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What is CHAPTER TWO. Sin Fronteras: Mexican Workers about?

Migrant agricultural workers are often pictured as historical nonentities, helpless victims of a rapacious system, who lack the roots that nurture families and friendships and form the basis for social and political organization. Certainly the agricultural labor system shaped the parameters within which Mexicans lived and worked, and it was indeed an unstable and chaotic labor system, which paid them little, disrupted their lives, and demanded endurance and imagination to survive. As part of the cheap labor pool, Mexican migrant workers were easily exploited. Most were not United States citizens, and the estimated 80 percent who crossed the border without documents not only lacked political rights but lived under the threat of deportation. The lack of formal power increased their vulnerability to exploitation. And racism helped isolate them from other workers and both intensified and justified their exploitation in the fields and the surrounding society. In the 1920s and early 1930s, 75 percent of the cotton work force were Mexicans: on larger ranches they constituted 90 percent or more. Mexicans adapted to some of the seemingly insatiable demands of the agricultural industry and r

Author

Devra Weber

Publisher

University of California Press

Published

1994

Language

EN

ISBN

9780520084896

Subjects

History, Management, Economics