Power and Control in the Imperial Valley by Andrés Benny J.;Andraes Benny J;

Author:Andrés, Benny J.;Andraes, Benny J; [Andrßs Jr., Benny J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

THE GOSPEL OF LABOR REBELLION

We have a strong, enthusiastic organization in the Valley, and the effectiveness of our work is evidenced by the lack of strikes in our county. We have an excellent formula for getting rid of cockroaches, grasshoppers, and C.I.O. agitators.

Hugh Osborne, Imperial County Board of Supervisors, 1934

Agricultural workers in the Imperial-Mexicali Valley used a spectrum of resistance strategies to improve their wages and working conditions. Individually and collectively, workers’ main source of power derived from giving or denying their labor to harvest the desert’s agricultural bounty. Before the advent of organized farming associations, workers held the upper hand in determining wages. When farming organizations recruited migrants and reduced wages, workers responded by forming packing shed and field unions. Yet field and shed workers preferred negotiation and compromise rather than confrontation. Strikes by white packing shed laborers occurred frequently and often ended quickly and peacefully. When shed owners refused to negotiate with their employees, workers walked off the job and appealed for racial solidarity from their taxpaying and voting neighbors. As the nobility of agricultural labor, white shed workers demanded collective bargaining, and shippers, the police, the courts, and the press granted them respect and seriously considered their concerns.1 Strikes and picketing by shed packers were tolerated, but Mexican field strikes challenged “law and order,” and county officials brought the full weight of state and vigilante coercion and violence to crush them. Interracial solidarity and working-class collaboration floundered on the shoals of ethnic and racial animosity, nationalistic fervor, and cutthroat competition for jobs.

The Imperial Valley was a corridor of radicalism. Exploited workers, political radicals, labor organizers, social dissenters, and veterans of the Mexican Revolution entered from the four cardinal directions.2 Disgruntled laborers devised ingenious methods to demonstrate their dissatisfaction. They stuffed cotton-picking sacks with dirt and rocks and pillaged produce from the fields. Laborers threatened and assaulted labor contractors and farmers, deserted abusive employers, filed wage complaints, petitioned the US and Mexican governments for redress, and denounced Mexican consuls who sought to defuse labor opposition. Spontaneous shed and field “wildcat” harvest disruptions were common tactics to gain concessions, express collective indignation, and demonstrate working-class power. Yet these practices were the last resort because delaying harvesting fast ripening crops brought devastating repercussions.

Worker-employer relations went through four periods in which both sides devised new strategies to meet changing circumstances. In the first period, labor scarcity led to competition for workers and high wages. Conflicts arose between bosses and individual workers or field crews. During this period, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) made the first attempt to organize fieldworkers in the Imperial Valley. The IWW’s battle with desert agribusiness established a pattern of unionization and suppression that played out over the next two decades. Agribusiness considered it natural to organize for self-improvement, yet when fieldworkers joined a union and respectfully requested to negotiate wages and working conditions they were labeled “radicals.” After World War I, the shift to Mexicans in the fields and whites in the packing sheds ushered in a second period of employer-worker relations.

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