Illlllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll 1293 02058 6248 This 18 to certify that the ethesis entitled Not a Sweet Deal: Mexi an Migrant Workers in the Sugar Beet Farms of the Midwest and Mountain States, 1900-1930 presented by Camila Montoya has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for Master of Arts degree in History Major professor 0-7639 MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution LIBRARY Michigan State University PLACE IN RETURN Box to remove this checkout from your record. To AVOID FINES return on or before date due. MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested. DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE 11m animus-p.14 NOT A SWEET DEAL: MEXICAN MIGRANT WORKERS IN THE SUGAR BEET FARMS OF THE MIDWEST AND MOUNTAIN STATES, 1900-1930 By Camila Montoya A THESIS Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of History 2000 Professor Peter M. Beattie ABSTRACT NOT A SWEET DEAL: MEXICAN MIGRANT WORKERS IN THE SUGAR BEET FARMS OF THE MIDWEST AND MOUNTAIN STATES, 1900-1930 By Camila Montoya During the 1900-1930 period, hundreds of thousands of Mexican farm laborers in Texas migrated every year to work in the sugar beet fields of the Great Lakes, Mountain and Plain states. Current historical literature explains that the Mexicans traveled north to escape the racial discrimination they experienced in the Lone Star state and to take advantage of the higher wages and better conditions offered by the beet growers. The findings of this research indicate however, that the wages paid to Mexican agricultural migrant workers in the beet fields, and their net earnings, were not significantly higher than those paid by Texas cotton ranchers and vegetable farmers. Here, as well as in the sugar beet farms, Mexican migrant laborers suffered considerable wage, racial and social discrimination. I argue instead that surplus labor in the US Southwest, a high demand for unskilled labor in the sugar beet industry and the lure of higher paying factory jobs in the industrial cities of the Midwest drove the labor migration stream to the North. This study utilizes the reports of George T. Edson, an investigator from the Labor Bureau of Statistics who in 1926-27 surveyed the Mexican workers in beet fields and their employers, as its main primary sources. It contributes to the history of Mexican labor in the United States during the early 1900’s by focusing on the sugar beet farms in the northern states, which have received relatively little attention from historians. Most research on Mexican migrant agricultural workers during the 1900-1930 period has concentrated on California and on the US Southwest. This study also shows how the employers in the sugar beet districts, like their counterparts in the Texas cotton belt, built their practices of wage, job and social discrimination utilizing ethnic stereotypes that categorized the laborers as inferior and their back breaking work as “Mexican labor”. To my husband, Andrew iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks to David Kessler from the Bancroft Library of the University of California, who helped me locate many of the documents I used in this research. I also want to express my gratitude to the many professors of the Department of History at Michigan State University with whom I have studied during the last couple of years. They continue to inspire me to follow their path, to be able some day to teach other students. In particular, I want to thank Dr. David Walker from whom I learned to love Mexican history and Dr. Lisa Fine, who taught me how interesting and rewarding could the study of labor history be. Thanks to Dr. Javier Pescador for his assistance in evaluating many of the primary and secondary sources of this study. And my special thanks to Dr. Peter Beattie who has patiently coached and helped me, not only through the researching and writing of this thesis, but throughout the entire Master of Arts program. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1 IN THE SUGAR BEET FIELDS CHAPTER 2 THE EMPLOYERS: BEET GROWERS AND SUGAR COMPANIES CHAPTER 3 THE WORKERS: “THE DOCILE AND ENDURING MEXICANS” CHAPTER 4 “BUSINESS IS BUSINESS” CONCLUSION NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY vi vii 28 37 50 56 65 LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1 EARNINGS IN NORTH CENTRAL STATES DURING 1926 SEASON 22 FIGURE 2 SLIDING PAY SCALE OF THE GARDEN CITY SUGAR COMPANY 24 vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS The following refer to George T. Edson’s summary reports to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These documents are housed today in the Paul S. Taylor Collection at the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. CW “Mexicans in Sugar Beet Work in the Central West”, 1927. Covers Nebraska, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Kansas. DET “Mexicans in Detroit, Michigan”, 1926. FLINT “Mexicans in Flint, Michigan”, 1926. FR Edson’s field reports, 1926 and 1927. NCS “Mexicans in Our North Central States”, 1927. Covers area from Allegheny Mountains to the Missouri River, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa. NOR “Northern Sugar Beet Mexicans”, 1927. Report on North Dakota, Minnesota and northern Iowa. PONT “Mexicans in Pontiac, Michigan”, 1926. PTC Paul S. Taylor Collection at the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. vii INTRODUCTION Over the course of the first three decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrant farm laborers traveled every year, in the early spring, from the US Southwest to the sugar beet fields of the Great Lakes and northern Plain and Mountain states, where they toiled the soil until the late fall. The historical literature explains that the workers embarked on this annual trek to the North to take advantage of the better wages and living conditions in the beet farms and to avoid the virulent racial discrimination to which they were subjected in the Southwest, particularly in Texas. However, a close analysis of the daily lives and labor of the beet farm hands shows that the nature of their work, earnings and standard of living in the North were not too dissimilar from those they encountered in the Lone Star state. Mexican migrant laborers found similar prejudice and social, occupational and wage discrimination in Texas cotton ranches and in northern sugar beet farms. This study shows that the migrants traveled North every year driven