Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest

OF FORESTS AND FIELDS

LATINIDAD

Transnational Cultures in the United States

This series publishes books that deepen and expand our understanding of Latina/o populations, especially in the context of their transnational relationships within the Americas. Focusing on borders and boundary-crossings, broadly conceived, the series is committed to publishing scholarship in history, film and media, literary and cultural studies, public policy, economics, sociology, and anthropology. Inspired by interdisciplinary approaches, methods, and theories developed out of the study of transborder lives, cultures, and experiences, titles enrich our understanding of transnational dynamics.

Matthew Garcia, Series Editor, School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies; and Director of Comparative Border Studies, Arizona State University.

For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.

OF FORESTS AND FIELDS

Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest

MARIO JIMENEZ SIFUENTEZ

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sifuentez, Mario Jimenez, 1979–

Title: Of forest and fields : Mexican labor in the Pacific Northwest / Mario Jimenez Sifuentez.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 2016. |

Series: Latinidad : transnational cultures in the United States | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015024443| ISBN 9780813576909 (hardcover : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9780813576893 (paperback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9780813576916 (ePub) | ISBN 9780813576923 (Web PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Migrant agricultural laborers—Northwest, Pacific—History. | Foreign workers, Mexican—Northwest, Pacific—History. | Mexican Americans—Northwest, Pacific—History. | Mexicans—Northwest, Pacific—History. | Immigrants—Northwest, Pacific—History. | Working class—Northwest, Pacific—History. | PCUN—History. | Agricultural laborers—Labor unions—Northwest, Pacific—History. | Northwest, Pacific—Economic conditions. | Northwest, Pacific—Ethnic relations.

Classification: LCC HD1527.N87 S54 2016 | DDC 331.5/4408968720795—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015024443

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2016 by Mario Jimenez Sifuentez

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my parents Mario and Lilia

and

in memory of Tam Ngoc Tran

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Many Miles from Home: The Bracero Program in the Pacific Northwest

2. Los Tejanos: The Texas-Mexican Diaspora in Oregon

3. The Genesis of the Willamette Valley Immigration Project

4. Whip That Hoedad in the Ground: Undocumented Workers in the National Forest

5. Now I Can Hold My Own with Anybody: IRCA, Immigrant Organizing, and the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos Noroeste (PCUN)

6. Huelga!: PCUN Organization of Farmworkers in the Willamette Valley

Epilogue: La Lucha Sigue

Notes

Index

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to begin by thanking the most important people in my life, Mario and Lilia Sifuentez. My parents are two of the hardest-working people I have ever known, and I am grateful that I have inherited a small portion of their work ethic. My sister Brenda has been an instrumental part of my success. I know of no other siblings who share the same bond as we do. I would like to thank my enormous extended family. They have labored in the fields for over five decades, and I am indebted to the sacrifices they made so that future generations could take advantage of opportunities they never had. My grandmothers have been an inspiration to me. Although they are very different from one another, I have never met two more powerful forces of nature.

Next to my family members, my advisor and mentor Matt Garcia has played the most influential role in my life. He continues to mentor me through a profession that I am ill-equipped to handle. As the son of migrant farmworkers and a first generation college student, I had no idea what the writing of a book entailed. Matt Garcia has guided me through the transition from consuming knowledge to producing it.

I would like to thank Karl Jacoby and Evelyn Hu-DeHart for their mentorship and guidance during my time at Brown University, and my colleagues in academe, Jerry Cadava, Marcia Chatelain, Matt Delmont, Maria Hwang, Hilary Jenks, Heather Lee, Erin Linell, Mireya Loza, Mark Padoongpatt, Felicia Salinas-Moniz, Sarah Wald, and Julie Weise, who at one point or another offered invaluable advice, comments, sources, and suggestions. Grey Osterud played a crucial part in helping me turn the dissertation into a manuscript, Her expertise in labor and the Pacific Northwest were invaluable. I would like to thank my copyeditor, Gary Von Euer, whose careful attention to detail have made this text more readable, engaging, and accurate.

