ghetto as Midwest industrial employment,

though year-round and more remunerative than field work, did not provide

enough for decent housing in urban centers. The Hermosillo family, who left the

stream on the outskirts of Chicago, lived in a shack located near a sewage canal

which they rented for ten dollars a month.775 Though leaving the stream, the

Hermosillo family’s living conditions hardly improved from the shacks in the

fields. Though Carmen Hermosillo’s employment as a janitor allowed for his

family’s stable presence in the Midwest, their shack hardly served as a stable

home. Like the Hermosillo family, many ex-migrants lived in slums, so much so

that the Wisconsin’s United Migrant Opportunity Services, Inc. struggled to

remedy it through assistance for migrants transitioning out of the stream.776 For

the former migrant farmworkers drawn to year-round employment in the urban

Midwest, large cities offered the possibility of a Mexican American community

in addition to the disadvantage of urban decay and poverty.

The opportunities of the Midwest in the last half of the twentieth century

would ultimately combine with the social movements of the time to reshape the

gender dimensions of ex-farmworker families. Ex-farmworkers who found a

remunerative urban job that provided for their family, usually led to the

775

776

renegotiation of gender norms. With more remunerative jobs, women could stay

in the private realm of the home with men in the public realm of paid

employment. However, not many ex-farmworkers found high paying jobs.

Amelia Nava spent a few years away from the agricultural fields of the Midwest,

but as her family grew she returned to the fields around her new home in Tiffin,

Ohio to help support her family as her husband continued to work in a Bettsville,

Ohio factory.777 Year-round industrial employment did not guarantee ex-

farmworkers ability to return permanently to traditional gender roles.

At the same time the Midwest drew migrants to the region for year-round

employment, the Feminist movement altered farmworker and former

farmworker’s perception of reproductive labor and remunerated employment.

Though some migrants held relatively traditional views about men and women’s

roles in the public and private spheres, some demonstrated a desire for change.

Amelia specifically argued that she should have greater control over the finances

as she was in charge of the private realm of the home and therefore knew the

financial needs of the household.778 She then went on to talk about how a man

should be faithful to a woman as she is to him, not only because of all the cooking

and cleaning she did in the house, but also because cheating meant he would

spend money on another woman.779 For Amelia, traditional gender norms

777

778

779

provided justification for changing power relationships between husband and

wife, arguing her reproductive labor gave her the right to hold financial power

and to expect her husband’s fidelity. Not just with women, male migrants after

the 1960s and 1970s showed a changing perspective on gender relations. A

migrant in the Midwest stream, Fernando Cuevas’ family power structure

changed when he accepted a democratic voting structure to handle important

decisions that affected the entire family.780 For farmworkers living in the stream

or creating a home in the North, the Feminist Movement forced a renegotiation of

gender roles. Former migrants struggled to find a place in the Midwest where

they could find year-round employment and a Mexican American community that

made them feel at home; but just as they were in the Midwest stream, ex-

farmworkers also struggled to adjust their family dynamics to address the

changing perceptions of gender and the gender division of labor.

Conclusion

As the fervor of the Chicano Movement, like the other social movement of

the 1960s and 1970s, slowly died away, Mexican American organizations

disappeared and opposition to programs that supported social movements and

migrant legislation increased. In the Midwest, migrant and ex-migrants faced

continual discrimination from local white elites as urban renewal destroyed some

780

barrios.781 In addition, Midwesterners, like the rest of the public in the United

States, were filled with rampant fear about undocumented immigrants, as people

around the nation portrayed and viewed all ethnic Hispanics as undocumented

persons. Simultaneously, the national government decreased funding for

important programs, leading to the decline of programs and laws that addressed

discrimination in the nation. This led to diminished support for many of the

Mexican American cultural institutions.782 Financial and social changes led to St.

Paul’s Mexican American day care center, cultural centers, and numerous

Mexican American organizations like the Brown Berets, to disappear, leaving

only a handful of organizations that supported Mexican American culture by the

late 1990s.99 In addition, urban renewal destroyed vibrant Mexican American

communities in Cooks Point, Iowa and St. Paul, Minnesota.783 Changes in

agriculture altered migrant routes, forcing the closure of aid organizations like

DeKalb’s Migrant Ministry, which combined with dwindling government funding

and public support for legislation and regulations, meant migrants in the 1980s

and 1990s received little in the way of assistance.784 All the changes of the 1980s

and 1990s combined to complicate migrant and former migrants’ sense of home

in the Midwest.

