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 Rightspaints 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.