by conditions of surplus labor in Texas, a large demand for unskilled labor in the sugar beet business and by the possibility of finding more permanent and higher paying employment in the industrial urban centers of the upper Midwest. The subject of this study reflects my interest in the history of Mexico and labor. Relatively little historical research has been conducted with specific focus on Mexican agricultural workers in the sugar beet, fruit and vegetable farms of the upper Midwest and Plain states during the 1900-1930 period. This is regrettable because commercial agriculture was the single largest employer of Mexican labor in the United States at the time and the sugar beet industry employed more Mexicans than any other economic sector in the northern half of the US. Some historical accounts include these laborers as a point of departure for an analysis of the experience of Mexican migrant workers in fields I and factories in subsequent decades. In these studies, the betabeleros of the 1900-1930 period are simply a minor part of the cast of a larger story. This is the case of Dennis N. Valdes’ history of the Mexican people in Michigan and Detroit from 1900 tol976, and of his more recent study of Mexican agricultural workers in the Great Lakes region from 1917 to 1970.1 Similarly, Carey McWilliams’ survey of the history of Spanish speaking people in the United States and Rodolfo Acuna’s account of the history of Chicanos give rather brief consideration to the sugar beet workers.2 Otey Scruggs’ study of Mexican agricultural workers in America centers on the period 1942-1954, though it includes a general overview of the preceding four decades.3 Mark Reisler’s history of the Mexican immigrant labor in the United States during the first decades of the 1900’s provides a comprehensive analysis of the economic reasons that drove the movements of large number of Mexican workers across the international border and the American legislation that facilitated it.4 Some scholars see the Mexican presence in the beet farms of the Midwest in the early part of the twentieth century primarily in terms of the support it gave to Mexicans in the industrial urban centers. Valdes argues that, “...the importance of the sugar beet industry in the Midwest can be illustrated in comparison with their compatriots farther east... Without an agricultural base to provide jobs during difficult times, Mexican settlements in the East Coast disappeared early in the years of the Great Depression... [But] in the Midwest, the beet fields offered [the Mexicans] employment during hard times in the city”.5 A detailed analysis of the labor relations that governed the work in the sugar beet fields and of the living conditions of the Mexicans who toiled in the beet farms is lacking in the literature. More recent historical literature has also generally focused on other aspects of the work experience of Mexican migrant workers in the United States. In 1993, Zaragoza Vargas published his account of Mexican industrial workers in Detroit and the Midwest from the first World War to the onset of the Great Depression.6 Vargas’ analysis is important because it interprets the migration of Mexican workers to the industrial centers 2 of the Midwest as an integral part of the larger migratory stream that flowed from Mexico to the US Southwest, and from there to the farms of the northern tier American states. The study shows how Mexican migrant laborers moved from beet farm to factory work and back to the sugar beet fields, depending on labor demand and economic conditions. But of course, Vargas’ emphasis lies on the Mexican industrial worker. In contrast to the scant literature on Mexican beet labor, a larger amount of historical research has addressed the experience of the Mexican migrant in farms in the US Southwest and in California in the 1900-1930 period.7 Most of these studies agree that racial stereotypes of the Mexican workers played a key role in shaping the labor relations in the farms of the Southwest and the social and wage discrimination inflicted on the laborers. This discrimination was pervasive and truly virulent in Texas. Thus, it has generally been assumed by historians of Mexican labor that the farm hands who migrated to the northern states to work in the sugar beet fields did so to improve on what indeed were harsh working and living conditions, under considerable racial discrimination, in the Lone Star state.8 However, a closer examination of the life and work of the Mexicans in the sugar beet farms shows that they did not represent a significant improvement to the laborers. My examination of the living and working conditions of the betabeleros, as the Mexican migrants in the beet farms were known, is primarily based on the unpublished reports of George T. Edson, a field investigator for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1926, the Bureau assigned Edson the task to ascertain the status of the Mexicans living in the northcentral United States, an area defined for official purposes as extending from Pittsburgh to Nebraska. This was not the first time that the Federal Government had ordered an investigation of the conditions of imported Mexican labor in the United States. The Department of Labor had conducted several inquiries since 1920, after the war, when organized labor and other groups began to show skepticism about further need for foreign workers.9 Southwestern farmers insisted at the time however, that a shortage 3 of farm workers still existed. A special committee, appointed in 1920 by the Secretary of Labor to investigate these complaints against the temporary admission of foreign agricultural workers, had recommended that Mexican farm labor continue to be imported. Thus, the exemption of Mexican laborers from the immigration restrictions imposed by Congress in 1885 and 1917 continued through 1922.10 In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson Immigration Act, which placed specific caps on the number of immigrants from individual countries. Mexico was not included in this legislation, but the debate between farmers and organized labor, which sided with other restrictionist groups, over the need to continue to import Mexican workers, persisted. Practically every year, from 1920 to 1930, bills designed to restrict the migration of Mexicans to the United States were introduced in Congress, though none came to a vote in either House. “ Edson’s field studies of 1926 and 1927 were the product of