781

782

783

784

The Mexican and Mexican American migrants who traveled to the Midwest

lived between two worlds as they migrated al Norte for work. The Mexican and

Mexican Americans who migrated to the Midwest traveled between their Southern

homes where family, friends, and a Mexican community existed, to work and

sometimes live in the North where farmworkers would meet either cultural

isolation and hostility or a supportive Mexican American community. Unlike the

East Coast stream, migrants in the Midwest had families to divide waged and

reproductive labor roles in the stream, yet family did not prevent some

farmworkers from feeling culturally isolated in many parts of the Midwest. In

contrast to the Western stream that provided migrants an opportunity to be among

Mexican Americans, many in the Midwest public viewed Mexican Americans as

“immigrants” and “outsiders.” For both Sylvia Garcia and John Ortega’s families,

job opportunities drew them al Norte and allowed them to survive in their

Northern homes and communities, and in the case of the Garcia family, to

establish a permanent year-round home up North. For the farmworkers who

traveled up and down the Midwest migrant stream, home, family, and identity

were an important part of their life and survival strategies in the stream; but even

as some created for themselves a permanent home in the Midwest, the migrant

identity of living and working between two worlds would forever influence them.

To live between these two worlds, migrants and former migrants’ attempted to

create a home for their families, adjusting familial roles to establish a temporary or

permanent home in the North. Even when farmworkers eventually viewed their

Northern house as home, many still identified if not worked, as migrant

farmworkers throughout their life. As

Jose Martinez stated of growing up as a migrant traveling from Texas to the fields

of Michigan, “Still, I don’t think I’ll ever stop being a migrant. Once you’re a

migrant, you’re a migrant for the rest of your life, whether or not you travel from

place to place, working the fields. Even when I have a degree, I’ll still be a

migrant, on the inside anyways.”785

CONCLUSION

MIGRANT FARMWORKERS SINCE 1993

And then decreasing social activism and awareness that was apparent in

newspaper articles and other media. Though national and state governments,

some aid organizations, many growers, as well as agricultural corporations did

not wish to drastically alter the food pyramid, many in the public pushed for some

785

type of change for farmworkers. The changes people demanded during this era of

awareness and activism often exemplified what they reacted to, either the

conditions of poverty depicted in Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame or the

United Farm Worker’s call to empower farm laborer. The types of programs and

legislation developed during this era ultimately shaped the experience of migrant

farmworkers in the Midwest stream as some migrants were able to settle in the

Midwest, some migrant children received an improved education, and some farm

laborers unionized. For the Farm Labor Organizing Committee

(FLOC), public sympathy was critical to transform the power dynamics in at least

two crops. Though a small success in comparison to the Midwest as a whole,

FLOC’s success altered a small part of the food pyramid as some growers

discovered their common position with migrants against a larger system of power.

Yet as the era of activism and aid diminished, so too did the momentum for

change. For this reason, the different features that made up the Midwest stream

from the 1960s to the 1990s: migrant families, state and national governments,

agribusinesses, gender dynamics in the stream, unions, aid societies, the public,

and growers, remained relatively in the same position within the pyramid. Some

state and national migrants developed aid programs, some migrants were

unionized, some growers worked with migrants, and some within the public

supported aid organizations or farmworker empowerment, but no massive

alteration of the entire food pyramid occurred. Since the passage of the North

American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the almost pyramidal power structure

with farmworkers on the bottom, struggling growers and the misinformed public

in the middle, and powerful agribusinesses on the top, continues on within the

Midwest migrant stream.

