Maria Serrano celebrated her ninety-fifth birthday at the start of 2025 in her Coachella, CA, home of six decades. Her children (seven), grandchildren (twenty-five), and great-grandchildren (nineteen) arrived in clusters, each traveling spoke-like from Visalia, Tulare, and San Diego, CA; Las Vegas, NV; New Jersey; and Japan to the family’s original point in the United States, each marveling at her health and fashion (a burgundy blouse with a ruby pendant) while bending to kiss her cheeks and offer sleepy newborns like a bouquet of kittens. Plates of food soon passed hands, as did photos of the great-grandmother who had led her family across the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1960s. Interspersed were Serrano’s co-unionists in the United Farm Worker (UFW) movement, a labor-civil rights campaign among farmworkers not covered by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935. These friends counted seventy, eighty years themselves, their numbers had already thinned by life and its endings, though memories and convictions remained vivid. Collectively, they had built the UFW movement without formal labor rights and stitched pro-worker alliances across the country in a period birthing the revanchism we know all-too well today. They also raised proud homes, expanded farm labor protections in 1970s California, and then, when white audiences tired of labor and civil rights in the late twentieth century, Serrano and her co-workers kept their union’s history, and its hard-won lessons, alive.Footnote ¹

One of those lessons centered on labor law’s role in mapping what is considered possible in challenging times. To Serrano, labor laws such as California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) of 1975, which mirrored the NLRA’s protections and processes, showed that deeply marginalized workers could overcome employer power to secure tools for building a democratic and worker-empowered society. Prior to enabling union contracts, in other words, these laws embodied worker accomplishment—to codify labor rights, to harness the state as arbiter—and exemplified the ever-present reality of future possibilities; not for nothing was the UFW’s mantra, “yes, we can.” Serrano noted this observation in late 2024, when she spoke to an inter-generational audience of Coachella residents. “I experienced the boycott,” she said, “I experienced the [labor] camps, I experienced many things, the marches, sometimes long, sometimes short, a lot of suffering. But I feel proud, fulfilled, that despite it being very difficult, it was achieved… Most importantly, you have the labor law [the ALRA], which was achieved after so much sacrifice; after all, it was achieved.”Footnote ² It was achieved—this “it” of legal protections, public recognition, and legitimacy, of unimaginably effective campaigns despite lopsided power and pervasive violence, an “it” built through social and personal sacrifice and offered as a militant humanizing gift to themselves, to other workers. Even if recent history marks the two labor laws’ unmistakable declensions, their achievements and histories provide a rich inheritance for continuing the work of past labor organizers.

On this ninetieth anniversary, the same year President Donald Trump hobbled the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), I want to consider this inheritance in relation to the U.S. history of nonwhite immigration and to the current era of racist authoritarianism built precisely on xenophobia.

Admittedly, turning to the ALRA to discuss the NLRA may appear like a digression—but the distinction between the two highlights their shared history and the NLRA’s racialized, and thus vulnerable, underbelly. Codified in 1935 by a New Deal majority, the NLRA provided federal protections to most private sector workers, facilitating a two-decade, cross-sector movement for “industrial democracy,” as Joseph McCartin reminds us, and achieved, in Kate Andrias’s words, “the most significant incursion into capital.”Footnote ³ It was intellectually and politically legitimated by the reigning Keynesianism, and then steeled by a global war and postwar bounty, the latter built on a capital-labor truce that kept factories running and exports flowing to a war-worn world. Unionization thus grew exponentially, and within a generation many working families entered stable, and increasingly well-paid, employment, into a life that could escape the bosses outside of work. This was a remarkable achievement.