these controversies. He was one of several investigators charged to report on the status of the Mexican workers and on the need that their employers had for their labor. Upon the completion of his inquiry, Edson sent summary reports to his superiors in Washington DC, informing them that throughout the northcentral United States, sugar beet growers and sugar manufacturers depended on the Mexican workers for their economic viability. Moreover, Edson asserted that neither Anglo—Saxon Americans nor European immigrants, only the Mexicans, would willingly perform the strenuous beet farm work. 12 Unimpeded by Congressional caps on Mexican immigration, beet farmers continued to utilize Mexican laborers in their fields throughout the rest of the 1920’s. In his travels during 1926 and 1927, Edson paid special attention to Mexican workers in sugar beet farms and city factories. He interviewed employers and workers and he also visited Mexican communities - referred to as colonies at the time- in towns and in the farm fields. Edson’s extensive, unpublished reports constitute the main primary source for the analysis that follows. I have also utilized some reports on the conditions in the beet farms commissioned by the state of Michigan in the 1940’s. 4 Edson’s reports proved quite valuable because of their considerable detail and their attention to the nature of the work and the living conditions of the workers, as well as to the variety of contractual arrangements and wage levels prevalent in the extensive territory covered. However, the reports provide a wealth of information about the Mexicans and their employers but do not give an unfiltered voice to the workers. Finding this voice will be the focus of future research. In the meantime, with the information at hand and to introduce the laborers in a more personal way, I have reconstructed what might have been a typical Mexican family working in the beet fields of the Midwest in the late 1920’s. Chapter 1 provides a brief, composite account of this family’s immigration into the United States, its work in the cotton farms of Texas and its migration to a Michigan beet farm. It is based on a careful sifting of data found in Edson’s reports and in the historical literature. Chapters 2 and 3 lay out the foundations of my study with an analysis of employers and workers in the beet districts, the labor relations they negotiated, on paper, and in everyday practice, and the resulting living conditions of the Mexicans. Chapter 4 compares the conditions of the Mexican agricultural laborers in Texas with those in the northern sugar beet fields. It also provides an interpretative analysis of the results of this comparison, namely that the economic and social conditions that the migrants experienced in both settings were similar. The study’s conclusion ponders the implications of my argument for the historiography of Chicanos, American labor, immigration and ethnicity, placing it in a broad context and a variety of fields. CHAPTER 1 IN THE SUGAR BEET FIELDS What follows is a composite picture of the Mexican migrant workers in the beet fields, based on statistically probable traits that observers found among the laborers. In his survey of the sugar beet farms, George Edson recorded a variety of facts about the Mexicans, including their average ages, family organization, living arrangements in the farms, places of origin, both in Mexico and in the American Southwest, daily diet, and the laborers’ experiences with hiring agents and with the town folks of the beet districts. This chapter presents an aggregate of these data, along with observations that scholars of Mexican agricultural labor in Texas and in the Midwest have reported in the extant literature.l On a warm and sunny day in early June, 1927, in one of his visits to the beet farms in Michigan, Edson would have seen countless number of acres of neatly arranged rows, where the green sugar beet plants had just begun to sprout. He would have noticed groups of workers here and there, moving slowly, but steadily, along the individual rows of plants. Coming closer, the Department of Labor surveyor would have observed a gang of eight workers, three men in their late twenties or early thirties, a couple of women the same age and three children, eight to ten years old. Each worker moved in an almost rhythmic pattern, repeatedly bending down, cutting some of the small seedlings with a hoe, throwing the cuttings aside, along his path, and then straightening up, moving forward and bending over again by the next beet plant. With their hands, the laborers were uprooting the weaker plants within each green cluster, leaving a single strong beet seedling in place. The men, women and children were blocking and thinning the beets, reducing the number of plants and leaving clusters of beet seedlings ten or so inches apart.2 Approaching the workers, Edson would have soon concluded that they were Mexicans. In spite of the dirt and sweat that covered their faces, hands and clothes, the 6 color of their skin and facial features were still distinguishable and they spoke Spanish. Besides, having spent already a year surveying farming agriculture in the Midwest, Edson knew perfectly well that beet farm work was “Mexican work”.3 With the help of one of the men who spoke some broken English, the observer would have learned that, like many Mexican beet farm hands, the gang of laborers was an extended family consisting of two couples, Jose and Rosa, their cousins Florencio and Esperanza, their three children and Evaristo, Jose’s single brother.4 They were Mexicans, from Michoacan, and had just come from San Antonio, Texas, in late May, piled up on a stake-bed truck, in an exhausting and seemingly endless journey, the eight of them and the four large bundles containing all their possessions.5 They had started to work right away, as soon as they arrived in the farm, because the beet farmer had taken advantage of the early spring and had drilled the ground and planted the seeds in mid May. During his visit, the Labor Department investigator would have learned that these men, women and children had been performing the blocking operation on the beet rows for eight or nine hours a day, six, sometimes seven days a week, for four weeks, constantly bending, kneeling and straightening up. Evaristo would have explained that on that day, the family had almost completed blocking and thinning their assigned 30 acres.6 Only two more acres remained. Then, they