"Pablo's Problem": Michigan Chicano Movement Anticolonialism and the Farm Bureau's Peasant Menace, 1962-1972

The Michigan Historical Review 45:2 (Fall 2019): 1-38©2019 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved “Pablo’s Problem”: Michigan Chicano Movement Anticolonialism and the Farm Bureau’s Peasant Menace, 1962-1972 By Nora Salas The earliest large scale colonial farmers were faced with a shortage of local labor . . . . These early land owners turned to foreign agricultural labor recruiting programs. [Colonial farmers] imported back-country African natives . . . the development of our country [the United States] . . . was all based on an unlimited supply of imported farm labor. The underprivileged classes from China, Japan, the Philippines, Mexican-Indians and the peasant classes from scattered places over the globe came to perform these agricultural duties . . . . For the most part, the repetitive farm work has been done by foreign peasant labor. —M. J. Buschlen, Michigan Farm Bureau, 19691 Michigan, donde las grandes fabricas productoras de pollution por un lado y automóviles por el otro, donde los ricos granjeros constituyen el centro económico del estado y uno de los mas importantes de este imperialista país . . . . He ahí parte del orgullo de esta América, que ha construido riquezas explotando a la gente con sueldos de hambre. (Michigan, where large factories produce pollution on one hand and cars on the other, where the rich growers constitute the economic center of the state and one of the most important of this imperialist country. . . . Behold, part of the pride of this America, that has built riches exploiting the people with starvation wages.) —Sol de Aztlan, Lansing, 19702 1 M. J. Buschlen, “Potential Seasonal Labor Problems Confronting Michigan Fruit Growers,” 99th Annual Report of the Secretary of the State Horticultural Society of Michigan for the Year 1969, vol. 99 (Lansing, MI: Speaker-Hines and Thomas, Inc., 1969), 51-57. 2 “The Misery in Which the Chicano Migrant Lives,” Lansing Sol de Aztlan, May 1970. 2 The Michigan Historical Review M. J. Buschlen and the editors of the Lansing-based, Chicano movement newspaper Sol de Aztlan agreed. For both, the agricultural labor of impoverished people was key to the historical development of the United States. As head of the labor services cooperative for the Michigan Farm Bureau (MFB), Buschlen used his speech at the 99th annual meeting of the Michigan State Horticultural Society to argue for the revival of the Bracero Program, a contract labor agreement between Mexico and the United States that began as a wartime emergency labor program in 1942 and lasted until 1964.3 Buschlen asserted that the critical role of the “importation” of “peasants” in American history justified such a program. In contrast, Sol de Aztlan promoted labor rights for farm workers because it believed America’s historical dependence on poor migrants constituted imperialist exploitation. Buschlen and Sol de Aztlan agreed that Michigan’s crops had always been harvested by impoverished migrants, but they differed greatly on the significance of America’s reliance on those whom Buschlen termed “foreign peasants.” After the Bracero Program ended in 1964, Latin Americans rejected this view and focused on incorporating migrant workers into the United States by reforming labor policy. Buschlen’s comments so late in the 1960s epitomized the MFB’s continued colonial rhetoric, which it enacted through a largely successful campaign to quash new labor regulations. After nearly a decade of unsatisfying struggle with the MFB and state lawmakers, Chicanos decided that moderate tactics and an appeal to citizenship were ineffective. Instead, they increasingly concluded that the United States’ conquest was ongoing. In Michigan, this Chicano anticolonial thought was formed in fundamental conflict with growers. Agricultural production was critical to Michigan’s twentieth-century economy, and growers’ need for seasonal labor brought diverse populations to the state, including Mexicans.4 Mexican immigrants and 3 The MFB is a branch of the national Farm Bureau organization. The original purpose of the bureau was to help farmers improve their standard of living through professionalization and scientific knowledge. Much of this was accomplished through close ties with state college cooperative extension programs. The MFB was founded in 1919. The Michigan State Horticultural Society was founded in 1880 to encourage fruit production in Michigan. See Nancy K. Berlage, Farmers Helping Farmers: The Rise of the...