In May 1975, United Farm Workers (UFW) activists picketed the melon fields of the Lower Rio Grande Valley (hereafter “the Valley”) in a wildcat strike to protest for better wages and working conditions. In so doing, the largely Mexican American protesters provoked the anger of the mostly Anglo growers who were accustomed to ruling uncontested. Amid a volatile and rapidly deteriorating environment, the growers, finding that they could not persuade the Democratic governor to dispatch Texas Rangers to quash the strike (as Texas employers had done to crush labor movements going back to the nineteenth century), responded with a wave of vigilante violence. In a sensational incident, C. L. Miller, an Anglo ranch supervisor at the El Texano property near the international border, opened fire on marchers whom he claimed had veered onto private property and bombarded his truck with rocks. “I opened season on them,” he later said. “I didn’t shoot at them. I shot them.”Footnote 1
The victims disputed the claim that they had launched projectiles but concurred that Miller had opened season. “He was shooting at us from behind when he opened fire,” UFW supporter Jesús Luna told the Texas Observer. “We took cover in the fields and in the drainage ditch. Miller kept yelling at us to leave the ranch, but whenever someone raised his head, Miller would shoot at him.” By the time law enforcement officials arrived, eleven strikers had been hit by shotgun pellets. According to a local reporter, “A piece of Miller’s buckshot was lodged above Luna’s right eye. The wounded were taken to McAllen General Hospital and released. None were determined to be in serious condition.” Although the mass shooting ought to have raised concerns, responding officers instead “told Miller he had a right to do what he was doing,” a point that Miller and his victims confirmed to reporters. As news of the shooting spread, hundreds of farmworkers flocked to the union’s cause across Hidalgo and Starr Counties.Footnote 2
Anglo growers responded to this labor unrest as they had long done before—by sending a request to the governor for Rangers to break the strike. To their chagrin, the growers discovered that they no longer possessed the influence that they had enjoyed even a decade before. Angry and humiliated at the governor’s refusal to send in the Texas Rangers, growers turned to a crude, chaotic campaign of vigilante violence to reestablish their dominance, one that they hoped would underscore their strength but which instead highlighted and exacerbated their weakness. Sustained by similarly thrashing, almost petulant acts of violence to quell subsequent strikes in the Valley in the mid-to-late 1970s, however, growers eventually concluded after a volatile and economically threatening onion strike in Raymondville in 1979 that violence, when it was not backed by the state in the form of Rangers, was simply too dangerous and put themselves at too much personal and financial risk.
Furthermore, with the tentacles of national labor organizations like the UFW, competing regional outfits like the Texas Farm Workers Union (TFWU), and attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Texas Rural Legal Aid (TRLA) reaching into local affairs, and with state and national news organizations covering the strikes closely, growers recognized that they could no longer perpetrate acts of intimidation with impunity the way that they had before. Their fear of consequences imposed by outside forces not beholden to them revealed itself in the tepid nature of their violence, which mostly involved threats and the waving of shotguns rather than the bold acts of aggression that would have accompanied a stronger hand. Pivoting from the Raymondville strike, Texas growers recognized their weakness and adjusted tactics, which became clear in a 1980 onion strike in Hereford, in West Texas, when the growers (although requesting and receiving the ancient but now toothless boon of a Texas Ranger dispatched to the scene) repudiated violence altogether and shifted the basis of their challenge to unions.
In place of violence against workers and unions, growers pivoted toward attacking labor groups and their legal representatives through decidedly non-mediagenic efforts—indeed, soul-crushingly boring bureaucratic and legal maneuvers involving court challenges, and efforts to erode the legal and financial capacity of leftwing forces to mobilize effectively. Through new methods as ruthlessly efficient as earlier ones, but minus the danger or legal exposure associated with violence, growers tied up unions and their representatives with court challenges, attacked and undermined the sources of financial support for government agencies tasked with defending ordinary people from corporations, and launched the neoconservative backlash against liberalism and the post-New Deal state in Texas, culminating in the rise to the presidency of Ronald Reagan. All the while they implemented tactics too dull or complicated to attract crusading journalists or to appeal to the heartstrings of readers inclined to favor the little guy.
This study charts the sputtering and ineffective vigilante violence perpetrated by growers to suppress farmworker activism from the mid-to-late 1970s and then their abrupt shift in tactics with the 1980 Hereford strike toward the adoption of strictly nonviolent and tediously legalistic new methods associated with the rise of the New Right in state and national politics. Importantly, we argue that rather than the 1970s marking a downturn in working-class activism in Texas, farmworkers and their allies pressed on into the era of Reagan and the New Right, anxious and able to secure major legislative victories for their rights and interests. This study proceeds in two major sections. In the first, grower violence is chronicled in detail that underscores both its rage and its ineffectiveness. The second section shows how the New Right usurped the longstanding usage of physical violence against ethnic Mexicans in Texas by the mid-to-late 1970s; conservatives in the state flocked to the Republican banner during the late 1970s and early 1980s due in large part to the party’s ability to deliver on the New Right’s designs of defeating the cultural liberalism embodied by the civil rights movement of the previous few decades.Footnote 3 The Democratic coalition’s large-scale “defeat” of anti-ethnic Mexican violence during the mid-1970s gave conservatives an opening to transform the nature of resistance against ethnic Mexican workers and civil rights activists.