would start again, working every acre, this time to get rid of the weeds brought out by the spring rains and already sprouting in the fields. Kneeling and bending, they would pull out the weeds, with hoes or with their bare hands, every day through July or perhaps early August, to allow the beet plants to grow strong and large. Only then could the family take some time off the beet fields, perhaps for three to four weeks, until the harvest time, in late September or early October. This time off was hard for the family though, because they would not receive any pay for it. Jose, Florencio and Evaristo planned to search for temporary jobs in nearby onion and corn farms, but they knew they could not move very far because the beet harvest had to be done on time, or the sugar in the beets would spoil and the grower would cut their pay.7 Harvesting the beets was hard work. The entire family was needed, from sun up to sun down, to ensure timely harvesting of the product. The farmer would pull the mature beets out of the ground with a mechanical plower, while the family, on foot, would follow behind, bending over each plant left on the ground by the plower, shaking off the loose dirt from the beets, removing the t0ps with topping knives and throwing the harvested product into piles. The farmer was responsible for transporting the beets to the sugar factory. By late November, Jose would have explained, their beet season contract would be over. In response to Edson’s questions, the men would have acknowledged that beet farm labor was hard, long, difficult and tiring work. For Rosa and Esperanza, the back breaking work on the beet rows was also hard, but there was more waiting for them. Long and arduous hours of continued labor waited for them at the end of every day, when they returned to their homes from the fields. The women did the washing, cleaning and cooking for the entire family, mostly during the evening, while the men rested for a while.8 Judging by the comments he frequently made in his reports to his superiors, Edson would have found the living conditions of these Mexican migrants appalling. The eight member family lived in a two room shack, 20 by 22 feet, one in a row of ten similar structures built by the beet farmer in a corner of his preperty. A single door led to the first room, which contained a coal stove, a small table and some wooden crates that served as chairs. Pots and pans hung over the stove and there were a couple of what appeared to be large sacks of flour and beans in a comer, along with a small bed. A straw mat was rolled on another comer. A single, small window let some light in the room and several used candles on the table attested to the lack of electricity. A thin partition separated these living quarters with the second room, windowless and only 8 by 20 feet, where two narrow cots were set against the walls. An image of the Virgin of Guadalupe 8 hung on the far wall, along with a rosary. An old and worn out valise completed the room’s fumishings.9 The family had no running water in their house and Rosa and Esperanza, with the help of the older children, had to bring the water needed for washing, drinking and cooking from the single water hand pump provided by the farmer for all his workers. The pump was located about two blocks from the women’s home. Rosa, Esperanza and their family shared a single privy, placed a few yards behind their small cottage, with other four worker families. ‘0 Families shared other things too. The women helped each other with child care. The younger women, perhaps only fourteen or fifteen years old would often stay home during the day, with the small children, while everyone else, including the older boys and girls, worked on the fields. ‘1 One of the men owned an old, dilapidated car and in it, on special occasions, perhaps a Sunday afiemoon, the men would visit the nearest town, fifteen miles down the road, to play some pool or to buy food, matches, candles and other supplies their families may have needed. Sometimes, on a week day, one of the men would travel to the nearest bank to send some of their hard earned money to the dependent relatives he had left in Texas, or even Mexico. '2 The workers’ visits to the town were infrequent however, because free time was rare. Jose, F lorencio and Evaristo knew they were paid by the acre and they had extended themselves and the entire family contracting for a total of 30 acres. Like most gangs of beet laborers in the region, the whole family would have to labor during the entire beet season to complete the assignment. But the Mexicans visited the nearby town infrequently for other reasons. City folk did not always welcome the Mexicans, but fiowned upon them in city parks, public picnics, barber shops, restaurants and stores. Just the other day, in Saginaw, Jose and Evaristo had rescued a fellow betabelero from a beating at the hands of several town folks, who attacked him because he was a “damned Mexican”. ‘3 Nor could the laborers afford tickets to the movie houses and town theaters. ‘4 If their experience was common to most migrants, Jose and F lorencio would have made contact in Mexico with a coyote, a smuggler of illegal workers who promised to take them to Texas for a fee. After traveling to the Mexican border by train, each immigrant would have probably paid $15 to the smuggler. The laborers would have explained to Edson that they had entered the United States near Laredo. Once in Texas, the Mexicans had been handed over to an enganchador, or labor agent, who extracted and additional $1.50 apiece to take them to a cotton farm west of San Antonio. Florencio and Jose knew that the profits in the labor smuggling racket were significant because the enganchador also received about $5 per worker from the Texas farmer, upon delivery of the workers. '5 Jose and F lorencio had traveled by train and truck to the cotton farm. Upon arrival, their employer had announced, through an interpreter, that the cost of transportation from the border, as well as the employment agent’s fees, would be extracted from their first week’s wages. ‘6 Without money or transportation back to their home towns, or to the border, most workers had no choice but to acquiesce. Besides, they were well aware that the cotton farmer could keep them under strict surveillance and force them to work in the fields until they had earned what he claimed they owned him. ‘7 With plenty of Mexicans crossing the border every day, the farmer could turn any recalcitrant worker over to the Border Patrol, which would deport them back to Mexico. Jose and Florencio had felt trapped, but they were now in the United States and they had a job, after long months of unemployment in Mexico. Like most cotton farm hands in Texas in the 1920’s, F lorencio and Jose made $0.80 per day, harvesting cotton. ‘8 After the season, they had worked in a couple of vegetable farms and had done odd jobs in San Antonio. But finding a steady job was becoming increasingly hard, because there were plenty of idle workers throughout the 10 Rio Grande Valley. 