My special thanks goes to Larry Kleinman and the people at PCUN. They have been gracious with their time, memory, and archives. I am grateful for their trust and for their work in the farmworker community. Larry Kleinman was essential to the completion of this book. His insight, candor, and connections led me down a fruitful path of discovery. This book could not have been written without his expertise and generosity.

No less important were the staffs at the University of Oregon special collections, the Four Rivers Cultural Center, Malheur County Library, University of Texas El Paso Oral History Project, Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections and Archives Research Center and the Smithsonian. A special acknowledgment goes to my support system, Keith Allen, Richard Butler and Cecilia Butler, Desiree Garcia, Huy Ong, Ryan Shaw, Ty and Alex Shaw, and Gloria Wong. All of you played a special part in my life outside of academia.

The University of California, Merced has been instrumental in the publication of this book. Their institutional support has been that of a first-class research institution. Just as important are my colleagues in history, Susan Amussen, Kevin Dawson, Sean Malloy, Ruth Mostern, Sholeh Quinn, and David Torres-Rouff, who have mentored me, encouraged me, jealously guarded my time, and protected me from many of the pitfalls of junior faculty. But above all I want to thank the students because they remind me on a daily basis why I wanted to be in this profession in the first place.

My editor Leslie Mitchner and the rest of the staff at Rutgers University Press have taken much of the stress and tension out of the process. They have been a pleasure to work with and have been timely, conscientious, and engaged. I can’t imagine working with a better publisher. The anonymous readers who offered insightful comments and support for my manuscript have been invaluable.

Finally and most importantly I want to thank my wife Sarah Garcia Sifuentez. Your companionship, comfort, and love are immeasurable. You are one of the most compassionate, caring, genuine, and understanding people I have ever met. You are truly selfless. Not only could I not have finished this book without you, I look forward to never having to do anything without you again. ¡Hasta La Victoria Siempre!

OF FORESTS AND FIELDS

INTRODUCTION

In 1975 Ernest Callenbach’s novel Ecotopia, which depicted a secessionist, ecologically stable Pacific Northwest, attracted national attention. One of the first attempts to portray a sustainable society, the novel influenced generations of environmental activists. It has sold over a million copies in nine different languages, was reissued in 2005 on the thirtieth anniversary of its release, and is a staple in environmental studies courses across the country.

Callenbach imagined the Pacific Northwest of the future as the locale for solutions to the ecological consequences of capitalism. Ecotopia’s high-speed rails, recycling programs, energy-efficient buildings, and population control have all become essential aspects of the green movement. Callenbach’s world has one other defining feature: people of color are essentially absent. Blacks have self-segregated. Native Americans are relics of the past that allow Ecotopia’s residents to play Indian, going so far as giving themselves Indian names and partaking in ritualized warfare. Mexicans simply do not exist in this ecological wonderland. In Ecotopia the workweek has been cut to twenty hours. People who want to use the abundant timber supplies must travel to the forest and contribute a month of labor to make up for their consumption. The residents of Ecotopia grow their own food on community farms and hunt for meat. For Ecotopians, work is not labor but a pleasurable exercise in sustainability. Perhaps Ecotopia does not need any Mexicans because it does not need any workers.

For my family, the Northwest represented something very different: work. Although born in Mexico, my father and the majority of his relatives considered themselves Tejanos. His father was born in Houston and left Texas voluntarily during the Depression. Twenty years later he returned with his brothers to the United States. As early as the 1950s my father’s family, along with other Tejanos, worked in the fields, lived in the labor camps, and enjoyed themselves in the dance halls of Nyssa, Oregon. My mother, a Mexican immigrant, came with her family to Ontario, Oregon, much later. As the oldest child of seven, she labored in the free-zone factories known as maquiladoras just south of the border and in Texas cotton fields before making her way to Oregon, where she met, fell in love with, and married my father. My parents represent two distinct waves of Mexican immigrants to Oregon: the Tejano migration that lasted from the 1950s to the early 1970s, and the migration of Mexican nationals that followed in their wake. As children, my cousins and I worked in the fields alongside our parents until the agricultural sector in eastern Oregon mechanized and no longer needed so much labor.

