Sweet Tyranny: Migrant Labor, Industrial Agriculture, and Imperial Politics

9. The Politics of Migrant Labor

9 The Politics of Migrant Labor As the Great Depression spread across the Midwest in early October 1930, Detroit resident W. H. Davis took pen in hand to write a letter to Henry Hull, the Commissioner General of Immigration. In the letter, Davis complained about Mexicans as the root cause of unemployment in “his” city. Davis even went so far as to describe Mexican immigration as “alien bootlegging ” and suggested that to solve this problem, the government should begin to issue “citizenship cards” and that “possession of such cards would show a person entitled to employment when they apply for work.”1 Davis’s letter hints at the numerous ways the Great Depression transformed the question of Mexican immigration and the status of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Midwest. In contrast to the 1920s, when the debate over Mexican immigration in the Midwest was confined largely to the halls of Congress, in the 1930s the discussion moved to private homes, small-town streets, and city halls, making the issue of Mexican immigration as much a matter of local scrutiny and debate as a concern of national and international policy. Equally important, in contrast to the 1920 debates, which had centered on whether to include Mexicans in the national origins quotas, the current “crisis” involved local and municipal authorities, working hand-in-hand or with the approval of federal immigration personnel, to organize a “voluntary repatriation” back to Mexico. Although the repatriation of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from Michigan in 1931 and 1932 would do nothing to end that state’s economic woes, it did blur the line between legal and illegal immigration, turning all persons of Mexican descent into noncitizens and nonresidents who took jobs and relief from “real” citizens and “real” residents. In this way, the repatriation campaign worked to exclude Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans from the larger American political body and the local communities in which they lived and worked. If the repatriation campaign marked the exclusion of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, the coming of the New Deal held out some promise of inclusion . The Jones-Costigan Act of 1934 and the Sugar Beet Act of 1937 made it possible that all sugar beet workers, regardless of race or citizenship, might be recognized as workers by the state. These acts not only empowered the secretary of agriculture to intervene in disputes between growers and workers, they also required growers to abide by child labor prohibitions and minimum wage provisions. Unlike all other agricultural workers, whose only inclusion in the New Deal was as wards of the state, the laborers toiling in the sugar beet fields were recognized as workers with some rights. Rather than simply rely on the state to define and protect their interests through the sugar acts, however, many sugar beet workers also looked to other parts of the New Deal labor policy—especially the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively —to define their rights. Whether or not Michigan’s sugar beet workers realized they were excluded from these parts of the New Deal matters less than the fact that by joining unions and participating in strikes, they tried to make them apply in practice.2 As such, the New Deal had the potential to remake the ever-shifting capital, land, and labor boundaries defining rural America—offering some chance of social and economic citizenship for those who thinned, blocked, pulled, and topped sugar beet. Depression and Repatriation Throughout the Midwest millions of people experienced the full force of the Great Depression. By 1931 unemployment in Chicago and Detroit reached a staggering 40 and 50 percent, respectively.3 Loss of jobs was often followed by evictions and foreclosures as residents failed to earn enough to make their mortgages or pay their rents. The closing of banks and the downfall of insurance companies and mutual aid societies dealt yet another blow to residents already hard hit by economic deprivation. Even the churches and municipal welfare offices that had traditionally helped the poor found that they could not keep up with the requests of those in need.4 As months of depression turned into years, a number of self-proclaimed white “citizens” tried to explain the economic disaster around them by point216 . sweet tyranny ing to the thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who had settled in the Midwest, as well as those who migrated between southwestern homesteads and midwestern...