19 Jose and F lorencio were eager to make enough money to bring their wives, whom they had left in Michoacan. A year ago in April, they had heard a labor agent from the American Sugar Beet Company speak in their barrio, in San Antonio. He had offered $23 per acre to any Mexican worker willing to sign a season contract, along with transportation and housing in the Michigan beet fields. Jose and F lorencio had signed up, each for a total of 7 acres.20 It had worked out quite well for them. The immigrants had labored in Michigan from late May till the end of November, when they returned to Texas, in time to earn some additional money picking vegetables during the first four months of this year. By then, they had been able to pay the cost of bringing their wives, the three children and Evaristo. In May, the family had come back to Michigan, this time under a contract with the Michigan Sugar Company. Had other observers surveyed the beet fields of Michigan in subsequent years, they would have noted that Jose, F lorencio, Evaristo and the rest of the family returned to the state’s beet farms for the next few seasons. They would have also noted that at the end of the 1931 season, before the group embarked on their usual migratory journey back to Texas, the Mexicans had been rounded up by Michigan state authorities and forcibly placed in specially chartered trains that took them, along with hundreds of other undocumented workers, back to Mexico. The family was among the first of the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans in the United States, legal and illegal immigrants, who would eventually be involuntarily repatriated during the Great Depression.21 Perhaps some visitor of the beet districts in the 1930’s would wonder why, of all immigrant groups in America, were Mexicans the only ones targeted for deportation in those years? 11 CHAPTER 2 THE EMPLOYERS: BEET GROWERS AND SUGAR COMPANIES The scholarly literature explains that Mexican agricultural workers migrated from Texas to the beet farms of the northern states to take advantage of the better working and living conditions available in the North and to escape the harsh discrimination they consistently experienced in Texas.1 I argue however, that during the 1910’s and 1920’s, these Mexican migrant laborers did not travel every spring season to the sugar beet farms because the working and living conditions they encountered there were substantially better than those in Texas cotton ranches and vegetable farms. Instead, three factors drove the migrant stream North: Surplus labor in Texas, a large demand for unskilled labor in the sugar beet industry and the possibility for the Mexican workers, however remote for most of them, of finding more permanent and higher paying employment in the foundries, meat packing houses, construction and car companies of the North. My thesis rests on this study’s findings that the wages paid to Mexican agricultural workers in the beet fields and the ability of their earnings to cover the migrants’ cost of living were only slightly higher than those of Mexican laborers in the Texas cotton belt. It also derives from a comparison of the quality of life of the two groups, which shows that, in both Texas and the northern states, Mexicans experienced similar and considerable prejudice and social, wage and occupational discrimination. To begin the analysis, this chapter will examine the sugar beet industry and the ways in which the employers, the sugar refineries and the beet growers, shaped their labor relations and maintained a steady supply of farm hands with the single purpose of maximizing their enterprises’ profits. After the 1897 Dingley Tariff, the sugar beet industry experienced a tremendous expansion in the United States. In 1897, in response to lobbying pressure from farmers, Congress passed the Dingley Tariff, which placed the extraordinarily high duty of 78.87 per cent on imported sugar and consequently created a sugar beet boom in the Midwest, 12 and northern Plain and Mountain states. Sugar beet companies quadrupled between 1900 and 1907.2 Afier the passage of the Dingley Tariff, the acreage dedicated to the cultivation of beets in the Pacific Coast, Rocky Mountain and Great Lakes states multiplied to almost 600,000 acres by 1919.3 Beet farms had developed by then over the large region that extended from Montana to Pennsylvania. Manufacturers of sugar from beets represented one of the most protected segments of American agriculture at the time. In addition to the benefit from the tariff, they received tax exemptions and subsidies from the states. The sugar beet producers also actively and successfully lobbied the Federal Government to relax the immigration restrictions on Mexican farm laborers, upon whom they had grown quite dependent. The industry was organized around the needs of the sugar producing factories. Logistically, sugar refining facilities were located in the districts where the beets were grown, because the beets suffered significant loss of sugar content if left stacked in the fields for extended periods, or if submitted to long hauls after the harvest. A few, very large companies, particularly the American Beet, Great Western, Ohio, Michigan and National Sugar Companies, dominated the industry. Leveraging their size and cohesive organization, these sugar manufacturers managed and controlled the basic relationships within the industry, that is, the relationships between the refineries and their suppliers, the growers, and between the companies and the farm hands. The sugar producers maintained this control through a system of dual contracts with both growers and workers. In its contractual agreement with individual farmers, the refinery determined the number of acres to be planted, designated the specific fields to be cultivated and purchased the crop in advance of the season. The price paid to the grower ranged