And yet, the NLRA excluded the rights of agricultural and domestic workers because segregationists feared unionization’s potential among African Americans in the U.S. South.Footnote ⁴ This meant that when Serrano began working in California’s fields in the 1960s, she found a world of employers dominating a diverse, fissured, and migrant workforce, one that lived in makeshift company towns of shacks and rotting public housing, and who faced debilitating conditions, including sexual harassment and sexual assault, stagnant wages, insecure hours, and the modern spray of agricultural poisons.Footnote ⁵ Without codified labor rights, Serrano’s UFW movement survived its first decade (1965–1975) by over-relying on consumer boycotts and tenacious farmworker sacrifice. It finally won its labor law in 1975, but the ALRA’s basis on a single industry in single state meant its protections strained among a purposely short-term, differentiated workforce, prefiguring today’s union challenges in a “fissured” economy of labor-free brands and contract-based employers.Footnote ⁶ Furthermore, while the NLRA counted four decades of effective, if contested, jurisdiction by 1975, the ALRA arrived just as the Reagan Administration pushed a neoliberal assault on all labor.Footnote ⁷

In other words, the ALRA exists today because of and to attend to the NLRA’s racialized origins; it also illustrates how the latter’s declining fortunes determined the former’s still-born life in the 1980s, when Serrano welcomed her first grandchildren. Today, many U.S. farm and domestic workers still lack basic labor rights and receive inhumane pay for life-threatening, shameful working conditions, such as child labor, mutilated bodies, working poverty, workplace deaths, exposure to disproportionate health threats, and sexual violence.Footnote ⁸ Arguably, many of today’s non-agricultural U.S. workers have come to know such conditions, too.

Two points deserve further elaboration for understanding the NLRA and its relationship to immigrant workers in the United States. First, both the NLRA and the ALRA had implications for and engaged immigrant workers, but the immigrant populations they drew from often came from different worlds and the contexts in which they operated meant a racialized coverage of their protections. For many southern and eastern European immigrants, for example, the 1930s followed decades of exploitation and marginalization in the United States, including the racial humiliation of the National Immigration Act of 1924.Footnote ⁹ But the 1930s still flowered possibility for many. In fact, through the NLRA, many transitioned into the racialized American Dream, one of working-class confrontations with industrial giants, and of ethnic pride bulwarked by accrued citizenship and its white-limited benefits and political power.Footnote ¹⁰

For nonwhite immigrants, in contrast, the decade was less generous. Just before the NLRA’s passage, U.S. officials led a mass deportation of ethnic Mexican residents, immigrant or not, to protect depression-era white access to exploitative labor.Footnote ¹¹ Meanwhile, roving white mobs attacked Filipino migrants along the Pacific West—again, for white jobs, plus white women—and inflicted assaults, mutilations, and lynchings.Footnote ¹² More famously, the same president who spoke of fearing only fear itself, and for an economic bill of rights, cordoned off Japanese immigrants and their American families out of fear of that boogeyman tattooed on nonwhite bodies: that their racial solidarity would trump and undermine equal citizenship; an odd projection, if there ever was one.Footnote ¹³ No law, in short, ever governs by itself, and for the NLRA this meant shared governance with white supremacists politics, and a fracturing into different laws for different immigrants.

Second, the NLRA cannot be said to have been explicitly against immigrants of color. The NLRA’s exclusionary target, instead, were African Americans in white fields and white homes, and this exclusion, to the detriment of all workers today, grafted itself onto the law’s skin for the rest of the century. It produced national havens for capital flight, enabled white prejudice, and made interracial solidarity more difficult when capital decided to break northern unions by, in part, turning to the anti-union South. By the time African Americans and workers of color won tools to organize all U.S. workers, including through anti-discrimination and public sector labor laws in the mid-century, employers and conservatives were already dismantling the NLRA.Footnote ¹⁴ Michael Goldfield’s sweeping history roots the origins of this dismantling in the late 1930s and early 1940s, well-before the Taft-Hartley Act or Operation Dixie.Footnote ¹⁵ Maria Serrano and her co-unionists thus existed in a labor regime created by anti-Black animus, and, yet, they wrenched a labor law and attempted to achieve what some had expected from the NLRA: to bring democracy to the workplace, make humans out of workers and bosses alike, and labor without prejudice.Footnote ¹⁶

