Corridors of Migration: The Odyssey of Mexican Laborers, 1600-1933
Search in google:
In the San Joaquin Valley cotton strike of 1933, frenzied cotton farmers murdered three strikers, intentionally starved at least nine infants, wounded dozens, and arrested more. While the story of this incident has been recounted from the perspective of both the farmers and, more recently, the Mexican workers, this is the first book to trace the origins of the Mexican workers activism through their common experience of migrating to the United States. Rodolfo F. Acu a explores the history of Mexican workers and their families from seventeenth-century Chihuahua to twentieth-century California, following their patterns of migration and describing the establishment of their communities in mining and agricultural regions. He shows the combined influences of racism, transborder dynamics, and events such as the Mexican Revolution and World War I in shaping the collective experience of these people as they helped to form the economic, political, and social landscapes of the American Southwest in their interactions with wealthy landowners. Acu a follows the steps of one of the murdered strikers, Pedro Subia, reconstructing the times and places in which he lived. By balancing the social and geographic trends in the Chicano population with the story of individual protest participants, Acu a shows how the strikes were in fact driven by human choices rather than the Communist ideologies to which they have been traced since the 1930s. Corridors of Migration thus uncovers the origins of twentieth-century Mexican American labor activism from its earliest roots through its first major manifestation in the San Joaquin Valley cotton strike.From one of the founding scholars of Chicano/a studiescomes the culmination of three decades of dedicated research into the origins of the migrations and the labor activism that have helped to shape the economics and politics of the United States into the twenty-first century.