This study intersects with the work of a number of historians of the modern United States. Labor historians, for example, have identified working-class activism at the national level that was similar to the activism examined here by Mexican American farmworkers. Writing of a lengthy boycott and strike in 1977–1978 aimed at the Coors brewery in Colorado, historian Allyson P. Brantley argues that these efforts “reflected a ‘rank and file union revolt’ sweeping the nation. Blue-collar workers of color, women in white-collar professions, and clerical and retail workers launched militant, vibrant strikes and organizing drives in these years, challenging employers and their own unions in the process.” Those who organized against Coors, she adds, “were aligned with this working-class restlessness and radicalism, and in turn, many of these new rank-and-file activists saw the struggle against Coors as their own.”Footnote 4 Such workers pushed back against what historian Jefferson Cowie describes as a turn toward desperation and marginalization that had taken hold of the American working class during the 1970s after decades of halting progress since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.Footnote 5 Similarly, Mexican and Mexican American farm labor activists along the border made significant advances for migrant workers in Texas during the 1970s and 1980s, even when those advances stemmed from work being done by unions that were in direct competition with one another. Given that the South Texas model for exploiting the Mexican and Mexican American working classes had effectively gone national in scale, as historian John Weber demonstrates, the victories by pro-farmworker organizations in rural Texas were potentially severe for members of the New Right during the late 1970s and early 1980s.Footnote 6 Additionally, this study also speaks to the recent works of historians like Sergio M. González and Delia Fernández-Jones, which show that Mexicans and Mexican Americans had, as in South and West Texas, continued to press their rights through social activism in other parts of the United States during the late twentieth century. The unique Texas case, as this essay emphasizes, rests on the deliberate shift by a powerful New Right from anti-worker violence to bureaucratic stonewalling in the span of just a few short years.Footnote 7
As elsewhere in the country, general conditions for ethnic Mexican farmworkers in Texas remained deeply problematic in the 1970s. Indeed, despite the UFW’s achievement of several milestones for California farmworkers—the attainment of union contracts with grape growers in 1970, as well as the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in the California state legislature in 1975—growers fought back and managed to roll back such gains on the West Coast by the late 1970s. Given the UFW’s primary focus on California, Texas farmworkers would not even enjoy the pyrrhic victories of their California counterparts—dismal living conditions along with poor and unsanitary working conditions, as this essay will in part show, festered well into the 1980s.Footnote 8
Early Violence
Difficult conditions for Texas’ ethnic Mexican working class, rooted in Anglo repression, long predated the 1970s. Some of them are widely studied today, such as the tragic killings of hundreds of ethnic Mexicans in “La Matanza” in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in 1915, during the Mexican Revolution, and the Porvenir massacre in the Big Bend region in 1918.Footnote 9 These massacres resulted in an investigation that the Texas Rangers conducted in 1919 and the subsequent reorganization of the law enforcement agency to preclude such violence.Footnote 10 While La Matanza and Porvenir represent the most notorious acts of twentieth-century Ranger brutality toward ethnic Mexicans, Rangers continued to act as enforcers of Anglo domination in the mid-twentieth century. In disputes between Anglos and Mexican Americans, the Rangers threw their weight behind the interests of the former. In 1934, near Marfa, Anglo ranchers and a pair of Mexican American brothers, Pablo and Gregorio Prieto, had a dispute over the ownership of stock animals. W. F. Hale, a Texas Ranger, along with J. S. Weatherby, a prominent Anglo rancher, visited the Prieto ranch under the pretext of investigating some stray bullets that (allegedly) nearly struck the Rangers.Footnote 11 When Gregorio refused them entry, they smashed inside and shot him. “Gregorio, fifteen bullet holes in his body, is in a critical condition at a hospital,” reported the Corpus Christi Caller. Accompanied by more Rangers, Hale and Weatherby then hunted down and killed Pablo at Pinto Canyon.Footnote 12
Following the shootings, local authorities charged Hale and Weatherby with the murder of Pablo Prieto. Taken at face value, the charges seem to indicate a conscientious county attorney prosecuting a wanton killing. However, while the charges against the Ranger and the rancher do suggest that the shootings were highly questionable, they were more likely about putting the imprimatur of legitimacy on the killing to a jury certain to acquit. Claiming that he shot in self-defense, Hale was acquitted. Weatherby sought a transfer of his case to Upton County, whereupon the charges appear to have been dropped.Footnote 13 In sum, Hale and other Rangers joined Weatherby and other Anglo ranchers in shooting the Prietos and terrorizing Mexican Americans generally and then walked free.
Ranger violence continued for decades thereafter. In 1963, for example, Rangers served as a hammer of oppression in Crystal City, forty miles east of the Rio Grande River, when civil rights activists and the local Mexican American population organized to elect an all-Mexican American slate to the city council (including the mayoral position), defeating stunned Anglos and overturning decades of their rule. Summoned to the city to intimidate Mexican Americans, on the night of the election, Rangers led by Captain A. Y. Allee broke up the Mexican American victory party and forbade them to celebrate.Footnote 14 Remaining in town after the election, Allee repeatedly harassed or assaulted the new mayor, Juan Cornejo. On one occasion, the press relayed, Allee called the mayor “an SOB” and “grabbed him and banged his head against the wall several times. Cornejo also charged that Allee had threatened him with more bodily harm if he continued to speak publicly against Allee.”Footnote 15 Measured against the violence of the World War I era and even against that of the Great Depression, the Texas Ranger violence in Crystal City in the early 1960s demonstrates an erosion of the sense of impunity enjoyed by these officers in their dealings with Mexican Americans.
Of course, growers did not rely on violence alone to maintain their dominance, particularly by the mid-twentieth century. For decades, growers undermined labor activism, and particularly activism by persons of color, by linking their efforts on behalf of a living wage and decent living conditions to leftwing politics and a supposedly un-American opposition to the concept of personal property. Historian Cristina Salinas recognizes this in her work on growers and farmworkers in Texas during the early Cold War, writing that “conservative elements and institutions… used Communism as a weapon to battle against any kind of social change.”Footnote 16 As Salinas notes, conservatives also charged that Latin American leftists infiltrated the United States along the southern border by blending in with Mexican migrants arriving to do agricultural labor: “pronouncements about Communists sauntering across the border amongst migrating Mexican workers were common in writings about the border migration problem.”Footnote 17
Growers continued to weaponize this rhetoric throughout the 1970s. “Perhaps the most frequent and loudest tactic used by growers against a union, is that of accusing the organization of being under communist control,” explained El Cuhamil, a pro-farmworker newspaper. “Growers usually do their red-baiting by alleging that the leaders and the union are supported by communist parties and that they received orders from communist countries.” In addition, growers believed in the maxim “‘divide and conquer’ and so they are constantly trying to find ways by which they can cause division within the labor organization and those that might join it.” During strikes, growers also offered short-term benefits that lasted only until the strike concluded: “For example, a grower will raise wages, offer bonuses, or sanitary facilities when a strike begins. The idea behind this is to get the more gullible workers to believe that the grower is a nice guy after all and this, of course, will divide these workers from those on strike.”Footnote 18
Growers promoted the notion that property rights trumped the most fundamental rights of farmworkers. During a 1976 citrus strike, a grower confronted a group of strikers and warned that “he was prepared to shoot the strikers if they trespassed [o]nto his property, adding that he had been promised a month’s supply of shotgun shells by the local sheriff.” This and other incidents convinced El Cuhamil that within “a ‘free enterprise’ system pr[i]vate property has more worth than the life or liberty of a human being. It can even be said that private property within such a system is sacred, so sacred that a man is willing to kill another human being for the mere act of setting foot on it.” As the newsletter recognized, most of the available evidence from the Valley suggested that growers could kill those they defined as unruly workers with impunity. “If he does kill him,” stated one pro-union observer, “the property owner would be protected by the law because in this country the law is designed to protect private property and a man is legally within his rights to kill anyone who trespasses his property.”Footnote 19
Under the auspices of this political logic, traditional forms of anti-worker and anti-ethnic Mexican violence easily persisted into the 1960s and 1970s. In June of 1966, impoverished and malnourished melon harvesters struck in Starr County to protest paltry wages and the lack of union representation, targeting the largest agribusiness in the county, La Casita Farms. They quickly achieved national attention. Meeting intransigence from the agribusinesses and their abettors, the laborers, organizers for the UFW and other unions, as well as those supporting racial equality generally, initiated a mass march in early July from Rio Grande City to Austin, a 400-mile trek. Their march ended in a massive rally in the capital, a testament to the determination of the workers to fight (Fig. 1). However, back home in Starr County, the strikers gained few concessions in terms of union contracts, elections, and increased wages. They continued to strike throughout the rest of 1966 and into 1967. As tensions escalated, county authorities in May of 1967 requested that Governor John Connally dispatch the Texas Rangers. Although forbidden by law from taking sides, the Rangers favored the growers and intimidated the strikers. When they arrived in Starr County, they began to menace the striking farmworkers, jailing them without charges or on fabricated pretexts, and administering beatings.Footnote 20
Figure 1. Farmworkers gather for a small rally during a 1966 march from San Juan, Texas, to the state capitol in Austin to protest their appalling working conditions. Courtesy Migrant Farm Workers Organizing Movement Collection, Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, Arlington, Texas.