This book examines the role that ethnic Mexican labor played in fashioning the Northwest into one of the most productive regions in the country after the Second World War. Expanding water development projects, accelerated timber harvests, and a booming agricultural sector owe their success in large part to the labor of braceros, Tejano migrants, and Mexican immigrants, both documented and undocumented. Like Callenbach’s Ecotopia, the residents of the Pacific Northwest attempted to obscure the presence of ethnic Mexicans in the region and relegated them to being invisible and temporary laborers. Yet ethnic Mexicans refused to be erased from the landscape. They struggled against their marginalization with whatever method was available to them. Their methods ranged from what James Scott calls the weapons of the weak, such as skipping out on contracts and sabotage, to more recognizable forms of resistance, such as forming a labor union.¹

I follow the trajectory of worker resistance both unorganized and organized in the Pacific Northwest. It began with individual braceros and their isolated efforts to win respect, dignity, higher wages, and fairer treatment. Next came the Tejanos. I argue that their resistance came not in the form of traditional labor militancy but in the maintenance of a Tejano culture in the Northwest that often challenged Anglo notions of superiority. Finally, I turn to the efforts of activists in Oregon, who built one of the only long-lasting and successful farmworker unions in the country. Their success was based primarily on a strategy that at the time was generally considered anathema to success—organizing undocumented immigrants.

This history of ethnic Mexican immigration to the Pacific Northwest is important in the context of a larger Chicana/o history for a number of reasons. Numerous scholarly books and articles have been written about the Mexicanization of rural communities across the country. For the most part these are examinations of relatively recent transformations of small-town largely Anglo communities into predominantly Mexican towns. My work, however, traces that movement back to the bracero program and its effects not only on the Southwest but on the creation of a migrant network to the Pacific Northwest that began a transformation of rural communities as early as the 1950s. Thus the Mexicanization covered in this book is taking place, in the case of the Northwest, much earlier in time than what is studied in most scholarly works.

I also demonstrate that place matters. The great distance between Mexican communities in the Northwest and other Mexican communities in the Southwest and Mexico provided challenges and opportunities for ethnic Mexicans. For example, the bracero program and farmworker unionization took on different characteristics in the Northwest than they did in California.

Political culture in the Northwest created unique enemies and allies for ethnic Mexican farmworkers. Farmworkers found themselves at odds with white reforestation workers who were ostensibly anticapitalist, yet reverted to the rhetoric of ownership when faced with undocumented workers in the forests. Conversely, they also found a strong ally in the Nisei growers, who were often the only people willing to rent homes and provide year-round work to them. Thus the Northwest is not just important because it is not the Southwest but because unique patterns of migration, settlement, and resistance arose out of its specific location.

In some ways, the exploitation of the braceros in the Northwest was similar to that in California. Housing and food were substandard, contracts were often violated, violence was prevalent, and workdays were long. On the other hand, braceros in the Pacific Northwest received somewhat better wages, in part because they took a more militant stance towards their employers and went on strike more often. This book complicates the conversation about the Bracero Program by examining the bittersweet experiences of those who participated in the bilateral labor program in the Northwest. Although as a whole the program was exploitative and inhumane, the men who engaged in the work saw themselves as agents of their own labor and performed with dignity. Erasmo Gamboa’s Mexican Labor and World War II: Braceros in the Pacific Northwest 1942–1947 details the numerous strikes, slowdowns, and walkouts braceros conducted. In addition to the contemporary documents on which Gamboa relies, I use oral interviews with braceros that worked in the region. Taken together, these sources provide a vivid and detailed account of braceros’ lives that testifies to the special character the program assumed in the Northwest.

