(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Q&A: Why Are Farmworkers so Vulnerable? [1] ['Olivia Weeks', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar'] Date: 2024-08-16 Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. Andrew Hazelton is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas. His recent book, Labor’s Outcasts: Migrant Farmworkers and Unions in North America, 1934-1966, is a history of Mexican agricultural laborers in the United States. Enjoy our conversation about the origins of American guestworker programs, the interconnectedness of rural population crises in the U.S. and Mexico, and the idea that immigrants simply fill the jobs Americans “won’t do,” below. California farmland seen from the Coast Starlight route by Amtrak (Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash). Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: Tell me a little about yourself and how you got interested in farmworker history. Andrew Hazelton: I grew up in Pike County, Pennsylvania, which is mostly a rural recreational area for New York City and Philadelphia – it’s in the Pocono Mountains. However, my father and his siblings grew up on a dairy farm, and my father’s side of the family was a multigenerational farming family. My grandmother’s father sold horse-drawn McCormick equipment door-to-door, for instance. I think that wandering around the family place and seeing old barbed wire fences at the edges of the field, using a tractor regularly, etc., all prepared me to think about rural history broadly. Academically, I became interested in the history of working-class people and the policies and institutions that affected them as an undergraduate student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. My particular research interests for my Ph.D. and the eventual book came during my first semester of graduate school at Georgetown University. I became interested in transnational history and North American history by taking courses in both U.S. and Mexican history. I liked focusing on transnational migration because it allowed me to think about “big picture” history, which I find more compelling than more specific deep dives. Image provided by Hazelton. So I suppose you could say that my rural upbringing primed me to be receptive to the right combination of professors and subject matter in graduate school to stimulate an interest in the history of farmworkers, immigration, labor, and agricultural policy. DY: I think people see gruesome headlines about agricultural work conditions and wonder why farm labor is so distinctly unregulated. Historically, where do regulations in agriculture begin to really differ from those of other workers? AH: The big divergence between farm labor and other workers really opened up during the Great Depression and New Deal era. In the urban-industrial core of the nation, a powerful union movement successfully leveraged its political power to win real gains, including the right to bargain collectively through representatives of labor’s own choosing. The Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act also bestowed significant benefits upon American workers during the 1930s. Farmworkers were excluded from most of these landmark laws. Because of their seniority, Southern Democrats controlled key aspects of the legislative process during the New Deal. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt needed these Southerners’ support on Capitol Hill in order to pass legislation, and they carved out exemptions for farm labor both to preserve traditional power structures in agriculture and to prevent black and ethnic Mexican workers from improving their bargaining position. This also preserved the racial apartheid systems of the Deep South and the Southwest. Although the legal standing of farmworkers has improved since the New Deal, farmworkers remain among the most exploited and vulnerable workers in the United States. The roots of that historic inequity reach back to the New Deal from the standpoint of the law. DY: Something your book points out that I think goes overlooked is that, during and after World War II, Mexico and the United States really experienced twin rural crises. Wartime production efforts drew working age men in both nations out of the countryside and into the industrial urban center. In what sense were guestworker programs a solution to labor-market woes in both countries? AH: Guestworker programs offered an expedient solution to perceived crises in both nations. On the U.S. side, growers clamored for Mexican labor after the rural upheavals of the 1930s, such as the sharecroppers movement in Alabama, the tenant farmers’ union movement in the Mid-South, and the revolt of ethnic Mexican, white, and black labor in California. Going into World War II, large growers sought to keep their labor market full in order to hold down wages as workers moved to urban areas for defense work. Workers from Mexico offered an easy solution, and in Mexico, the government could position the Bracero Program as a way to contribute to the broader global fight against fascism by contributing to Allied production efforts. That said, this temporary wartime program soon became a hallmark of postwar U.S. agriculture due to the outsize influence of organized agribusiness over farm, labor, and immigration policy. The Bracero Program and the undocumented immigration that accompanied it effectively nationalized what had been the labor model for agriculture in Texas and the Southwest – exploitation of Mexican workers. Meanwhile in Mexico, the postwar era brought a demographic boom that stressed the land base in the north-central states of the country. These areas never saw the kind of widespread land redistribution that happened in the 1930s under President Lázaro Cárdenas, so land tenure was even more stressed here. Downwardly mobile farmers and their children effectively faced a choice: migrate to urban areas in Mexico (chiefly Mexico City) and compete for industrial- or service-sector jobs, or migrate to the United States in hopes of earning enough money to secure land or outcompete neighbors. For those seeking to secure rural autonomy, migrating to the U.S. proved more compelling. So overall, policymakers in both countries found it useful to continue the migration regime after World War II. U.S. growers found deportable workers, and Mexican policymakers found a band-aid to rural underdevelopment and inequality. DY: One political narrative you hear today is that immigrant workers take American jobs. The typical liberal response to that, in my experience, is that immigrants often do jobs Americans aren’t willing to work. To me, it seems like we don’t know how to talk about the ways migrant farmworkers were and are used to undercut American worker power without demonizing the migrants themselves. What do you think the history you lay out in Labor’s Outcasts can add to that tired debate, if anything? AH: If I had one thing to add to that tired line of immigrants doing jobs American “won’t do,” it would be “at the wage offered.” So-called labor shortages exist when the price of labor is too low to attract sufficient labor. Now, growers being squeezed by packer-shippers, food processing companies, or big retail chains certainly exerts pressure in the system to hold wages down for producers. But overall, the experience of the Bracero Program and indeed of the modern H-2A visa system reveal that growers effectively create their own labor shortages by offering wages U.S. workers won’t accept, clearing the way for their contracting of guestworkers who are by definition more vulnerable and less able to speak out about working conditions and wages. It’s my hope that the book makes clear that the U.S. food system is based essentially on the exploitation of immigrant workers, who themselves are merely pursuing greater economic opportunities than are or were available in their sending communities. DY: Lastly, I know it’s been a couple of years since this book came out, and likely many more since you started working on it. What are you researching now? AH: I’m currently working on two smaller-scale projects, one of which will contribute to another longer-term book project. I’m researching nativist rhetoric by Mexican American citizens who lived along the Texas-Mexico border against Mexican “commuter workers” who held visas empowering them to permanent residence in the U.S. but who continued to live in sister cities across the river in Mexico. This will be part of a broader book about Mexican American nativism in the early to mid-twentieth century. My other project is a journal article on the Texas farmworker movement from the 1960s to 1980s. The United Farm Workers opened offices and conducted job actions in South Texas haltingly before union organizer Antonio Orendain broke with the UFW and launched an independent union. The story captures the fractures and decline of the farmworkers movement nationally in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time. 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