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The Bureaucratic Origins ofMigrant Poverty: The TexasCotton Industry, 1910–1930José Guillermo PastranoPublished online: 10 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: José Guillermo Pastrano (2008) The Bureaucratic Origins of MigrantPoverty: The Texas Cotton Industry, 1910–1930, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 35:4,688-719, DOI: 10.1080/03066150802681997

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The Bureaucratic Origins of MigrantPoverty: The Texas Cotton Industry,

1910–1930

JOSE GUILLERMO PASTRANO

Migrant poverty resulted from the bureaucratization of Mexicans as

a cheap source of labor for the Texas cotton industry from 1910 to

1930. State and federal employment programs and policies designed

to maintain an organized and efficient labor market bureaucratized

the divisions of labor that segregated Mexicans in seasonal low-wage

agricultural work. While the implementation of labor legislation

solved the temporary labor needs of large-scale cotton farmers, it

exacerbated the working and living conditions of Mexican migratory

workers. The welfare of Mexican migrants worsened as state

managers integrated the recruitment and distribution of this labor

force into the organizational structure of the Texas cotton industry.

INTRODUCTION

The Texas migrant families that the researchers for the US Department of

Labor and the University of Texas observed in the cotton-growing regions of

that state lived inhumane conditions. Poverty was widespread among all

migratory families that followed the Texas cotton-picking circuit from June

to December.1 Living conditions were no better than those of other migrant

families in the American Southwest.2 Families that picked cotton from the

lower Rio Grande Valley to the high plains of west Texas in the 1920s

camped on the side of road between harvest dates. They slept and cooked on

the open road, waiting for seasonal work. Cotton growers occasionally

showed their compassionate side by housing migrants in empty farm

buildings during harvest. Such shelters, nevertheless, were no safer than tents.

They had no floors or windows, and the only exit was a single door.

Jose Guillermo Pastrano is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy atthe University of Texas-Pan American. The author would like to thank Alex Lichtenstein forencouraging him to participate in this round table discussion. The author would also like to thankthe staff in the Humanities Research Center at Rice University.

The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.35, No.4, October 2008, pp.688–719ISSN 0306-6150 print/1743-9361 onlineDOI: 10.1080/03066150802681997 ª 2008 Taylor & Francis

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Sanitation in vacant buildings in addition was no better than on the open

highway. The lack of sanitary facilities caused as much health problems as

the absence of fresh clean water. The fortunate ones stayed in ‘helped

houses’, where conditions were equally inferior. While some of these houses

were abandoned, others were classified ‘unfit for human habitation’. Housing

migrant families in such huts was something that researchers found shocking

and disturbing [DoL, 1924: 62–66; Allen, 1929: 361–363; 1931: 131–142;

Coalson, 1977: 29]. (See Figures 1 and 2.)

The anti-Mexican environment of the 1920s marginalized any discussion

that highlighted the bureaucratic origins of migrant poverty. The nativism

that had advocated the repatriation of Mexicans in the 1920–21 economic

recession racialized the socio-economic ‘evils’ that unfolded with the

industrialization of agriculture [CIN, 1921: 13–14; Reisler, 1976: 53–54].

Cheap Mexican labor, nativists argued, was the root cause of the

unemployment problem affecting American workers in the 1920s. In their

view, the cheapness of Mexican laborers had transformed the agricultural

workforce: Cotton growers’ preference for Mexican migrant families had

forced thousands of white small farmers out of business [CIN, 1928: 28, 46–

47; Reisler, 1976: 168–174]. Unable to compete, either they joined Mexicans

in the cotton-picking circuit or opted for unskilled industrial work. Mexicans,

nativists and restrictionists further claimed, were not just a labor problem;

they were also a social dilemma, especially in rural Texas where local

officials considered them as a menace to the social and economic fabric of

FIGURE 1: MEXICAN MIGRANT FAMILIES COOKING ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

Source: Allen, Ruth, 1931, ‘The Labor of Women in the Production of Cotton’, University of Texas Bulletin,

No.3134, p.235.

TEXAS COTTON INDUSTRY, 1910–1930 689

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their agricultural communities. The cheapness of Mexican workers, from this

perspective, had undermined ‘American standards of living’. ‘They

[Mexicans]’, in the words of one small farmer, ‘ruin the schools; they carry

germs; they add nothing to society [CIN, 1928: 9]’. Any discussions on the

migrant poverty crisis therefore stressed the Mexicanization of farm work

rather than the system of large-scale crop production [Montejano, 1987: 189–

190; Gutierrez, 1995: 53–56; Foley, 1997: 52–53].

Labor reformers during the Progressive Era reached a different conclusion.

Market-oriented farming was the basis of the poverty problem that had

emerged in the large-scale agricultural regions of the American Southwest.

Reformers like W. M. Leiserson agreed that the substandard living conditions

of itinerant laborers did not reflect the workers’ individual characteristics.

Leiserson and other employment experts in the 1910s ceased stressing

inefficiency, laziness, or lack of skills as the roots of migrant poverty and

focused on the system of large-scale crop production for answers [Leiserson,

1915a: 5–7, 9, 12, 17–20]. Progressives concluded that specialized seasonal

farm work changed the character of the laborers needed for each phase in

production. Workers required less overall knowledge than did the traditional

farmhand, but they needed to have more specific skills. Each operation had a

FIGURE 2: A ‘HELP HOUSE’ FOR MEXICAN MIGRANT FAMILIES

Source: Allen, Ruth, 1931, ‘The Labor of Women in the Production of Cotton’, University of Texas Bulletin,

No.3134, p.216.

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variety of manpower needs, with some requiring more workers than others.

Specialized farm operations provided only temporary employment, but their

success depended on workers who understood the specific requirements of

each field task. Seasonal unemployment resulted not because laborers refused

to look for work. The problem was that the production of commercial crops

provided extremely limited work periods [Leiserson, 1915a: 5–7; Speek,

1915a: 1; CIR, 1915: 156, 159].

Progressives focused on the seasonal nature of market-oriented agriculture to

examine the poverty associated with a growing class of peripatetic laborers. By

the 1910s, the seasonality of large-scale crop production had institutionalized

seasonal unemployment and mass idleness in the nation’s agricultural regions

[Leiserson, 1915a: 5–7, 9, 12]. In Texas, where commercial farming was

maturing, growers rarely employed Mexican agricultural workers year-round.

Short-term farm work like cotton picking normally lasted a few weeks or a

month, or sometimes as little as four to six days; other jobs were longer or

shorter, depending on climatic and market conditions [Galarza, 1964: 34].

Changes in the weather normally reduced the work week by two or three days,

causing laborers to lose time and money as they searched for new work in new

places [Leiserson, 1915a: 15, 17]. Likewise, bad market conditions usually

meant limited employment for few Mexican workers. Until the demands of

special farm operations prompted Texas cotton farmers to seek mass numbers

of day laborers, Mexican wage-earners remained jobless. The seasonal

character of these kinds of jobs combined with unstable market and climatic

conditions defeated any efforts on the part of the workers to climb out of

poverty [Leiserson, 1915a: 6–7, 16].

To Leiserson and other reformers, an unorganized, unregulated labor

market was the root cause of migrant poverty. Compelled to annually travel

long distances for employment, Mexican laborers relied on rumors to locate

seasonal farm work. Workers often congested agricultural districts where

there was no real demand for seasonal help. Meanwhile, other regions faced

manpower shortages, because temporary wage-earners were not informed of

opportunities. An unfettered labor market, too, made it easy for private

employment agencies to prey on peripatetic Mexican laborers, who depended

on their recruiting services. Recruiters either sent seasonal hands to

agricultural areas, which were already flooded, or they neglected to distribute

workers where work was available. Moreover, because laborers did not have

the slightest idea where to find farm work and because they lacked the

resources to travel, fee-charging agencies profited from their recruitment. The

dishonest methods of the licensed and unlicensed recruiters impelled

Progressives to support a labor policy that would rationalize the recruitment

and distribution of seasonal help. A well organized and regulated labor

market, Leiserson and his contemporaries believed, was the solution to

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improving the poor living conditions of migrants by increasing work duration

and income [Leonard, 1913: 71; Leftwich, 1913: 75; Leiserson, 1915a: 24–

26, 35–42; Leiserson, 1915b: 1–5, 10–11; CIR, 1915: 157; Gilmartin, 1942:

135–136; Coalson, 1977: 46].

