Farmworkers' Movement

The farmworkers' movement is a social justice movement that seeks to obtain the rights and fair treatment of migrant farmworkers across the United States. Beginning as early as the 1930s, the movement [Page 548]originally comprised migrant Mexican farmworkers in California, gaining momentum by 1964. Today, scholars and activists consider it one of the most influential strides in the effort to protect and give face to the ongoing mistreatment of migrant farmworkers in the United States.

The movement's early efforts were centered in California, where the main source of agricultural labor came from migrant Mexican farmworkers. In the 1930s, places like the San Joaquin Valley in Southern California were staples of American farming industry, producing the most cotton crops on the West Coast. Crops such as oranges, grapes, and strawberries were also thriving across California and Texas. The labor that fueled the successful mass production of these crops came from migrant Mexican farmworkers, workers who often worked in the United States and lived in Mexico, moving with the crops and their seasons. For some time, work was steady and many migrant workers felt lucky to receive jobs in the United States where work was more available than in their home of Mexico. Yet by 1931, the United States was thrown headfirst into the worst economic crisis in its history, known as the Great Depression. Unemployment reached an all-time high, with one in every ten Americans out of work. The government offered little to no economic relief. U.S. officials, including President Hoover himself, felt that the crisis would quickly wear off, and Hoover often told the American people to simply have faith in the economy. But the people didn't. Many were homeless and hungry. Entire families roamed the country in search of jobs and aid. Others had lost all their savings and finances in the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

The Great Depression hit the agricultural industries of California like a hammer. Those Americans that were out of work began to seek jobs in the fields. Yet, they were often denied. Migrant workers tended to work long hours for little pay, making the high profits and mass production possible in some areas. Soon, a sentiment of anger and resentment began to build amongst the American people. They felt Mexican migrant workers were taking “their” jobs and in some ways contributing to the despair of the economy. By 1933, some labor contractors began to agree with these sentiments and started denying the workers even more rights in an attempt to get them to quit their jobs and leave the states. The treatment became so harsh that some did just that. Yet others stayed. They were confused by the country's attitude toward them, because a number of the workers saw themselves as Americans. They were also angry by how a country they considered to be a “home away from home” was turning on them. Instead of leaving, many stayed and organized some of the first strikes to win migrant workers' rights.

One of the most significant strikes was in 1933 in the San Joaquin Valley and was organized with the help of a migrant worker named José Mendez Bañales. Bañales, a sharecropper in Mexico, had come to the United States in the early 1910s, working on the Kansas railroad until finally landing a job picking cotton in the San Joaquin Valley. He, like many migrant workers, felt the need to organize and realized that it had to happen fast. He and a group of migrant workers (which included his son, Sosimo Bañales) formed a committee to travel the state to gain support for a strike of the cotton crops in Southern California. They invited any farmworker, regardless of race, to join their struggle and many Anglo American farm-workers participated in these first strikes. They also involved women, using their influence in strategizing the strikes. For instance, many of the wives of the farmworkers did not always work so they could not be arrested for participating in the strike (in fact, when the men were arrested, the women continued the strike and some police officers refused to arrest them because some of them were as far along as 8 months pregnant). The Cotton Strike of 1933 was the first significant strike to bring attention to the mistreatment of migrant workers, and it won the first bargaining power of migrant workers with major labor contractors.

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