from $6 to $8 per ton of beets and was calculated from previous crop yields, sugar content of the beets and the current wholesale price of sugar.4 The company thus advanced to the growers the money necessary to get the crop started. Throughout the growing season, the 13 sugar manufacturer sent representatives to supervise the field operations, dictating the methods to be practiced in the cultivation of the beets. The company also agreed to furnish the farmer the necessary labor. For their part, the growers agreed to prepare the ground, drill the seeds, cultivate and irrigate the fields and haul the beets to the refinery. They were also responsible for providing housing for the workers and for transporting them and their luggage to and from the nearest railway station. Farm hands received their wages directly from the refineries or from the growers, but in both cases the farmers carried the labor expenses. The contracts and controls imposed by the sugar companies did not constitute a happy arrangement for the growers who often complained about them. Their gross income averaged $60 to $70 per acre, per year, but the beet farmers claimed that their operating costs, which included wages, the laborers’ housing, local transportation of the workforce, seeds, maintenance of tools and equipment and transportation of the harvested crop, were too high.5 Under these circumstances, and because the sugar company took responsibility for supplying all the needed labor, the farmer had no incentive to invest in good housing or to ensure better working conditions for the workers, even if this meant better worker retention until the harvest. As the next chapter shows, growers in fact made minimal provisions for the well being and comfort of their laborers. Farmers provided their workers with small, squalid shacks and huts, without electricity, running water or much ventilation and with only straw mattresses and a wood stove for furniture. Some Mexican migrant farm hands lived in abandoned boxcars during the beet season.6 Growers knew that the cultivation of sugar beets was a labor intensive operation. They were keenly aware that this “stoop” labor was also seasonal and depended on the availability of a good number of workers at harvest time because of the perishable nature of the crop. The beets had to be harvested and processed quickly after maturity to minimize the loss of sugar content. Farmers therefore consistently tried to encourage as many workers as possible to enter the harvest labor market, which sometimes resulted in 14 underemployment and low wages for the farm hands during the beet season. But even more difficult for the workers were the winter months, after the completion of the beet harvest, when the laborers experienced real unemployment and deprivation. Outside of the farming season, temporary or permanent jobs for unskilled workers were very scarce in both towns and farms of the beet districts. The seasonality, physical demands and low pay that characterized the labor performed in the beet farms made most Americans avoid this kind of work. Therefore, sugar companies and beet growers came to rely on ethnic minorities such as eastern Europeans, Blacks, some native Americans and increasingly after 1900, on Mexicans. Up until the 1910’s, the bulk of the sugar beet labor in the Rocky Mountain and Great Lakes states was supplied by immigrants from eastern Europe. By then however, the upward mobility of Russian and German immigrants many of whom had become farm owners, restrictions placed on European immigration into the US, and increased availability of Mexican labor, opened up opportunities for the latter. This increased supply of Mexican labor resulted from a number of different factors. First, the economic development of the United States Southwest, which had rapidly expanded since the last decades of the 1800’s created a significant labor demand and a steady stream of Mexican workers that flowed across the international border in the first decades of the 1900’s. The movement of these immigrants was greatly facilitated by the new railroads that now connected central and northern Mexico directly with the United States. This vast new network of Mexican tracks was part of the significant economic expansion and industrialization accomplished by northern Mexico during the first two decades of the presidency of Porfirio Diaz, which lasted from 1876 till 1910. Mexico’s economic expansion during the Porfiriato also acted as a force that pushed the labor migration stream across the border to the US Southwest. Under Diaz, massive expropriation of Indian corporate and village communal lands accompanied the large expansion of Mexico’s commercial export agriculture. By 1910, ninety percent of 15 the Mexican campesino population had no land.7 This landless peasantry, not easily absorbed by the industrial sector, also suffered periodic famine, as a result of droughts, irrigation shortfalls and steadily rising prices of staple foods, caused by the dedication of most arable lands to export commercial crops such as cotton, sugar, coffee and henequen. Between 1907 and 1910, Mexico imported 200,000 tons of corn per year.8 By the 1890’s, many of the dispossessed peasants had become migrant laborers in Mexico itself, working as temporary peons on the large estates, or in the mines. Many others immi grated to the United States Southwest. By the early 1900’s, Mexican industrial workers joined these agricultural laborers in their migration to the United States. Facing the severe recession that rocked the i Mexican economy in the first decade of the twentieth century, the foreign owners of - Mexico’s industry shut down a large number of their facilities in the country. Thousands of Mexican workers in mines, smelting, timber, textiles and oil producing operations were laid off, or experienced significant loss of wages in real and nominal terms. Many sought relief to their plight by migrating north to the US Southwest.9 The violence and political and economic turmoil that accompanied the 1910—1920 Mexican Revolution, and its aftermath in the 1920’s, further pushed hundreds of thousands of laborers from Mexico to the United States during those years. ‘0 In the decade of the 1920’s the number of immigrants peaked at approximately 500,000 legal entries, plus thousands of others who entered the US illegally. ‘1 One can visualize the dynamics of the immigration process of Mexican labor to the United States in the 1900-1930 period as