Will the Revolution be Funded? Resource Mobilization and the California Farm Worker Movement

Abstract

Based on archival and qualitative field research, this paper describes how the philanthropic investments of the Max L. Rosenberg Foundation contributed to the emergence of the historic California Farm Worker Movement. The author argues that foundations do not always have articulated or clear-cut political agendas to dilute organizing campaigns; instead moments of agreement (and antagonism) emerge and are fluidly negotiated as points of convergence appear and disappear. This paper reveals the three critical periods in which the Max L. Rosenberg Foundation invested in farmworker organizations in California's Central Valley: the dustbowl migrant education period of the 1930–1940s, the self-help housing projects of the 1950s, and the early leadership training campaigns of the Farm Worker Movement of the 1960s. This paper makes a significant contribution to resource mobilization theory by showing how private funding of a particular social movement (and therefore perhaps others if examined) was most aligned with the goals of the movement at the open-ended idealist beginnings. This alignment ruptured during the heat of the late 1960s when demands were made on picket lines and through international boycotts and became most problematic in the wake of significant defeats when movement organizations reshaped and professionalized themselves around foundation grants and ceased to represent their original constituents.