Think Globally, Write Locally: Contextualizing a History of Mexican American Civil Rights

Zaragosa Vargas. Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. xvi + 368 pp. Halftones, notes, and index. $29.95.

The story of the quest for Mexican American civil rights has yet to be fully and convincingly told. Despite some excellent studies about disparate aspects of the struggle for full inclusion in the United States, we lack a synthesis that brings all these efforts together into a coherent interpretation. In particular, the crucial questions about when and how the drive for Mexican American civil rights began and the nature of the ideologies and leaders that propelled the movement remain subjects of debate. One school of thought locates the origins of civil rights agitation in the middle decades of the twentieth century, emphasizing the role of the reformist middle-class leadership of the Mexican American generation of the 1930s to 1950s.¹ Among those who challenge this view and posit a more radical working-class genesis is labor historian Zaragosa Vargas.²

In Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, Vargas not only masterfully synthesizes two critical decades—the 1930s and 1940s—in the labor history of Mexican Americans, but he also gives them a bold new significance: the post–World War II civil rights activism that gave rise to the modern Chicano movement was rooted in the seedbed of labor strife as workers fought to improve miserable wages and working conditions in unskilled agricultural and industrial jobs during the 1930s and 1940s. The New Deal and World War II presented unique conditions that opened new opportunities for Mexican Americans to push for economic, social, and political equality in unprecedented ways; this is where it all began.

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. Among its many virtues, two especially stand out. First, Vargas's book presents a nuanced treatment of Mexican American labor history of the 1930s and 1940s that reveals new insights about its multi-faceted nature. Specifically, Vargas skillfully surveys the labor activism of the 1930s and 1940s with a sharp eye for pointing out its transnational and multiethnic dimensions as well as the prominent role played by women. Second, this study forces us to think more broadly about Mexican American history. Labor Rights Are Civil Rights retells familiar stories, to be sure—the litany of agricultural and industrial strikes, the deportations and zoot-suit riots, and the names of labor and civil rights leaders and organizations of the times are documented elsewhere—but Vargas also uncovers new material and he recounts important events in these decades in a way that relates them to the wider panorama of U.S. and international history. As a result, we come away not only with a deeper understanding of the 1930s and 1940s but also with a model for integrating labor, political, and other perspectives to arrive at a more holistic interpretation of the complex history of Mexican American civil rights.

And indeed the story of Mexican Americans' pursuit of labor and civil rights is a complicated one. To begin with, it is a story about border crossings of different kinds. The main characters in this saga are workers from two countries, the fluid mix of Mexican immigrants and native-born Mexican Americans that made up the exploited workforce and much of the membership of the unions that sought to improve their wages and working conditions. But it is more than just a story about a migratory labor pool of Mexicans coming to the United States, and Mexican Americans following crop harvests from state to state. As the author clearly shows, it is also a story of trans-border cooperation among unions and political activists and organizations. In the 1930s, for example, the efforts of the Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos...