History of Mexican Americans - Labor Struggles

Labor Struggles

Mexican-American workers formed unions of their own and joined integrated unions throughout the 20th century. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was particularly active in organizing Mexican-American farm workers and hard rock miners the first three decades of that century, in Arizona and elsewhere. In 1917, many of them were expelled in the Bisbee Deportation.

The first recorded strike led by Mexican-Americans was in the start of the 20th century in Southern California. There, a small group of Mexican farm laborers along with Japanese-Americans organized strikes in 1905 near Oxnard, California located in Ventura County, California but were not successful in meeting demands for better wages and working conditions.

From about 1902 to 1914, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) attempted to organize coal miners in Colorado. In 1927, Mexican-American coal miners participated in a bloody coal strike in Colorado, walking out under the banner of the IWW. Mexican-Americans in the southeastern part of the state, particularly from the Walsenburg, Pueblo, and Trinidad areas, took leadership roles in the 1927 strike.

Numerous workers from Mexico were in the mines. As many as 60 percent of all these wage earners had come to Colorado after further labor troubles at Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) properties in 1919 and 1921. As the IWW agitation increased in 1926-27, mine owners refused to hire Mexicans, blaming them for the labor unrest.

The UMWA returned to northern Colorado in 1928, just weeks after a machine-gun massacre of strikers, when Josephine Roche, president of the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company, invited the AFL-affiliated organization to take the place of the more radical IWW.

The Communist Party-affiliated Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union led a massive strike of cotton pickers in California in 1933; that strike was defeated after mass arrests and the murder of several strikers. The movie Salt of the Earth depicts another strike, waged by the mostly Mexican-American members of the Mine Mill and Smelter Workers; the movie itself became an important document in the later Chicano movement.

The most significant union struggle involving Mexican-Americans was the United Farm Workers' long strike and boycott aimed at grape growers in the San Joaquin and Coachella Valleys in the late 1960s, followed by campaigns to organize lettuce workers in California and Arizona, farm workers in Texas, and orange grove workers in Florida. While the union suffered severe setbacks in California in 1973 and never established a strong union presence in other states, its struggle propelled César Chávez and Dolores Huerta into national prominence, while providing the foot soldiers who helped increase the visibility of Mexican-Americans within the Democratic Party in California and elect a number of Mexican-American candidates in the 1970s and 1980s.

More recently, the Service Employees International Union has led a number of successful "Justice for Janitors" campaigns throughout the United States among predominantly immigrant workers, many of whom have come from Mexico and Central America. Those campaigns do not stress cultural or ethnic identity in the way that the UFW did, but have linked immigrant workers' struggles with the political interests of Mexican-Americans in many communities, such as Los Angeles.

The IWW is also once again organizing, particularly among Troquero truck drivers and immigrant taxi drivers in the Los Angeles, California area.