Progressives, despite their sincere intention to alleviate the migrant poverty

problem, failed to understand large-scale farmers’ reasons for an organized

and efficient farm labor market. Texas growers’ objectives like those of other

commercial farmers in the American Southwest revolved around maintaining

the cost of labor at a low fixed rate.3 Conscious that they found themselves in

a competitive national and international market, cotton farmers, as historian

David Montejano illustrates of commercial growers in south Texas, aimed to

reduce the cost of production by controlling wages [Montejano, 1987: 198].

And, as this article argues, controlling wages was the chief motive for Texas

cotton growers to advocate the organization of an agricultural labor market

from 1910 to 1930. An organized seasonal farm labor market guaranteed

Texas farmers that wages, particularly during cotton harvest, remained near

to the ground.4 Low wages, as cotton-growing associations claimed in the

1920s immigration hearings, permitted Texas cotton producers to compete in

a global market and to make a profit at the end of the season [CIN, 1928:

147–148; Saloutos, 1964: 254–255]. Preserving a low-wage structure,

however, proved to be a challenge, as the agricultural economies of the

Texas and the American Southwest rapidly grew from 1910 to 1930.

Controlling wages developed into an institutional problem for cotton farmers

as more and more commercial growers in the US West relied on Mexican

migratory wage-earners for the picking season.

Naturally, Texas cotton farming associations were among the chief

supporters for the creation of a public employment bureau. Though the

government lacked the right to set farm wages, an apparatus such as the US

Employment Service (USES) in World War I and the State Free Employment

Service (SFES) under the Texas Bureau of Labor Statistics (TBLS) in the mid–

1920s gave cotton farmers’ bureaucratic control over low wages and the state

agricultural labor market. With the authority to centralize and routinize the

mobility of peripatetic laborers, the government undermined the threat of

competitive higher wages. By focusing on the technical aspect of stabilizing

the labor market, the government bureaucratized the low cost of labor, and, by

extension, the poor living conditions of Mexican migrants [Edwards, 1979:

130–162; Montejano, 1987: 197–201; Foley, 1997: 48; Robertson, 2000: 12].

This article further argues that the bureaucratization of labor recruitment and

distribution in the organizational structure of the USES and the TBLS

segregated a Mexican migratory workforce in the low-wage seasonal farm jobs

of a burgeoning modern farm economy. Free recruiting services institutiona-

lized the division of labor between seasonal and permanent employment,

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low-wage unskilled farm jobs and better-paid industrial occupations, rural and

urban labor, and Mexican and white work. By deputizing state managers with

the authority to regulate the dishonest activities of licensed and unlicensed

labor recruiters, an organized labor market intended to discourage Mexicans

from settling in farming communities and industrial centers outside south

Texas. State intervention in the years prior to the new concern for migratory

workers generated by the Great Depression, had bureaucratized migrant

poverty within the government agencies and programs tailored to rationalize

the farm labor needs of the cotton industry.

Before moving ahead, an explanation of terminology is needed here.

Throughout the article I use the term Mexican when referring to Mexican

Americans and Mexican immigrants, because it was the common term used

by Texas cotton farmers and government officials prior to 1930. Large-scale

growers and state regulators rarely made a distinction between US- and

Mexico-born Mexicans, especially when they made reference to seasonal

farm laborers. Mexican wage-earners, regardless of their citizenship status,

were viewed through the same racialized lens. Mexican Americans and

Mexican immigrants as a racialized labor force, at least to Texas farmers,

were the desirable race to work in the agricultural sector [Montejano, 1987:

4–7, 186–187; Zamora, 1993: xi-xii]. ‘Mexicans as a race’, as one expert of

agricultural labor claimed, ‘can do practically anything, [such] as thinning

sugar beets, teaming, range riding, pick and shovel work, fruit picking and

handling, cutting corn, etc [Adams, 1921: 522]’. The desirability of Mexicans

as a race also explains why Mexican immigrants before 1917 were not

subject to the same immigration restrictions that excluded other racialized

immigrant groups, particularly the Chinese.5 As long as Mexicans toiled in

low-wage seasonal farm work and as long as they returned to Mexico after

the cotton-picking season, white people overlooked their growing presence in

rural Texas. Since their temporary settlement in cotton farms posed no threat

to the racial, cultural, and social structures of farming communities, the

federal government saw no need to regulate Mexican immigration prior to the

First World War [Clark, 466, 485, 511–512, 519; Reisler, 1976: 12;

Gutierrez, 1995: 48–49, 52; Guerin-Gonzalez, 1996: 47; Foley, 1997: 45].

THE UNREGULATED ERA (1910–1917)

Texas farmers’ monopoly over the low-wage labor market waned as a diverse

market-oriented economy matured after 1910. The state possessed regions

that produced corn, cotton, and wheat for commercial purposes; districts that

grew Bermuda onions and cabbage on a large scale; and areas where lumber,

mining, and oil were the dominant industries. Growers farmed more than

twenty kinds of perishable and staple crops. The rapid diversification of the

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farming economy during the first two decades of the twentieth century

generated diverse seasonal labor demands that restructured the state’s wage

system and labor market. [T.B.B., 1901a: 801–802; T.B.B., 1901c: 930–921;

Connell, 1902: 30–32; DoA, 1905: 212–218; TCSBMA, 1910: 8–9; TCSBMA,

1912: 4–33; DoCL, 1912: 33–34; USRA, 1919: 3–49].6 Such economic

changes drove Texas farmers to compete for seasonal help and gave Mexican

wage-earners some leverage over an unregulated labor market. Mexican

laborers continuously used whatever limited job opportunities were available

to contest the bargaining position growers enjoyed [Zamora, 1993: 30–31,

66–71].7

The Texas cotton belt provides an example of the economic diversity that

existed in the unregulated era. This cotton-producing area formed a

quadrangle with San Antonio in the west, Dallas in the north, Houston in

the east, and Corpus Christi in the south. Cotton farmers in the region

produced a significant fraction of this commodity at a time when Texas

ranked first in cotton production [Foley, 1997: 15–16]. Between 1900 and

1920, Texas growers annually grew over 20 percent of the nation’s cotton.

Still, not all the counties in this agricultural region raised this staple. The area

also had a wheat-growing district near Dallas, a corn-producing section near

Waco, and a vegetable and fruit region in the counties around Houston. Truck

and fruit farming, moreover, was gradually displacing the cattle industry in

the counties between San Antonio and Corpus Christi. Vegetable and fruit

growers in Karnes, Gonzalez, and Victoria counties in south-central Texas

and Smith and Cherokee counties in east Texas produced a considerable

amount of perishable crops in the early 1910s [T.B.B., 1901b: 839–840;

T.B.B., 1902: 512; Richardson, 1902: 752; DoA, 1905: 214–216; Cox, 1915:

58–65].

By 1914, when the US began to support the Allies in Europe, farmers in

the black land belt of the quadrangular region annually fought over seasonal

help. As the production cycle of cotton, corn, and oats became permanent,

competition for a migratory workforce increased. Because growers conducted

their farming activities during the same months of the year, labor needs for

large-scale operations conflicted. Ground preparation for the seeding of

cotton and corn overlapped with the harvesting of oats, while the cotton- and

corn-picking seasons took place during the oat soil preparation and seeding.

The demand for short-term help in this farming region every spring and fall

pressed local growers to compete for Mexican workers, potentially driving up

the cost of wages. Each spring, farmers competed for itinerant laborers to

prepare their soil for cotton or corn crops. And each fall, this was repeated for

the harvesting of oats and cotton [Willard, 1914: 225–226].

Since Texas farmers were increasingly required to compete for temporary

help, individual recruitment became problematic in the unregulated era.

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Cotton growers, who at one time had depended on this scheme to meet their

individual labor needs, could no longer rely on it. Such a recruiting system

caused extensive technical difficulties during harvest. Outbidding was one of

these common technical problems that evolved in the early 1910s. Individual

farmers, anxious to get the best price for their cotton, generally offered higher

wages to recruit the seasonal hands needed for cotton picking. The trouble

with this recruiting method, at least to labor-economists like W. E. Leonard,

was that it cost farmers hundreds of dollars because of the instability of the

cotton market. Wages rapidly rose, particularly during harvest, while prices

quickly fell [Leonard, 1913: 67–68; TSES, 1940: 11]. Employment specialists

also perceived the lack of communication among growers who conducted

their own individual recruitment a technical dilemma, because it exacerbated

labor conditions. Communication deficiency caused some areas to be

regularly flooded with migratory workers, while others faced labor shortages.

