La Casa de Esclavos Modernos

Abstract

F or California state employees concerned with agricultural production, the solution to one crisis at the outset of World War II meant having to confront another one.1 The first crisis was a fear, as the war heated up, of a serious labor shortage and thus a collapse of California’s highly intensive, specialized industrialized system of agriculture that many understood to be essential to the war effort.2 While there was ample evidence that such a labor shortage did not exist, there was no doubt that a certain hysteria did—a hysteria that California agriculturalists were determined to exploit as a means of gaining access to the large pool of labor that lived just across the border in Mexico.3 And they did. Fairly significant opposition to labor importation voiced in 1941 by members of the New Deal Farm Security Administration and the California State Division of Immigration and Housing, which was the primary state agency devoted to questions of agricultural labor, and which in Culbert Olson’s so-called Little New Deal government was headed by the redoubtable Carey McWilliams, quickly melted away after Pearl Harbor. By August 1942 an agreement had been signed with Mexico providing for the recruitment and importation of tens of thousands of men for temporary agricultural work in the United States (Figure 1).4 While workers were sent to the cotton fields of Texas and the south, the beet fields of Colorado and Nebraska, the mixed farms of the upper Midwest, and the orchards of the Pacific Northwest, California quickly became the largest importer of Mexican workers. First deployed to the beet fields of the Sacramento and Salinas Valleys in September 1942, imported workers— braceros , as they were called—soon came to dominate harvests up and down the state: from the early lettuce and carrot harvests …