Farm Workers and the Churches: The Movement in California and Texas by Alan J. Watt (review)

Alan J. Watt addresses the important but neglected theme of Christian faith-based activism within the farm worker social justice movements in California and Texas from the early twentieth century to the 1970s in this well-informed and thought-provoking monograph. Watt is senior pastor at the Christ Lutheran Church of York, Pennsylvania, and his book grew out of a Vanderbilt University dissertation in church history, but it is not a dry-as-dust celebratory chronicle of Catholic and Protestant institutional history. Instead, he offers a sympathetic but not uncritical account of “the roles played by and the interactions among several Christian traditions in the farm worker movement,” mindful that “human activity lies at the heart of any meaningful historical narrative” (p.168). His use of this quotation from the late Ferenc Morton Szasz suggests that Watt sees traditions as embodied and contextualized, and his methodology is accordingly an eclectic mix of genres. Alongside the now old New Western History, with its attention to the dynamic interaction of economic and political power with race, class, and gender, Watt deploys the equally venerable New Labor History, with its goal of rescuing ordinary working people from “the enormous condescension of posterity” in E.P. Thompson’s classic formulation. The result is a salutary contribution that features numerous, and for the most part, unsung priests, ministers, bishops, laymen, lay-women, and their now-forgotten Protestant and Catholic organizations.

Watt begins his study with three chapters on faith-based work with farm-workers in California from 1920 to 1970, followed by two chapters on the Texas story from 1930 to 1969. Given the relatively more extensive and successful farm-worker movement in the Golden State, California is allotted twice as much space as the Lone Star State; a succinct historical summary of the social and political history of the pre-twentieth-century period is provided for each state, and black and white illustrations follow each section, six pages of photos from California and five pages from Texas. Within each of his two state-focused sections, and within each chapter of each section, Watt demonstrates how institutional history and individual biography interacted in the evolution of social networks that shaped the farm worker movement. (Nature also played a role in Texas in the form of Hurricane Beulah on May 20, 1967.) Readers of this journal will be interested to know that Watt goes well beyond familiar figures such as Cesar Chavez and Bishop Robert E. Lucey, and organizations like the Spanish Mission Band and the Bishops’ Committee for the Spanish-Speaking. He provides a veritable “Who’s Who?” of Catholic men and women “organic intellectuals”; he appreciates the importance of “Mexican Devotional Catholicism” in mobilizing support for La Causa; and he acknowledges the impact of each state’s distinctive historical political culture on the Catholic Church’s role in deciding whether and how to assist the farmworker movement in California and Texas.

Watt’s scholarship is thorough. In addition to using the relevant archival collections, which included oral histories, he conducted his own interviews with movement activists, immersed himself in local and national newspapers and periodicals, and he mastered the extensive scholarly literature. His study adds research depth and an important comparative dimension to earlier books by Frederick John Dalton and Marco G. Prouty, and it complements but is not supplanted by more recently-published books by Frank Bardacke and Miriam Pawel.