Post–World War II Tejano Farm Labor: A Remembrance

Abstract

Post–World War II Tejano Farm Labor:A Remembrance Arnoldo De León (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution A map of South Texas showing notable locations for this article. [End Page 136] Recent historical monographs about post–World War II South Texas posit that due to Cold War-era modernization and industrialization, large and mechanized corporate entities able to buy the needed farm machinery and devices, pay irrigation costs, and invest in insect eradication products displaced small independent farmers who could not afford the investments required for healthy profits.1 Newer research detects in this era the rise of a powerful and politically influential conglomerate of agribusiness companies with a free hand to exploit a mass of transient Mexican farm workers.2 The corporate farming system that took root in the trans-Nueces River area, some of these latest tomes find, was as brutal in its oppression as other systems adopted by capitalist powers in the exploitation of their territorial dependents. Indeed, historian Tim Bowman likens South Texas [End Page 137] corporate bosses to European oppressors who established colonial societies in underdeveloped countries. He argues that this colonialism, first implanted in the Lower Rio Grande Valley by Anglo growers in the early twentieth century, remains in a modified form. Texas Mexicans faced a cold-hearted, merciless, and detached syndicate of growers in the 1950s and after who manipulated the sizable pool of braceros and mojados (the former legal workers from Mexico temporarily in the United States under contract and the latter in the country illegally, derisively called "wetbacks") to depress farm wages. John Weber, another scholar of Mexican American labor, writes that "South Texas growers devised a thoroughly modern set of practices that relied on forced mobility, enforced immobility, and an activist state not present in earlier times."3 Corporate farming, the literature indicates, consisted of a structured world undergirded by an army of mobile families. Migrant farm workers after World War II suffered grim poverty and grappled with precarious road travel. They agonized first over what means of transportation (many relied on troqueros, or truckers) would carry them through the harvest season. Then they faced uncertainties about work availability at the next destination. Distress beset male heads of families who concerned themselves with properly provisioning their wives and children and obtaining safe shelter for them; some of the labor camps along the migrant route offered barely livable conditions. There appeared no refuge for migrants upon returning to their home region. Most came back to struggle through the winter in substandard quarters until the seasonal cycle resumed. Children enrolled at run down and unkempt "Mexican schools" until the spring.4 Weber writes: The condition of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in South Texas changed little from the beginning of the farm boom in the 1910s until the post-Bracero era. From the beginning of large-scale migration from Mexico during the Revolution, Mexican and Mexican Americans were viewed by potential employers as a never-ending supply of labor power, more beasts of burden than citizens. This system was merely amplified over the next several decades, even as massive economic and political changes occurred in both nations.5 My remembrances of growing up on small farms in South Texas run counter to the conventional characterization given of labor structures in the history books. Certainly, corporate farming gained power and influence over labor in Texas after World War II, but to not to the extent of [End Page 138] being the sole system of agricultural order in the state. I contend as much based on memories of my youth in Nueces County,6 first at the Chap-man Ranch (1945–56) and then at the Jesse T. Parr farm in Robstown (1956–63), where an alternate labor structure prevailed. The Parr farm in particular stands out as a salient exception to what the scholarship says about the world of organized cropping after World War II, and so I draw attention to it as a viable agricultural model that persisted concomitantly with and complementary to commercial farming in that era. Small farming operations, commonly found in Nueces County and neighboring counties, consisted of a white property owner...