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Chapter Six

“I GO SAD AND HEAVY HEARTED”

Sojourner Pluralism for Asians and Mexicans

MEXICAN workers in the United States in the 1920s sang a corrido, a Mexican ballad, “An Emigrant’s Farewell,” telling of the anguish of a young man about to leave for the United States to work. “I bear you in my heart,” he sang about Mexico, his family, and the beloved Virgin of Guadalupe, lamenting, “I go sad and heavy hearted, / To suffer and endure / …”¹ It was an immigrant’s lament not limited to Mexicans. Millions of male sojourners, and later females, too, came from Asia, Europe, Canada, the Caribbean Islands, and the Azores to the U.S. on a lonely journey in search of work. But of all the sojourner immigrants, two large groups—Asians and Mexicans—had in common an extended history of systematic labor exploitation enforced with the cooperation of national and state governments, the local police, and the system of justice.

The U.S. conquest of more than half of Mexico was preceded by the revolt of Euro-Americans in Texas in 1837, leading to its annexation in 1845. Some of the Americans had been invited to settle in Texas. Many more came as illegal aliens, and, by 1830, Americans outnumbered Mexicans in Texas by two to one. The American cry for manifest destiny, driven largely by racism, anti-Catholic bigotry, land hunger, and the desire to expand slavery into new territories, led to the invasion of Mexico and the conquest of a vast land area with a relatively small number of indigenous people.

The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which brought the war between the two nations to a formal close, forced Mexico to cede what eventually became California, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, and Utah. Those Mexicans who chose to remain for one year in what was now U.S. territory were granted American citizenship. As interpreted by Mexico, protocols to the treaty signed by U.S. emissaries guaranteed to the Mexicans land and water rights and religious and cultural integrity. The American government took the position that since the protocols were not part of the treaty itself, they were not binding. But the U.S. established a system for adjudicating land claims, and a majority of initial claims were approved. Despite that system, Mexicans in the conquered territory lost a substantial amount of property to Euro-Americans through extralegal means within two decades. Bad feelings between the two groups, generated by arguments about land, cultural tensions, and racism, led to recurring conflicts, especially on the border, where the resistance of Mexicans to what was seen as American colonization was extensive.² The Americans blamed banditos. The Mexicans complained of “gringo justice.”

The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo became the basis for subsequent land claims by Mexican-Americans in south Texas, New Mexico, and southern California and for assertions that Mexican-Americans were a colonized people, as Indians were. But nearly all Indians in the U.S. today are descendants of tribes who made treaties with the U.S. government, and all but a small minority of Mexican-Americans descend from immigrants who arrived long after the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed.

The vast majority of Mexicans who came to work in the U.S. thought of themselves as Mexican sojourners in a foreign country. What was distinctive about their experience and that of most Asian immigrants was the extent to which they were confined in systems of pluralism intended to coerce their labor.

Cooperation between local police and employers in controlling workers was common in industrial America, as in the coal fields of Appalachia, where native-born Americans were exploited by the coal companies with the help of the police throughout much of this century. But only in the case of the Asians and Mexicans were there national policies to keep such groups of immigrant workers in their place. Other sojourners, such as Italians, Greeks, Turks, Poles, West Indians, French Canadians, and Cape Verdeans who went back and forth to their homelands, were not subject to widely enforced systems of sojourner pluralism that made Asian and Mexican workers particularly vulnerable to employer abuse.

Sojourner pluralism was far less rigidly restrictive than the caste pluralism that restricted black Americans, and in every decade a number of Asian and Mexican immigrants broke through the boundaries intended to keep them in unskilled and servile jobs. The U.S. was a land of opportunity as well as exploitation for sojourners. Chinese immigrants of the turn of the century spoke of California as “the golden mountain,” even as Jewish immigrants called America “the golden land.” Eighty years later, one of the most popular ballads on Spanish-language radio in Texas told of a poor young Mexican woman who waded across the Rio Grande without money, found her boyfriend with a blonde girlfriend, frightened them away with a gun, then married a Hollywood producer and bought a ranch.³

Many sojourners succeeded beyond what would have been possible at home. But the vast majority, at least for a while, were confined by law and custom in menial jobs. When they were no longer needed, they were expected to go home voluntarily or be sent home. The coercion of their labor rested on their being socially stigmatized as racially and morally inferior and the imposition of political and legal restrictions.

The linchpin in the system of sojourner pluralism for imported workers from Asia was the Naturalization Law dating back to 1790 that made them ineligible for citizenship. Mexican workers, who came in extraordinarily large numbers illegally, were vulnerable to employer control because so many were working without authorization.