The Texas Rangers had a long history of violence against farmworkers in Starr County. In fact, in 1906, Rangers killed four ethnic Mexicans under suspicious circumstances at La Casita in what appears to have been a campaign of intimidation against Mexican American voters.Footnote 21 Given this history, therefore, many Mexican Americans responded with palpable fear to the interjection of Rangers in 1967. To them, in the words of the Civil Rights Commission, “the ‘Texas Rangers are a symbol of oppression.’”Footnote 22 Given the long history of Ranger brutality against persons of Mexican descent, many of those sympathetic to the aims of the farmworkers strenuously opposed the use of Rangers to defuse the situation in Starr County. Visiting the scene of the strike, state senator A. R. “Babe” Schwartz, a liberal Democrat, took a similar view, telling a reporter that “in some cases the very presence of the Rangers might trigger violence.”Footnote 23
Upon their arrival, the Rangers reinforced their violent reputation with a campaign of harassment, intimidation, and assault against strikers. On June 1, 1967—the one-year anniversary of the strike’s start—several Rangers arrested a pair of farmworkers and beat them viciously. Responding to this violence, a state legislator “accused the fabled Texas Rangers Friday of bringing ‘police state’ conditions” to the strike. For their part, many Mexican Americans agreed with the views of McAllen physician Ramiro Casso (who had treated one of the beaten workers), who declared that “the Rangers are just a bunch of thugs.”Footnote 24
Legislators investigated the incident. Learning that Democratic state senators would visit, a Starr County labor organizer quipped: “Maybe we’ll picket the railroad tonight and let the senators watch the Rangers in action.”Footnote 25 The visiting senators—Oscar Maury of Dallas, Don Kennard of Fort Worth, and Schwartz of Galveston—soon issued a “blistering” report against the Rangers and local law enforcement officials. The senators found that, far from being impartial, the lawmen had allied themselves with the growers from the moment they arrived in Starr County.Footnote 26 Federal lawmakers likewise investigated. While the state and federal studies provided a platform for Starr County Mexican Americans to vent concerns and fears over labor conditions and police brutality, the legislators did not translate their concerns into legal remedies. After the onset of the investigations, the strike collapsed, and the governor withdrew the Rangers.Footnote 27 The Corpus Christi Times later noted that a “federal court ruled the Texas Rangers took sides with the melon growers in an attempt to break the union’s organizing drive.”Footnote 28
Unrequited Grower Demands for Rangers and Vigilante Violence
The events in Starr County had serious consequences for the activism of Mexican American farmworkers and the role of Texas Rangers in their longstanding capacity as enforcers of Anglo power. For the UFW, the violence and defeat of the strike at La Casita provoked a retreat from organizing in Texas, and concentration instead on California and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the beatings of the workers in Starr County conjured memories among Mexican Americans of the Ranger violence of the early twentieth century, gave a black-eye to the state police, embarrassed Texas nationally, and (as shown below) undermined the willingness of the governor and legislators to again dispatch Rangers as a force of intimidation. This was especially the case among members of the Democratic Party, which had a lock on the governorship throughout the 1960s and most of the 1970s and, due to major political realignments of the period, now supported both Mexican American civil rights activism and laborers.
By 1975, however, some farmworkers—most notably the head of the UFW in Texas, Antonio Orendain, a key player in the 1966–1967 strike in Starr County—had decided that the time had come to initiate new strikes in the Valley. Against the expressed demands of UFW national leader César Chávez, Orendain initiated a wildcat strike against melon growers in the Valley in May. Recalling the struggle in Starr County eight years earlier, the strike quickly grew volatile.Footnote 29 “United Farm Workers Union members and angry melon growers from this South Texas area faced each other, weapons in hand, at least four times Thursday in another tense day of demonstration,” noted the Odessa American, after several dustups. The confrontations pitted Mexican American farmworkers and union organizers for the UFW against wealthy, influential Anglo growers, who owned large tracts of land, enjoyed in some cases vast fortunes, controlled international corporations, and possessed considerable political power. “Sparks of violence flew at different times,” the Odessa American reported, “but the presence of deputy sheriffs cooled the situation.”Footnote 30
Furious, the growers turned (as they had long done) to the governor for Rangers to suppress the workers and discovered that the sands had shifted. Anxious to avoid the tumult that had resulted from the use of Rangers at La Casita and eager to maintain their coalition, twenty-six Democratic state representatives (including Mexican Americans) opposed the request in a letter to fellow Democrat, Governor Dolph Briscoe. Representatives Ben T. Reyes, Craig Washington, and Mickey Leland urged Briscoe not to send Texas Rangers into the Valley: “We feel that their presence will only exacerbate the situation. The Rangers’ presence will only encourage greater violence and unrest.”Footnote 31 Prominent Mexican-American activist and politician Ramsey Muñiz advised the governor that “the Texas Rangers have had a long history as strike breakers and the current situation in the Rio Grande Valley must not become an oppressive repetition of the La Casita incident.”Footnote 32 The UFW likewise lobbied against deployment. “We’re afraid we’ll have a repeat of what we had in 1966 and 1967,” explained a union representative.Footnote 33 These voices found a willing ally in Briscoe, who declined the request from the growers. “A spokesman for Gov. Dolph Briscoe said there are no plans to send Texas Rangers into the tense area because ‘local authorities have the situation well in hand,’” the local press explained.Footnote 34
To say the least, the growers resented the snub and vowed payback against the politicians who, as they saw it, buckled to leftist pressure. Grower Chester Moore railed against the legislators who had urged Briscoe to refuse the request for Rangers. “Moore said he will try to find out who the 26 are and work against their re-election,” the press reported. Moore declared that he wanted to “find out who those characters are. They are gutless wonders. They didn’t have guts enough to put their names in the paper.”Footnote 35 Valley agricultural booster Charley Rankin sent a scathing telegram to Briscoe: “Your refusal to send Rangers to stop the illegal UFW picketing and illegal trespassing on private property is inexcusable.” Rankin added that “I have been on the scene personally and the mob is almost out of hand.” Local law enforcement officials “cannot handle the situation,” he added, predicting (or warning) that “there’s going to be someone killed if you do not expedite extra law officers.”Footnote 36 Reflecting on the desire of the growers for Rangers, a UFW attorney underscored what he regarded as hypocrisy. He called it “ironic” that the same growers who claimed to need protection from the Rangers were the same people who were “provoking all the violence. I think they are creating a situation of violence to get the Rangers down here to break the whole thing up.”Footnote 37
The growers were unquestionably driving the disorder. However, some strikers did hurl invectives at their adversaries and at those who defended corporate interests, which no doubt strengthened growers’ anti-union stances. On occasion, they hurled not just invectives but projectiles, as when UFW protesters pelted a vehicle driven by one of grower Othal Brand’s workers. “The truck window of Glenn Martin, a Griffin and Brand Produce Co. employe [sic], was smashed Thursday when he drove along a farm road lined by jeering pickets,” a local account offered.Footnote 38 During a march through McAllen, strikers quarreled with an Anglo. “The march was marked with one brief confrontation with an unidentified farmer, who drove by the marchers and [was] hassled by a handful of marchers,” reported the Monitor. “The marchers were reprimanded by Antonio Orendain, UFW organizer.”Footnote 39 From California, the national UFW leader sent a similarly stern message: “UFW President Cesar Chavez ordered the union not to engage in any more violent confrontations with the melon growers.”Footnote 40 The Texas Observer likewise noted that the “violence and threats of violence have not all been directed one way.” In a number of incidents, the strikers had thrown rocks, smashed truck windows, and destroyed innumerable melons. Furthermore, members of the McAllen chapter of the Brown Berets, a Chicano civil rights group, may have joined the strike, aiming to intimidate in their own right. During one protest, a witness recounted, a “Brown Beret (or a man wearing a brown beret) climbed onto a car roof, rifle in hand.” Some of the strikers also set about intimidating those farmworkers who did not wish to join the protests. “Farmworkers who have refused to join the picket line have been threatened, harassed, abused, chased, and pelted with rocks.”Footnote 41
