Ernesto Galarza is deserving of a full-length biography. The most influential non-elected Latino in Washington, D.C. during the Roosevelt years, Galarza did more than anyone during the fifties and early sixties to get Congress to end the bracero program, which served as a precursor to the successful farm labor union drives by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.

Thanks to the University of Oklahoma Press, readers have regained access to a mostly forgotten part of Galarza’s amazing career: organizing farm workers under the aegis of the AFL’s National Farm Worker Union. The NFWU grew out of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and expanded into California. The union enjoyed ties to the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas.

The material on Galarza lies in H.L. Mitchell’s Mean Things Happening in This Land: The Life and Times of H.L. Mitchell, Co-founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. The university press has released the formerly out-of-print book with a foreword by the late Michael Harrington and a preface by Samuel Mitchell.

Mean Things Happening in This Land sheds important light on Ernesto Galarza, farm labor organizing, and the tension between Socialists and Communists with the CIO’s United Cannery, Agricultural, and Packing Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), of which Southern Tenant Farmers Union was briefly part.

My review of Mean Things Happening in This Land appears in a recent issue of the Labor Studies Journal. See my website for additional reviews, articles and video.

Today’s guest blogger is Martin Schiesl, a professor emeritus of history at California State University, Los Angeles, and a  coeditor of City of Promise: Race and Historical Change in Los Angeles. While researching his forthcoming book on the NAACP in California from 1930 to 1970 he came across a letter from Cesar Chavez to the NAACP that piqued his interest.

The growers turned to politics in an effort to overcome the UFW's strike and consumer boycott.

Farm worker unionism encountered much dislike and resentment in the California state legislature in the early 1970s. There were several attempts to enact anti-farm worker legislation in 1971. The principal bill was AB 964 sponsored by Assembly Democrat Kenneth Cory. It outlawed the secondary boycott. The bill received a “do pass” recommendation from the Labor Relations Committee in June and was referred to the Ways and Means Committee, where it appeared that there were enough votes to send the measure to the floor of the Assembly.

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