governed by a combination of forces that pushed and pulled the labor stream north. Powerful political and economic factors that characterized Porfirian, revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico pushed hundreds of thousands of laborers across the international frontier. At the same time, the growth experienced by commercial agriculture and mining in the US Southwest increased the demand for unskilled and semi-skilled labor and pulled Mexican workers north, like a 16 magnet. The same demand in labor intensive commercial crops in the North, and to a lesser extent in its industrial centers, caused a significant number of Mexican immigrants to continue their journey to the sugar beet fields and factories of the northern states. Here, demand for Mexican labor grew considerably as a result of the restrictions on European immigration set in place during the first World War. The trek to the beet farms was greatly facilitated by the oversupply of unskilled Mexican labor that had developed by the late 1910’s and 1920’s in parts of the US Southwest, particularly in Texas, as a result of the steady international immigration process. Evidence of the labor oversupply in the Lone Star state is provided by the fact that in those years, thousands of Black sharecroppers, wage farm laborers and railway construction workers lefi Texas to go north. Displaced by the steady flow of Mexican immigrants, many of these Blacks migrated to the growing industrial cities of the East Coast and upper Midwest. Often, they traveled in the same trains that carried equally displaced Mexican farm laborers from Texas to the northern sugar beet farms.12 The possibility of settling in urban centers and securing more permanent jobs in the factories also pushed Mexican immigrants to move North. The rapid industrialization of the northern states during the first decades of the twentieth century increased the demand for unskilled and low skilled labor, at a time when immigration from Europe became more restricted. As a result, a good number of Mexican immigrants secured urban jobs in factories. ‘3 Some lived in the cities for short periods of time and after the completion of their temporary jobs joined the migratory stream back to the US Southwest. However, the unskilled labor demand in the factories could not accommodate but a fraction of the Mexican migrant workers in the United States in the early 1900’s. The majority of these laborers remained in agricultural jobs. George Edson estimated that a total of 8,000 to 10,000 Mexicans lived in Detroit in 1926. '4 From the end of World War I to the first years of the Great Depression, about 58,000 Mexicans settled in the cities of the Midwest. In contrast, Edson calculated that approximately 145,000 Mexicans l7 labored in the sugar beet fields of the Great Lakes, Mountain and Plain states in 1926 alone. 15 Thus, during the first three decades of the twentieth century, there was a large and growing pool of Mexican labor in the United States. Sugar beet production became the single largest employer of these Mexican immigrants in the North. Only railroad construction and maintenance came close to the beet industry in terms of migrants F employed. During the growing season of 1926, the total number of Mexican sugar beet workers reportedly ranged from 65 to 80 thousand and in some individual regions they constituted 75 to 95 per cent of the work force in the farms. ‘6 The number of Mexican l laborers was hard to define with absolute certainty however, because many of them i" constantly drifted from one sugar district to another, in search of even slightly better wages. But, as one sugar company official boasted in 1927, in Kansas, Colorado and Wyoming, ...beet work has come to be regarded as a Mexican’s privilege and duty...” ‘7 Identifying beet farming with Mexican labor, employers confined the migrants to this most physically demanding, repetitive and low paying occupation. Because beet farmers paid a fixed amount per acre, they assigned their workers a given number of acres at the beginning of the season. An adult male farm hand typically handled an average or 7 to 9 acres in a season and a maximum of 15. The weather of course affected the workers’ output, because a rainy season could bring an extra amount of weeds that had to be pulled out by hand. With wages calculated on a per acre rate, beet farm labor was specially suited for families and groups. Edson reported that in 1926 in the Midwest, the proportion of adult Mexican male workers to women and children was approximately one to two. Though a number of migrants traveled alone, a significant number of families migrated and worked together. A migrant family consisting of husband, wife and children working in Ohio, Michigan or Minnesota in the 1926 and 1927 seasons typically tended 15 to 20 acres of beets. ‘8 18 As the dominant enterprise in the industry, the sugar refineries not only negotiated agreements with the growers advantageous to the company, but also established equally favorable contracts with individual workers. These contracts stipulated wages and transportation to the beet district. Because the sugar refineries supplied all labor requirements to the farmers, they often had large Labor Departments. Their recruiters maintained contact with the workers, labor leaders and hiring agents in Texas and other ‘. parts of the Southwest, from which most Mexican beet workers came. To hire the IL required number of farm hands, the sugar companies covered an extensive territory. Company men traveled to the US Southwest in the early spring to begin their recruitment operations. The largest proportion of Mexican laborers in the Great Lakes region came from San Antonio and Fort Worth, while those in the western states were hired primarily in El Paso, Albuquerque and even Phoenix. But by the 1920’s, company recruiting agents also visited cities like Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City and other centers that had developed by then a significant Mexican population. Close to 80 per cent of the Mexicans over 20 years of age who worked in the beet fields in South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska during the 1926 season had been born in Mexico, though many had been in the United States for 10 or even 20 years. 