Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

importantly, to break up the rising Mexicano labor and n&
tional agitation. In a celebrated case in 1936, miner Jesus
Pallares was arrested and deported for the "crime" of
leading the 8,000-member La Liga Obrera De Habla
Espanola in New Mexico. (28)
The U.S. Government used violent terror against
the Puerto Rican people and mass repression against the
Mexicano people during the 1930s. But it did nothing like
that to stop Euro-Amerikan workers because it didn't have
to. The settler working class wasn't going anywhere.
In the larger sense, they had little class politics of
their own any more. President Roosevelt easily became
their guide and Patron Saint, just as Andrew Jackson had
for the settler workmen of almost exactly one century
earlier. The class consciousness of the European immigrant
proletarians had gone bad, infected with the settler
sickness. Instead of the defiantly syndicalist I.W.W.
they now had the capitalistic CIO.
This reflected the desires of the vast majority of
Euro-Amerikan workers. They wanted settler unionism,
with a privileged relationship to the government and
"their" New Deal. Settler workers accepted each new
labor law passed by the imperialist government to stabilize
labor relations. But unions regulated, supervised and
reorganized by the imperialists are hardly the free working
class organizations called by that name in the earlier
periods of world capitalism.
One reason that this CIO settler unionism was so
valuable to the imperialists was that in a time of labor
upheaval it cut down on uncontrolled militancy and even
helped calm the production lines. Even the "Left" union
militants were forced into this role. Bob Travis, the Com-
munist Party leader of the 1937 Flint Sit-Down, reported
only months after besting General Motors:
"Despite this terrifically rapid growth in membership
we have been able to conduct an intensive educational
campaign against unauthorized strikes and for observation
of our contract and in the total elimination of wild-cat actions
during the past 3 months." (29)
Fortune, the prestigious business magazine,
said in 1941:
"...properly directed, the UA W can hold men
together in an emergency; it can be made a great force for
morale. It has regularized many phases of production; its
shop stewarts, who take up grievances on the factory floor,
can smooth things as no company union could ever succeed
in smoothing them. " (30)
The Euro-Amerikan proletariat during the '30s
had broken out of industrial confinement, reaching for
freedoms and a material style of life no modern proletariat
had ever achieved. The immense battles that followed
obscured the nature of the victory. The victory they gained
was the firm positioning of the Euro-Amerikan working
class in the settler ranks, reestablishing the rights of all
Europeans here to share the privileges of the oppressor nation.
This was the essence of the equality that they won.
This bold move was in the settler tradition, sharing the
Amerikan pie with more European reinforcements so that
the Empire could be strengthened. This formula had partially
broken down during the transition from the Amerika
of the Frontier to the Industrial Amerika. It was the
brilliant accomplishment of the New Deal to mend this
break.
CAREY MCWILLIAMS
WATCHES A MASS DEPORTATION
I wtckd the first shipment of "repatriated Mexicans leave La
Angeks in February, I 931. The loading process began a six o'clock
in tk morning. Repatriadm arrived hy the truckload - men. women.
, and children - with dogs, cats, and goats, half-open suitcases, r&
of -,
and lunchbaskerr. It cost the County of Los Angeles
$77.249.29 to repatriate one trainload, but tk savings in nlicf
mowued to $347468.41 for this one shipment. In I932 alone over
ekven thousad Mexicams were repatriated from La Angeles. . . .
The strikes in California in the thirties, moreover, wen duplicated
wherever Mexicans were employed in agriculture. Mexican fieldworkers
~rwk in Ariama,- in l&ho and Washington; in Colorado; in
Michigatt; and in t k Lower Rio Grand Valley in Texas. When Mexiuin
shrrpshcarers want on strike in west Texas in 1934, one of the
skepmcn nuuie a speech in which he said: "We are a pretty poor
bunch of white men if we are going to sit here and kt a bnnch of
Mexicans tell us what to do." . . .
With scarcely an exception, every strike in which Mexicans portici-
pted in tk borderlands in the thirties wa.r broken by the use of vie
knce and was fd1~tt.d by deportations. In most of these strikes,
Mexican workers stood alone; thol is, they were not supported by
organized labor, for their organizationr, for tk most part, were aflC
iorrd neither with the CIO nor the AFL.
Carey McWilliams,
North from Mexico
4 84'