Keeping Asian Sojourners in Their Place

From 1850 to 1934, employers in Hawaii and on the West Coast sought laborers successively from China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. They preferred single males who would work hard, fast, and cheap at the most menial jobs. During the 1870 congressional debate on the law that provided for naturalization of persons of African descent, Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts proposed an amendment to permit naturalization for other nonwhites as well. But senators from western states, determined to exclude Chinese from citizenship, led an overwhelming defeat of Sumner’s motion.⁴ The Chinese were, as the Democratic party platform of 1884 later said, “unfitted by habits, training, religion or kindred … for the citizenship which our laws confer.”⁵ The writers of the platform had insisted that “the liberal principles embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and sanctioned in the Constitution, … makes ours the land of liberty and the asylum of the oppressed of every Nation,” but the Chinese were seen, as nativists saw the Irish in the 1850s, as being incapable of becoming members of a self-governing republic.

Something else beyond “habits, training, religion or kindred” kept the Chinese outsiders. That something else was race. Popular literature, political speeches, and government reports tended to stigmatize Chinese as immoral by nature. “Celestials,” “Mongolians,” “coolies,” and “chinks,” they were portrayed as racially habituated to filth, disease, and immorality, themes stressed in a half dozen popular magazines in the 1850s and 1860s.⁶ One California senator asked, “Can we stand all the vices, all the diseases, all the mischief that infect humanity the world over and retain our American civilization?”⁷ “It is my deliberate opinion,” said one popular writer, “that the Chinese are, morally, the most debased people on the face of the earth.”⁸ An 1865 New York Times editorial said, “We have four million of degraded negroes in the South … and if there were to be a flood-tide of Chinese population—a population befouled with all the social vices, with no knowledge or appreciation of free institutions or Constitutional liberty, with heathenish souls and heathenish propensities … we should be prepared to bid farewell to republicanism and democracy.”⁹

A state senate investigator in California in 1876 reported that five or six Chinese were sleeping in spaces only six feet wide and six feet long in rooms at the Globe Hotel in San Francisco. One policeman, who reported seeing seventy-five in a room, also told of two hundred houses of prostitution and a great many gambling houses in a six-by-eight-block area.¹⁰ One San Franciscan gave testimony that he went into places “so filthy and dirty I cannot see how these people live there.” He concluded, “the houses would be unfit for the occupation of white people, for I do not see how it would be possible to cleanse them, unless you burn up the whole quarter, and even then, I doubt whether you can get rid of the filth.”¹¹

What the report did not add was that the Chinese were often energetic, enterprising individuals, many of whom had opened stores in cities throughout the West and in Hawaii. Many sent home remittances to support their families. Crowded quarters often housed bachelors trying to create extended families of their own. They resorted to opium and prostitutes as white American men in similar circumstances used alcohol and prostitutes, as a relief from the misery of separation from their families.

The racist stigmatizing of the Chinese, and of the Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, and Mexicans, reinforced their exclusion from political rights and their maltreatment by the legal system. An older California law that prohibited blacks, mulattoes, or Indians from giving evidence for or against a white person was interpreted by the California Supreme Court in 1854 as applying to all nonwhites, including Chinese. After all, said the chief justice, if Chinese were permitted to testify, “we might soon see them at the polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls.”¹²

The ruling and others like it, in effect, sanctioned many brutal attacks against Chinese. When, in 1869, 350 members of the Miners Union at Gold Hill, Nevada, raided the living quarters of Chinese railroad workers, the county sheriff made no effort to stop them.¹³ Another sheriff told white men around a mill camp that they were free to take the law into their own hands if they suspected any Chinese men of robbery, and they did. They hanged two to a derrick until nearly dead and, unable to obtain their confessions, drove them out of the area.¹⁴ On Thanksgiving Day in 1877 in San Francisco, seven thousand white marchers, many carrying American flags, paraded against Chinese labor. A popular poster held aloft showed a large boot in close proximity to a flying Chinaman.¹⁵ In 1886, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a night attack by 150 armed white men plundered and burned the homes of Chinese strikebreakers and killed twenty-eight.¹⁶ Chinese workers were driven from Tacoma and Seattle and from the San Joaquin Valley in California, where they were taken to the railroad station and loaded onto departing trains.¹⁷

Eastern and southern European immigrants also were frequently harassed, and there were instances of violence, and even murder, against them, the most notable the lynching of Italian prisoners in New Orleans in 1890. But the law generally was on the side of the Europeans, and in the New Orleans case the U.S. government paid indemnities to families of the murdered prisoners.¹⁸ Chinese were often intimidated by U.S. marshals, who would surround a community, herd them together, and demand that they produce their registration certificates. Later, Japanese and Filipinos in Hawaii were systematically intimidated by the police and courts when they struck for better wages and working conditions.¹⁹