Deprived of Rangers’ support, growers took violence into their own hands. They boasted that they were heavily armed and would defend their interests by any means necessary. Eager to show that he was not “gutless” like the politicians in Austin, Chester Moore told reporters that he carried a shotgun when dealing with disaffected workers. “I always keep it ready,” he said. “That’s a year-round process.”Footnote 42 Many of his peers assumed a similar stance. When strikers pelted his truck with bottles, as noted above, Glenn Martin “leaped from his truck with a shotgun but was ordered by a deputy sheriff to put the weapon away.” In an incident near Mission, “a farmer waved a shotgun at a crowd of about 500 demonstrators, many of whom sought cover.” This grower got a pass from officers at the scene, who declined to arrest him. “Deputies stepped in and ordered the unidentified man to put his gun away,” a San Antonio correspondent observed.Footnote 43
Without question, the growers in Starr County responded with less aggression than did their counterparts in Hidalgo County, a point that ACLU attorney James Harrington addressed. “Starr County was the site of most of the violence and repression in the 1966 strike,” he noted, and “a suit against the Rangers which originated in Starr County eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Rangers lost.” Chastened by their losses, the Starr County growers were willing to show patience in a way that their neighbors were not. The lessons of the 1966–1967 strike had “not been lost on the Starr County officials this time,” Harrington continued. “I think the same thing will probably happen in Hidalgo County. Once things have settled down over here, the ranchers will realize how stupid they have looked.”Footnote 44
In an episode detailed earlier, C. L. Miller, a Hidalgo County ranch foreman, opened fire on strikers near his farm, injuring eleven with shotgun blasts. The growers rallied behind him. “All farmers in Cameron, Willacy, Starr and Hidalgo counties interested are invited to attend a ‘C. L. Miller Defense Meeting’ called by the Hidalgo County Farm Bureau for 8 p.m. Thursday in the county courthouse auditorium in Edinburg, a Farm Bureau spokesman said,” reported the Brownsville Herald a few days later. “Other growers came to [Miller’s] defense in a recent meeting and the Thursday night event is a continuation of that defense program.”Footnote 45 Remarking on the Miller Defense Meeting, the Texas Observer noted that the growers had rallied behind the Miller shooting “in the best die-hard tradition.”Footnote 46
In addition, policemen during the 1975 strike showed open favoritism toward growers, epitomized by the fact that they arrested farmworkers on the flimsiest pretexts but refused to curb even open acts of grower aggression. When Hidalgo County officers confiscated a high-powered rifle possessed by a striker during a protest on Brand’s land in 1975, they failed to disarm the grower, who clutched a firearm and shouted threats. “Brand reached for his pistol which was on the dash [of his car],” explained the Valley Morning Star. “The act of defending himself apparently went unseen by deputy sheriffs standing nearby but they took note immediately when a newsman told them they should intercede in Brand’s behalf.”Footnote 47 The incredulous protestors “complained that officers had not confiscated weapons brandished by growers, including the automatic shotgun a farmer [C.L. Miller] used to wound [eleven] demonstrators Monday.” A Mexican American activist at the scene of the unrest shouted, “We want justice.”Footnote 48
The confrontation involving Brand and the protesters was among the strike’s most precarious clashes. Brand drove through a crowd of picketers and struck one of the trucks adorned with loudspeakers being used by the strikers. Fearful that the workers might respond badly to his aggression, Brand pulled a pistol. “A bunch of these boys made a charge at the door of my car,” he claimed. “I wasn’t about to let them turn it over and set it on fire, so I grabbed my pistol [which he says was sitting on the car’s dashboard and therefore not a concealed weapon] and jumped out of the car. They backed off pretty fast then.”Footnote 49 In addition to these dustups, the Texas Observer identified an incident that “must be considered a serious attempt at murder” against Armando Acosta, a strike leader, as he drove from a strike against Brand-owned fields in Starr County toward the town of San Juan in Hidalgo County. “At about 12:45 p.m., his car, the tail car in a caravan of huelgistas, was passed by a west-bound pick-up truck,” the outlet reported. “A shot was fired at Acosta’s car as the truck sped past,” sending a .38 slug through the windshield but not striking Acosta or the two women traveling with him.Footnote 50
The growers continued their vigilante violence for several years thereafter. Splitting with the UFW in August 1975 due to the rifts caused by the melon strike, Orendain formed a competing union, the Texas Farm Workers Union (TFWU), which continued to promote strikes in the Valley over the following years, and his group’s efforts generated similar responses.Footnote 51 During a 1976 tomato strike near Weslaco, someone shattered the windshield of a vehicle at the scene with rifle fire. “Hidalgo Deputy Sheriff Harry Colwell was sent to investigate and said that the bullet, possibly a .22 caliber, may have come from ‘rabbit hunters,’” reported El Cuhamil.Footnote 52 The farmworkers newsletter rejected Colwell’s explanation. “Last year they opened season on farm workers and eleven of the[m] were wounded” when C. L. Miller shot them, it declared. “This year they opened season on rabbits but the bullets are still being directed at farm workers.” Was it possible that the bullet was intended for a rabbit? “Perhaps. But before the incident occurred, the strikers were threatened.” It seemed strange that at the precise moment that the laborers went on strike, these “incidents of threats and even shootings began to occur.” Significantly, “this year’s shooting happened exactly on the same day as last year’s shooting when C. L. Miller ‘opened season’ on farm workers.”Footnote 53
In August 1976, a grower killed sixteen-year-old Juan José Trinidad of Donna in broad daylight. The grower claimed that he had riddled the youth with bullets when he caught him breaking into his house. El Cuhamil attributed the killing to the whim of someone with “a John Wayne mentality.” Would Trinidad have actually broken into a home at midday with the owners inside? “Exactly why did the grower fire six shots at Trinidad without first giving any warning? And was Trinidad actually inside the house or was he merely looking in? Perhaps even knocking?”Footnote 54 The newsletter linked the Trinidad shooting to the mass-shooting the year before: “Since last year when C. L. Miller shot and wounded 11 farm workers a precedent has been set in the Valley, which says that any farm worker on private property can be legally shot and even killed by a grower.”Footnote 55 El Cuhamil predicted that this killing, swiftly swept under the rug, would reinforce that precedent: “This [killing] tied in with last year’s shooting will assure Valley growers that they can shoot anyone on their property and then claim that they were being robbed and get away free.”Footnote 56
In 1976, the growers strengthened their control over local policing when they supported Brig Marmolejo, himself a Mexican American, for Hidalgo County sheriff, a position that he would win. Marmolejo was “heavily supported by area growers,” explained El Cuhamil, including a notorious one: “Listed among the contributors to the Marmolejo campaign was the C. L. Miller Jr. Farms of Hidalgo.”Footnote 57 After he won, Marmolejo acknowledged who had supported him and declared fidelity to them: “Talking about his defeated opponent, Marmolejo said he had tended to side with farm workers over the growers in the incidents surrounding last year’s strike,” noted El Cuhamil. “He said that such favoritism made it necessary for growers like C. L. Miller to take the law into their own hands.” Throughout his campaign, Marmolejo extolled the “sanctity of private property.”Footnote 58 The growers strengthened their control still further in 1977 when Othal Brand won the mayoralty of McAllen and made the city’s police a force of oppression against working-class Mexican Americans, including many farmworkers. Throughout the mid-to-late 1970s and into the 1980s, officers with the McAllen Police Department earned a reputation for wanton beatings of young Mexican American men, both on the streets and in the police station, until a scandal in 1981 revealed the extent of the repression.Footnote 59
