Overview

In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights paints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era. Drawing on extensive archival research, Vargas focuses on the large Mexican American communities in Texas, Colorado, and California. As he explains, the Great Depression heightened the struggles of Spanish speaking blue-collar workers, and employers began to define citizenship to exclude Mexicans from political rights and erect barriers to resistance. Mexican Americans faced hostility and repatriation. The mounting strife resulted in strikes by Mexican fruit and vegetable farmers. This collective action, combined with involvement in the Communist party, led Mexican workers to unionize. Vargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights. He details how interracial unionism proved successful in cross-border alliances, in fighting discriminatory hiring practices, in building local unions, in mobilizing against fascism and in fighting brutal racism. No longer willing to accept their inferior status, a rising Mexican American grassroots movement would utilize direct action to achieve equality.

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9780691115467

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Reviews

Important books are provocative--they teach us new things, open new conversations, and point the way to new research. Labor Rights Are Civil Rights does all of this. -- Roberto R. Trevino Reviews in American History Vargas does much to chronicle the role of Mexican American workers in the turbulent decades of the 1930s and 1940s and to document their important role in the labor struggles and political controversies of those years. -- Robert H. Zieger Labor History Vargas has produced a synthesis of Mexican American labor history worthy of the attention of every labor, Chicano, and civil rights historian. -- Matt Garcia Western Historical Quarterly Vargas's analysis is at once informative and illuminating. -- Clete Daniel Business History Review

Author Information

Zaragosa Vargas is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of ""Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917-1933"".

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