The contrast between the treatment of Chinese sojourners as outsiders and European immigrants as potential citizens was stark. At the same time that police authorities and immigration inspectors chased the Chinese in the West, German and Scandinavian aliens in Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Nebraska were being urged to vote (seven states had laws permitting alien suffrage up to the outbreak of the First World War). At the very time the California constitution of 1878–1879 stipulated that “no alien ineligible to become a citizen of the United States shall ever be employed on any state, county, municipal or other public work in this state,”²⁰ more than fifty Irish Catholics served on the Boston police force; and, in five years, the immigrant Hugh O’Brien would be elected to the first of five terms as mayor. Keeping the Asians from citizenship and from voting also kept them from owning land or obtaining licenses. In Hawaii, where the plantation oligarchy nourished a tradition of noblesse oblige and where laws were less restrictive than in California, the head of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association said in 1910 that “up to the present time the Asiatic has had only an economic value…. So far as the institutions, laws, customs, and language of the permanent population go, his presence is no more felt than is that of the cattle on the ranges.”²¹

More than 322,000 Cantonese-speaking male peasants arrived in the U.S. between 1850 and 1882 to work on American railroads, in mines, on plantations, at logging camps, in vineyards, orchards, and ranches. By the late 1870s, it was clear that tens of thousands of them would neither return home nor be confined to servile labor. In 1882, when nearly forty thousand Chinese nationals arrived and only ten thousand went home, Congress decided to oblige employers to look elsewhere for muscle by passing the first law to exclude Chinese laborers. (In no other year in the nineteenth century would there be a net immigration of Chinese.)

Not long after the exclusion of Chinese laborers in 1882, employers sought temporary alien workers among the Japanese, who, like the Chinese in Hawaii, worked on sugar and pineapple plantations there, and who in California on farms, worked in collectives or labor gangs, and in towns in domestic service. The Japanese differed from the Chinese and Filipinos in that Japanese men were often joined by wives, and eventually 80 percent of the issei (foreign-born generation) had families in the U.S. As their numbers grew, state laws were passed to keep the Japanese in their place. State antimiscegenation laws were generally applied to Asians on the mainland, but in 1905, California passed a statute aimed specifically at preventing intermarriage between Caucasians and Japanese. One witness testified that he knew of a Japanese who lived with a white woman. “In that woman’s arms is a baby. What is that baby? It isn’t Japanese. It isn’t white. I’ll tell you what it is,” he said. “It is the germ of the mightiest problem that ever faced this state.” It would make, he said, the black problem of the South “look simple.”²²

In order to keep the Japanese and Chinese as sojourners and to discourage settlement, in 1907, Congress provided that any American woman who married a foreigner—keeping in mind that only Asians were ineligible to become Americans—would automatically take the nationality of her husband. Although that law was repealed in 1922, female citizens who married aliens who were ineligible for citizenship were deprived of their own citizenship until 1931, a rule that discouraged women from marrying Asians even in states with no antimiscegenation law. Since the ratio of male to female sojourners was enormous, especially for the Chinese (twenty-six to one in 1890) and Filipinos (ten to one in 1910), such legislation kept many newcomers from marriage at all, and hence from becoming parents of American-born children.²³

As a growing number of Japanese sojourners became settlers, the cry of restriction arose once more, and in 1907 the imperial government of Japan agreed to impose limitations on Japanese emigration rather than suffer the indignity of a Japanese exclusion statute. It was not enough to restrict immigration; it became increasingly necessary to enforce the system of sojourner pluralism against Japanese already here. After the Japanese farmers achieved considerable success, California, in 1913, passed an Alien Land Law that prohibited aliens who were ineligible for citizenship from owning land, although they were allowed to rent it.²⁴

Efforts to enforce sojourner pluralism were only mildly successful. Despite limitations, the Japanese by the early 1920s were producing most of the berries, celery, asparagus, and onions raised in California. Despite the strong hostility toward them, they were able to increase their role in agriculture.²⁵ Their numbers were not large (only 80,000 Japanese and 20,000 Chinese immigrated into the U.S. between 1911 and 1920), but because of their success in agriculture and other work, overt white racism became more blatant. “California was given by God to a white people,” said the president of the Native Sons of the Golden West in 1920, “and with God’s strength we want to keep it as he gave it to us.” ²⁶

The sugar planters and other haole (Caucasian) leaders in Hawaii also were concerned about the success of the Japanese workers, who by 1920 constituted more than 30 percent of the territory’s population. Unlike the California farmers, who were beginning to look to Mexicans to replace the Chinese and Japanese, the employers of Hawaii implored Congress to permit importation of large numbers of Chinese “coolie” laborers, once again under contract and at low cost. After a Japanese plantation strike in 1920, the most powerful men in Hawaii for two years importuned Congress for a permanent system of rotating peonage, but the planters underestimated the growing influence of Hawaii’s small (off-plantation) labor movement with the mainland’s American Federation of Labor and through it with Congress, and the planters were turned down.²⁷

Walter Dillingham and other leaders in Hawaii argued that it was impossible for the Japanese or their children to become Americans. When the Californian executive secretary of the National Committee on American-Japanese Relations testified before Congress on exclusion of Asian immigration, he insisted that if Asians were permitted to emigrate they would create a race problem like that faced by the whites in the South. When he made that argument to officials in the Japanese government, he said, “they saw the point instantly.”²⁸ Of course the Japanese understood it. Caucasian farmers would not have been permitted in Japan; nor were Chinese and Koreans in Japan allowed to assume any significant roles in the country.