This problem also resulted in hundreds of dollars’ loss in crops for the same

reasons as outbidding. Individual farmers who rationalized their manpower

needs by paying higher wages moreover made the technical crisis of the labor

market unmanageable in the early 1910s. While losing control of practical

problems generated other difficulties besides labor, government intervention,

as Leonard argued in 1913, could rationalize the supply side and, by

extension, resolve both technical and non-technical problems [Leonard,

1913: 67–70; TSES, 1940: 11; Speek, 1915b: 4; Roback, 1984: 1171].

Unable to get state and federal government support from 1910 to 1917,

cotton growers responded to this technical crisis by organizing in groups to

recruit short-term help. Cotton growers then collaborated with farming

associations and chambers of commerce to boost their recruiting efforts.

These private organizations assisted by advertising the seasonal labor

requirements of their members in local newspapers and statewide bulletins.

‘Help wanted’ notices and announcements were quite simple, and the

objective was to attract as many laborers as possible [Taylor, 1930: 325;

TSES, 1940: 26; Rosenbloom, 2002: 27]. By advertising in farming

communities and cities before harvest, this recruiting strategy probably met

the manpower needs of cotton growers in the early 1910s. Unfortunately, out-

of-town labor recruiting also disrupted local labor markets and wage

standards, because Texas farmers’ fundamental objectives remained the

same. Commercial growers continued to stress the need for an adequate

supply of cheap laborers to pick crops. For this reason, rationalizing the labor

requirements of cotton growers remained a technical dilemma until World

War I. Organizations complicated matters when they placed calls for wage

workers in the newspaper of other communities instead of finding a

systematic solution to the labor problems of their members. The technical

crisis faced by individual growers in their own schemes evolved into an

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institutional dimension as farming associations competed for Mexican wage-

earners statewide in the unregulated era [Taylor, 1930: 330; TSES, 1940: 26–

27].

The railroads, the biggest employer of Mexican workers in the early 1900s,

also experienced the problem of competitive wages [DoCL, 1908: 477;

Reisler, 1976: 96–97; Zamora, 1993: 19]. Since penniless Mexicans could

not afford the US$12 to US$15 train fare to the US, they repeatedly used

railroad employment as a springboard to higher-paying occupations in Texas.

During the off season, unskilled laborers in the unregulated era who sought

work contracts as track or construction workers with the Southern Pacific

Company and other rail lines in Mexico did so to catch a free ride to the coal

mines. The Southern Pacific, in particular, annually lost a significant fraction

of its recruits to mining, because salaries were better. A railroad employment

agent complaining to labor-economist Victor S. Clark while he was

conducting field work in 1908 claimed that ‘They [Mexicans] will go to a

job, if they agree to, and work, though they may not stay long’ [DoCL, 1908:

471]. Labor conditions, however, changed once the cotton-picking season

started in Texas and Oklahoma. Cotton harvest was the most frustrating time

for the railroads because of the high rate of desertion. Mexican section hands

– sometimes entire gangs – abandoned railroad worksites after a few days for

cotton picking. Seeing that Mexicans could earn more harvesting this staple

in one day, railroads raised day wages up to US$1.75 in the early 1900s. Still,

higher pay only provided limited assurance, as track crews arriving at their

final destination increasingly jumped train rather than honoring their

agreement [DoCL, 1908: 471–472, 482–483; Reisler, 1976: 8–11; Zamora,

1993: 36–37; Foley, 1997: 44–45; Driscoll, 1999: 18–19; Calderon, 2000:

34–35].8

Individual recruiting encouraged Mexican wage-earners to confront Texas

farmers directly for better pay. Mexican onion clippers in Asherton, Texas

went on strike for higher wages on April 27, 1912. While local growers

perceived onion clipping to be an unskilled low-wage job, the striking

workers saw it otherwise. The Mexican onion clippers, who requested more

money, clearly understood that they possessed valuable skills necessary for

the springtime harvest of Bermuda onions, a highly perishable crop. They

demanded four cents per onion crate rather than the average two cents that

truck farmers paid in this part of Texas from 1912 to 1915 [ TDA, 1915: 45;

Taylor, 1930: 324]. ‘The onion growers’, the local newspaper reported,

‘couldn’t see the raise’. Doing so would have undercut the average wage in

the area and the bargaining position that Asherton truck farmers took for

granted in pre-World War I Texas. It would have also set up a precedent, a

new wage standard for a racialized seasonal workforce. Since Asherton is

located in southwest Texas near the US-Mexico border, the onion growers

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had a geographic advantage over the regional labor market. They could, as

they did in the end, ‘simply sent out for more Mexicans’. Before the growers

reached this point, they tried to compromise with the Mexican onion clippers.

Mindful that truck farmers statewide picked their onions in May, Asherton

growers proposed a 50 percent increase, raising pay to three cents per onion

crate. The striking workers, feeling ‘pretty crusty’, declined the offer and

stood their ground until the farmers promptly dismissed them [The Javelin,

1912: 1; Taylor, 1930: 351; Zamora, 1993: 58].

Progressives feared that the kind of agitation manifested by Mexican onion

clippers could produce a social and political upheaval in the Texas labor

market. Discontent over cheap wages had the potential to trigger organized

and unorganized resistance, particularly in large-scale farming regions, where

migratory workers’ living conditions continued to deteriorate in the early

1910s. Rural demagogues had no problems finding listeners and followers in

areas where unsanitary conditions, poor housing, and disease made migrant

life insufferable. Intolerable conditions had ‘easily aroused [itinerant

laborers] to riot and rebellion [Leiserson, 1915b: 10]’ in the past. Large-

scale farmers in Texas indeed had experienced rural unrest in the late 1880s

and early 1890s, and the political impact of it was still present in their

consciousness.9 Worse, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had

shown an interest in organizing peripatetic wage-earners. The Wobblies

had unionized seasonal workers in numerous areas of the West, and had

participated in some of the biggest farm strikes from 1910 to 1914. They had

converted agricultural communities like Asherton, Texas into breeding

grounds for radicalism. The IWW’s success in organizing laborers was based

on bread-and-butter issues like low wages and the lack of steady employ-

ment. They exploited the inhuman conditions of living under such an unstable

system of crop production to boost their recruitment in the years leading to

World War I [Speek, 1915b: 6; Lieserson, 1915a: 1–3; Higbie, 2003: 134–

165; McWilliams, 1999: 150–164; Majka and Majka, 1982: 51–61; Daniel,

1981: 76, 81–104].

Simply sending a recruiter to employ more Mexicans instead of raising

wages, illustrated that the interests of Texas growers outweighed any concern

farmers may have had for the poor living conditions of migrants. Unlike the

reformers of the US Commission on Industrial Relations (1912–1915), Texas

farmers’ interests lay in solving the technical problems that threatened the

stability of a low-wage labor market. Commercial growers were aware that

maintaining an adequate supply of unskilled labor was vital for large-scale

operations. But even more important was preserving a stable racialized low-

wage structure. An abundance of cheap Mexican labor, as even land promoters

recognized by 1910, was transforming the economic and industrial landscape

of the state. A marginalized low-wage workforce gave Texas farmers the

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competitive edge they wanted [FLP, 1904: 17–18; RI-FLP, 1906: 57, 61–62;

LCC, 1926: 11–12; Montejano, 1987: 198–200; Zamora, 1993: 11–12].

Meeting the four-cent-per-onion-crate demand of the Mexican onion clippers

would have contradicted growers’ racialized economic views on cheap labor.

Commercial growers were not interested in improving the welfare of migrants

to maintain a stable workforce. Texas farmers would even have preferred

hiring a private employment agency to standardizing a new wage rate.10

Since the business of recruiting Mexican wage laborers ran into the

thousands of dollars, licensed and unlicensed agents from the start caused

more troubles than did workers in the unregulated era. Instead of solving the

manpower crises emerging with the industrialization of the state’s

agricultural economy in the early 1910s, they intensified them, by

capitalizing on the needs of both farmers and laborers. As Texas cotton

growers and Mexican seasonal workers gradually depended on recruiters

from 1910 to 1917, fraud and abuse became rife in the unregulated era. Labor

agents’ deceitful schemes kept the Texas farm labor market in disarray,

flooding and causing shortages in agricultural districts [Lieserson, 1915a: 34–

41; TBLS, 1915: 13; TBLS, 1917: 12; TBLS, 1920: 29–31].

