Between Two Nations: Organizing among Mexican Migrants in Los Angeles, California, 1920–35

Ten percent of the Mexican people migrated to the US in the early twentieth century as Los Angeles emerged as the largest center of Mexican settlement in the US with tens of thousands of migrants passed through the city each year. The area became a large hub that acted as the center of various migratory routes that took people to fields up and down the west coast and the Midwest. At the center of this stood the regions own migratory economy of fruits and vegetable agribusinesses. Mexicans in Los Angeles maintained lives there and in Mexico, often traveling back and forth in large numbers. The Great Depression changed all of these patterns.

As the relationship between the Mexican governments’ consuls and the migrant population became strained during the repatriation drives, radical groups began to more successfully organize among Mexicans. Rather than the Mexican population becoming more “American” in its outlook in this era, many still saw themselves as Mexicans and turned to the Communist Party among others. The 1933 Berry Strike bought all of these tensions to the surface. Centered in El Monte, outside of Los Angeles, in an era before the Wager Act, at the height of anti-Mexican prejudice, and along radical lines, the strike challenged almost all conventional thinking about organizing migratory laborers. The Mexican government became involved in the strike only to see its relationship with the migrant population become more and more strained.  

I argue that this strike showed the limits of both the Mexican public sphere that migrants had created centered on Mexican Consuls and Spanish newspapers, and showed the limits of the nascent Mexican-American organizations that were not better at improving conditions. Under these conditions people turned to radical organizations in a brief but ultimately far reaching effort to change conditions on the ground.