The attorney general of California warned the U.S. Senate committee that “If the Negro had had the capacity, the efficiency, the ambition, the energy, and the power to accomplish possessed by the Japanese, all south of the Mason-Dixon would long ago have been entirely black.… the white American will not live upon conditions of equality with the Negro, nor with the Japanese, nor with the Chinese, nor with the Hindu.”²⁹ The warning reflected a considerable degree of intellectual confusion. Blacks were disparaged and thought unfit for full membership in the American polity because of their inferiority. They were seen as lazy and stupid. The Japanese were seen as superhuman; yet in 1924 Congress agreed that all Asians should be barred from immigration.

Following the agreement between the U.S. and Japan in 1907 to limit Japanese immigration and especially after passage of legislation in 1924 barring Japanese, Chinese, and other aliens ineligible for citizenship from immigrating, employers sought workers from the Philippines, a territory of the United States. As the latest sojourner aliens ineligible for citizenship, Filipinos were pushed to the bottom of the system of stratified sojourner pluralism in the West and in Hawaii. From 1909 through 1931, about 113,000 Filipinos came to Hawaii, of whom 55,000 remained in the islands, 39,000 returned to their homelands, and 18,600 moved on to the West Coast to join the 20,000 Filipinos who had gone directly to the mainland. In Hawaii, they worked mainly in the sugar cane mills and fields and on pineapple plantations. In West Coast states (most numerous in California), they took menial service jobs during the winter in hotels and restaurants or as domestic servants, and in the spring as migrant farm workers.

As bad as the situation was for Chinese and Japanese aliens in the 1930s, it was worse for Filipinos. On the plantations in Hawaii, Filipinos made less money for the same work. Without the protection of federal collective bargaining laws, Filipino and other workers in Hawaii were extremely vulnerable to retaliation for strikes. During a 1924 strike on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, sixteen Filipinos were killed.³⁰ But Filipino life was generally better in the plantation camps in Hawaii than on the West Coast, where, like the Mexicans in the Southwest, Filipinos provided a cheap, expendable work force of bus boys, dishwashers, toilet cleaners, ranch and cannery workers, and pickers of grapes, lettuce, asparagus, pears, and a dozen other vegetables and fruits that fed America. Growers came to depend on such workers and employed railroad detectives, town and county policemen, and agents to help control them. Often brutalized by whites and each other, they moved with the crop seasons in a world of Chinese gambling houses, Japanese hotels, dance halls, small-time gangsters and petty racketeers, pimps and prostitutes of every hue and several nationalities. They suffered with tuberculosis and slept, ate, fought with, and nursed each other ten in a room in cheap boardinghouses in Honolulu, Seattle, Los Angeles, Stockton, Bakersfield, and a dozen other cities in the West and Southwest.

As nonwhite males ineligible for citizenship (the 1930 ratio of males to females in California was fourteen to one) and denied federal relief benefits until 1937, Filipinos, more than the Chinese and Japanese or even the Mexicans, were kept in a servile labor class. But they kept coming to the U.S. until 1934, when Congress established a quota of fifty Filipino immigrants per year in the Philippines Independence Act. With the Depression, these sojourner-workers had become expendable. But, as intending sojourners often do, a large number remained, and by the 1950s and early 1960s, they, and especially Mexicans, were the core of the agricultural work force in California and in Hawaii, where they constituted the largest single ethnic group of plantation workers.

Mexican Sojourners: Turning the Spigot On and Off

Filipinos were easily replaced by Mexicans in California, and for the other border states, Mexico was the obvious source for a steady supply of inexpensive and exploitable labor. An informal system of Mexican sojourner pluralism emerged in the 1890s after U.S. immigration laws excluded Chinese laborers. For several decades before the beginning of large-scale migrations from Mexico in 1897, exploitation had driven farm laborers deep into poverty. The displacement of small farmers by the expansion of large ranches increased the number seeking work as laborers. Railroad development in northern Mexico, where peons could earn three times as much as in the south, brought many closer to the U.S. Soon, knowledge that American wages could be anywhere from four to fifteen times as high as in rural Mexico enticed increasing numbers to cross the border.³¹ Under 1902 congressional legislation, construction of large federally funded reservoirs encouraged labor-intensive irrigated farming, especially in Texas and California. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, hundreds of thousands fled north. Between 1910 and 1930, 10 percent of the population of Mexico had emigrated to the U.S.; about 685,000 were legal immigrants, an unknown but possibly a larger number illegal immigrants. There were no numerical restrictions on immigration within the western hemisphere, but many Mexicans avoided immigration fees, visas, and various exclusionary tests, including the requirement that they not become public charges, and, after 1917, the literacy test, and hence were in the U.S. illegally. How many illegal aliens came to the U.S. for any one period is impossible to say, but the commissioner general for immigration estimated in 1911 that from 1900 to 1910 ten to twenty times as many “unofficial immigrants” came north from Mexico than entered legally. Although there was no way of knowing how many entered illegally, the number, while no doubt exaggerated, was probably substantial.³²