Private employment agencies stepped in when farming associations and

chambers of commerce could no longer meet the labor needs of desperate

cotton growers who went off to cities during harvest to hire temporary help.

Agricultural organizations, chambers of commerce and, later, municipal and

state governments lacked the organizational structure and resources to

routinize the recruitment and distribution of Mexican workers before World

War I. Private agents in the unregulated era profited from this void in the

farm labor market [Peck, 2000: 49–81; Rosenbloom, 2002: 46–79]. They

preyed on cotton growers by charging them extortionate fees and

transportation cost to secure laborers. Fees averaged from two to five dollars

per person, depending on the season; in some instances, farmers paid up to

ten dollars for workers. Re-selling laborers was another ploy that the so-

called man-catchers commonly practiced from 1910 to 1917, especially

during cotton harvest. Aware that this was the peak period when Texas

farmers required the most help, man-catchers normally waited two or three

days after growers had paid them for delivering workers before persuading

laborers to leave for higher pay somewhere else. Once they had collected the

money from another farmer, again, they waited two or three days before

repeating the process. The most unscrupulous agents would not even

distribute the recruited workers before re-selling them to another farmer.

Man-catchers who received advance money were known to persuade

Mexicans to jump train before arriving in their final destination [Lieserson,

1915a: 40–41; TBLS, 1917: 12; TBLS, 1919: 16–17; TBLS, 1920: 30; TSES,

1940: 13–19; Coalson, 1977: 46; Foley, 1997: 48–49].

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Labor agents exploited Mexican workers as well. Abuses resulted from the

growing preference of Texas farmers for low-wage Mexican labor. By the

mid-1910s, the integration of cheap migrant labor into the large-scale

production of a market-oriented agricultural system was evolving. Mexican

labor was an essential, seasonal component that assured commercial growers

in the American Southwest a profit. This indispensability, yet seasonality,

segregated them in the margins, where labor agents freely ran their business

as they saw fit. The segregation of Mexicans generated the conditions that

facilitated the exploitation of them by licensed and unlicensed agents in the

1910s. Misrepresentation of terms and conditions was the most common

fraud in the man-catching business. Labor agents generally promised workers

high wages and free transportation as an incentive to get them to sign a

contract. Recruits always found the opposite upon arrival. Farmers

occasionally paid workers 25 to 50 percent less that what recruiters had

promised them. Workers sometimes sadly discovered a deduction of their pay

to cover the cost of transportation and meals [TBLS, 1919: 26; TBLS, 1920:

16–17, 29–30; Foley, 1997: 48–49].

To T. C. Jennings, the Texas Labor Commissioner from 1917 to 1921,

corruption reflected the absence of an effective labor law to police dishonest

behavior. Initially, the TBLS lacked the authority to end the illegal activities

of labor recruiters. This state government agency functioned like an advisory

board, conducting surveys on the working and living conditions of wage-

earners and making recommendations on labor legislation from 1910 to 1915

[TBLS, 1926: 7]. The man-catching business thrived even after the state

legislature passed a law to govern private employment agencies in the mid-

1910s. Inspectors had no administrative apparatus, were understaffed, and

had limited resources to monitor the activities of unscrupulous labor agents.

Flaws in the law also encouraged licensed and unlicensed agents to look for

possible loopholes or to flat out reject this legislation. Private employment

agencies’ refusal to file the required annual report of workers recruited

illustrated the defectiveness of this labor law. Their complete rejection of the

law undercut the state’s duty to supervise their recruiting business and to

gather ample evidence to prosecute them for any wrong doing. And even

when the TBLS had collected the information to bring violators to trial,

county officials declined to press charges. County administrators in the

unregulated era snubbed this labor law, because it ‘interfere[d] with . . . the

natural advantages enjoyed by the employer [TBLS, 1919: 18]’. Texas labor

laws encroached upon the basic principles of a free-market society. Since

county officials belonged to the same class as those who broke the law,

Commissioner Jennings suspected political corruption. Local political

influence undermined the efforts of the TBLS to enforce labor laws. After

just a few years, frustrated with the statute’s shortcomings, Commissioner

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Jennings recommended the law be repealed in 1918 [TBLS, 1917: 12; TBLS,

1919: 16–18, 26–27; TBLS, 1920: 11, 15–16].

World War I generated the conditions that restructured the nation’s labor

markets. Though the United States did not send troops to Europe until 1917,

its support for the Allies increased production in all industries as early as

1914. The demand for war-related material and the halt of European

immigration created an urgent situation for common labor in the nation’s

industrial centers. Labor scarcity in manufacturing industries drove factory

owners to raise wages to attract unskilled laborers from the countryside

during the First World War. Industrialists in addition sent their company

recruiters to the South to induce tens of thousands of rural wage-earners to

toil in northern factories. Government manpower needs also absorbed

millions of farm workers. While the armed forces drafted thousands of young

men, the federal government employed thousands more to toil in military

camps, ships, and munitions factories during the war [US Department of

Agriculture, 1918: 3; Schwartz, 1942: 178–187; Brody, 1969: 180–198;

Hoffman, 1974: 9; Coalson, 1977: 14; Fite, 1984: 98; Tuttle, 1996: 74–107;

Hahamovitch, 1997: 79–80].

Wartime labor needs broadened the geographic boundaries of the man-

catching business. Northern manufacturing employers and Midwestern

farmers hired the services of the so-called ‘emigrant agents’ or ‘traveling

man-catchers’ to recruit unskilled wage-earners in Texas [TBLS, 1919: 26;

Valdes, 1991: 10–11]. By offering higher wages and steady employment to

lure Mexicans from Texas farms, emigrant agents expanded the geographic

boundaries of migratory seasonal farm work during World War I. Mexican

migrants could now begin clipping onions in Asherton, move to central Texas

to pick cotton, and end up in the sugar-beet fields of the Midwest. Traveling

man-catchers shipped out over 150,000 laborers to out-of-state employers and

farmers between 1917 and 1918 [TBLS, 1919: 26]. By war’s end, emigrant

agents had further undermined the stability of an unregulated labor market

and the monopoly that Texas agricultural employers enjoyed over a Mexican

workforce [TBLS, 1920: 15–16; TSES, 1940: 22–23; Coalson, 1977: 46–47].

Regardless of the wages, the wartime labor competition pressured Texas

farmers to pay, the division of labor remained intact. Wartime wages scarcely

affected the segregation of Mexicans in seasonal agricultural work. The high

takings that resulted from meeting the requirements for unskilled labor

temporary reinforced the marginalization of Mexicans in the agricultural

sector. Similarly, the integration of ‘Mexican wages’ within the bureaucracy

of the licensed and unlicensed recruiting business bolstered growers’

bargaining position throughout the 1910s. Texas cotton growers, despite

the complaining and financial losses, maintained an upper hand in farm labor

relations. Though some Texas farmers raised wages to attract short-term help

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during the war, the institutionalization of low wages in the man-catching

business minimized resistance. Private employment agencies safeguarded the

low-wage structure once threatened by onion clippers in Asherton, Texas in

1912.

Ironically, the recruiting services of licensed and unlicensed employment

agencies in the unregulated era initiated the bureaucracy that segregated

Mexican laborers in low-wage agricultural work. By bureaucratizing the

migratory routes used by Mexican migrant families, the system created to

facilitate the recruitment and distribution of itinerant laborers institutiona-

lized the occupational structure of an unregulated labor market [Rosenbloom,

2002: 46–68, 78–79]. Despite the disorder that emigrant agents and man-

catchers unleashed, the division of labor in the agricultural sector remained

relatively undamaged in the 1910s. Private recruiters bureaucratized low-

wage unskilled ‘Mexican work’ within the organizational structure of their

recruiting businesses, and, by extension, within the institutional structure of

the Texas cotton industry.11 Agencies’ organizational structure also

strengthened the division between seasonal agricultural work and permanent

industrial labor. The numbers of Mexicans employed in urban-industrial

occupations compared to farm work remained low in the 1910s. Labor agents

in border towns like Eagle Pass and Laredo employed Mexicans specifically

for low-wage farm work. The recruitment and distribution of Mexican

laborers from the border to the interior minimized the permanent entry of this

workforce in the labor markets of Texas cities in the 1910s.