Mexican Americans understood that the role of local police forces in the resumed struggle between farmworkers and growers was to intimidate the strikers. “The police brutality in Texas has never been so severe and serious as in the last few months,” declared El Cuhamil in 1977. “Beware of the police.”Footnote 60 While notorious cases had occurred elsewhere in the state, several incidents occurred in the Valley. Just a couple of years earlier, the newspaper recalled, policemen in Raymondville had arrested a youth, Hector Reyna, at a football game and placed him in lockup. “The next day the police called Hector’s parent[s] [to say] that he had hung himsel[f] inside the jail.” When the youth’s father demanded an autopsy, the officials blocked an investigation. “Many people confirm that Hector Reyna didn’t hang himself, but was brutal[l]y murdered by the police.” In a radio interview, the father of the deceased declared: “I know that my son was murdered, that’s why the sheriff department didn’t let me see the body.” Recalling the La Casita Farms strike, El Cuhamil noted that “during the strikes of the 60’s the evil Texas Rangers attacked brutal[l]y the farm-workers and broke their strikes,” adding that, a decade later, local police forces were doing the same. “Clearly we see that the police forces are protecting the growers and not the people like they should do.”Footnote 61
Not surprisingly, local and regional police departments (along with McAllen Mayor Othal Brand) played an important role in crushing a TFWU onion strike in Raymondville in April 1979. “On the second day of the strike in the Raymondville area a high concentration of police forces beg[a]n to show up. Police officers were brought from Corpus Christi and other parts of South Texas with the intention of breaking the strike,” reported El Cuhamil. Simultaneously, the growers brought in “professional strikebreakers and paid thugs” to assist the officers, and these aligned forces warned the workers “that they had better stop the strike.”Footnote 62 Writing a few months later, the newsletter alleged that Raymondville growers;
utilized the Department of Public Safety, the sheriff’s department and groups of armed ranchers and businessmen to repress the strike. The terrorist acts against the strikers were contin[u]ous. The Union’s bus was fire bombed, the workers were detained daily by the police, several of them were beaten, and the majority of them were threatened with death over the telephone and by armed individuals such as the grower, Monte Stewart and the Raymondville Bankers Bill Thornton and John Calkins.Footnote 63
While police officers intimidated and assaulted the strikers, they failed to intervene when Anglo growers or their allies threatened or used violence. During the Raymondville strike, the Anglos again enjoyed a monopoly on violence, impulsively seizing weapons to confront protesters. “In this hurried photo, Monty Stewart is shown threatening a group of farmworkers with a .38 caliber pistol, during the strike,” El Cuhamil remarked in a caption to a disturbing photograph. “The authorities never even bothered him.”Footnote 64 In another instance, a prominent Anglo stormed into a community center “where the strikers were holding a meeting” in a “complete state of drunkenness, [and] threatened and verbally abused both men, women, and children who were present. [He] threatened the workers by telling them that nobody in the community would ever hire them again, at the same time he lifted his sweater to show everybody the pistol he was carrying.”Footnote 65 Within a week and a half, Mayor Brand crushed the strike by buying the onions still in the fields from the smaller growers affected and then importing his own workers to pick the vegetables and crush the union effort.Footnote 66
By the time of the Raymondville clash, Texas growers had apparently realized that their lukewarm vigilante violence was insufficient to hold back the demands for change by farmworkers and their unions; they began to turn to other less volatile and dangerous methods to maintain their grip on power—methods that involved armies of lawyers, courtroom challenges, and attacks on the sources of financing undergirding existing federal programs and agencies aimed at protecting working people. Evidently, to use attorney Harrington’s words cited above, once things “settled down,” the growers realized “how stupid they have looked” by attempting in vain to hold back a wave of social change with a shotgun. Growers thusly devised new approaches. These new methods were fully on display in response to a TFWU onion strike in Hereford in August 1980.
The 1980 Hereford Onion Strike and Fading Violence
The 1979 onion strike in Raymondville foreshadowed farmworker activities further northwest in the Texas Panhandle.Footnote 67 Newspaper coverage from Hereford, in West Texas—the so-called “Salad Bowl” of West Texas—chronicled the activities in Raymondville with growing alarm.Footnote 68 Readers of the local newspaper, The Hereford Brand, learned, for example, that a new organization of young, activist lawyers from a group called Texas Rural Legal Aid (TRLA) (who also represented the farmworkers in Raymondville) had received an injunction from local District Court Judge Darrell Hester, barring them from representing any of the striking workers in court. Federal law blocked TRLA, which received taxpayer money, from direct involvement in labor disputes.Footnote 69
Texas Rural Legal Aid was a relatively new organization that did not yet exist during the earlier UFW struggles in the Valley. The organization was founded by the Texas Trial Lawyers Association in 1970 with the purpose of helping the rural, mostly ethnic Mexican poor of South Texas. Texas Rural Legal Aid initially received funding from the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was a part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs of the mid-1960s. By 1974, TRLA secured federal funding through the Legal Services Corporation, created by Richard Nixon just before he resigned the presidency, with an oversight board that reported back to the U.S. president. Three years later, in 1977, TRLA established a farmworkers division specifically to aid migrant workers throughout the state.Footnote 70 By 1980, Legal Services had gained an annual appropriation of about $3 million in federal funding. As a clear legacy of New Deal liberalism as well as the expansion of the federal state under Johnson, and an unambiguous threat to the existing social order, it would only be a matter of time before TRLA—if successful—would draw the ire of Texas growers targeted by the UFW or the TFWU. This new drama would play out in the isolated town of Hereford.Footnote 71
Ethnic Mexicans had first gained employment in Hereford-area agriculture around World War II. Local growers harvested a variety of crops, such as potatoes, onions, and lettuce, which contributed to agriculture briefly surpassing livestock as the staple of the local economy. The town thus became an important stop for migrant workers from Mexico as well as from the Valley. Consequently, the migrant labor community in Hereford developed rapidly.Footnote 72
Given the aforementioned delay in UFW organizing in South Texas after the end of the 1966–1967 strike in Starr County, it makes sense that it would take the breakaway TFWU some time before it could turn its attention away from the Valley, the home-base of its operations, toward far-flung communities on the Texas migrant circuit. The TFWU had already gained important experiences in places like Pecos, involving the melon strike in 1975, and perhaps more notably in Raymondville in 1979. With the Hereford onion strike of 1980, it would become clear that the farmworkers’ movement had, both geographically and tactically, shifted its approach to organizing. As such, growers themselves would have to adjust their responses.Footnote 73
Notably, growers in the Hereford area were already prepared to avoid the mistakes of their counterparts in South Texas, as indicated by their frequent and explicit calls for the renunciation of violence. At a spring 1976 meeting of the local Vegetable Growers and Shippers Council in Hereford, Sheriff Travis McPherson told growers that “workers, union people will come in some day on a hot afternoon when tempers are short and trouble will erupt unless we are prepared to handle the situation cooly (sic) and sensibly.” Chief Deputy Art Burton agreed:
Don’t lose your temper when you’re confronted with a group of these farm labor organizers….Don’t break the law yourself and don’t fight with pickets, even if they are on your own property. Don’t make threats to the union organizers or promises you can’t keep. And, above all, don’t try to take law enforcement into your own hands.Footnote 74
One TFWU observer concluded that, “undoubtedly, both McPherson and Burton were thinking of the shooting incident that occurred last year in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, when grower C.L. Miller shot and wounded eleven farm workers with a shotgun.”Footnote 75 Such violence from growers, in other words, was dangerous, ineffective, and potentially counterproductive.