From an employer point of view, the system was almost flawless. The large number of illegal aliens who came to work provided a strong supply of vulnerable workers who would accept depressed wages and labor standards, thereby keeping employer costs down and preventing formation of any effective labor organization. The growers of perishable fruits and vegetables particularly appreciated a loose labor market since they never knew how many workers they would need, depending upon the vagaries of weather. Nor were they pushed to invest in labor-saving equipment or to spend more for domestic labor. Those Americans who used low-cost, foreign unskilled help for menial tasks, such as hospital orderlies, dishwashers, and housemaids, directly benefited from their presence, and American consumers paid less for their produce. Only American farm workers, an especially weak group politically, suffered directly from the competition. Hence, growers could rely on the flow of undocumented labor and also on the cooperation of government in managing that flow as their needs required.

French Canadian workers who came to New England throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were most like the Mexicans in the ease with which they moved back and forth across the border, in their reluctance to put down roots in American life, in their strong sense of cultural identity with their homeland, and in their difficulty in acquiring English literacy and fluency. But there were also differences between the two groups. French Canadians were lighter in skin color, and they came to an area where labor unions were relatively strong and where there were large numbers of immigrants from other countries who had already become active participants in American life.

Sojourners from Puerto Rico, like Mexicans in the Southwest, moved frequently back and forth from the mainland. They also had difficulty in acquiring effective use of English. And they, too, suffered from racial prejudice. Large growers’ associations often negotiated contracts for Puerto Rican farm workers, after 1948 with the migration division of the Puerto Rican government’s Department of Labor. But compared to Mexicans, the scale of migration was small, and Puerto Ricans working in the post—Second World War era were American citizens with recourse to protection from the Constitution and laws of the U.S., especially in the civil rights era.³³

Puerto Ricans, French Canadians, and Mexicans shared a sojourner mentality. Armando B. Rendon, a Chicano activist of the 1960s, explained that few Mexicans would buy a house, even when it was to their economic advantage, because most believed they would return soon to Mexico. Others shied away from adult education courses. What sense did it make to learn English if they were returning home? Politics was for those who had a future and a stake in the country. Even lawful resident aliens saw little point in being naturalized. Families as far away as Chicago and New York visited their Mexican home towns at least once and sometimes twice a year for a few weeks on vacation.³⁴

By the 1980s, research on the effects of the sojourner mentality of illegal aliens had become more sophisticated, confirming Rendon’s impressionistic interpretation.³⁵ The sojourner mentality was well suited to the needs of growers, ranchers, and other employers of unskilled labor in the South west and elsewhere; it made it easier for whites generally to think of Mexicans as stoop labor or “wetbacks” or in racist terms as “greasers,” and not as persons. Anglo-Europeans could accept the need for sudden roundups, deportations, and contract labor programs and ignore the miserable conditions under which Mexicans and Mexican-Americans often lived and worked.

The circular pattern of Mexican migration, driven in large measure by employer demand with the cooperation of the government, was entrenched early in the century. When workers reached a certain savings goal or when they could not adapt or were terribly lonely for relatives or friends, or a combination of these, they often returned home on their own. The system of sojourner pluralism was distinctive in the Southwest to the extent of government cooperation in amending and administering the immigration law for the benefit of employers without regard to the immigration statutes. For example, the Immigration Acts of 1903 and 1907 imposed head taxes of two dollars and four dollars on immigrants, except for Mexicans, ensuring the Southern Pacific Railroad and others a steady supply of Mexican workers.³⁶ Laws forbidding entry of contract laborers, the diseased, the insane, and certain classes of criminals were enforced weakly in order to cater to western employers’ need for labor; and until 1908, the U.S. Bureau of Immigration did not even bother to count incoming Mexicans except for the few who said they intended to remain permanently.³⁷ When workers were no longer needed, they would be repatriated, as in the recession of 1907, when several thousand railroad track laborers in California lost their jobs. Mexican officials cooperated with the railroad, which gave workers free transportation to the border city of Juárez, where they received food and free rail passes back to their homes.³⁸

By 1917, when the U.S. enacted the most restrictive (so far) immigration statute in its history, including a literacy test, the law made a special exception for employers in the West. It authorized the secretary of labor to permit otherwise inadmissible persons to enter the country as temporary workers, and in May 1917 the first bracero program for Mexican workers was created (later expanded to allow some to be employed in nonfarm work). Regulations called for the braceros to return home after their work was done, but the rules were incompletely enforced; of the 76,862 Mexican workers admitted under the program, only 34,922 returned home.³⁹

