In 1993, Chicana/o labor historian Zaragosa Vargas published Proletarians of the North, surveying Mexican industrial workers’ labor in and migration to the Midwest in the early twentieth century. The second major text published on Mexican industrial workers and migration in the Midwest, the book details in part how the Ford Motor Company used Mexican industrial workers in their mass production line. Vargas’s scholarship has made an important impact on the production of regional historiographies of Chicana/o labor and migration.
Published in 2009, Zamora’s Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas looks at working-class Mexican labor politics and oppressive labor practices in Texas during the World War II era. The book is a corrective to historians and previous histories of American labor during World War II that excluded Mexican workers, and it is the first scholarly monograph to focus on how Mexican labor politics contributed to workplace struggles for equal rights in Texas during this era. In it, Zamora documents the employment discrimination and political inequalities Mexican workers faced, making this a critical monograph for future studies of employment discrimination, particularly as it pertains to Chicana/o workers.
Juan Gómez-Quiñones’s Mexican American Labor, 1790–1990 and Vargas’s Labor Rights Are Civil Rights are major pieces of historical scholarship on Mexican industrial workers, labor production, and migration in the contemporary United States. Gómez-Quiñones probes Mexican labor organizing in North America, detailing this community’s marginalization by the American class system. Vargas considers Mexican labor and civil rights in the workplace during the twentieth century, arguing that Mexican workers were major rank-and-file members of the Congress Industry Organization and the Communist Party and demonstrating that they were key organizers within the American labor and civil rights movements. Vargas’s historical perspective differs from that of Gómez-Quiñones in how they examine Mexican labor and labor organizing. Gómez-Quiñones’s historical perspective encompasses over two centuries of the Mexican labor experience. Taken together, both books enhance the working-class Mexican voice in labor studies and the debate around the Chicana/o contribution to the labor movement.
How did the foundation of scholarship on Chicana/o agricultural and industrial workers change and finally allow more progressive and critical historiography? The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s enabled more Chicana/o labor and migration scholars to emerge in the academy, giving voice to the Mexican working class in the historical profession and challenging the racist frameworks of earlier twentieth-century, nativist intellectuals. This turn clearly influenced the current direction of Chicana/o labor and migration studies.
