Legal Status and the Struggles of Farmworkers in West Texas and New Mexico, 1942-1993

Abstract

Differences in race and ethnicity have long been acknowledged as obstacles to unity among farmworkers in their struggles to organize and improve wages and working conditions. Another important but less systematically examined factor, differences in individuals' legal status-whether they are citizens, resident aliens, foreign workers under contract, or undocumented aliens-has also divided them. This is particularly evident in much of the Southwest, where most farmworkers have historically been Mexicanos. Critical to an understanding of the organizing struggles of farmworkers in West Texas and southern New Mexico since World War II are conflicting notions about freedom. Growers and their academic allies often apply the notion in reference to a free market in agricultural labor, an ideal condition that would be realized only if employers had an unlimited supply of workers whom they could hire without legal constraints (Acuna, 1988: 262). Growers have long complained that such constraints constitute red tape, particularly in reference to governmental regulations on wages, working conditions, recruitment, transportation, and other legal protections afforded workers (El Paso Herald-Post, 1942). Workers and their sympathizers associate the notion of freedom with workers' rights. They argue that the dearth of regulations and explicit legal protections, including the right to engage in collective bargaining, demonstrates that farmworkers lack freedoms enjoyed by most other workers in the nation. To advance workers' freedoms, they seek to attain the strongest possible legal status for farmworkers, although they do not consistently agree on how to achieve that end. These two conceptions of freedom and their opposing concerns have played an important role in the history of worker organizing efforts in the Southwest. The enactment during World War II of the bracero program marked the beginning of an important struggle between farmworkers and growers in the