Labor recruiting agencies, deprived of European workers after the restrictive immigration legislation of 1921 and 1924, sought Mexicans for outside the West as well. Because of its central position in the midwestern railroad system, in the 1920s Chicago became a central point for Mexican labor. In 1927, sixteen labor contractors reported that they had placed 75,400 Mexicans in jobs in the Chicago area alone for a fee the employers paid them. A less expensive way for employers to obtain labor was to use smugglers, “coyotes,” who, operating along the border, put the workers on a train for Chicago, after which the employer sent the coyote a check for each worker who arrived.⁴⁰

Once in Chicago and other cities, Mexicans were outside the system of sojourner pluralism enforced in behalf of growers and ranchers in the Southwest and California. In the East and Midwest, there was the possibility of joining strong labor unions, and the situation of Mexicans in Chicago or Detroit resembled that of other sojourners in the North and Midwest, as, for example, dark-skinned West Indians who came to the mainland, many illegally.

The system was particularly brutal in Texas, where around the turn of the century vigilante bands attacked Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.⁴¹ By the early twentieth century, Texas Rangers had replaced the local police as principal enforcers of the system of sojourner pluralism, and later, the Border Patrol of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and local police forces took over from the Rangers. Although the Border Patrol itself was not brutal, it developed informal arrangements of cooperation with agricultural employers from the 1920s on through the 1950s. The INS would go easy on enforcement until picking time was over, making only a few raids to indicate that they were doing their job in order to justify federal appropriations. Sympathetic to the needs of the local economy and amenable to political pressures, the INS stepped up enforcement as in its crackdown after the “wetback strikes” of 1951 and 1952.⁴²

Turning the spigot that controlled the labor supply on and off with the cooperation of the authorities was a well-established pattern of labor control by the 1920s. At crop-picking time, workers would go north from Mexico. At slack periods and especially at Christmas, they would go home. When employer desires for Mexican labor waned in 1928, U.S. authorities cooperated in keeping Mexicans out by applying the literacy test enacted by Congress in 1917, previously ignored for Mexicans for years. With the onset of the Depression, between 1929 and 1934 more than 400,000 Mexicans were sent home without formal deportation proceedings, including thousands of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent who were deported illegally.⁴³

The vulnerability of the sojourner Mexican workers was not diminished by the fact that many labor contractors themselves were Mexicans. Italian, Greek, Filipino, and labor contractors of other nationalities also held enormous power in the system of sojourner labor recruitment. But in the Southwest, where so many workers were smuggled in illegally, the possibilities for corruption and abuse by contractors probably were greater than in other parts of the country. In his autobiography, Barrio Boy, Ernesto Galarza, a leader of the Chicano movement in the 1960s, told of going to work for a rancher near Sacramento after being hired by a contractor who never discussed working conditions or wages or even how much Galarza would be charged for his meals. The contractor “could fire a man and his family on the spot and make them wait days for their wages.… the worst thing one could do was to ask for fresh water on the job, regardless of the heat of the day; instead of ice water, given freely, the crews were expected to buy sodas at twice the price in town, sold by the contractor himself.”⁴⁴

The political control of Mexicans was easiest at the border, where the movement back and forth was constant. Even Mexican-American citizens who lived near the border seldom felt enfranchised. In Hidalgo, Starr, Cameron, and Duvall counties, local Anglo political machines that developed in the late nineteenth century effectively controlled the votes of Mexican-Americans. Although political boss rule of European immigrants was developing in the big cities of the Northeast and Midwest, too, with machines usually run not by Anglos but by ethnics themselves who asserted group interests in the name of American rights, Mexican-American politicians on the Texas border tended to follow an older Mexican pattern of exchanging their votes for favors, this time from Anglos.

The most influential of all Anglo-American bosses in south Texas, James Wells, explained that Mexican-Americans asked ranch managers who they should vote for because they were totally dependent on them; ranchers protected their servants and workers with jobs, help with the law, loans, and other favors, and, therefore, expected the peons to vote at their direction as a form of compensation.⁴⁵ Since most of the Mexican-Americans worked as ranch hands, farm laborers or sharecroppers or small farmers with little expectation of advancement, and most expected to go home someday, it is not surprising that they did not develop an independent ethnic-American political stance.⁴⁶

The Big Bracero Program

At the beginning of the Second World War, the system of sojourner pluralism in the Southwest seemed about to come to an end. The American Dust Bowl migrants—Okies and others—who contributed about half of all migratory workers in western agriculture in the 1930s, were now entering the armed services or working in expanding defense industries in West Coast cities. Also, unemployment and underemployment in Mexico were relatively low in 1941 and early 1942, and the supply of migratory workers was reduced. Growers asked the federal government to help them procure Mexican workers as was done during the First World War. Mexico, unhappy with the way Americans had handled repatriation in the 1930s, was at first reluctant to supply workers.

