The Tejano Diaspora: Mexican Americanism and Ethnic Politics in Texas and Wisconsin

3 Activism across the Diaspora: The Tejano Farmworker Movement in Wisconsin

3 Activism across the Diaspora the tejano farmworker movement in wisconsin On August 15, 1966, twenty-two-year-old Jesus Salas, a college student and the son of a migrant contractor and restaurant owner from Crystal City, Texas, organized a “March on Madison” to bring attention to the problems of Wisconsin’s migrant farmworkers. This was the third farmworker march of the year. In March, the fledgling National Farm Workers Association (nfwa) had led a march from Delano, California, to Sacramento, and put the plight of the farmworker on the national agenda. In June, Father Antonio Gonzalez, a Catholic priest whose family annually traveled to the cucumber harvest area of Wautoma, Wisconsin , had led a march of La Casita Farms workers from Starr County, Texas, to the capitol at Austin. The nfwa sponsored these two earlier events with funding from the afl-cio in an e≠ort to build a national farmworkers union. While the young Wisconsin activists linked the plight of Wisconsin’s migrants to the national farmworker movement, the Wisconsin event remained formally independent.1 The protest had specific local goals, as Salas hoped that the march would publicly “dramatize the plight of migrant workers” and arouse “the social conscience of progressive Wisconsin.”2 All three marches gained national attention and in so doing demonstrated that the migrant stream was truly a diasporic system that linked Tejano and other Mexican American migrant workers to one another in South Texas, California, Wisconsin, and other states.3 This transregional community linked the Crystal City activism of 1963 to the developing farmworker movement: Mexican American activism spread and became connected to the larger movement via the Tejano diaspora. Following the rise and fall of Los Cinco in Crystal City, activism across the diaspora 61 young people and migrants continued to move north each spring, and they carried an activist spirit with them. The transregional migration of young workers from Crystal City became the backbone of a grassroots movement that informed community action and brought together several related groups in a web of pan-Tejano cooperation and mutual dependence in Wisconsin. This chapter details the development of transregional migrant unionism in Wisconsin between 1966 and 1970 as one window into the importance of the Tejano diaspora in Mexican American history. Focused on the growth of Obreros Unidos (ou), a transregionally grounded and independent labor union of mainly Tejano workers in Wisconsin, it shows how social networks function and expand within both interstate and local settings to accommodate community activism. The emergence of ou as an outgrowth of both Texas- and Wisconsinbased activism and reform movements expands our understanding of grassroots mobilization among Mexican Americans during a period of state-level legal reform, interstate union competition, interregional ethnic conflict, and multiethnic and multiracial civil rights activism in Wisconsin. Its growth shows some of the ways an ethnic movement relied upon both preexisting social networks among Tejano migrants and state-based networks linking a variety of Wisconsin progressives, New Left student activists, and Old Left labor activists in building a broadbased labor and reform organization. This chapter also considers how institutional forces, particularly the legal system and bureaucratic unionism, can overcome the spirit and frustrate the goals of grassroots labor activism. With the support of the afl-cio legal sta≠, ou won victories in court and before labor boards, yet these decisions came after striking workers had returned to Texas or moved on to other work. Even with state-level protections for labor in place, the structural tendencies of labor law and procedure in one of the few states to protect agricultural workers mitigated against grassroots activism and the spirited commitment of the organizers. In addition, the national afl-cio and the farmworkers’ union, represented by César Chávez, tried for many years to bring ou union under national control and, eventually, to dissolve the union altogether. Thus, both legal protections and the national union movement itself proved unstable supports for a grassroots movement led by young people on behalf of some of the nation’s neediest workers. activism across the diaspora 62 Roots of the Wisconsin Movement Wisconsin was central to the annual circular migration of nearly ten thousand farmworkers, a position strengthened in the decade after World War II. Other states, including Michigan and California, received more migrants and had larger settled populations of former migrants, yet Wisconsin served as a midseason hub for workers from several...