Abstract
Analyzing the decline of the United Farm Workers has become something of a cottage industry. It is easy to forget the other organizations, like the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in the Midwest and South and the Pineros y Campesinos Noroeste (PCUN) in Oregon, that continue to organize and even thrive despite the undeniable challenges of building stable farm worker unions.
Mario Jimenez Sifuentez has written a short but illuminating book about the emergence of PCUN. It began not as a union but as an immigrant rights organization called the Willamette Valley Immigration Project (WVIP). Advocating for the undocumented remains central to its mission, and in tracing its history, Sifuentez offers a host of insights about organizing strategies, coalition politics, and the changing demographics of farm labor. Given the current attacks on Mexican immigrants emanating from the White House, the book could not be more timely.
The first two chapters provide valuable context by showing how Oregon’s farm labor force has evolved since World War II. In Oregon, as elsewhere, wartime labor shortages made the bracero program indispensable, but in Oregon, a thousand miles or more from the Mexican border, the guest workers in the program were not easily replaced. This gave them plenty of leverage in dealing with growers, and “strikes, work stoppages, and walkouts occurred monthly” (p. 28).
The bracero program’s extension after the war is generally viewed as a windfall for agribusiness, and growers in the Southwest profited immensely from it. But for their Oregon counterparts, the cost of recruiting and transporting braceros—which employers now had to bear—was prohibitive, and the wartime experience suggested that these workers were anything but docile.
One consequence of the war, however, was that growing numbers of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans migrated to Oregon. The bulk of them were Tejanos who, like their African-American counterparts in the Deep South, came North after the war, uprooted by mechanical cotton harvesters and fleeing the abuses of the Jim Crow South. These Texas transplants became the backbone of Oregon’s farm labor force, and Sifuentez makes good use of oral history interviews to portray the lives they built for themselves in the Northwest.
By the 1970s, the Tejanos were leaving the fields for better paying work. The undocumented workers who replaced them faced aggressive workplace raids by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The WVIP began as an attempt to inform them of their rights and publicize INS abuses. It pioneered the strategy, currently favored by the American Civil Liberties Union, of using the Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination as the immigrant’s first line of legal defense against possible deportation.
WVIP’s founders included Larry Kleinman of the National Lawyers Guild, Cipriano Ferrel, a former Brown Beret and United Farm Workers boycott organizer, and Ramon Ramirez, a native of East Los Angeles who had been involved in the Chicano Moratorium. Ferrel felt a deep bond with the UFW and its commitment to unionism, but grew frustrated with its often hostile approach to Mexican immigrants. Ramirez was influenced by CASA, a left organization that rejected the distinction between Mexican immigrants and U.S.-born Chicanos altogether. (In fact, CASA regarded the term “Chicano” as inherently divisive.)
Their different political paths led the three to a common concern for the undocumented. They came to realize that “chasing immigration agents across the state, a tedious task punctuated by dramatic moments, did not develop a community base or stimulate the growth of a movement” (p. 82). This led them to begin organizing pineros (tree planters), whose dangerous job and isolated work sites made them among the most vulnerable and viciously exploited of Oregon’s undocumented.
In a fascinating chapter, Sifuentez details WVIP’s unsuccessful attempt to make a principled alliance with the Northwest Forest Workers Association (NFWA), a labor cooperative of anglo environmentalists committed to repairing the damage done by U.S. Forest Service mismanagement of federal lands. Nominally leftist in its politics, NFWA was initially sympathetic to the undocumented but eventually came to see them as competitors rather than potential allies—much like the UFW.
With the passage of the Simpson-Rodino immigration bill in 1986, WVIP emerged as a mass organization, soon reconstituting itself as PCUN. It helped thousands of undocumented Oregonians navigate the amnesty provisions in the law, and, in the process, gained a foothold in the fields as well as the forests. It was involved in a number of farm labor struggles in the 1990s, most of which appear to have been initiated by workers themselves. Workers turned to PCUN for help; PCUN responded with a strategic approach straight out of the UFW’s playbook, augmenting militant workplace action with lawsuits, coalition-building, and consumer boycotts.
Given the instability of farm labor, PCUN was often less concerned with winning formal collective bargaining than with building stable organizations in the community that could sustain workplace struggles as they occurred. A notable feature of its boycott work was its alliance with Basic Rights Oregon, a gay rights group that proved a far better coalition partner than NFWA.
Sifuentez’s account of this phase of PCUN’s history relies heavily on the organization’s archives, and the partisan rhetoric of PCUN’s literature finds its way into the narrative. This can be distracting: referring to someone as a grower’s “henchman” does not afford much insight into the person’s behavior, an important consideration from an organizer’s as well as a scholar’s point of view. I also wanted some analysis of the Chicano and Mexicano labor contractors (with nicknames like “El Diablo”) who often served as heavies in PCUN’s dramas. It would have been useful if Sifuentez had been able to provide more information about the workers who initiated the struggles detailed in the book’s last two chapters.
These weaknesses bear mention only because the rest of Fields and Forests is so good. I learned enormously from it, and appreciate that it is written so that both academics and general audiences can do likewise.