The Border Question, that is, the massive influx of Mexican workers into the United States, has its origin in the demand of the imperialist exploitation of the Southwest for a proletariat. U.S. imperialism instituted a policy of encouraging immigration of Mexicans to meet this need for labor power to develop and exploit the Southwest as a region. Mexican labor built the railroads, developed the truck farming industry, the sugar beet industry and the cotton industry in the Southwest.
In general, there are three distinct waves of Mexican immigration. The first one in 1900, the second during the Mexican revolution beginning in 1910 and lasting until 1930, and the third which began during and after World War II.
The first wave resulted from the immediate economic demands of U.S. imperialism. The period from 1870 to 1900 was the period of the completion of the western railroads and the beginning of capitalist agriculture in the Southwest. Between 1870 and 1900 the total farm acreage tripled and the amount of land under irrigation increased from 60 ,000 to 1,446,000 acreas.(Meier and Ravira, The Chicanos, Hill and Wang, NY, p. 124, 1972)
It was during this period that U.S. imperialism was busy committing genocide against the Indians and ruthlessly driving Chicano peasants off the land by legal means and extra-legal terror. However, there were not enough Chicano workers to fill the vacuum that was created in the labor market by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The vacuum was filled by Mexican national minority workers.
The first capitalists to send agents to recruit workers from Mexico were the railroad bosses. After 1880, seventy percent of the section crews and ninety percent of the extra gangs on the principal western lines, which employ between 35,000 and 50,000 workmen in these categories were Mexican workers. (McWilliams, North from Mexico, Greenwood Press, NY p. l68, 1948).
The railroads constantly lost workers to other industries and so they were constantly recruiting workers in Mexico. The railroads spread Mexican national minority workers throughout the Southwest and the country. Mexicans worked in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. In 1900 the Southern Pacific was employing 4,500 Mexicans in California and the Mexican community in Watts (Tajauta) dates from 1906.
The major industry to which the railroads lost workers initially were the sugar beet and cotton industries which expanded rapidly in the West between 1900 and 1917. Between 1890 and 1910 cotton became an important crop in Western Texas and Mexican labor replaced poor white and Negro sharecroppers. Mexicans were recruited out of Brownsville, Laredo, Eagle Pass and El Paso and concentrated in San Antonio from where they were shipped into the fields.
The recruitment and delivery of Mexican workers became an enterprise in itself. so-called labor smugglers recruited and sold Mexican workers. Workers who tried to escape were chained. At night workers were locked in barns to prevent a rival smuggler from stealing them. During the day they were marched under armed guard to terminal points.
The Mexican Revolution displaced large numbers of Mexicans, many of whom fled to the U.S. This wave of immigration had tremendous effects on the Southwest. Because of its tremendous volume, it provided the matrix for the Mexican national minority communities in California and elsewhere and underscored and reinforced Chicano communities in Texas.
The massive influx of Mexican national minority workers caused by the Mexican Revolution was aided and encouraged by the U.S. imperialists. The expansion in industry brought on by selling to the Western European imperialist powers was in part made possible by Mexican workers. Between 1917 and 1920 some 50,000 Mexicans entered the U.S. “legally” and an additional 100,000 others are estimated to have entered during the same period. Mexican workers generally faced the lowest wages and were given the most menial jobs. Housing was incredibly poor and any sort of health care was non-existent. Much of the work was for short duration. Many workers were fired and never paid.
During this process, many Mexican national minority workers who had arrived in the first wave of immigration sought work in factories in the larger cities. By the end of World War I, Mexicans were working in coal mines, steel mills, meat packing houses, automobile plants, etc., in Michigan, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania, as well as in the Southwest. In 1918 Detroit had a Mexican national minority community of 8,000, and Chicago of 4,000. All totaled, some 70,000 Mexicans including some Chicanos (natives of the Chicano Nation) were living east of the Mississippi; however some 423,000 Mexican born persons were concentrated in the four states of Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico.
It was during this second wave of immigration that the focal point of entrance shifted from Texas to California. This was caused by the tremendous economic development which was taking place in California, such as the development of more than 200 commercial crops in California. By 1930 there were 368,000 persons of Mexican descent in California. By 1925 there were more Mexicans in Los Angeles than in any city in Mexico except Mexico City. And between 1920 and 1930, California had an annual increase in the Mexican national minority community of 20.4 percent, as compared to Texas with 26 percent. The depression ended the second wave of immigration with large numbers of deportations and the voluntary return of workers who found no work in the U.S.