Compounding the decreasing interest in migrants’ plight in the 1990s was

the changes in the structure of the migrant stream that made it more difficult to

improve migrants’ lives after the implementation of NAFTA in 1993. A

struggling Mexican economy, faltering in part because of the United States

policies and increasingly stringent United States border controls, forced primarily

Mexican males to stay for long periods of time in the United States.786 Many

Midwest growers came to rely on international laborers through the H-2(A)

program or undocumented workers, including the Eckert fruit farm in Illinois

which employed primarily H2(A) workers in the 1990s and early 2000s.787 The

increasing internationalization of laborers failed to bring the same sympathy that

news article and specials about men, women, and children in the Midwest stream

brought during the 1960s to the 1990s, sympathy that was so critical to public

awareness and activism that brought about aid and legislation. At the Eckert farm,

both Martin Mauricio who managed the H-2(A) workers and one of the workers,

786

787

Jose Martinez, both lived between two worlds, working in Illinois and living

occasionally with their families in Mexico. Mauricio had been working in the

United States in some capacity since 1989, yet he met a woman in Mexico and

got married by 1999, returning to Mexico every year for a few months to be with

his family.788 Men like Mauricio struggled in the fields without their families

because of the masculine nature of immigration from Mexico, because they still

desired to permanently settle in Mexico, or because of the difficulty Mexican

families had in entering the United States.789 Though the Midwest remains family

oriented to a greater degree than other streams, the Midwest notably changed.

While migrants in the mid-twentieth century struggled living transcultural lives

between their homes in Texas, Florida, or Mexico and the Midwest fields, at the

turn of the century, the Midwest migrant stream became increasingly single

Mexican and Central American men working alongside migrant families.

National government policies and international relations in the late

twentieth century internationalized the farmworker populous in Midwest states at

a time that states’ aid budgets shrank and state and cities struggled to handle a

diverse population. Migrants in the Midwest in the last half of the twentieth

century faced a bureaucratic structure that did not wish to alter the system of

power, but rather created programs that addressed only certain issues within the

788

789

stream. National governments and international policies continued to influence

the structure of power, with state governments enacting policies to react to the

changing environment caused by national policies. Part of the increase in

Mexican Americans in the rural Midwest reflected the aid migrants received

during the 1960s to the 1990s. The growing national Spanishspeaking population

at the turn of the century came at a time of public backlash against Mexicans,

government spending, and equality initiatives.790 Like before NAFTA, Spanish

speakers in the Midwest stream received educational opportunities and some

assistance, but also discrimination as state governments relegated the Spanish

Speaking migrants as “other.” The growing Hispanic population in 1990s

Willmar, Minnesota occurred because of educational and job opportunities in the

community, but a newspaper reported some locals believed the influx happened

because of the state’s lenient and generous welfare program.791 This view

exemplified anti-immigrant sentiments that characterized the public belief that

migrants and immigrants abused the welfare system, despite the fact that many

migrants struggled managing the aid system. Though Hispanics could receive

state welfare assistance, many felt the sting of anti-immigrant sentiment, as an ex-

migrant noted locals starred at him and his family when they spoke Spanish in a

store and as other former migrants reported being denied housing or jobs because

790

791

of their ethnicity and former migratory status.792 Midwest state and city

governments faced larger numbers of Hispanic immigrants who increased the

cultural stresses in cities and states as some in the public called for an English

speaking America and fewer benefits for questionably legal residents at the same

time public schools faced pressure to educate Spanish speaking children. Despite

the increasing number of Mexican Americans in the Midwest, many still

disregard the Midwest as a Latino area. Though migrant workers are more likely

to encounter a Mexican American community in the rural Midwest, many

migrants and Mexican Americans still struggle to be accepted in the Midwest.

The later changes in Midwest demographics shifted how other parties in the food

pyramid interacted with each other, as cities and states struggled to adapt to a

changing population with a different language and culture and as current migrant

farmworkers were more likely to travel to rural cities with a

Hispanic community.

As the Hispanic population increased in the Midwest, agricultural corporate

power continued to grow. In the Midwest and the nation, powerful agribusinesses

forced more and more growers to “get big or get out” leading to a significant

reduction in growers in the Midwest at the turn of the twenty-first century and

decreasing migrants’ employment options in the Midwest.793 By the turn of the

twenty-first century, the United States public became interested in their food, with

792

793

public interest in farmer’s markets and organic growers as more of the public

became aware of corporate power and what they ate. Similarly, corporate power

has arguably grown, but few academics explored its effect on the food pyramid.

