Mexican Consuls and Labor Organizing: Imperial Politics in the American Southwest

by Gilbert G. González

Overview

Chicano history, from the early decades of the twentieth century up to the present, cannot be explained without reference to the determined interventions of the Mexican government, asserts Gilbert G. González. In this pathfinding study, he offers convincing evidence that Mexico aimed at nothing less than developing a loyal and politically dependent emigrant community among Mexican Americans, which would serve and replicate Mexico's political and economic subordination to the United States.

González centers his study around four major agricultural workers' strikes in Depression-era California. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, he documents how Mexican consuls worked with U.S. growers to break the strikes, undermining militants within union ranks and, in one case, successfully setting up a grower-approved union. Moreover, González demonstrates that the Mexican government's intervention in the Chicano community did not end after the New Deal; rather, it continued as the Bracero Program of the 1940s and 1950s, as a patron of Chicano civil rights causes in the 1960s and 1970s, and as a prominent voice in the debates over NAFTA in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292728240
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	11/01/1999
Series:	Center for Mexican American Studies Series
Edition description:	1 ED
Pages:	301
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.68(d)

About the Author

Gilbert G. González is a Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Director of the Focused Research Program in Labor Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Table of Contents

• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The 1910 Mexican Revolution, the United States, and México de afuera
• Chapter 2. Organizing México de afuera in Southern California
• Chapter 3. The Los Angeles County Strike of 1933
• Chapter 4. The San Joaquin Valley Strike of 1933
• Chapter 5. The Imperial Valley Strikes of 1933-1934
• Chapter 6. Denouement and Renaissance
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

What People are Saying About This

Dennis Nodín Valdés

This is the most comprehensive extant study in a growing literature on the role of the Mexican consulate in the United States.
-- Dennis Nodín Valdés, author of Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the Great Lakes Region, 1917-1970

Dennis Nodín Valdés

This is the most comprehensive extant study in a growing literature on the role of the Mexican consulate in the United States.