As we stated above, most American national minority workers found jobs in the agricultural industry, especially in California. Because life is dialectical, the rise of the large commercial farm companies, like the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation, the Kern County Land Company, the Newhall-Sangus Land Company, etc. was accompanied by the formation of workers’ organizations. The intollerable conditions of life for agricultural workers gave rise to militant and violent struggles throughout the Southwest. Beginning in 1903 when Mexican and Japanese workers walked out of the field near Ventura, California to today, with the struggles of farmworkers throughout the country, minority workers have had a long history of militant struggle. Nor have they confined their resistance to the fields. Bitter struggles have taken place in coal mines, on the railroads and in factories.
The conditions of Mexican national minority workers in that period and today were exemplified by the Durst Ranch in 1913 where there were eight toilets for three thousand workers, inadequate drinking water, no garbage disposal, dirt low wages, etc. The IWW sought to organize the workers there and met with fierce resistance. Sheriffs fired on workers, killing four. Four companies of national guard occupied the ranch. More than 100 workers were arrested, many were deported. The IWW organizers were sentenced to prison for life.
This type of vicious repression was the rule in the struggles of Mexican national minority workers. Evidence of this is the strike of workers in the Imperial Valley in 1928. This strike was broken by wholesale arrests and threats of deportations. Between 1930 and 1935 there were a large number of strikes led by the Trade Union Unity League and the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union, (CAWIU) both communist led. The TUUL was involved in the struggles of the migrant workers from 1929. It organized a number of hunger marches to protest high unemployment and poor wages. In 1933, dissatisfied with wages of 39 cents an hour, workers struck the El Monte Berry Company in a strike led by the Confederacion de Uniones de Campesinos y Obreros Mexicanos. This organization became the most active agricultural union and by 1933 claimed some 5,000 members.
One of the most significant strikes of the thirties was by the San Joaquin Valley cotton pickers led by the CAWIU in 1933. It involved some 18,000 workers. The strike was defeated by large scale extra-legal terror, the national guard and the use of the Mexican council to try to “reason with the workers”.
In order to meet the growing militant unity of Mexican national minority workers, the growers formed the Associated Farmers of California which opposed unionization in general and called for use of the state’s criminal syndicalism law in labor struggles and for legislation to outlaw picketing. By 1934, this group turned to blatant force as a means of suppressing the desires of the workers to organize. An example of this was the Brentwood, California strike in 1934 when deputies and vigilantes penned up 200 workers and shipped them out of the country. Raids were carried out against the CAWIU and its leaders arrested. When the CPUSA dissolved the TUUL in 1935 the CAWIU went into decline.
Militant strikes continued under the leadership of the CUCON through 1935, 1936, 1937. These strikes were crushed by the traditional methods of growers, police, guards, tear gas, killings, arrests and deportations.
In 1937, many Mexican national minority agricultural workers’ unions affiliated with the United Cannery, Agriculture, Packing and Allied Workers of America (CIO) at the first national convention of agricultural workers in Denver. However, most Mexican unions went on to affiliate with the AFL.
The third wave of immigration began during World War II and has continued through today. In August of 1942, the U.S. imperialists began recruiting Mexican workers according to an agreement between the U.S. and Mexico. In a five year period approximately 250,000 braceros were brought into work, primarily for California, agricultural companies (especially citrus and sugar beet industries. During this period 200,000 bracers were employed in 21 states. In 1947 this program was ended and another began which spanned the years from 1948 to 1964, during which time 4,500,000 braceros temporarily came into the United States to work. In addition, the “legal” braceros were supplemented by thousands of Mexican workers who “illegally” came into the United States. Between 1946 and 19 54 these workers supplied the main amount of labor power to growers in the lower Rio Grande Valley. In 1949, an estimated half million workers crossed the border into the U.S. “illegally”.
The end of the bracero program in 1964 saw a rise in the so-called “commuter labor”. These Mexican workers are divided into Blue-carders and Greencarders. Greencarders are entitled to permanent legal residence in the U.S., while Bluecarders may not stay more than 72 hours in the U.S.. These workers have taken the position of braceros. In 1970, between 100,000 and 150,000 “commuters” were working in the Southwest. Forty percent of them work in agriculture. Others work in the garment industry. In 1965 “commuters” formed twenty three percent of the work force in Brownsville, seventeen percent in El Paso, and five percent in San Diego.
There are two major aspects to the border question in the Southwest today: the presence of millions of Mexican national minority people in the states of California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, and the influx of Mexican national workers into the border area, both legally as commuters and illegally as mojados.