After Mexico declared war on the Axis powers, Mexico and the U.S. worked out a new bracero program; an executive agreement signed in July 1942 pledged that workers would not be used to displace American workers or to lower wages and that Mexican workers would receive minimum guarantees on wages and working conditions. Nevertheless, employers found it easy to evade these commitments without much interference. In fact, the bracero program was evidence of the willingness of the U.S. government to subsidize Southwest and California agriculture with cheap labor. Braceros, essentially limited to the agricultural sector, free from the draft, and unable to join unions, cost less than an average of $500 a year each in wartime wages.⁴⁷ Many employers, especially in Texas, which did not participate in the bracero program, continued to hire Mexican illegal aliens, partly because sophisticated irrigation systems added 7,500,000 acres to the agricultural lands of seventeen western states between 1945 and 1955, stimulating a substantial increase in demand for Mexican workers.

Smuggling aliens became a highly profitable business. Between 1947 and 1955, more than 4,300,000 Mexican nationals were apprehended.⁴⁸ But the Border Patrol’s enforcement practices varied to meet employer needs. The Immigration Service began a practice known as “drying out,” which involved giving undocumented workers employed by American farmers identification slips, then deporting them, and allowing them to reenter the U.S. legally. The technique was used extensively in 1949, when 87,000 of the 280,000 aliens deported were “dried out,” and in 1950, when 96,000 of 459,000 were allowed to reenter this way.

To employers, the drying-out system was not as reliable as the bracero program, and therefore, at the beginning of the Korean War in 1951, Public Law 78 established a third bracero program in which the Department of Labor became the labor contractor. The new bracero program did not stanch the accelerating flow of illegal aliens. Returning braceros became recruiting agents for growers by recounting the opportunities to earn good money in the U.S. Many illegal aliens were ex-braceros or relatives of braceros. The program, it turned out, was not just a replacement for illegal migration but a stimulus to it.⁴⁹ The Border Patrol could now vigorously apprehend aliens (875,000 were caught in 1953), while employers could continue to count on large numbers getting across.

The number of illegal aliens alarmed organized labor, which saw illegal aliens increasingly employed in industrial occupations, and also those who saw illegal crossings as a threat to U.S. sovereignty. But labor did not have enough political muscle to gain a law to penalize employers of illegal aliens. When the liberal Senator Paul Douglas (D-Illinois) offered an amendment to the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act to provide such penalties, it was defeated overwhelmingly by a vote of sixty-nine to twelve.⁵⁰ Congress did make it illegal to harbor an undocumented alien, but specifically provided that employment was not harboring, a provision that became known as the “Texas proviso” in recognition of the benefit it brought to employers in Texas and the Southwest.

The Eisenhower administration launched “Operation Wetback” in June 1954. Special mobile forces of the Immigration and Naturalization Service began sweep operations in California and Texas. Light planes were used to find illegal aliens and to direct ground teams, and transport planes airlifted aliens to staging areas for prompt return to Mexico. Some 1,075,000 undocumented aliens were rounded up, but Operation Wetback was more symbolic than real in dealing with illegal migration. Periodic roundups did not constitute a long-term enforcement strategy. Roundups also led to violations of the civil rights of Mexican-Americans. Thousands of Mexican-American citizens as well as resident aliens were arrested and detained, and some even were deported illegally. Raids took place not just in factories and restaurants, but in apartments and homes, and some Mexicans eligible for naturalization did not apply, afraid they might be deported. Mexican-Americans were stopped on the streets or searched at highway checkpoints and asked to prove their legal right to be in the U.S. Some families were separated when fathers and husbands were deported, many of them American citizens.⁵¹

Because of the Texas proviso and the bracero program, employers themselves could tolerate the roundups and summary deportations. (Of the 3,075,000 mojados deported between 1950 and 1955, only 63,000 went through formal deportation proceedings.) Between 1955 and 1959, when an average 430,000 braceros entered annually, braceros were about one-quarter of all the farm workers hired in Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and in 1960 they accounted for 26 percent of the nation’s seasonal agricultural labor force.⁵² Bracero wages tended to become the norm. Farmers discouraged employment of domestic labor as in the San Joaquin Valley in 1960, where the tomato harvest employed 1,530 braceros for the harvest and only 860 citizens and resident aliens, including Mexican-Americans.⁵³

The existence of the braceros enfeebled efforts in the 1950s and the early 1960s to establish a strong union. The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, which in 1945 had become the AFL’s National Farm Labor Union, conducted a 1950 strike near Tracy in San Joaquin County, where most of the canning tomatoes in California were grown, to protest a wage cut for tomato pickers. Its weakness was quickly exposed: Teamster truck drivers refused to respect the picket lines; illegal aliens, a large number of whom were employed by the tomato growers, continued on the job; and two thousand braceros were brought in under the protection of the California Highway Patrol and local police escort.⁵⁴