The public support of FLOC during this era of activism created a bond between

some growers and migrants as tomato and pickle growers around Ohio eventually

realized how they could benefit from working with migrants to realign the system

of power. Yet corporations continued to consolidate their power in the 1990s and

afterwards as they patented genetically modified seed to force all growers to pay

exorbitant prices for seed each year.794 Corporations’ power after the 1990s was

apparent even in the Department of Agriculture’s shift from a Food Pyramid to a

Food Plate. The Department of Agriculture’s food pyramid previously had clear

divisions, which the Department replaced with a plate where almost all groups

looked evenly distributed. The plate speaks to hopes by those on the top of the

food pyramid that few in the public would understand the system of power,

accepting instead that various parties have equal influence over what people eat.

Though more and more recent books, documentaries, and articles analyze where

our food comes from in terms of corporate influence, government decisions, and

grower rights, few in the public talked extensively about farmworkers in the

fields.

794

The recent interest in what we eat instead of who labors in the fields,

exemplified the decreasing activism and concern regarding migrant farmworkers

in the 1990s. After the 1990s, migrants disappeared from the publics’ perception

of the land, with one Village Board in Lake in the Hills apparently unaware of a

local old farmhouse that housed migrants nearby. Unaware migrants came to the

community, the village zoning board also denied the grower’s request to build a

“ranch-style bunk house” for the approximate ten migrants that came to work at

the farm. Huntley Mayor, Charles Becker claimed, “[the housing was]

incompatible and will adversely impact the future residential and commercial uses

in the area.”13 Ignored by some Midwest communities, growers forced other

migrants to live in local communities as growers tried to disconnect migrant

poverty from their farm. One newspaper article in 2004 noted how Zenon and

Isidra Zuniga’s family, as well as their neighbors the Canter family, lived in an

offfarm housing complex near Des Moines, Iowa. Both families paid rent for a

place that had bats, no hot water, and no working smoke detector. Farmworkers’

working and living conditions hardly improved since the 1990s, even when they

lived off the farm. The public’s lack of interest and acknowledgement of

farmworkers in Midwest fields, coupled with growers’ effort to disconnect

stooped workers with their farms, ultimately led to migrants disappearing from

the public’s imagination.

The public’s unwillingness to see migrants in the fields, mirrored the

Midwest public’s disinterest in migrants. Many aid organizations that offered

support for migrants in the Midwest either totally ceased existence, or local

operations closed their doors in the 1990s. Changes in agriculture forced the

DeKalb Migrant Ministry and GAP in Minnesota to close their doors, while

religious groups like PADRES and Las Hermanas ceased to operate or became

significantly less active by the late 1980s.795 Though some organizations still

exist on a national or state scale, specifically the national Migrant Ministry and

United Migrant Opportunity Services in Wisconsin, the diminishing social

activism of the public decreased interest in migrants’ plight. Instead, public

concern since the mid-1990s focused on personal or international issues, with

books and documentaries on what is in our food, international agricultural

policies, genetically modified food, and animal treatment. The United States

Conference of Catholic Bishops exemplified a rare interest in agriculture and

labor, referring to the power of agricultural corporations in the world, the need for

greater grower rights, better access to food, with some discussion on farm

labor.796 Despite current FLOC and the United Farm Workers (UFW) efforts in

addition to books and documentaries about agribusinesses and food safety, the

United States public usually ignore documentaries about migrant children

produced by TV stars or specials on the 50th anniversary of The Harvest of

795

796

Shame.797 Though the public is reacting to the recent activism by fast food

workers, few if any tied the meager wages and living conditions of fast food

workers in the food pyramid with the migrants in the field that harvest the food in

the food chain.798

The minimal public awareness of agribusiness and the agricultural

power structure since 2000, centered more on the connection between growers

and corporate interest, than farmworkers. FLOC’s radical decision to seek a three