Texas Rural Legal Aid was, in fact, an enemy with whom Hereford growers and powerbrokers had tangled before. Bill Beardall, who managed the Hereford TRLA office, and his colleagues had arrived in town in 1978. As young, progressive lawyers, the group of four had filed a number of suits locally, most of them on behalf of Mexican and Mexican American clients. Previous suits had dealt with farmworker abuses in Deaf Smith County and nearby Castro County, a discriminatory school board election in Hereford, voting precinct lines, and the illegal detention of a U.S. citizen whom local law enforcement suspected of being an undocumented immigrant. “Carpetbagging troublemakers,” one of their detractors insisted, the lawyers allegedly were prone to “run roughshod” over the town’s citizenry. “We are a good community here with many responsible, solid Spanish-surnamed citizens,” said Bruce Coleman, a dryland wheat farmer and rancher, who went on to note that a number of Hereford’s Spanish-surnamed residents had signed petitions protesting TRLA actions. To Coleman, this was evidence that any alleged anti-ethnic Mexican prejudice in Hereford was a myth.Footnote 76 Other locals, however, in fact showed that racial tolerance in Hereford was itself a myth. In March of 1980, just a few months before the strike, Hereford’s city manager, Dudley Bayne, exasperated at the lawyers who had won about 98 percent of their lawsuits over the last year, referred to the lawyers as “just a bunch of Yankee Jews down here to stir up trouble.” Bayne’s prejudice also extended to the farmworker in general, whom he claimed did “not care where or how he lives. He does not want his children in school; he wants ‘em left along so he can use ‘em in the field, even if they’re four years old, for whatever they can do to make him a nickel.”Footnote 77
Given the tactical and ideological shifts of the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new kind of grower response would be needed when TRLA and the TFWU came out in a united front against Hereford onion growers in June of 1980. On the morning of June 24, TRLA and TFWU representatives announced a strike against a prominent local onion grower, the Howard Gault Company. Texas Farm Workers Union director Orendain appointed Jesús Moya, a veteran of the Raymondville strike, as head of union efforts in Hereford. Moya announced that the union was striking for workers to receive the minimum wage and for portable toilet facilities in the Gault fields. In a joint statement, an attorney from the TRLA’s Hereford office named Inez Flores reported that Gault was paying workers .45 cents per 53-pound field bag of onions. According to Flores, in order to be in line with federal minimum wage requirements, the company would need to pay its workers .80 cents per bag, or nearly double their current wage. Another TRLA attorney, Edward Tuddenham, commented, “Hopefully we can convince Mr. Gault to pay the minimum wage.” In an effort to stave off criticisms of TRLA from the Raymondville strike the year before, Tuddenham added that “one of the criticisms of the TRLA is that we have been too quick to sue without discussing matters. So we’re talking first before suing in this matter.”Footnote 78
What became immediately clear was that the TFWU, with the backing of its lawyers, was willing to engage in direct confrontations despite the obvious risks of a violent response—and may, in fact, have desired a violent response that would attract attention to their cause. Notably, six units from the Hereford Police Department (HPD) were on hand to witness the strike unfold, but—reflecting the concerted effort to avoid violence—they did not move aggressively against the strikers, who also remained peaceful.Footnote 79
The lack of engagement by the HPD is particularly significant—and suggests concerted effort—because the city police force had a history of brutality against Mexican Americans, and a recent history at that. In fact, in February 1980, just months before the strike, Mexican Americans met en masse with law enforcement officials and a federal mediator. “The representatives discussed the arresting of people believed to be illegal aliens, employment of Spanish-speaking persons in law enforcement agencies and training law enforcement officers to deal with cultural differences,” reported the Austin American-Statesman. “The meeting was called in an effort to reduce the tensions in the Hispanic community.” Noting that the meeting ended without any “concrete proposals to reduce the tensions,” the American-Statesman, citing the federal mediator, concluded that “such a problem can’t be solved in one night.” Given the history of conflict between the HPD and the Mexican American population in Hereford, the passive approach taken by the officers during the onion strike certainly corroborates the argument that the retreat from violent repression was part of a concerted strategy by the onion growers in response to the events in the Valley over the previous five years.Footnote 80
On its second day, the strike spread to a neighboring onion field, owned by an old enemy from the Valley with whom the TFWU was all too familiar: Griffin and Brand. Protesters demanded better wages, a union contract, portable toilet facilities, and drinking water in the fields. “It’s not like we’re asking for anything illegal,” said Jesús Moya. “We are just asking for what these people are entitled to. Mainly we are asking,” he continued, “for the dignity and respect of the farm worker.” Griffin and Brand officials again declined to meet with the protestors.Footnote 81
The strike quickly picked up steam. Around 400 workers had joined the protest after the first few days, and TFWU organizers planned to spread the protests to sheds and fields in neighboring Castro County.Footnote 82 Rather than blaming the union for the disruption, though, Hereford growers turned toward the anti-rights trope of the “outside agitator.” According to one grower’s tirade, the whole thing was TRLA’s fault: “If there is a problem and they’re not making the minimum wage, we’ll adjust it,” grower West Fisher said. “But with TRLA leading this whole thing, no. It’s illegal for TRLA to lead or encourage strikers,” clearly referencing the Raymondville strike the year before. Other growers and local officials would echo Fisher’s sentiments.Footnote 83
Texas Rural Legal Aid thus came under increased attack alongside the TFWU in Hereford. Local growers successfully gained an injunction against picketing in late July, which named several of the lawyers alongside union representatives. A few days after the picketing injunction, TRLA lawyers successfully convinced a district court judge in nearby Amarillo to dissolve a portion of the petition restricting workers from picketing within fifty feet of a field’s entrance or within fifty feet of one another, which they argued violated the picketers’ constitutional rights. The rest of the restraining order would be struck down by a third judge in a nearby Lubbock courtroom. Hereford growers were no doubt unaccustomed to worker protests, let alone effective legal maneuvering from trained lawyers working on behalf of migrant workers.Footnote 84
Growers’ frustrations with the TFWU and the TRLA continued as the strike progressed throughout the remainder of the summer harvest. Strike activities eventually affected the entirety of the 8,000 or so acres planted in the area to onions before the harvest ended in August. Many workers avoided the fray, and the piece rates for onion bags increased only slightly and in just a few circumstances. If there was anything that became clear from the 1980 Hereford onion strike, however, it is that growers understood two things: collective action by farmworkers in the Texas Panhandle was now a real threat to their bottom line, and the federal government under the auspices of TRLA was apparently now fully in sync with the farmworkers’ movement in the state. The Hereford onion strike signified that the nature of the fight against farm labor unionism in Texas was undergoing drastic changes.