Studying Mexican immigration to the Pacific Northwest requires an engagement with the environmental history of the region as well. Major dam projects during World War II brought millions of previously arid acres under cultivation in eastern Oregon, Washington, and western Idaho. The national forests of the Pacific Northwest have long been essential to the region’s economy. William Robbins’s Landscapes of Promise delineates the transformation wrought by dams and changing agricultural practices on Native American ecosystems in Oregon. In Landscapes of Conflict, he argues that the movement to the suburbs, the automobile, and the increasing fascination with outdoor recreation reshaped Oregon’s landscape. The intense use of land and timber was not slowed until the 1970s, when pressure from environmental activists resulted in state regulations regarding land use, federal environmental standards, and the Endangered Species Act.²

This book locates new points of intersection among Chicano/a, labor, and environmental history.³ Older environmental histories often told stories that focused on literary treatments of nature, the corporations that destroy the natural environment, and the state apparatus that shapes policy. Historians such as Richard White, William Cronon, and Andrew Hurley have made concerted efforts to link labor and environmental history.⁴ White’s work on the Columbia River, for example, connects natural history and human history, examining the labor organization of Native Americans on the river and the connections that fishermen and boat captains have with the river. I extend this marriage of landscape and laborers to Mexicans who worked in the forest as well as the fields and explore the meaning that they gave to their work with nature.

Despite these efforts, as Gunther Peck points out, there remains little ‘nature’ in labor history and few working-class subjects in environmental history.⁵ This book highlights the immigrant workers themselves and maintains that reforestation should be considered part of agricultural labor. This book places major themes of environmental history, such as land use, the concept of wilderness, national forests, and pesticide use, in the context of race, labor, and social justice.

The geographical focus highlights the importance of the national forests and the agricultural fields to immigrants’ work experiences. In addition to working in traditional row crops, undocumented Mexican immigrants labored in the national forests of the Pacific Northwest. While felling trees and working in sawmills are notoriously dangerous occupations, little attention has been paid to the work of those who toiled in planting trees. Indeed, timber escaped classification as a crop until the mid-1980s. My research demonstrates that the federal government sees the national forests as yielding a crop. Consequently, those who labor in the forests should be thought of as agricultural laborers.

A crucial component of that struggle is the history of the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos Noroeste (Northwest Treeplanters and Farm Workers United), known by its Spanish acronym PCUN (pronounced Pe-Coon) and their early incarnation as the Willamette Valley Immigration Project (WVIP). The goals of the reforestation, nursery, and farmworkers’ union are to empower agricultural laborers and eliminate their systematic oppression and exploitation through collective bargaining, boycotts, legislative campaigns, and, most importantly, immigrant organizing. PCUN challenged the idea that the absence of citizenship made undocumented workers vulnerable to deportation and thus unorganizable. Its commitment to organizing all workers regardless of citizenship made PCUN a leader among groups that were rethinking the relationship between farm work and immigrant rights.⁶

The story of PCUN contributes to an already substantial body of work concerning farmworkers and the farmworker movement. This book demonstrates that PCUN utilized strategies similar to those of the United Farm Workers, yet defined its own criteria for success. In sharp contrast to the UFW, PCUN developed an internationalist critique of imperialism, capitalism, and militarism reminiscent of those of the International Workers of the World (IWW) and Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA). PCUN’s strategies, tactics, and vision were influenced by the UFW, but it also learned from the larger group’s failures and embraced a more inclusive viewpoint.

In the early 1970s, the UFW had an initial presence in Oregon but failed to establish a solid union, effectively abandoning the state. Its departure created a vacuum that PCUN later filled. The union has succeeded and sustained itself as a movement, even during the antilabor Reagan years when organized labor lost numerous battles and declined precipitously in many sectors of the economy.⁷ PCUN’s success came partly as a result of their formation of a separate union, independent from the UFW and the AFL-CIO. Three factors contributed to their ability to emerge from UFW’s shadow: the leadership of Cipriano Ferrel, a former UFW organizer and close friend of Chavez who learned from his mentor’s mistakes; the UFW’s war with the Teamsters Union and their commitment to organizing all immigrant workers.