Let us consider the latter aspect first. The extensive use of Mexican workers in the Southwest is an excellent example of how a semi-colonial country like Mexico is used as a reserve for the U.S. imperialists. The imperialists use the Mexican national workers to create a vast reserve labor force in the Southwest. The use of Mexican workers has depressed the wages in the region and results in high unemployment for Chicanos and Mexican national minority workers as well as for other workers. Mexican workers are used to break strikes and thwart union organizing drives. The white chauvinist policies of the AFL-CIO and the revisionist CPUSA stand as our obstacles to proletarian internationalism. This white chauvinism is directed against Chicanos and the Mexican national minority as well as Mexicans and thus blocks the unity of the working class in the Southwest. In addition, the national chauvinism of Chicanos and Mexican national minority workers is actively developed and pushed by the U.S. imperialists and their agents like the CPUSA and creates the absurd, idiotic situation where Mexican workers are mistreated by their class and black brothers and sisters.
Conditions for the Mexican workers are some of the worst suffered by any workers in this country. Labor contractors (contractistas) have a thriving business smuggling workers in at $150 and $200 a head. As they are being brought in and taken to their place of work, Mexican workers suffer gross indignities and physical abuse and pain. Hundreds die of dehydration or carbon monoxide poisoning. They are crowded in vans, cars or trucks and transported hundreds of miles without being allowed to relieve themselves. Many die of suffocation in these crowded conditions.
Once on the job, usually in the fields, the workers are served poor food, many times unfit for human consumption. There is substandard housing at excessive rates, no sanitary facilities, inadequate sewage, infested drinking water causing malaria and dysentery. They are physically abused, exposed to pesticides, subject to excessive deductions from their paychecks. Often they are not paid but deported.
Efforts to organize trade unions are met by the usual methods of the growers: legal violence, extra-legal terror, arrests and deportations.
The bourgeois solution to this aspect of the border question is exemplified by the Rodino Bill. (sponsored by Congressman Peter Rodino D-NJ) This bill will lay the legal foundation for the massive deportation of Mexican and of Latin American workers who are in the U.S. without immigration papers. In addition to the deportations, there is the strengthening of the Border Patrol, which is already charged with the task of rounding up and deporting about 400,000 Mexicans a year.
The agents of the bourgeoisie among the working class, like reformist labor union leaders and the revisionist CPUSA are supporting the bill as a “realistic solution” to the border question. On the question of the fascist border patrol, the CPUSA merely asks that “the border patrol in its present form (our emphasis) must be abolished.” This demogogic position of the revisionists coupled with their white chauvinism against Mexican workers successfully aids the bourgeoisie in their drive for super-profits and the division of the international working class.
Communists proceed to solve this aspect of the question by pointing out first, that nothing short of proletarian revolution will actually lay the basis for the ultimate solution of this question. U.S. imperialism has no intention of ending the general depression of wages in the Southwest by closing the border to Mexican workers. The deportations and other fascist tactics are merely means by which U.S. imperialism controls Mexican workers, breaks their organizing drives, and deceives workers in general.
Communists do not fight for closing the borders nor do they support deportations. Instead of national chauvinism we advocate proletarian internationalism as the basis for the solution of the border question. We raise the slogan: “Full democracy and equal rights for Mexican national workers.” Communists must fight for an end to deportations and the abolition of the Border Patrol in any form. We seek to carry out political work among Mexican national workers, organize them and lead them in the fight for equal wages and conditions for the Mexican national workers.
Among native workers, communists expose the imperialists and their agents in the working class like the CPUSA. True communists set forth the real nature of the question and publicize the conditions of Mexican national workers. They resolutely point out that fascist laws are not the basis for the mistreatment and exploitation of Mexican national workers, nor are Mexican workers to blame for the depressed wages and high unemployment of the Southwest. Communists show that U.S. imperialism is solely responsible for this situation and only a proletarian revolution led by a multi-national Communist Party can put an end to this situation and lay the basis for a just solution of this aspect of the situation.
The second aspect of the Border Question is the large presence of a Mexican national minority in the Southwest. This aspect divides into two distinct but interrelated questions: The question of the Mexican national minority in the Chicano Nation, and the question of the Mexican national minority in the rest of the Southwest.
Let us consider the former question first.
Travel between the Chicano Nation and Mexico continued almost uninterrupted after the Anglo-American conquest. This was especially true in Southwestern Texas. When, between 1890 and 1920, the U.S. imperialists needed workers to make possible the imperialist exploitation of the Southwest, the workers were expropriated Chicano peasants and Mexican workers. The majority of Mexican workers passed through the Chicano Nation. El Paso and San Antonio became large centers where Mexican workers were grouped up and sent out into the fields and the factories. Only during the second wave of immigration did the majority of immigrants begin to go into California in search of work.
