Plainfield Library

Obreros Unidos, the roots and legacy of the farmworkers movement, Jesus Salas

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Obreros Unidos

bibliography

1349460418

Jesus Salas

the roots and legacy of the farmworkers movement

"In a genre-defying blend of history and first-person narrative, Jesus Salas examines the history of migrant labor in the United States and the migrant farmworkers' movement of the 1950s-1970s. He begins with his grandparents' relocation in 1906 from Coahuila, Mexico, to the semi-arid but fertile floodplains along Comanche Creek in southcentral Texas. Their community of tens of thousands of Mexican settlers, recruited by land speculators to cultivate, plant, and harvest vegetables, were joined by thousands more fleeing the Mexican Revolution and the chaos that followed. Salas describes the resulting system of borderland apartheid, of segregated schools, poll taxes, and "white primaries," and examines the values of the "mutualistas," or mutual aid societies, that sustained the farmworkers and would form the basis for the Wisconsin farmworkers' "social unionism." As the Great Depression dislocated the settlements and forced laborers to seek work elsewhere to survive, whole communities began to migrate to the Texas gulf counties and Panhandle, to the Plains States, and to the Great Lakes region, a generational pattern that began with Salas's grandfathers, continued in the 1940s with his parents, and persisted in the 1950s by Salas and his five brothers, who ultimately relocated to Wautoma, Wisconsin. While Mexican and Tejano workers fueled the growth of Wisconsin's agriculture and food processing industries, they paid a profound personal toll, and Salas provides a firsthand account of the migrant farmworker experience: brutal working conditions; overcrowded and unsanitary labor camps; physical and mental devastation, particularly harmful to women and children. He describes a life of uncertainty, constant fear of injury, his brother's broken bones, the hospitalization of his mother-all of it on reflection feeling like a "harvest of madness." Salas recounts how the gross violation of Wisconsin's social and progressive legislation and administrative code that protected migrant workers-child labor laws, migrant housing codes, minimum-wage law-led him and others in 1966 to form Obreros Unidos (Workers United), a farmworker union based on the tenets of the mutual aid societies in the Texas borderlands. That August, at age twenty-two, Salas led the union's protest march from Wautoma to Madison to draw attention to their cause. The first Wisconsin farmworkers' strike soon followed. Not solely concerned with improving the wages and working conditions of its members, Obreros Unidos offered meeting spaces, published a newspaper, provided free legal services, opened a gasoline cooperative, and later assisted in the establishment of the first migrant health clinic in the area. Salas recalls the greatest challenge of serving and organizing migrant families living in labor camps dispersed across a three-county area; he describes meeting with migrant families after church services and while shopping in downtown Wautoma, organizing rallies, and setting up grape boycott pickets in support of California striking workers. In the late 1960s, Obreros Unidos continued its community development strategies, but the environment changed; with increasing mechanizing on farms and in processing plants, for the first time the majority of OU organizers now lived in an urban industrial setting. In Milwaukee, one of the country's most segregated communities and recently convulsed by 200 consecutive days of open-housing marches, the NAACP Youth Council and the farmworkers' movement intersected in a profound manner. OU and Latino community leaders joined the Youth Council's protest of employment discrimination in summer of 1969; that fall Father Groppi joined OU's picket of Kohl's Foods, and attorney Lloyd Barbee helped organize a grape boycott rally for Latino and African American labor and community leaders. The next year both communities supported protests of Wisconsin's "welfare reform," the dismantling of the safety net for indigent families. Most significantly, OU organizers adopted the Youth Council's direct action strategies in its action for Latino civil rights. Salas demonstrates how the farmworkers' movement and Latino activism of the 1960s led to later action and lobbying efforts on a number of migrant labor and other Latino issues, including the creation of a Hispanic Desk in the Wisconsin governor's executive office, the offering of a Chicano Studies program at UW-Madison, Wisconsin's Bilingual/Bicultural Act and Wisconsin Migrant Labor Law, and the Migrant Tuition Bill"--, Provided by publisher

Roots and legacy of the farmworkers movement