The small but energetic National Farm Labor Union, led by dynamic organizer Ernesto Galarza, found its efforts to create a lasting California farmworkers union in the 1940’s and 50’s stymied again and again by the growers’ manipulation of braceros. In fact the growers had wanted the Bracero program to continue after the war precisely in order to replace domestic workers. In reality this provision was rarely enforced. Public Law 78 stated that no bracero-a temporary worker imported from Mexico-could replace a domestic worker. Started during World War II as a program to provide Mexican agricultural workers to growers, it continued after the war.

The Bracero program, an informal arrangement between the United States and Mexican governments, became Public Law 78 in 1951. Within another fifteen years more than 50,000 farmworkers were protected by union contracts.

And yet by the early 1960’s things were beginning to change beneath the surface. Essential to the state’s biggest industry, but only so long as they remained exploited and submissive farmworkers had tried but failed so many times to organize the giant agribusiness farms that most observers considered it a hopeless task. For more than a century farmworkers had been denied a decent life in the fields and communities of California’s agricultural valleys.

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