party deal between corporations, growers, and farmworkers, exemplified their

understanding of the true system of power within the United States, influencing

future union actions by themselves and other farmworker unions and altering

power relationships in part of the Midwest. Since FLOC’s success in the Midwest

in the 1980s, the union went to North Carolina during the 1990s where they

worked with H2(A) pickle workers and are currently working with tobacco

workers.799 Though still doing community building in Ohio, FLOC’s move down

South characterized the changing agriculture in the Midwest as Ohio diminished

in prominence as a tomato producer, and as FLOC had to address the increasing

use of H-2(A) workers as growers sought cheaper labor. This shift in focus meant

an international shift as well as gender shift as H-2(A) workers are primarily

international men, though FLOC recently refocused on unionize families working

797

798

799

in tobacco fields, reintroducing the importance of family to FLOC.800 Yet since

FLOC’s Midwest success in the 1980s, few if any attempted to organize Midwest

migrants. Though unions moved away from organizing Midwest laborers, it was

the Midwest union’s tactics that shaped union efforts for migrants elsewhere in

the country. Since the 1980s, activism drifted South with FLOC and the Coalition

of Immokalee Workers who adopted FLOC’s strategy, targeting fast food

restaurants who bought Florida tomatoes and successfully increasing wages for

many Florida tomato pickers in 2005.801 FLOC’s success in Ohio’s tomato fields

not only changed the structure of the food pyramid for part of the Midwest, but

also provided future farmworker unions like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers

an important tactic. Now addressing the increased internationalization of farm

laborers, a FLOC member commented about why he joined the pickle effort in

North Carolina, “I want to change the economic life of Mexico. I want to change

farm-labor in the U.S., make sure that our rights are respected.”802 After the

success of FLOC in the Midwest, FLOC and other unions continued in the

Southern part of the

United States, taking on the increased international nature of the agricultural

power structure.

800

801

802

Despite the changes in agriculture and the national and international

policies that bring more and more Mexican men to the Midwest for work, the

Midwest is still a place of migrant families. The documentary, The Harvest/La

Cosecha, told the story of several migrant children who worked in the nation’s

fields. Released in 2011, three migrant children regularly traveled with their

family from their homes in Texas and Florida to Michigan, Tennessee, and

Mississippi.803 All three dealt with the stressors of leaving friends, missing school,

working dangerous jobs, and worrying about family members. For Perla Sanchez,

her family had to travel throughout the Midwest, including Indiana and Ohio,

after a family medical emergency delayed the family’s regular migrant route.804

All three, Perla Sanchez, Victor Huapillo, and Zulema Lopez, hoped for a better

future, but understood the importance of helping their family to survive by

working in the fields, looking after younger siblings, and helping out in the

house.26 Like the pre-NAFTA migrant stream, family and gender norms continued

in the 1990s and afterwards, serving as an important tool for farmworkers’

survival as every person in the family worked together to survive. In the Midwest,

Zulema traveled up and down the stream with her family, often working in fields

next to single men. While it was common for Zulema to work alongside male

workers who likely missed their families down South, Zulema and other migrants

803 The Harvest/ La Cosecha.

804 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

in the Midwest, continued to rely on familial relationships to survive the migrant

stream.

The Midwest during the era of activism between 1960 and 1990, proved a

unique moment and place in time. In an area of family migration during an era of

increased interest and activism and an era of financial crises on farms, various

parties including growers, farmworkers, agribusinesses, national and state

governments, unions, and Catholic aid organizations interacted to adjust the

agricultural system of power. The Midwest was an area where national events

stimulated change, farmworker unions developed new models for changing the

migrant power structure, and gender and family norms shaped migrants’ survival

strategies in the stream. Though the various groups that shaped the Midwest

stream continued to influence the stream after 1990, the changing nature of

agriculture, national and international policies, and social activism after the

1990s, altered the way these groups interacted in contrast to the mid-1900s. For

the Mexican and Mexican American migrants living and working between their

Southern homes and the Midwest fields, the mid 1900s was a time of struggle but

also hope as unionization and public interest supported some efforts to better their

conditions in the stream. Aid alleviated migrants’ struggles, but empowerment

gave migrants the ability to alter relationships within the pyramid and reshape

some power relationships. The pyramidal structure of power placed farmworkers

at the bottom of the agricultural system, with growers, the public, governments,

and agribusinesses profiting from the labor of farmworkers. In 2011, the

Department of Agriculture’s replaced its well-known food pyramid eating guide

with a plate with very closely sized wedges and a small circle. This choice

coincides with public perception of agriculture, with some acknowledgement of

the powerful few in agribusinesses with little awareness or interest in the system

of power that places growers, the public, and most especially, farmworkers under

the control and influence of the elite. As Edward R. Murrow stated in 1960’s

Harvest of Shame, “Must the two to three million migrants who help feed their

fellow American work, travel and live under conditions that wrong the dignity of

man?"805 As almost a response and characteristic of the era of activism in the mid-

1900s, organized Mexican and Mexican American migrant farmworkers often

sang “Nosotros Venceremos/We Shall Overcome.”806

805

806

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