WORLD WAR I TEMPORARY ADMISSION PROGRAM (1917–1921)

On June 27, 1919, eight months after World War I ended, the South Texas

Cotton Growers’ Association (STCGA) held a convention in Corpus Christi,

Texas.12 With the cotton-picking season just a week away and a labor

shortage already evident in the cotton-growing counties of the south Texas

gulf coast, members discussed possible solutions to the labor crisis. Confident

of their political support in Austin, STCGA representatives asked the Texas

State Legislature to pass a resolution requesting the assistance of the United

States Senators and House of Representatives in changing, modifying, or

suspending the current immigration legislation pertaining to alien labor from

Mexico. The STCGA was probably referring to the Immigration Act of 1917,

because it was during World War I that the first legal barriers to the

customary free flow of seasonal labor across the US-Mexico border were

enacted. The Immigration Act of 1917 increased the head tax to eight dollars

and required that immigrants pass a literacy test [Hoffman, 1974: 9; Reisler,

1976: 17; Daniels, 2004: 46; Tichenor, 2008: 43]. These new conditions and

the contract labor clause of 1885, however, were ignored for the most part.

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Cotton and sugar-beet growers associations in the Southwest and West

employed their political influence to pressure the federal government to

suspend these legal barriers in support of the war effort. They answered the

call for national support by insisting that the US Labor Department

rationalize the recruitment and distribution of seasonal help to meet the

demands of a wartime economy. Two years after the 1917 Immigration Act

was passed and eight months after World War I ended, aliens migrating were

obligated by law to submit an application for admission at the US ports of

entry [Ngai, 2004: 64]. Thus, it was not a surprise that the STCGA asked

Texas policymakers to adopt a resolution urging the US Congress to

temporarily cancel the US$8.00 head tax, literacy test, and contract clause so

local cotton farmers could recruit the necessary help for the 1919 crop season.

[CIN, 1926: 288; Foley, 1997: 45].13

Federal government intervention gave Texas growers the opportunity to

eradicate the man-catching business. Unlike in the Deep South, where

farmers resisted the presence of the US Labor Department, in Texas, cotton-

producers welcomed the assistance of state regulators, because it provided

commercial growers with the occasion to gain control of the low-wage labor

market from private employment agencies. While the inter- and intra-state

character of the labor market did not generate labor shortages, it forced cotton

growers to compete directly with out-of-state employers for seasonal help.

Competition for Mexican wage-earners cost farmers thousands of dollars, and

threatened the stability of the labor market and of the state’s low-wage

structure. Determined to minimize recruiting agencies’ influence over the

labor market, cotton farmers received the federal government with open

arms.14 With the US Labor Department regulating the manpower needs of a

wartime economy, cotton grower associations’ pressured federal officials to

lay out a legal and bureaucratic system to institutionalize labor recruitment

and distribution within the bureaucracy of the government [TBLS, 1917: 18;

TBLS, 1919: 30; Hahamovitch, 1997: 80].

Cotton farmers successfully persuaded US Secretary of Labor William B.

Wilson to implement a temporary labor admission program. Although this

scheme addressed the wartime manpower demand in the American Southwest

and Midwest, in reality it minimized cotton and sugar-beets growers’ need to

contract the recruiting services of labor agents. Conscious that they could

face an uphill political and legal battle with private employment agencies,

farming associations focused on converting temporarily admitted aliens into

quasi labor agents, by shifting responsibility from recruiters to the individual

Mexican immigrants. Every departmental change and suspension that large-

scale farmers advocated, and Secretary Wilson approved, made temporary

admitted aliens accountable for their part of the labor contract. Responsible

workers, for one, could not desert their workplace; those who did faced

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deportation. Aliens who challenged employer’s wages after being contracted

were also expelled. The definite terms and conditions that guaranteed

employment and a set wage criminalized laborers’ ‘irresponsible’ actions. By

making individual Mexican migrants the sole agent of their agreement, the

temporary labor admission program gave individual farmers legal and

bureaucratic authority over their seasonal workforce during World War I

[DoL, 1918a: 1–4; DoL, 1918b: 1–2].

Texas cotton growers supported the suspension of the US$8.00 head tax,

literacy test, and contract clause, because it segregated unskilled alien labor

from Mexico in the agricultural sector. Penniless Mexicans, who had no

education and yearned to work in the US, could now do so as long as they

agreed to the proviso. Temporary Mexican aliens could only apply for low-

wage unskilled seasonal occupations in the farming sector of the Southwest

and Midwest. Though employers were obligated to explain the pay they

offered, the kind of work they intended to provide temporary aliens, and for

how long they planned to hire them, employment was still unskilled and low-

wage. These wartime modifications likewise made it easy to arrest and deport

temporary laborers who violated any of the terms. To prevent alien labor

from venturing into nonagricultural industries, Mexicans were forbidden to

change employers once they had accepted employment. Growers also

reserved the right to withhold earnings to prevent temporary workers from

deserting their farms and to ensure that immigrants returned to Mexico.15 The

money was deposited in the United States Postal Saving Bank and returned to

aliens, with accumulated interest, upon their return to Mexico [DoL, 1918a:

1; DoL, 1918b: 1–2; DoL, 1918i: 9; Reisler, 1976: 29–30].

Farming associations induced the federal government to make wages a local

issue. The only stipulation that the US Labor Department required was for

employers to pay alien labor the same salary being paid in the community.

While the clause also obligated farmers to disclose the wages they intended to

pay, the government had no further say on regulating salaries. US Employment

Service agents during the First World War ensured that the wages offered

agreed with the wage standard of the farming community where admitted

aliens were destined to work. Although employment officers had the authority

to carry out this policy, wartime farm wages were, in reality, a local matter.

With wages locally standardized, Texas growers could solve the labor

problems they had faced with private employment agencies prior to the war.

Once community farmers agreed on a set rate, the threat of high wages ceased

to be a destabilizing factor in the local labor market. Growers stopped

competing for seasonal laborers and instead shared them. Individual farmers

were free to recruit the Mexican workers of fellow growers as long as they were

no longer needed on the original farm. The community wage rate also protected

the local agricultural labor market from ‘labor theft’. Because the provision

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prohibited growers from offering high wages, outside farmers or labor

recruiters that wanted to employ the temporary laborers of a farming

community had to pay the same wages [DoL, 1918a: 1; DoL, 1918b: 3].

Mexicans’ duration of employment in the US depended on employers.

Texas growers had the final word on how long temporary laborers could

remain. The initial World War I program permitted temporary farm laborers

to work up to six months. Aliens who desired to prolong their stay could

renew their contract with their employer’s endorsement, as long as they

worked in any of the specified industries. Growers then submitted an

application for an extension. If the application was approved, as in most cases

it was, aliens stayed in Texas for an additional six months of labor. Farming

associations eventually petitioned the US Labor Department to revise the six-

month rule, which caused the same technical crises that the system of

individual recruitment had generated years earlier. Growers’ organizations

wanted the flexibility of keeping temporary workers for the duration of the

war to eliminate competition and facilitate the hiring of alien labor among

members. Secretary of Labor Wilson agreed, on the condition that employers

immediately updated immigration officials with the information on the

whereabouts of temporarily admitted aliens. Growers had to inform officials

of the name of the new employer who planned to hire the workers. Farmers in

addition had to notify authorities of aliens who left the workplace without

their consent [DoL, 1918a: 1; DoL, 1918b: 3; Reisler, 1976: 24–42].

The temporary admission program also furnished employers with bureau-

cratic support. Immigration officials were given the authority to decide if

Mexican aliens qualified to enter the US under the wartime labor scheme. Once

immigrants passed inspection, officers issued them an identity card and

maintained a duplicate in the station. Mexicans already recruited were

permitted to proceed to their employers. Immigrants not yet hired were directed

to the offices of the USES, so they could be placed. Since this was a cooperative

program between services, immigration officials provided employment officers

with the information of the admitted aliens to monitor their whereabouts. From

this point on, all legally permitted immigrants came under the management of

the USES. Before laborers were distributed to their employers, employment

agents surveyed the labor conditions of the location where farmers requested

help. Employment officers intended to prevent areas from being flooded with

temporary aliens, while unemployed local workers were available. Agents then

supervised laborers’ employment status to discourage idleness and drifting to

nonagricultural industries. Unemployed or striking laborers were reported to

the Immigration Service for deportation. Lastly, both services had the authority

to police ‘agents or agencies that operate[d] on a fee basis’, or employers who

hired their services, from recruiting temporarily admitted aliens at the ports of

entry [DoL, 1918h: 2–3; DoL, 1918e: 1, 9].

