Labour militancy deferred: racial state interventions and the California farm worker struggle

Abstract

This article explains how the US’s employment of racial state projects directly affected efforts to unionise farm workers in California – the 1942 Bracero Program which imported Mexican agricultural workers into the US Southwest, and Japanese internment, which forcibly moved Japanese people from their homes in US Pacific coast states to internment camps situated throughout the country. Both projects decimated the momentum and militancy of the farm worker movement. Thus, the projects created a period of suspended social movement activity in which farm labour organisers directed their energies away from confrontation with growers and towards confrontations with the state. The state’s emergence as a central actor in the farm labour struggle managed to exploit the differences in terms of land-ownership/class and citizenship rights between groups of workers: ‘white’ Americans, Mexican Americans, Japanese, Filipino and Braceros – non-citizen Mexican workers brought in on a temporary basis. All of which weakened the capacity for joint action – until the mid-1960s.