A Report California Farmers Tried to Suppress
Strangers in Our Fields: Based on a report regarding compliance with the contractual, legal and civil rights of Mexican agricultural contract labor in the United States . . .
Publication: Washington, DC: United States Section, Joint United States-Mexico Trade Union Committee, 1956. Second Edition.
Notes: An examination of the working conditions and treatment of Mexican laborers under the Bracero program. Galarza, in his role as Research Director for the National Agricultural Workers Union, conducted four months of field work for this report. He served simultaneously as the California Field Representative for the Joint US-Mexico Trade Union. This report, sponsored by US labor unions, documented the abusive working condition and low wages of the Mexican laborers who worked in American agriculture under the Bracero program.
This second edition, published six months after the first, has three new paragraphs, which replaces an image on page 30. It also carries a new introduction describing the response to the first edition. The introduction reports that the US Secretary of Labor "was urged by farm employers to prevent its circulation." The publisher then goes on to chastise the farmers who opposed the publication of Galarza's report: "We remind those who previously denounced 'Strangers in Our Fields' and attempted to suppress it, that truth thrives on controversy and that mere denunciation never altered a fact."
Galarza, a Mexican American researcher from Sacramento, California, had a long career, publishing his first book in the 1920s. In the late 1960s, he self-published a series of educational books for Chicano children and later a volume of poetry.
vi, 80 pages.
Edition + Condition: Second edition. Very good in wrappers with wear to the spine ends.
Item No: #365196
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