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The restructuring of the United States Employment Service into a war-labor

mobilizing machine in 1918 rationalized the recruitment and distribution of

seasonal workers. Within months, the USES rapidly grew into a nationwide

network of branch offices. District 11 alone, which included Texas and New

Mexico, by mid-summer had twenty-nine offices in cities that included all

major and minor ports of entry. Branch offices worked closely with state

extension services, state farm-help specialists, and county representatives, to

coordinate the recruitment and distribution of farm help. To verify if local

farmers needed outside seasonal help, employment officers first assessed labor

conditions. Then they suggested ways to relieve the area’s manpower shortage.

Sometimes, rather than request temporary laborers from a border station,

officials advised growers to use local help or workers from nearby regions

where surplus existed. Farmers could ask for seasonal workers from one of the

branch offices in inland Texas, which included cities like San Antonio, Waco,

and Fort Worth [DoL, 1918c: 8; DoL, 1918d: 1–2; DoL, 1918e: 1, 9; DoL,

1918g: 4; DoL, 1918j: 1–2; US Department of Agriculture, 1918: 3].

While the temporary admission program survived until 1921, the US Labor

Department terminated most of its bureaucratic support. The US Employment

Service lost most of its resources and organizational structure within a year

after the November 1918 truce. Insufficient financial backing from the US

Congress prompted the US Labor Department to reduce the USES to a

skeleton organization and to close nearly all of the programs and offices. The

US Labor Department even cancelled its wartime employment policies and

services. By fall 1919, the void in the agricultural labor market left by the

dismantling of the USES forced some cotton growers to once again rely on

the recruiting efforts of municipal and state governments. While some states

and farming communities furnished their own resources, others sought

appropriations from chambers of commerce and private organizations to aid

farmers. Local recruiting schemes, as before the war, had their own

shortcomings. Other cotton growers employed the hiring services of private

agents. The high profits that resulted from meeting the seasonal unskilled

labor needs of Texas and Midwest farmers encouraged man-catchers and

emigrant agents to expand their employment services. The man-catching

business was not affected by the regulations enacted by the Texas State

Legislature or US Labor Department. Unscrupulous recruiters throughout the

First World War continually conceived new strategies to evade new

employment laws [Smith, 1923: 43–51; Kellogg, 1933: 8–10; TBLS, 1920:

15–30; TSES, 1940: 8–28; Reisler, 1976: 96, 100–101].

By the end of World War I, the temporary admission program had shifted

the institutional thinking on migrant poverty. For one, the poverty crisis that

had troubled the US Commission on Industrial Relations in the mid-1910s

had been swept under the bureaucratic rugs of the USES. The US Labor

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Department’s focus on managing the labor needs of growers, instead of

improving the situation of migrants, marginalized the recommendations of

the commission. The assumption that an organized efficient labor market

could solve poverty thus was no longer part of the equation. Policymakers

ceased viewing the poor living conditions of peripatetic wage-earners as the

outcome of the institutional changes that farming had undergone since 1900.

The bureaucratization of poverty removed the responsibility from the ‘system

of casual labor’ and placed it on the individual and his or her alleged ‘racial’

characteristics [Leiserson, 1915a: 80]. In Texas, where the seasonal

agricultural workforce was predominately Mexican by World War I, migrant

poverty was now regarded a ‘Mexican problem’.16

THE POLITICS OF MIGRANT POVERTY (1920–1930)

By 1920, the cotton industry in Texas and the American Southwest had been

restructured by large-scale cotton companies. Corporations like Anderson,

Clayton, based in Houston, Texas, capitalized on the wartime demand for

cotton to expand their business. Besides buying land and machinery to

increase production, they vertically integrated their activities to minimize

cost, reduce financial losses, and maximize revenue. In the process, they

created a new management structure that eliminated the middle person

between cotton producers and European cotton spinners. Rather than deal with

gin owners, Anderson, Clayton and other firms built their own gins in Houston

to ease the exportation of this staple from the Texas farms to Europe.17 By

consolidating the movement of cotton, corporations ceased doing business

with merchants and minimized transportation expenses. With cotton retailers

rooted out, Anderson, Clayton dealt directly with spinners across the Atlantic

Ocean. Corporations’ direct transaction with Europeans gave them more

bureaucratic control of the market; companies better speculated future market

demand. The centralization of the cotton industry in Texas and the American

Southwest continued after the 1920–21 recession. By the mid-1920s, 24 firms

handled 60 percent of this nation’s staple; Anderson, Clayton alone managed

15 percent [Weber, 1994: 29–34; Buenger, 2001: 143–146].

Since the economic downturn also transformed the industry in other ways,

integrating a low-wage labor market into the bureaucracy of companies posed a

political challenge. Politicians whose constituency suffered greatly during and

after the 1920–21 depression urged the US Labor Department to discontinue

the temporary admission program set up during World War I. Once cotton

prices dropped, thousands of small farmers who expanded production during

the war fell from the agricultural ladder. Wartime demand had also inspired

those growers to buy land and expand production. Determined to profit from

the wartime need for cotton, small farmers who increased their acreage

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overlooked inflated land and commodity prices. Inflation however wrought the

most damage among share-tenants and sharecroppers, who lacked the

resources to begin with. High prices made it unrealistic for this group to

farm. For share-tenants and sharecroppers, it was thus the beginning of a long

and unforgiving ‘great depression’ that eventually forced million of them off

their land [CIN, 1921: 3–18; Saloutos, 1964: 256; Fite, 1984: 102–104;

Hahamovitch, 1997: 113–116; Buenger, 2001: 146–148].

Political pressure from organized labor mounted as well after 1920. Unions

pleaded with the federal government to end the temporary admission

program, because alien laborers increasingly deserted the farm sector for

industrial employment. Irritated with the growing presence of Mexicans in

Texas cities, unions like the Galveston’s Dock and Marine Council found

political support for the deportation of this immigrant workforce among

restrictionists like US Congressman John C. Box [CIN, 1921: 11]. Industrial

laborers disapproved of the suspension of the literary test, head tax, and

contract labor clause; this opened the back gates to occupations that up to the

war only Americans were entitled to. Organized shipyard laborers’ anger

intensified as the number of Mexicans working on the docks grew in 1920.

Immigrants temporary admitted to pick cotton in nearby counties left for the

better-paying jobs in the shipyards of Galveston. The rural-to-urban exodus

of Mexicans threatened organized workers, particularly those in unskilled

occupations. Forced to compete, the Council reminded Congressman Box

that labor competition from a low-wage racialized workforce was a danger to

union wages and standards of living [Slayden, 1921: 121; CIN, 1921: 11;

Reisler, 1976: 168–174; Montejano, 1987: 189–190; Zamora, 1993: 40–47].

Local officials, too, wasted no time in denouncing the use of cheap Mexican

labor during the 1920–21 recession. Plunging wartime farm prices affected the

state’s cotton-growing regions, where Mexicans made up the majority of the

agricultural workforce. Pressured to migrate, as cotton prices fell from 35.34

cents a pound in 1919 to 15.89 cents in 1920 [Saloutos, 1964: 255], thousands

of Mexican families flocked to Fort Worth, Dallas, Houston, and other Texas

cities, where a manufacturing sector had matured by 1920. Once there, their

economic situation worsened. Their arrival in urban centers coincided with a

growing unemployment rate among white workers who had left farming for

industrial labor during the First World War. Unable to secure employment, this

newly arrived rural workforce sought relief from local charity and church

organizations. While aid organizations eagerly helped until their resources

dried up, local officials called for the deportation of Mexican families. The

prewar poverty that surfaced in rural Texas because of a low-wage system and

the lack of steady farm work became a permanent feature of urban-industrial

centers after the 1920–21 economic slump [CIN, 1921: 12–13; CIN, 1926: 335;

The Literary Digest, 1920: 53; Reisler, 1976: 50–53].

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Communities’ appeal to the federal government to repatriate Mexican

families shifted the political discussion on migrant poverty. To nativists, it

was a national calamity that had been evolving since World War I. The

displacement of white sharecroppers by Mexicans in the cotton-growing

counties of central Texas foreshadowed the Mexicanization of the labor

market after 1920. Mexican seasonal workers’ rise to the status of tenant

farmers destabilized the security of ‘white jobs’ in the region’s occupational

structure and white residents’ economic and social status [Montgomery, 1931:

171, 193–195;Montejano, 1987: 189; Zamora, 1993: 33–34; Foley, 1997: 11,

40–41]. Meeting the seasonal labor needs of cotton growers was no longer

just a technical dilemma. The rise of rural nativism in wartime Texas

indicated that the ‘farm labor question’, at least in the agricultural sector of

this peripheral southern state, was turning into a political question as well

[Elliot, 1918: 7, 11; The Literary Digest, 1920: 53]. For restrictionists and

nativists in the 1920s, the deteriorating living conditions of whites were the

consequences of years of employing cheap Mexican labor. The poverty that

resulted from the Mexicanization of agricultural work was now seen as a peril

that was generating poverty among whites [CIN, 1928: 8–9, 21, 26].