The Hereford Onion Strike, the New Right, and Anti-Ethnic Mexican Politics
The growers taking on TRLA in the summer of 1980—and by proxy, the liberal federal state—came as little surprise to left-leaning social activists. Working-class activists with agencies like TRLA and TFWU indeed faced a newer, more modern threat as they progressed in their fight for workers’ rights during the late 1970s and early 80s—the effective legal mechanisms and bureaucratic assaults of the New Right, determined as ever to stop mid-twentieth-century liberal activism in its tracks.
The New Right had coalesced nationally during the 1970s under the banner of the Republican Party, completing its rise to political power with the election of Ronald Reagan (R-CA) in November of 1980. Reagan had, in fact, antagonized the farmworker’s movement since its inception during the mid-1960s when he was governor of California.Footnote 85 The TFWU, for its part, recognized the New Right and its political philosophies as being a new threat to their movement, publishing, for example, an article entitled “How to Fight the Right” in the January 1979 edition of El Cuhamil. The article noted that the New Right philosophy against “government interference” and its view “that people don’t need ‘handouts’ or ‘welfare,’” along with its support of so-called “right-to-work” laws, stood in direct contrast to the TFWU’s pro-union and pro-working-class philosophies.Footnote 86 Orendain believed that the TFWU would have to be part of a broader coalition of organizations if it wanted to have any chance of success in the new political climate of the 1980s.Footnote 87
Voting statistics from Hereford demonstrate the rapid rise in popularity of New Right politics over the course of the 1970s. In the 1968 presidential election, liberal Democrat Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) narrowly defeated Republican Richard Nixon (R-CA) statewide. At the same time, Nixon’s appeal to the so-called “silent majority” resonated deeply with voters in Hereford and surrounding rural Deaf Smith County, resulting in a margin of 2,474 votes to Humphrey’s 1,545. The subsequent presidential election showed even more pronounced support for Nixon; not only did he win easy reelection with the voters of Texas in 1972, but he widened the gap between Republicans and Democrats in Deaf Smith County, winning 3,690 votes to liberal Democrat George McGovern’s (D-SD) paltry 1,240. The 1976 general election witnessed some gains locally by southern Democrat Jimmy Carter (D-GA), who took 2,613 votes, only 163 votes short of Republican Gerald Ford’s (R-MI) 2,776. The key swing in county politics took place during the Carter years, however, when the New Right more fully coalesced under the banner of the Republican Party. Not only did Ronald Reagan take 55 percent of the vote statewide in Texas that year, but he tilted Deaf Smith County far to the right in the election, with 4,073 votes to Jimmy Carter’s 1,666.Footnote 88
Reagan’s 1980 election thus emboldened Hereford officials to continue their push against TRLA. Significantly, the Hereford onion strike only indicated the beginning of how anti-farmworker and anti-ethnic Mexican politics had shifted away from violence and towards a subtler form of backlash politics. The Reagan administration’s first budget submitted to the U.S. Congress sought to defund rural legal services programs nationwide.Footnote 89 With the federal government suddenly on their side, local officials and powerbrokers in Hereford went on the attack. U.S. Representative Larry Combest (R-TX), a Republican from nearby Lubbock, made attacking and defunding TRLA a campaign promise during the 1984 elections. Emboldened, a group of Hereford growers sued TRLA and the TFWU in federal district court in 1985. The lawsuit stemmed from various allegations of wrongdoing by the TRLA and TFWU members during the Hereford strike. Although the lawsuit failed to eliminate TRLA at the local level, Howard Gault Co. v. Texas Rural Legal Aid, Inc. further demonstrated the aggressive anti-federal, anti-working-class, and anti-ethnic Mexican stances that many locals were willing to take.Footnote 90
The struggle in Hereford continued throughout the Reagan era. In 1985, Texas Republican Congressman Phil Gramm (R-TX) proposed to transfer the entire $300 million budget for the Legal Services Corporation at the federal level to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where it could be shifted toward crop insurance or soil and water conservation programs. When that tactic failed, in October of 1987, Gramm proposed to “streamline” the Legal Services Corporation in Texas as an amendment to the federal budget, transferring the then-$9.7 million approved for migrant workers under the agency’s reach to a single fund for client legal services across the board, including eliminating training centers and office computers for the lawyers. Given that TRLA lawyers won most of their cases, but due to poor funding and salaries as well as the fact that most attorneys left the program within two or three years, Gramm’s motivation in “streamlining” the budget was clear; effectively, Gramm wanted to pull the rug (federal funding) out from under the lawyer’s feet. By the time of Gramm’s amendment, the Reagan Administration had already attempted to defund the Legal Services Corporation seven separate times in the federal budget, only to be met each time with a line-item spending mandate from the U.S. Senate. As such, Legal Services and thus TRLA would remain intact for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, much like the “open season” that C.L. Miller had declared on the TFWU when he shot eleven strikers in the Valley in the spring of 1975, the Reagan Administration and the Republican Party had now also declared “open season” on the farmworker—this time by targeting federal funding that directly benefitted ethnic Mexican farmworkers in Texas.Footnote 91 Growers turned away from anti-labor violence, but their opposition to farm labor unionism had taken on a new and perhaps more effective form.
Importantly, the working-class coalition of farmworker organizers made significant gains during this very period of the New Right’s ascendancy. In 1981, for instance, TFWU officials were celebrating “what they said were two victories for agricultural laborers—a law banning ‘el cortito,’ the short-handled hoe” and the “State Department of Health ruling that farmers must provide toilets and clean water to farm hands.” Energized by these victories, one activist told the newspaper that reformers “will try again in the next session of the Legislature to get farm workers covered by workmen’s compensation and by unemployment insurance.”Footnote 92
Conclusion
This study contributes in several significant ways to extant historiographies on labor, civil rights, policing, and politics in the twentieth-century American Southwest and nation as a whole. On a substantive level, the work demonstrates that, after a hiatus of nearly a decade prompted by the fallout from the explosive melon strike in Starr County in 1966–1967, Texas farmworkers in the Lower Rio Grande Valley rebooted their labor protests in 1975. To the anger of the region’s growers, the traditional use of Texas Rangers to suppress this activism proved unavailable because of the Democratic governor’s and representatives’ unwillingness to deploy them for fear of provoking violence, embarrassing the state, and alienating their voting coalition. Unable to dictate the terms as they had done previously, the growers responded with petulant anger and a chaotic outburst of vigilante violence that provoked fear among the strikers but mostly revealed their loss of authority and the weakness of their hand. Following a particularly volatile and embarrassing confrontation between growers and their police allies, on the one hand, and farmworkers and their supporters, on the other, during a strike in Raymondville in 1979, the former shifted tactics, and deployed them during another strike in Hereford in 1980. Now actively eschewing vigilante or police violence, the growers adopted neoconservative tactics aimed at attacking not just the workers’ ability to unionize and strike at the local level but also to secure federal support for labor or civil rights activity, particularly in the form of federal tax dollars for TRLA. Growers effectively transitioned from violence against workers to dismantling support for farmworkers from the liberal state.
