Ernesto Galarza NFLU and The Bracero Program

Title

Ernesto Galarza NFLU and The Bracero Program

Description

Through his research, Galarza came to understand that one of the major obstacles to unionizing Mexican farmworkers was the 1942 Mexican Farm Labor Program Agreement, better known as the Bracero Program. He left the Pan-American Union outraged by their acceptance of U.S. corporations’ exploitation of Mexican labor. In 1947 he became the director of research and education in California for the AFL-CIO’s National Farm Labor Union (NFLU) previously known as the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, which included black and white tenant farmers and agricultural laborers who organized for better wages, working conditions, and favorable legislation for small-scale farmworkers. In 1948 Galarza became vice president of the NFLU and was deeply involved in over a dozen unsuccessful strikes between 1947-1954, including tomato pickers in Tracy, cantaloupe pickers in Imperial County, and at the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation. Outside of California, he organized sugar cane workers and strawberry pickers in Louisiana.

In 1952 NFLU became the National Agricultural Workers Union (NAWU), and Galarza became its secretary from 1954-1963. Strikes were impossible to win because braceros would replace strikers as strikebreakers, and Galarza left labor organizing determined to use his writing skills as a weapon to help end the Bracero Program.

Galarza had visited bracero camps and saw firsthand how employers used braceros to break strikes and avoid union organizing. Bracero labor also depressed wages for American workers. Galarza exposed abuses within the Bracero Program in his best-known work, Merchants of Labor (1964), which helped to end the program and laid the groundwork for César Chávez to begin the United Farm Workers of America (UFWA) in 1965.

Galarza became a labor organizer because he believed that to achieve civil rights, Mexican Americans and labor unions needed to work together to address workplace and community problems. Between 1963-1964, Galarza served as advisor to the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor. In 1979, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature for his writing on braceros.

Scholar Talk

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Identifier

B4SV Exhibit Topic Five: Slide 006