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367 On June 29, 1967, four United States senators—Harrison Williams of New Jersey, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Paul Fannin of Arizona, and Ralph Yarborough of Texas—arrived at the steamy, isolated delta of the Lower Rio Grande Valley to hold hearings on recent farmworker strikes and resulting violence that had made national headlines for over a year.1 Their arrival marked the first time a Kennedy had traveled to Texas since Pres. John F. Kennedy’s assassination four years earlier, adding to the drama of the occasion.2 Valley residents, intrigued, puzzled, and worried about the arrival of this prestigious lineup of legislators, watched the proceedings as the media covered the culmination of over a year of strife and violent conflict between growers and farm strikers.3 The senators queried growers and union organizers about farmworkers’ wages and their thoughts on unionization. For decades, labor analysts’ calls for improvements in working conditions and pay had plagued corporate farms, but the owners refused to yield ground. Sensing the time was right for legislation to advance reforms, the senators heard testimony on work conditions and questioned the hegemonic relationship between growers and workers. Pending were Senate Bill 8, requiring agricultural workers to belong to a union; Senate Bill 195, to establish a National Advisory Council on Migratory Labor; Senate Bill 197, extending child labor rules to workers thirteen years of age and younger; and Senate Bill 198, to improve voluntary services to migrant workers, including health care and transportation.4 The senators also wanted to examine the recent actions and jurisdictional limits of the Texas Rangers in controlling strikers. However, as the hearings progressed, activists’ statements and affidavits revealed that more incendiary issues involving civil rights, politics, and organized labor had splintered their movement to aid the farmworker.5 Within a few months of the senatorial subcommittee hearings, two major factors silenced the outcry, scattered the players, and ceased most of the national scrutiny on Lower Rio Grande Valley farmworkers: the advent of Hurricane “Better to Die on Our Feet than to Live on Our Knees” United Farm Workers and Strikes in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, 1966–1967 mary margaret mcallen amberson 368 Mary Margaret McAllen Amberson Beulah and the Cabinet Committee Hearings on Mexican American Affairs held simultaneously with the hearings on the Chamizal Treaty of 1967.6 On September 20, 1967, Hurricane Beulah would cause an immediate cessation of all agricultural activities for months. Thirty-seven days later, the hearings signified Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson’s acquiescence to work with Hispanic-American civil rights activists and opened the door to La Raza Unida in Texas. By 1967 the strike in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, which had been weakening for some time, suffered from lack of money and interest, as Hispanics gaining political ground galvanized behind civil rights.7 The workers, who had neither organized the strikes nor realized much positive benefit from them, became extraneous once Hispanic civil rights achievements began to accrue. It was yet another episode in the Lower Rio Grande Valley’s 220-year history in which groups with larger political agendas came to find the area, its people, and proximity to the border useful, until certain ends were met.8 In order to understand how local incidents resonated nationally and propelled change through the 1970s, it is important to understand the network of players and sequence of events that transpired between the summers of 1966 and 1967. In May 1966, encouraged by recent progress toward farmworker unionization in California, Eugene Nelson, representing the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) under Cesar Chavez, traveled to Houston to advance a nationwide grape boycott.9 Chris Dixie, a Houston lawyer for the AFL-CIO and the Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations (PASO), advised Nelson to investigate the conditions in the Lower Rio Grande Valley fields, in particular La Casita Farms, a subsidiary of Harden Farms of California and one of the union’s main targets. Dixie and others in the AFL-CIO feared that unionization would occur in the valley under the Teamsters, since truckers were involved in shipping produce out of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. However, some in the AFL-CIO doubted that farmworkers along the border could be unionized, as the workers were highly mobile and the region’s proximity to Mexico offered an endless supply of workers, which could keep wages low.10 Undaunted by such concerns, Nelson mobilized other association members, like former farmworker Gilbert Padilla, Bill Chandler, and Chandler’s...

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