Significantly, this article also suggests that working-class ethnic Mexican farmworkers in Texas, through energetic protest in the mid-to-late 1970s and in the early 1980s, made unprecedented gains in several areas, a trend that contradicts events at the national level and that challenges the historiographical contention, epitomized by the work of Jefferson Cowie, that the 1970s marked the “last days of the working class.” At the same time, these farmworker victories jump-started new and more effective tactics and strategies by growers that would effectively arrest farmworkers’ continued gains during the 1980s.
Far from a triumphalist story, however, the farmworkers’ gains in these years can probably best be attributed to the fact that Texas growers—long accustomed to the casual use of violence that lost its legitimacy when directed at white workers elsewhere in the United States decades earlier—had simply failed to update their responses with the times. Once they discovered, to their great surprise, that the old tactics were no longer viable, they quickly shifted to New Right tactics that were more effective for the new era. In a sense, then, farmworkers’ victories of the period did not reflect any erosion in the racism of the class oppression that ethnic Mexican workers had endured for so many decades. Instead, their victories in fact underscored the continuing intensity of that oppression, revealing a violent racist contempt still so deeply entrenched that growers did not even consider altering it in accordance with changes in labor relations elsewhere in America until they discovered—with shock and rage—in the mid-1970s that they had waited too long and that their blithe assumptions had fallen out of favor with many of their contemporaries across the state and the nation. Reflecting their power, though, they were able to quickly pivot and, grounding their new approaches in the ascendant and more respectable tactics of the New Right, to regain control.
By shifting their tactics away from police and vigilante violence and toward nonviolence and bureaucratic and legal maneuvers intended to erode the legal and financial capacity of leftwing forces to mobilize, growers and their supporters were mirroring the strategy deployed two decades earlier by Laurie Pritchett. Pritchett, of course, was the chief of police of Albany, Georgia who infamously prohibited his officers from using the violence that Black civil rights activists such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. relied upon to attract the national media attention necessary for them to achieve their objective of toppling Jim Crow. Pritchett later told an interviewer that his men had been instructed “that if they were spit upon, cussed, abused in any way of that nature, that they were not to take their billyclubs [sic] out. And they would act in a nonviolent approach.” The police chief added that King himself had later admitted that Pritchett’s refusal to permit police violence had successfully stymied the Albany Movement, denying it the oxygen that less disciplined officers like Bull Connor had provided in places like Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, where endemic brutality had generated national televised attention and civil rights reform.Footnote 93 It may serve as a further indictment of the anti-ethnic Mexican racism of Texas to note that it took the state’s growers until 1980 to internalize the lessons that white southern racists had learned vis-à-vis Black activists in the early 1960s.
Nationally, the relationship between the Legal Services Corporation, state-based legal aid organizations, and the farmworkers movement in general has been virtually unexplored by historians. When targeting TRLA in West Texas, growers came to the realization that guns, weapons, and intimidation were no longer viable; less dramatic tactics such as lawsuits, political pressure, and the manipulation of ballot boxes were. Anti-Mexican and anti-farmworker initiatives had thus changed by the time of the short-lived Hereford onion strike, resulting in harder-to-see attacks on the infrastructure of the labor movement and fewer well-publicized physical attacks on the workers themselves.
While this study affirms the significance of the liberal Democratic coalition of Mexican American and African American civil rights activists and white labor leaders, it challenges the supposition that this statewide coalition experienced its “last hurrah” in the farmworker strike at La Casita Farms in Starr County.Footnote 94 Instead, this study demonstrates that this liberal coalition remained strong enough in 1975 to prevent the dispatch of Texas Rangers by the governor to suppress the Valley melon strike. Indeed, if this coalition could effectively ensure that the Rangers would no longer be a tool of state suppression in 1975, then it holds that the activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s was no “last hurrah.” Second, by demonstrating that the growers and their supporters had absorbed the lessons of the 1967 and 1975 strikes into their thinking and were now adopting neoconservative approaches to crushing strikes by attacking the sources of financial backing for groups like TRLA by the time of the Hereford onion strike, this article hints at how the rise of the liberal or “blue” coalition in fact contributed symbiotically to the coalescence of the New Right in Texas during the 1970s.
The historiography of the postwar period suggests that the decline of the Chicano movement in the mid-1970s signified the decline of the Mexican American civil rights movement more broadly. In this sense, it echoes the words of historian David Montejano in his classic Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas: “By 1975 the civil rights movement in Texas and the Southwest had largely been exhausted.”Footnote 95 This article challenges this chronology of civil rights activism by showing that farmworker protest reignited in Texas in 1975 and, with a series of union-led labor strikes, improved the lives of the largely Mexican American agricultural workers. Perhaps because unions and strikes coded this activism as class-based rather than racially based, the historiography has failed to identify this form of activism as central to the “civil rights” crusade, and by extension downplayed the degree to which the civil rights movement continued to flourish well beyond 1975. Stated another way, this study suggests that historians of civil rights in the 1970s should adopt the view expressed by historian Zaragosa Vargas in his study of the mid-twentieth century: Labor rights are civil rights.Footnote 96
Finally, this study provides a more expansive history of the role of the Texas Rangers in suppressing mingled Mexican American and agricultural activism across the twentieth century. Over the past several decades, a steadily expanding body of scholarship has detailed the brutality of the Texas Rangers through a focus on La Matanza of 1915 and the Porvenir massacre of 1918, and on the brutality of the Rangers in places like Crystal City in 1963 and in Starr County in 1967. While this work references each of these better-known episodes, it also adds new and revealing episodes before and between those, including the killing of ethnic Mexicans in Starr County in 1906 and Marfa in 1934. In so doing, the article also documents, as no previous study has, the steady erosion in the power of the Rangers over the course of the century. From the early twentieth century through the end of World War I, the Rangers could murder ethnic Mexicans with impunity, this even as a state investigation in 1919 resulted in a reorganization of the state police force so as to preclude the kind of embarrassing violence that had marred the state between 1915 and 1918. By the Great Depression, Rangers still brazenly killed ethnic Mexicans but they no longer enjoyed the sort of impunity that they had fifteen years earlier. This was evidenced in efforts by officials in Marfa to conduct a show-trial of Ranger W. F. Hale in 1934 in order to place the imprimatur of legitimacy upon his actions against the Prieto brothers and to stymie any subsequent investigation. Reflecting the ascendance of the United States as the dominant global power after World War II, its desire to improve its international reputation for civil rights amid the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the rise of increased civil rights activism, the Rangers saw their capacity for unrestrained brutality curtailed further. Indeed, while the beatings of activists in Crystal City and Starr County were harsh and intimidating, they were a far cry from the sort of murderous violence that Rangers had imposed during World War I or even in the 1930s. By the 1970s, their power had been reduced to such an extent that the governor would no longer even deploy them to the scene of labor protests.
The times had clearly changed.
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