Vigilante Violence, the Rise of the New Right, and the Persistence of the Texas Farmworkers, 1975–1980

Abstract This study charts the ineffective vigilante violence perpetrated by growers in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas to suppress farmworker activism from the mid-to-late 1970s and their abrupt shift in tactics with a 1980 strike in Hereford, Texas, toward the adoption of strictly nonviolent and tediously legalistic new methods associated with the neoconservative backlash. It does so in two major sections. In the first, grower violence is chronicled in detail that underscores both its rage and ineffectiveness. The second section shows how the New Right usurped the longstanding usage of physical violence against ethnic Mexicans in Texas, prompting conservatives to flock to the Republican banner due to the party’s ability to deliver on the New Right’s designs of defeating the cultural liberalism embodied by the civil rights movement of previous decades.