Mexican Migrant Workers and Lynch Culture Essay -- Mexico Agriculture

Mexican Migrant Workers and Lynch Culture More than a million agricultural workers migrated to the United States in the early twentieth century. The majority of these persons found work on small family farms in California; the white owners of these farms welcomed cheap labor. Although most migrant workers in California today are of Mexican descent, they originally came from all over the world: East and West Europe, China, Japan, Korea and Latin America, along with Mexico. The shift to almost exclusively Mexican migrant workers in the early 1900s was intentional. Growers at this time anticipated racial conflicts between the immigrating workers and the â€Å"natives† of California. Growers minimized local opposition to Mexican immigration by promising that the Mexican would return to Mexico (only a short distance away) following picking season. This broken promise enabled the growth of systematic oppression toward the incoming Mexicans. As time went on, growers depended increasingly on the cheap labor provided by the Mexicans. This dependence, coupled with rising unemployment in Mexico, created a rising influx of Mexican immigrants to California, establishing Mexicans as â€Å"the single largest ethnic farm workers group in California† by the 1920’s. [1] Because these workers were forced to settle into communities that did not want them, and in communities that were promised the Mexicans were only staying temporarily, Mexicans were segregated, victimized, and resented by the surrounding white population. This maltreatment eventually escalated into racial oppression comparable to that of the blacks in the Jim Crow south. [2] The racial hierarchy that Mexicans faced in the Southwest left t... ... or shot. The masked men were never investigated, or if they were, they were never arrested post-investigation. This information is available in more depth in Carrigan and Webb’s article. [5] Again, see the article cited by William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb for further information. [6] These groups are used to represent many other groups that adopt a similar ideology. I see them all a response to the growing Mexican population in the Southwest. Mediums like radio, internet, and other propaganda were used to broadcast the message of these groups, which was essentially that Americans must wake up to the â€Å"reality† of the Mexican invasion. More on these groups can be located at www.aztalan.net/lynched.htm. [7] Mexican American Civil Rights organizations have been formed in the Southwest to combat these oppressive forces, but they are severely outnumbered.