Attentive to the nativism influencing politics, Corpus Christi businessman

Maston Nixon proposed a temporary admission program similar to that of

World War I. Summoned to appear before the 1926 House Committee on

Immigration, the president of Black-Lander, Inc., a major firm on the south

Texas gulf coast, addressed the concerns of restrictionists. With the appropriate

administrative authority and support to administer the recruitment and

distribution of immigrants, the US Labor Department could end the

Mexicanization of industrial employment, he declared. Cotton farmers could

appear before a board at a port of entry and request temporary help, especially

during harvest. And since Nixon understood Mexicans’ inclination to do farm

work, a clause to restrict them to agricultural labor could ease immigration

officials’ administrative duties. Mexicans’ supposed innate propensity to do

seasonal labor guaranteed, at least to Nixon, they would not undercut the

division of labor. However, to discourage those few ‘drifters’ whose plan was

to settle in cities and seek industrial employment, the president of Black-

Lander suggested empowering the board with the authority to issue an

‘agricultural passport’. Officers could approve the special identification cards

to Mexicans on the condition that they only work in agriculture. The permit

would not forbid Mexicans to seek employment in the industrial sector, but

immigration officials would have the right to revoke the agricultural passport

and deport aliens who dishonored the provision [CIN, 1926: 41–52].

In the end, Maston Nixon’s political efforts to install a temporary

admission program fell short. Nativists during the 1926 immigration hearings

obstructed every move made by Nixon and other representatives of

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commercial agriculture. Restrictionists feared that such a scheme enabled

Southwestern and Western agricultural interests to exploit immigration laws to

their own advantage. Cotton farming associations, restrictionists argued, had

used their political influence in the past to manipulate U.S Labor Department

officials and regulations at the local level [CIN, 1926: 288; Congressional

Record, 1926: 5883–5884]. Though farming organizations advocated an ‘open

border’ policy through the 1920s, they had better success at the state level in

implementing a state government recruiting apparatus. Texas cotton firms

indeed found political support in the state legislature to establish a legal and

bureaucratic apparatus that brought the recruitment and distribution of

temporary labor under government management [Foley, 1997: 48].

Determined to integrate the seasonal labor market into the organizational

structure of the cotton industry, firms endorsed the enactment of the Private

Employment Agency Law in 1923. Because agencies had contested previous

labor legislations in court, this time the state legislature carefully crafted the

responsibilities and powers of the TBLS. Aware that government intervention

in the labor market went against the values of a free market, Texas lawmakers

established a regulatory system to prevent the mistreatment of workers and

growers. By making it impossible to qualify for a recruiting permit, the

legislation intended to root out future violators rather than competitors that

might jeopardize the stability of the labor market. Those applying for a license

had to demonstrate ‘good moral character’. Applicants had to submit with their

applications at least five sworn statements that they were ‘credible citizens’ for

the Labor Commissioner to assess their moral fiber. Since policymakers lacked

the legal right to prohibit out-of-state recruiters from operating in Texas, the

individuals providing references were required to have lived for three years in

the county where the applicants planned to recruit workers. The applicants

themselves had to reside for two years in the same county. Those who qualified

were required to agree to strict guidelines before the Labor Commissioner

issued them a recruiting permit [Employment Agents, 1923: 75–77; TBLS,

1923: 3, 5–6; TBLS, 1924: 10; TBLS, 1929: 23–24; TBLS, 1930: 12, 43, 52].

Labor agents applying for a license had to meet very specific terms to

operate in Texas. To minimize recruiting competition, the law required that

private agencies submit a separate application for each office they planned to

open after 1923. Since the TBLS was committed to breaking the monopoly of

recruiters, applicants who wanted to have more than one recruiting office in a

county had to submit a separate application for each office. After the Texas

Labor Commissioner approved an application, the labor agent paid US$150

for a one-year permit. The TBLS charged an additional US$5,000 bond to

discourage past violators from operating in Texas; the excessive amount for

the bond was to cover any future violations of the Private Employment

Agency Law (PEAL). The law also obligated recruiters to maintain records of

TEXAS COTTON INDUSTRY, 1910–1930 709

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their transactions for officials to examine. And, unlike in the past, state

managers now were authorized to make surprise inspections to prevent

licensed agencies from misleading government representatives about any

wrongdoing. Labor agents who still encouraged Mexican workers to leave

their Texas employers, were subject to a fine of from US$50 to US$250 and

the possibility of one-year incarceration in the county where they committed

the transgression [Employment Agents, 1923: 77–79; TBLS, 1923: 4–6, 11;

TBLS, 1929: 23; TBLS, 1930: 44].

Cotton companies needed more than legal support to vertically integrate

the agricultural labor market. The recruitment of Mexican workers by

unlicensed and out-of-state labor agents persisted, despite the 1923 labor

legislation that criminalized their recruiting methods. Private agencies still

controlled a significant percentage of the unskilled workforce recruited for

seasonal agricultural work in the early 1920s. The disruption of the labor

supply, especially during cotton-picking time, by ‘labor bootleggers’ cost

Texas farmers money. Abolishing the entire man-catching business, as

Progressives argued, also required bureaucratic support from the government.

The creation of a sophisticated labor-recruiting network, with the resources

and authority to bureaucratize the migratory streams already in place,

permitted state managers to provide growers and laborers free ‘public

services’. By establishing public employment offices in the same towns

where fee-charging agencies conducted business, the TBLS gradually gained

managerial control over the farm labor market in the mid-1920s. Installing a

public employment bureau with branch offices in the state’s farming districts

was instrumental in maintaining an organized, efficient labor market, and in

vertically integrating Mexican labor into the organizational structure of the

Texas cotton industry [TBLS, 1924: 11, 18; TBLS, 1926: 12].

By 1928–1929, Texas had a well structured labor-recruiting network that

included the cooperation of local chambers of commerce, farmers’

organizations, and the US Employment Service’s Farm Labor Division.

The TBLS placed the headquarters of the State Free Employment Service

(SFES) in Austin; the USES had a directing office of the Farm Labor Division

(FLD) in Fort Worth, Texas. State managers in these centers of operations

effectively monitored the recruitment and distribution of Mexican seasonal

workers in the late 1920s. Both the SFES and the FLD located their branch

offices in strategic cities, where an abundance of unemployed Mexican

seasonal laborers resided. Recruiting centers like Dallas, El Paso, and San

Antonio already had large Mexican-American and Mexican immigrant

populations in the 1920s [Zamora, 1993: 11–12; Vargas, 2005: 24–26]. In

San Antonio, for instance, the TBLS established its recruiting office ‘in

quarters suitably located for getting in touch with the surplus of labor [TBLS,

1924: 11]’. Since the majority of this working-class population was

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segregated to temporary jobs in the agricultural sector, placing offices in

these cities guaranteed farmers a stable supply of cotton pickers during

harvest. From these cities, government managers dispatched recruited

Mexicans to distribution centers in Bowie, Clarksville, Lubbock, Plainview,

and Waco, because cotton was among the principal commodity produced

around these farming communities [TBLS, 1926: 10; TBLS, 1929: 28;

Coalson, 1977: 48; Foley, 1997: 49–50].

The elaborate character of the network had a research component that

improved the efficiency of recruiting and distributing help. Both agencies

shared resources and information to rationalize the movement of Mexican

laborers. They sent inspectors to cotton-growing regions to conduct

preliminary surveys to determine the number of seasonal laborers needed for

harvest. Collaborating local organizations furnished field investigators with

information on cotton acreage planted, likely yield, workers needed, wages

offered, accommodation, and transportation. Once the SFES and the FLD

gathered the required data, they assigned state regulators to strategic recruiting

and distributing centers to supervise the movement of workers from one

location to another. Because the cotton harvest demanded the most help,

officials organized a calendar from the summer to winter to delineate the

number of pickers needed. During the summer months, state managers in San

Antonio, working together with their counterparts in the Rio Grande Valley and

the Gulf Coast, recruited and distributed help for the area. In the fall and winter,

they teamed up with representatives in Bowie in the east, Waco in the central

region, and Lubbock in the west to monitor the movement of this workforce

from south Texas to these locations [TBLS, 1924: 10–11; TBLS, 1926: 9–10,

12–14; TBLS, 1929: 28–29; TBLS, 1930: 51–53].