19 The large majority of these immigrants had come from the central Mexican states of Michoacan, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Aguascalientes and Zacatecas, though some had also originated in the northeastern states of San Luis Potosi, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon and Coahuila.20 The sugar company also recruited through labor agents in Texas, to whom they paid $2 for each man hired and $1 for every woman or child over 14 years of age. In the early spring, between April 10 and May 1, the refinery chartered special passenger trains that carried the Mexican migrants from major recruitment centers, such as San Antonio and Fort Worth, to the various beet districts of the North.21 Several of the companies provided the workers transportation from their place of origin to the railway station nearest the beet farms, free of charge, but only if the laborers finished their full contract 19 for the season. Poor living and working conditions in the beet fields prompted many migrants to leave their assigned farms, even before the harvest, to seek better wages in other districts. How to keep their workers through the end of the season was a common concern of farmers and refineries. The employers also worried about the migrants not returning to the beet fields the following spring. To entice the farm hands to stay in the area after the harvest and to save transportation costs, the sugar manufacturers uniformly did not provide the Mexicans a return trip to Texas or other places of origin. Instead, the companies obtained from the railways special rates of two thirds the regular fares, which the laborers could buy if they traveled in groups of ten or more.22 Very few workers took advantage of these fares however, because even the reduced fares were too expensive for their poor earnings. The refineries also paid $1 per acre more to locally hired Mexicans, or gave them the equivalent of their one way railroad fare, if they came by truck or automobile, a mode of transportation that had became more prevalent in the 1920’s. Clearly, the arrangements the sugar refineries made regarding the transportation of the workers reflected the interests of the companies, not those of the migrants. The sugar companies uniformly set wages on a per acre basis. In most of the beet growing states the better remunerated Mexican migrant workers received $23 or $24 per acre, which for an average of 8 acres per worker totaled $ 184 for an adult male, at the end of a 180 days long season.23 The migrants actually worked only 60 to 80 of those days, so a quick calculation would show that their daily wages ranged from $2.30 to $3.06, or varied from $0.23 per hour to $0.30 per hour, for a 10 hours day. In reality however, Mexican beet farm hands received compensation at rates considerably lower than these. The laborers lacked the freedom of movement to secure any but a few, short odd jobs in the farms near their contract location during the season’s idle periods. Unless they broke off their contracts with the sugar companies, the migrants were tied to their individually assigned or adjacent farms, for the duration of the beet season. Their relative isolation and the timing of the various tasks required in the beet fields made it impossible 20 for the migrant workers to absent themselves for long enough periods, or to travel long enough distances to seek additional temporary jobs that would help them stay continuously employed from May to November. Thus, for most adult Mexican beet workers, the $184 per person received under their contracts represented practically all their earnings over a 180 day season, even if they were idle some of those days. From the point of view of the laborer, the beet workers’ hourly wages ranged from $0.10 to possibly $0.15. In either case, whether their earnings are pegged at $0.10 or $0.30 per hour, Mexican migrants working for the sugar companies received significantly lower wages compared with those of Mexican unskilled workers employed in the industrial centers in 1926-1927. These laborers averaged $0.39 per hour in the railroads, $0.40 per hour in highway and building construction, $0.43 per hour in meat packing houses, $0.46 per hour in tanneries and $0.50 per hour in steel mills and foundries.24 The contracts that the sugar companies offered the Mexican agricultural laborer in the beet farms ensured that he occupied the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder in the North. Wages and pay schedules, like the transportation arrangements, also reflected the sugar companies’ advantage, not the workers’ best interest. Employers usually paid their Mexican beet farm workers in three separate installments. After the blocking and thinning of the beet plants, laborers received $8 per acre. Around August 1, when the final hoeing was completed, the company paid each head of family under contract $7 per acre. The final payment of $8 or $9 per acre was done at the end of the topping operation.25 Manufacturers like The Michigan and Ohio Sugar companies, that did not pay the workers’ transportation from Texas to the beet farms, deducted $ 5 per acre to cover this expense. These employers reduced the first and second payments by $1.50 per acre and the third by $2 per acre. Thus, the workers only netted $18 per acre. (See Figure 1). Attesting to the fact that their pay did not afford them an adequate standard of living, the migrants sometimes broke off their contracts and moved to other farms that 21 .t at .5: ...mmaa .228 :82 so 5 2852.. 588 .e 88.6 ”098m 605?: mm; 39cm; 05 bum mmxoh o. 3832 29:03 ooo.» SS4. .moEEuo 023:0 >5 Co 9.3.98 2 358 .93 .6: one!» 3 .2 626535: .2 oofiaoou 2o; 9.9.8 9: 59:22 5 Smog» mmoKEN» and?» mfivdmfiw» oodN» movwo out: 2.? F» o» w .oow» omm. P 5 own 62...» oodw» oovww o Pow nude» condor» ova» ovo. For» oo.vm» ooo» ohm? ooov F» mvw . KN» omod» mum.» Pm» oodw» mnmo comp mndv P» oomdov» o oomdov» oodw» oovom vow» gov F» ooo .08» o ooo.ooo» oodw» ooomv own» 820933. 383 .23 mscom moEEmm 20302.5 on< .02 29:03 .02 szo_.m> 52m 3293. 65 E fo>> .mom Son» 5 38:85... 633 F @980 ”850» 66.3% 55 we; 0.8m o>onm 2: can; .ooEEbfio mm; 32:2 .3: 05 5:: 20m .3 o» oo £me 05 :0 once was 9:82 or. Zoning .526 295 women 9: can; 20m .3 3» we name 05 co ones was 9:3... new 9:57: .8 E9526» oméw» oo. — P» cod.» 9. Show» omop» mud.» or oodw» oo.?» oo.»; 3. mNNN» omd» mud.» or omém» ooo» cod.» NF mNoN» ooo» mNNF» 3 oo.om» ooo» oo.N_.» or mud.» oms» on. _. P» o 093» oos» om. _. F» o mus?» ooo» mm. _. P» 5 oo.?» ooo» oo. _. P» o OZEQOP GZEOI Dz< .wZOh Z. wm0<>> 442.0... «.0... mw0<>> 02.22.15. m0“. mw0<>> mm0< mum o..m.> >z._..0 zwom<0 MI... >m 0mm: m.._<0w >