I examine the attitudes, circumstances, and influences that led to PCUN’s decision to organize workers within the context of immigrant rights, and show how that decision has led to their long-standing success as a union. My focus on PCUN contributes not only to the historiography of farmworkers but also to the burgeoning scholarship on the immigrant rights movements, immigrant organizing, and transnational labor.⁸

SOURCES AND METHODS

This book draws on archival documents and oral histories to illuminate the daily lives and struggles of ethnic Mexicans in the Northwest. While the archival sources contextualize and historicize workers’ situations, the official record often tells us more about what bureaucrats thought about Mexicans than about their lived experiences. The dearth of written records left by guest workers, migrants, and immigrants makes it difficult to ascertain their thoughts, desires, anguish, and dreams. For this reason, oral histories by others and myself form a substantial portion of my source material.

The interviews in the first chapter were primarily conducted when I was a member of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History’s Bracero Oral History Project. A team of graduate and undergraduate students, under the directorship of Matt Garcia and Kristine Navarro, traveled around the country conducting oral histories with former braceros. These oral histories were coded and uploaded to a digital archive available for public use. The Bracero History Archive has proven an invaluable resource for this book, and received the 2010 Public History Project Award from the National Council on Public History. The remainder of the interviews took place in various locations throughout Oregon over the span of six years (2004–2010). I knew the interviewees through personal connections; for instance, many of the labor contractors I interviewed agreed to participate because they had originally contracted my family to come and work in Oregon. Some of the migrant workers came in the same migrant stream as my relatives and labored in the fields next to them. Others I met through word of mouth and my connection to other migrants in the community. The activists interviewed also agreed to participate because of their familiarity with me as a student activist. Additionally, this gave me access to the previously private archives of the union. They have since been donated to the University of Oregon Special Collections. I told each interviewee that I was writing a history of Mexican migration to the Pacific Northwest and framed the interview as a contribution to an oral history collection.

I acknowledge that relying on oral histories entails certain obstacles to writing a comprehensive history. The interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee produces a subjective view of history. People remember and interpret things through their own historical lens, based upon their ideas and position at the time they are interviewed rather than as they understood them in the past. Recognizing those potential problems, I examined the oral histories critically and placed them within historical context. Most of the interviews I conducted were in Spanish. The subjects felt much freer and better able to articulate their thoughts and feelings to a person who shared their language and ethnocultural background. I have translated the interviews into English for this work. While this process leaves some room for distortion or misrepresentation, I consulted colleagues, native Spanish speakers, and texts for assistance. Despite the potential pitfalls of oral history, I have chosen to use it because I believe that the insights of my interviewees far outweigh the potential for distortion. Ultimately, I side with Gary Okihiro, who argues: the collective voice of the people once silenced has a right to be heard. Oral history is not only a tool or method for recovering history; it is also a theory of history which maintains that the common folk and the dispossessed have a history and that this history must be written.⁹ Over the years, as I conducted interviews with individuals who lived through the circumstances that I write about, they conveyed to me the importance they placed on having their history recorded. Elders often complained that the younger generation did not know about their struggles, the indignities they had suffered, and the victories they had achieved as youth and young adults.

Although the book relies significantly on oral histories, I use newspapers, government reports, and other official documents to further buttress the interviews. For a region where Mexican immigrants have been largely ignored in the official record, these sources are not as plentiful as they might be in the Southwest. Oftentimes the nature of documents pertaining to Mexican immigrants make obscure references to their presence while commenting on some other more pertinent issue.

If we lose these stories we risk perpetuating the myth that the economy of the Pacific Northwest is nature’s gift and not a product of human labor. We seldom interrogate the origins of the food on our table, the roof over our heads, and the other comforts that immigrant workers provide for most Americans. Including their voices in this book preserves their