Nowhere but in the Southwest would a major, powerful union such as the Teamsters not respect a picket line in 1950, and nowhere else would officials of the national government act as a conduit to supply workers for employers. When the NFLU struck the Imperial Valley cantaloupe harvest in April 1951, it was virtually defeated before it started. The U.S. Border Patrol, in typical cooperation with the growers, was lax in stopping the flow of illegal aliens. When the new leader of the NFLU, Ernesto Galarza, persuaded five hundred Mexican-American workers to strike the cantaloupe growers in 1952, the growers’ association, having anticipated such an emergency, simply transferred extra bracero workers they had already brought to the valley from employers who did not need them to those who were being struck. Galarza’s protest to the U.S. Justice Department that such an action violated the law that made it illegal to fill jobs vacated by a strike or a lockout was met with a promise to investigate, but soon the cantaloupe harvest was over.⁵⁵

No agricultural workers’ strike could be won in the Southwest in the 1950s and early 1960s as long as the bracero program was in effect. Strikers did not have unemployment insurance against lost wages, and when the strike was over, they found their jobs permanently filled by braceros. The established trade unions, largely indifferent to agricultural workers, had other important battles to fight. The U.S. Department of Labor gave low priority to the farm workers, a large proportion of whom were Mexican-Americans.

By the late 1950s and the early 1960s a new postwar generation of liberal politicians influenced by the civil rights movement began to listen to stories of exploitation and terrible living conditions, and they began to feel increasing pressure from a mainstream labor movement somewhat more sympathetic to the farm workers than before. When on September 17,1963, the driver of a makeshift truck full of braceros drove into the path of a speeding Southern Pacific freight train in the Salinas Valley, killing thirty-two workers, Galarza was hired by the Education and Labor Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives to investigate the conditions under which braceros worked.⁵⁶ The report appeared in spring of 1964, shortly before a combination of labor and liberal interests in Congress allowed the braceros program to terminate.

Employers of the West and Southwest increased their reliance on illegal aliens once more, supplemented at the borders by a large increase in the use of commuter labor. The commuters carried work authorization cards. Some crossed the border daily to work; others moved farther inland and returned to their homes in Mexico during the off season of the industry in which they were employed. The daily commuter became a new kind of bracero; by 1970 approximately 70,000 were working in American border cities.⁵⁷

Illegal alien workers may have supplied about 10 percent of the labor force in counties along the border. Many undocumented workers cooperated with employers in avoiding income and payroll taxes. Some employers failed to make contributions to Social Security or disability insurance, saving up to 20 percent of their wage costs.⁵⁸ Some workers were paid less than minimum wages, but they did not complain about that, or about overtime work or inadequate safety and health standards or the absence of fringe benefits. Particularly unscrupulous employers turned in their own illegal alien workers to avoid meeting a payroll. All around, the cost-benefit advantages to employers were considerable—undocumented Mexican nationals, according to one study, accomplished more during each hour worked on certain jobs than American workers and often worked more hours per week or per year.⁵⁹

Without braceros, the employer appetite for illegal aliens grew. In 1965, the first post-bracero year, there were only 110,000 apprehensions of illegal aliens. After 1976, when a new law placed a 20,000 limit on immigration from all countries in the western hemisphere (except for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens), the pressure to migrate illegally was increased for Mexicans. From 1977 through 1987, the number captured rose above one million annually in all but three years.⁶⁰ Although the vast majority caught at the border were Mexicans, only about 50 to 60 percent of illegal aliens in the U.S. came from Mexico, the rest from other Latin American countries, Asia, and even Europe. The best estimate of the illegal population in the U.S. in 1978 was between 3.5 million and 6 million.⁶¹

Most illegal aliens (70 to 80 percent) did not work in agriculture at all. Even Mexican nationals increasingly bypassed low-wage farm jobs and went directly to the cities—Los Angeles was the principal center—to perform a variety of jobs in restaurants, the garment industry, light manufacturing, construction, and even in white-collar jobs. With many points of access along the two-thousand-mile border, it was extremely difficult through conventional enforcement methods to keep Mexican nationals out.

In some respects, the system of sojourner pluralism worked the way employers of Mexican nationals intended. Their availability kept the labor markets loose in the West and Southwest. When a labor surplus was no longer needed, as during the Depression, the foreigners lost their jobs. So many Mexican nationals were returned home or chose to go back during the 1930s that the total number of Mexican-born persons in the U.S. was only 377,000 in 1940.⁶² The total number of Asian-born nationals was even smaller. But in some ways, the system did not work as intended. The children of those Mexican and Asian immigrants who remained in the U.S. were natural-born citizens, a large proportion of whom succeeded in obtaining work of much higher status than the menial tasks assigned to their parents. Almost 700,000 Americans born of Mexican parentage lived in the U.S. in 1940.⁶³ Most of the 285,000 Japanese, 106,000 Chinese, and 100,000 Filipinos had been born here.⁶⁴ The opportunities available to Asian-Americans and Mexican-Americans were not as ample as those available to the children and grandchildren of European immigrants, but they were not nearly as restricted as those of native-born black Americans stigmatized by racially based caste.