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This chapter explores the racial and labor landscapes of the Salinas Valley prior to World War II. The land that became the Salinas Valley was inhabited by Native Americans for 700 years before the Spanish, who colonized Mexico in 1521, arrived in present-day California. The valley's first residents were mostly migrants from the eastern United States, Canada, England, Germany, Ireland, Denmark, Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland. This chapter considers race-making in California after the U.S.-Mexican War and Gold Rush and how conceptions of racial difference led to the ethnic succession of Asian and Mexican workers in the state's fields. It shows how racialized beliefs that Asians and Mexicans were “naturally suited” for stoop labor led to other forms of discrimination It also discusses the strikes staged by “Okie” and Filipino agricultural workers during the 1930s, along with the antiunion hostility displayed in these moments of labor militancy and its impact on Mexican-origin workers.

This chapter examines the conflict between Mexican Americans and a white mainstream that denied them equal treatment, and between Mexican Americans and braceros in a militarized, masculinized agricultural context, in the Salinas Valley during the World War II years (1941–1947). It considers the ways that Latinos negotiated their relationships with other racial groups—and with each other—during wartime as well as the impact of the Bracero Program on the region's labor and power landscapes and race relations. It also explains why the activism of Mexican Americans living in agricultural California appeared weaker, or progressed at a slower pace, than that of urban Mexican Americans. It argues that the intraethnic conflict between four groups of Mexican-origin men—military servicemen, braceros, U.S.-born farmworkers, and “zoot suiters”—created tension in the larger Latino community which, along with the Bracero Program, slowed the evolution of a postwar Latino civil rights movement in the Salinas Valley.

This chapter examines the attitudes of Mexican Americans toward braceros and “wetbacks” in the Salinas Valley during the period 1947–1960, with particular emphasis on how the tension between them hindered the formation of a larger transnational Mexican-origin community in the region. It considers the concerns of some Mexican American middle-class civil rights leaders about the threat posed by undocumented immigrants on their economic stability and social respectability. It also discusses two particular flashpoints that brought the intraethnic conflict between Mexican Americans, braceros, and undocumented migrants into greater relief: the Immigration and Naturalization Service's “Operation Wetback” of 1954 and the peak of the Bracero Program in 1956. The chapter shows that the Mexican American agricultural working class felt betrayed by the state for creating a Bracero Program and immigration system that served at the pleasure of agribusiness instead of protecting them as worker-citizens.

This chapter focuses on a local Community Service Organization (CSO) in the Salinas Valley and how it operated in the agriculture-centered environment of the region in the years 1953–1963. It first provides an overview of the beginnings of the CSO chapter in Monterey County, founded by Fred Ross as a platform for Mexican Americans to prove their good citizenship while asserting their right to equal treatment. It then considers the CSO's membership, goals, and trajectory as well as its impact on California's Mexican-origin population and members' attitudes toward braceros and the Bracero Program. It also highlights the CSO's successes and failures, with particular emphasis on its inability to create interracial alliances, involve the larger Mexican-origin community in specific protests, maintain stable leadership, and risk its cultivated image of respectability.

This chapter examines the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee's (UFWOC) 1970 strike in the Salinas Valley and the various groups of UFWOC allies and detractors involved. It first considers the circumstances that led to the strike before discussing the strike in more detail. In particular, it analyzes the battle between Cesar Chavez's supporters, including farmworkers, and opponents as hundreds of incidents of violence erupted between the UFWOC and Teamsters Union during the strike's initial weeks. It also explores the various tactics employed by growers in response to the strike, the racial violence that erupted, the involvement of women such as Ethel Kennedy and Coretta Scott King, and the unprecedented cooperation seen between Mexican Americans and Mexicans.

This chapter examines the bracero tragedy of 1963 in the Salinas Valley, the communities involved in and affected by it, and its impact on the Bracero Program and California's Chicano Movement. The tragedy happened on September 17, 1963, when a bus carrying the bracero crew that lived at the Earl Meyers Company labor camp in Salinas collided with a Southern Pacific Railroad freight train in the town of Chualar. Twenty-three died instantly. After the accident, urban and agricultural Mexican American leaders came together to protest the Bracero Program's exploitation and safety hazards. The protests led Congress to discontinue the Bracero Program in 1964. This chapter also considers the trial of bus driver Francisco (Pancho) Espinosa before concluding with an assessment of the implications of the Chualar tragedy for California's embryonic Chicano civil rights movement.

This chapter examines the farmworker movement in the Salinas Valley after the termination of the Bracero Program. It first considers the rise of Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC) and the lawsuits filed by Salinas farmworkers with the help of the California Rural Legal Assistance. It then explores how the continued importation of braceros in what was supposed to be a post-bracero era affected Salinas's farmworkers, the majority of whom were Mexican Americans. It also discusses the legal actions and victories of Salinas farmworkers against growers who sought to continue importing braceros and prevent their employees from joining the UFWOC. These legal actions and victories, the chapter argues, were evidence of the farmworker movement's revival in the Salinas Valley.

This book investigates the history of the Salinas Valley to show how agriculture-centered environments and economies affected the politicization of U.S.-born and immigrant Mexicans in twentieth-century California. Located in Monterey County on California's central coast, the Salinas Valley occupied a central place in debates over agribusiness, labor, and immigration policy during the 1960s. Today, the valley's multibillion-dollar agricultural industry, and U.S. agriculture more generally, remains heavily dependent on Latino (mostly Mexican immigrant) labor. This book argues that the Salinas Valley, as an agricultural empire, was a microcosm of key transitions and moments in America's labor, immigration, and Latino history. It examines how Mexican Americans navigated their social place and political identity in an increasingly corporatized agricultural setting, especially in the face of a large influx of Mexican guestworkers brought by the government-sponsored Bracero Program (1942–1964). It also considers how people “became Mexican American” and articulated that identity in agricultural settings, as well as how these Mexican Americans then became Chicanos. Finally, it traces the Chicano Movement's evolution in California.

This book has emphasized the importance of agriculture-centered communities in the past, present, and future of Latinos in the United States and concludes with an analysis of the farmworker justice movement in the Salinas Valley from 1970 to the present. It first considers the aftermath of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee's (UFWOC) 1970 strike before discussing the decline of the UFWOC (renamed the United Farm Workers in 1972) during the early 1980s and how it affected farmworkers not only in California but also throughout the nation. It then looks at the emergence of other important forms of Mexican American protest in Salinas after 1970. Finally, it comments on the debates around immigrants and immigration policy, particularly with respect to undocumented immigrants. The book argues that both Latino and agricultural history must be situated within larger narratives about U.S. immigration, race relations, and politics.