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The historiography of farm labor in North America has undergone a renaissance of sorts in recent decades. Books such as Christian O. Paiz's The Strikers of Coachella and Mireya Loza's Defiant Braceros have reexamined the United Farm Workers (UFW) and the era of the Bracero Program (1942–64) respectively, reorienting the historiography toward a truly "bottom-up" perspective, which previous studies often lacked. Still, most studies in the history of farm labor have tended to compartmentalize the two eras: the bracero era, on the one hand, and the farmworkers movement (1965 onward), on the other.Andrew J. Hazelton's Labor's Outcasts fills a gap in the historiography by establishing farm labor activism from the 1930s to the 1960s as an antecedent to Cesar Chavez and the UFW. Hazelton examines how organizers in the National Agricultural Workers Union (NAWU)—principally its head organizers, H. L. Mitchell and Ernesto Galarza—challenged the Bracero Program and created "the preconditions required for later victories . . . by documenting abuses, pressing for reforms, mobilizing allies, and bringing questions of farmworker justice into the national conversation" (3). The first forceful effort toward farm labor organizing came under the auspices of the Southern Tenant Farmworkers Union (STFU) during the Great Depression. The STFU sought to organize displaced tenant farmers in the 1930s as farm laborers in the Southwest; although this effort failed, the union's cross-racial organizing set the stage for the new National Farm Labor Union (NFLU) to follow after World War II. Hazelton examines the NFLU's shift from organizing tenant farmers to wage workers in the immediate postwar era, where the organization learned the hard lesson that labor advocacy also meant dealing with forces inherent in the Bracero Program and the supposed "problem" of migrant labor during the early 1950s. The NFLU reconstituted itself as the National Agricultural Workers Union (NAWU) in 1952. Frustrations grew over the course of the next few years, as the grower lobby and the Labor Department's decentralized management of the extended version of the Bracero Program made enforcing the bracero agreement's worker protection stipulations next to impossible and lobbying for federal redress of workers' mistreatment fruitless. In Hazelton's view, by the middle of the 1950s the powerful grower lobby exerted almost complete control over the management of hundreds of thousands of bracero workers on an annual basis.In an effort to speak to the transnational nature of the problem, Hazelton chronicles how the NFLU-NAWU experimented with a cross-border approach to worker organizing and advocacy, a much more aggressive approach than any that the UFW would later employ in the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately for the union, growers in the 1950s used the Bracero Program to stymie any of the pro-worker reforms that the union wanted, and Mexican unionists favored the program's continuance in order to avoid labor and job competition in urban areas south of the border. Hazelton shows how the merger of the AFL-CIO in 1955, combined with a culturally liberal turn in national politics, helped advance the NFLU-NAWU's opposition to the continuation of the Bracero Program. Still, Hazelton notes that "as the money began to flow" in the 1950s, "it became apparent that the changing course of farm worker unionism would take more than traditional labor organizing" (138). Although the NAWU became a "dying union," as Hazelton puts it, in the early 1960s, the liberal coalition that Mitchell and Galarza had helped spearhead finally brought an end to the Bracero Program by 1964 (139). Additionally, the AFL-CIO launched the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) out of these anti-bracero efforts, laying the groundwork for the California movement that would mobilize agricultural labor by 1965. Mitchell, Galarza, and their colleagues had, to Hazelton, clearly "prepared the ground for future harvests" (164).Labor's Outcasts is a critically important addition to the literature on farm labor activism in twentieth-century North America. Too often, historians have treated early activity among farmworkers as distinct from the variant that emerged with the AWOC/NFWA union in mid-1960s California. Additionally, Hazelton provides a deeper understanding of farm labor's antagonistic relationship with the New Deal state. The NAWU's ultimate undoing of the Bracero Program in this instance is a direct precursor to the NFWA/UFWOC's later pushback against the National Labor Relations Act's failure to provide collective bargaining rights to farmworkers. Additionally, in Hazelton's view, growers who used bracero workers did so to stifle any sense of labor advocacy for migrant workers whatsoever; the bracero era thus shows that corporate agriculture's exploitation of workers was nothing new in the post-1964 period.Hazelton has done a major service for both labor historians and UFW historians alike in chronicling the complicated forces at play in labor advocacy prior to the modern period. The activities of Mitchell, Galarza, and their colleagues were far less dramatic than the marches, hunger strikes, and boycotts that came in the 1960s and 1970s. As Hazelton ably demonstrates, however, these earlier actors were no less important in advocating for some of the poorest and most exploited people in modern North American history—migrant farmworkers. Labor's Outcasts is essential reading for anyone interested in migrant labor or unionism in twentieth-century North America.
Tim Bowman (Wed,) studied this question.