This history does not mean that immigrants and workers of color did not leverage the NLRA. Mexican farmworkers in California used the law’s precursor, Section 7a in the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), to strike cotton in the 1930s, synthesizing the law with the radicalized cultures of the Mexican Revolution.Footnote ¹⁷ Similarly, Filipino “union men” in Seattle and Alaska used the NLRA to organize the Canned Salmon Industry and “make [workers] realize that we are but [one] laboring family.”Footnote ¹⁸ History is replete with such accounts, and, collectively, they point to nonwhite immigrants’ attempts to harness the NLRA for building a society that respects its laboring communities.Footnote ¹⁹ In California, immigrants of color played a critical role in labor organizing, and they increasingly represent a force in the state’s union expansion—and yet, still, the NLRA’s initial limitations, and their subsequent metastasis, continue to limit its ability to significantly improve the state’s entire working population.

So, what to make of the NLRA in its elder age? I thought of this as I drove to Serrano’s birthday celebration in January 2025. Congress had yet to ratify the 2024 presidential election, but Trump had already flattered a billionaire’s anti-union firings.Footnote ²⁰ A couple days after her birthday celebration, reporters filmed furious wildfires lapping up entire Los Angeles neighborhoods, as innumerable scientists had warned, while Trump tied emergency aid to voter suppression and anti-immigrant measures.Footnote ²¹ In the fire’s wake, the city’s exhaustion and displacement echoed the dynamics migration scholars associate with climate-devastated landscapes, those that compel- many to seek asylum in the United States, their numbers likely to grow as the century warms further. By the time I returned home, the billionaire-pungent inauguration had led to unconstitutional decrees, including the end of birthplace citizenship and the firing of NLRB members, effectively ending the NLRA. As many have noted, these are not fortuitous times for labor.

In fact, they remind me of the conditions Serrano faced in agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s, and they stress some concluding considerations. First, the NLRA attempted to uphold human dignity and build democratic cultures. In the best cases, worker solidarity militated against bigotry and facilitated community renewal.Footnote ²² This expansive vision is critical for a future NLRA. Second, unions suffered defeats in the twentieth century at the hands of outsized power; their severe weakening was not merely an implosion, much less a contravening of a progressive nation.Footnote ²³ Those who led the attack transformed other aspects of the United States, such as inundating elections with unaccountable money, turning media into disinformation machines, fissuring economies and outsourcing production, and weakening anti-monopoly laws.Footnote ²⁴ Future attempts to democratize the economy will face worse conditions than those in the mid-twentieth century, perhaps worse than the pre-NLRA days. Third, possibilities can still erupt from anywhere and inspire new contexts. The UFW exemplified this when it won the ALRA in 1975 and provided a vision of what our economy and society could be. It is these worker visions that historians can leverage for what will be steep, daunting odds.

Lastly, labor advocates must remain steadfast in our global perspectives. We are in a war on the world, for the world. Climate change has made this obvious, as has the specter of refugees being shuttled from one U.S. city to another, blamed by a frayed citizenry for the country’s social and political deprivations. In today’s world, a future NLRA movement cannot be limited to the nation.Footnote ²⁵ We may very well only build a strong union movement by seeing migration as a strike against global inequalities—as a refusal to stay put and simply take it, to labor for the measly southern wages subsidizing northern consumption. Our laws and unions must join these strikers, for their sake and ours, for we, too, have been immiserated by the global elite.

Like Serrano’s ALRA, I approach the NLRA as an inheritance. One does with it as one can to build the working world we deserve. History can play a powerful role in these efforts by stressing the bounty in worker pasts, and of the paths built despite the odds and antagonists. And though we have a long road ahead of us, as the late labor organizer and scholar Jane McAlavey reminds us, we are not alone, whether across time or space.Footnote ²⁶ Like many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, like Maria Serrano, workers have and will continue to create a way out of no way.Footnote ²⁷ That, too, is our inheritance and our promise. The NLRA and ALRA may offer only feeble frameworks for the challenges facing labor today, but the energy and courage and audacity and sacrifice that congealed them into fact and social force—that remains. As Serrano shared in late 2024, “I am ninety-five years old, and still, I am alive.” The same can be said of this history.