Pablo’s Problem: Michigan Chicano Movement Anti-colonialism and the Farm Bureau’s Peasant Menace

In 1969 M.J. Buschlen, employee of the Michigan Farm Bureau (MFB), asserted that “foreign peasant labor” and American agriculture were inseparable.  Likewise, the editors of Sol de Aztlan, a Lansing Chicano Movement newspaper, believed American prosperity depended upon paying migrant workers “starvation wages.” For both, the agricultural labor of impoverished “foreign” people was key to the historical development of the United States.  Yet, they differed greatly on the significance of America’s reliance on “foreign agricultural labor.”  Michigan Chicano Movement anti-colonialism grew out of this conflict and the need to combat growers’ colonial domestic/migrant binary.

Between 1962 and 1967 Mexican-Americans pressured the state to protect migrant workers’ through non-partisan organizations.  These organizations lobbied for migrants as American workers and citizens. Growers consistently opposed state regulation, but paid little attention to migrant advocates prior to 1965 because they were confident in their ability to prevent adverse legislation.  They promoted a conservative anti-Communist worldview wherein any state regulation of agriculture opened the door to communism, famine and peasantry for farmers. 

By the end of the 1960s the vision of both growers and Chicanos had evolved.  In their attempts to continue their access to a colonized labor force after the Bracero Program growers articulated a migrant/domestic binary while opposing the minimum wage, workers compensation and housing regulation. The slow progress of change for migrants between 1966 and 1968 contributed to the decline of a Mexican-American worker-citizen identity.  By 1969 former Mexican-Americans increasingly adopted a rhetoric of difference in the language of la raza. By 1970 the MFB also abandoned its principle opposing state regulation and supported new laws that recognized migrants as workers and citizens.  Despite this discursive shift material improvements for migrants were minimal; state regulations were poorly implemented and primarily functioned as subsidies for marginal growers.