Mexicans moving into the Chicano Nation faced a different situation from Mexicans moving into the rest of the Southwest. They found security and support in the Chicano Communities. Mexicans quickly merged into the Chicano Nation as their own. Mexican integration strengthened and reinforced the Chicano culture and language. They infused it with new values and attitudes from Mexico. They swelled the number of Chicanos making them an extremely visible people in the Southwest. The integration of Mexicans into the Chicano Nation brought about closer emotional and cultural ties between the Chicano Nation and Mexico. It produced feelings of solidarity and internationalism between Chicano and Mexican workers and peasants.
All of these facts illustrate the historical merger of the Hispano and Mexican (along with others) into the ethnically distinct Chicano, the transformation of a Mexican national minority into an integral part of the Chicano Nation. This fact should not be misconstrued to mean that regional differences do not exist in the Chicano Nation, or that Chicanos do not suffer from that same absurd national chauvinism the American Negroes often feel toward African or Latin American Negroes. Regional differences do exist as they do in every nation in the world. There are cultural and language differences between the Northern and Southern parts of the Chicano Nation. The Southern part has closer ties with Mexico due to the closeness of the border and large number of Chicanos with Mexican ancestry within the past three generations.
The result of this merger of the Mexican national minority into the Chicano Nation means that the principal aspect of the Border Question is the aspect of the commuter workers.
In the rest of the Southwest the principal aspect is the presence of a vast Mexican national minority. An estimated eight million Spanish surnamed persons live outside of the Chicano Nation in the Southwest. The vast majority of these persons are of Mexican descent. These people have retained, for the most part, the language, history, and traditions of Mexico. The vast majority of them are workers. The just solution of this question is therefore of greatest importance to the working class of the Anglo-American Nation.
The slogan of regional autonomy for the Southwest raises the concrete solution of the border question. This allows for the establishment of full democracy in the Southwest.
This solution of the Border Question also allows most importantly for unity of the working class of the Anglo-American nation because regional autonomy does not divide workers along national lines.
It does, though, deal with a definite territory where a national minority lives in compact groups. It gives the working class power to utilize and develop the resources of the territory. The Mexican national minority will have the right to organize their own courts and offer political and economic bodies functioning in Spanish with members recruited from among Mexican national minority people to develop the culture, press, schools, etc. (See Stalin, Marxism and the National Question)
The historical evolution of the national-colonial question in the Southwest has made possible the development of bourgeois organizations pushing the line of cultural autonomy. CLULAC, La Raza Unida Party, etc) These organizations seek to liquidate the national question in the Southwest by denying the existence of two separable questions, the border question and the Chicano National-Colonial Question. They seek to utilize the struggles of the Chicano Nation for national liberation and the struggles of the Mexican national minority for democratic rights in order to advance and consolidate their own positions in the Chicano Nation and in Chicano and Mexican national minority communities.
These organizations are tools of the US imperialists, backed by the Chicano comprador bourgeoisie and financed by large foundations. An examination of their record of action provides adequate proof of their role in coopting struggles in the Southwest.
First of all, they are attempting to drag the Chicano national liberation struggles onto the path of electoral politicking. They are trying the same thing in Mexican national minority communities. Secondly, these organizations are raising seemingly militant slogans against discrimination in support of working class struggles, and against US imperialism in a broad general sense. However, they ignore key issues such as the redistribution of lands in the Chicano Nation. They raise these slogans to rally the working class and patriots of the Chicano Nation and Mexican national minority workers behind them and direct their struggles to their, the opportunists’, advantage.
The real struggles of these organizations are for more privileges for the petty bourgeois elements. They fight for 0E0 and other governmental bureaucratic positions. They demand more teaching and business positions. Thus they make it very clear where their interests actually lie.
And finally they push the rotten line of cultural autonomy and the idea of a raza unida without classes. Thus for them Aztlan is not a territorial entity, but a psychological state, and national liberation is a metaphysical construct.
In conclusion, we see how the border question in the Southwest overlaps with the Chicano National-Colonial Question. This fact provides the material basis for the existence of imperialist-backed organizations seeking to sabotage the struggles of the people of the Chicano Nation and of the Mexican national minority by pushing the line of cultural autonomy and diverting the struggle into the electoral arena.
We saw how the Border Question divides into two aspects, the presence of a Mexican national minority and the immigration of Mexican workers. We raised the slogan of “Regional Autonomy for the Southwest” as a general solution to the Border Question and noted that the solution of the Chicano National-Colonial Question, that is, the exercising of the right to self-determination, will result in the solution of the Border Question in the Chicano Nation.
At present, communists must fight for full democracy and equality for the Mexican national minority and Mexican immigrants; an end to the border patrol and the fascist deportation of Mexicans; and self-determination for the Chicano Nation.