The calendar organized for the cotton-picking circuit provides an example

of government efforts in overseeing a stable and efficient seasonal farm labor

market in the late 1920s. Because the cotton belt ran from south Texas to the

east, central, and northwest sections of the state, officials conceived a

schedule that outlined the harvest dates of each region to rationalize the labor

needs of growers. Based on the preliminary surveys conducted, state

managers directed Mexican families from one cotton-growing area to another

from July to December to prevent labor shortages and gluts. The first large-

scale recruitment of cotton pickers started around July 1. Although cotton

harvest in the Rio Grande Valley normally lasted throughout July, the rush to

get the best price in the market coupled with capricious climatic conditions in

the area dictated the number of work days. ‘The army of cotton pickers’ was

directed onwards from here to three regions. By August, Mexican families

were picking cotton on the south Texas gulf coast, in the counties around

Corpus Christi; others migrated further east and north to the counties near

Houston. The third group found itself in central Texas, harvesting the cotton

TEXAS COTTON INDUSTRY, 1910–1930 711

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of the counties around Austin. Mexican families wishing to follow the cotton-

picking circuit were directed to west Texas after September. The cotton

harvest there lasted until the last week of November or the first week of

December [DoA, 1922: 36–45; TBLS, 1926: 9–10, 13–14; McWilliams, 1942:

230–231; Vargas, 1993: 15–16; Vargas, 2005: 20–21]. (See Figure 3.)

CONCLUSION

On the eve of the Great Depression, the SFES had reached institutional

maturity. Texas Labor Commissioner, Charles Mckemy, feeling proud of the

FIGURE 3: MIGRATION IN TEXAS

Source: Coalson, George O., 1977, The Development of the Migratory Farm Labor System in Texas,

1900–1954, San Francisco, CA: R and E Research Associates.

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work that the SFES had accomplished, claimed that ‘the greatest value of the

service [was] to be found in the assistance rendered to the farmers . . . in

promptly supplying them with the required surplus labor in times of seasonal

demand’ [TBLS, 1930: 53]. And, of all the state’s growers, cotton producers

almost certainly benefited the most from this government apparatus. By

providing Texas cotton farmers with temporary help, especially during

harvest, the state solved the supply part of the farm labor problem. Cotton

firms had finally integrated the agricultural labor market in the organizational

structure of the industry. Cotton companies in the American Southwest

ceased employing tenant farmers and sharecroppers, a labor system which

was considered obsolete in an expanding global market in the late 1920s

[CIN, 1928: 46, 86].18 Competition for labor no longer posed a threat, even

though emigrant agents hired Mexican families for sugar-beet work in the

Midwest. And, once the SFES came to control 50 percent of the seasonal

labor market, Texas experienced a decrease in the dishonest recruiting

methods of licensed and unlicensed agents [TBLS, 1926: 16]. The technical

problems that destabilized the labor market in the 1910s were now addressed

in a bureaucratic and legal way.

Commissioner Mckemy also acknowledged the limitations of many of the

government’s protective measures. State efforts to eradicate all the ‘evils’

that had surfaced with the industrialization of Texas agriculture caused more

problems, because they threatened the foundations of the nation’s economy.

Legislation designed to regulate the state’s agricultural labor supply violated

the basic principles of a free market society and thwarted competition among

employers. Anglo growers therefore saw no need to distribute the wealth

produced by cotton among their Mexican seasonal workforce. Seeing that

employment laws privileged them, cotton firms ceased distressing about

having an adequate supply of low-wage short-term labor. Cotton companies

could now expand production while state regulators maintained order in the

farm labor market. And as long as the government safeguarded the state’s

low-wage structure from outside threats, farm wages remained near to the

ground. Mexican migratory workers, despite the SFES’s efforts to provide

steady temporary employment, already found themselves in the abyss of

poverty at the dawn of the Great Depression [TBLS, 1930: 12].

ABBREVIATIONS

CIN US House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization

CIR US Commission on Industrial Relations

USES US Employment Service

DoA US Department of Agriculture

DoCL US Department of Commerce and Labor

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DoL US Department of Labor

FLD Farm Labor Division

FLP Frisco Lines Passenger Traffic Department

IWW Industrial Workers of the World

LCC Laredo Chamber of Commerce

RI-FLP Rock Island-Frisco Lines Passenger Traffic Department

SFES State Free Employment Service

STCGA South Texas Cotton Growers’ Association

TBLS Texas Bureau of Labor Statistics

TCSBMA Texas Commercial Secretaries and Business Men’s

Association

TDA Texas Department of Agriculture

TSES Texas State Employment Service

NOTES

1. Studies on migratory workers in Texas also included African Americans and poor whites.2. Ernesto Galarza found similar substandard living conditions among Mexican migrants in the

fruit and truck farms of California. See Galarza, [1931: 181], Taylor, [1938: 227–230],Gonzalez, [1999: 131–133, 163–165], Vargas, [2005: 36].

3. The state government in California was not as instrumental in organizing a labor market tocontrol farm wages. California farming associations created their own employment bureau toorganize a labor pool of low-wage seasonal workers. It was through such a labor pool thatgrowers controlled wages. See Galarza, [1964: 36–38]; Weber, [1994: 37–42].

4. Between 1900 and 1920, the average day wage for Mexican farm workers in Texas wasbelow a dollar. The rate between 1900 and 1910 was 55 cents and between 1911 and 1920was 75 cents. See Zamora, [1993: 213].

5. For a thorough and compelling study on the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, see Lee,[2003]. See also Ngai [2004: 18], Reisler, [1976: 12].

6. In the 1911 alone, Texas produced over 543 million dollars in agricultural and non-agricultural products TCSBMA, [1912: 4]. See also Carlson, [1982], Allen, [1961], Buenger,[2001].

7. Although a comprehensive study of labor strikes by Mexican farm workers is difficult todocument because of the scarcity of primary sources, walkouts in agriculture occurred priorto 1930. Local strikes were few, random, and manifested by small groups of laborers, whosought higher wages. See Allhands, [1931: 93]; Taylor, [1930: 351–351]; Jamieson, [1945:261].

8. On Texas coal mining, see Calderon, [2000].9. FredW. Mally, ‘‘‘Farmers’’ Institutes as Factors in the Advancement of the Agricultural Classes

of Texas’, (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Texas Farmers’ Congress, CollegeStation, Texas, July 4, 1900), pp. 237–246. See also, McMath, [1977]; Goodwyn, [1978].

10. On cheap labor in the South, see Cobb, [1988: 68–98; 1993: 96–121], Tindall, [1967: 318–319].

11. With the exception of central Texas, recruited Mexicans worked at the lower end of theagricultural job ladder. See Foley, [1997: 9–11, 51].

12. South Texas Cotton Growers’ Association Secretary to US Congress, June 28, 1919,memorandum, W. E. Pope Collection, Special Collection and Archives, Texas A&MUniversity, Corpus Christi.

13. At the same time, these new restrictions, combined with recruiting competition for thisworkforce, triggered the underground business of smuggling undocumented Mexican

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immigrants. The high profits of recruiting without a license made the smuggling ofundocumented aliens a lucrative illegal business. Unlicensed labor agents sprang up invirtually every section of Texas during the war. Smuggling undocumented workers was atransnational and transregional business with recruiting agents on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Smugglers had a well-organized and efficient underground labor-recruitingand -distributing system to meet the needs of Texas cotton growers and Midwest sugar-beetfarmers. They could transport transnational seasonal help from the Mexican side of theborder to the US interior with minimal restraints. TBLS, [1920: 16–17].

14. The acceptance of federal assistance by states in the West was common. See Nash, [1999].15. The practice of deducting money from Mexican workers was later cancelled. DoL,

[1918f: 7].16. Gin owners owned the machinery that cleans the raw cotton before it was shipped to Europe.17. On the Mexican problem, see Biggers, [1920: 3, 45–46], Callcott, [1920: 437–438],

Bamford, [1924a: 251–264; 1924b: 363–371].18. Mechanization and New Deal agricultural policies sped up the displacement of tenant

farmers and sharecroppers in the 1930s. See Foley, [1997: 164–170].

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