Rodolfo Acuña’s Corridors of Migration, Gilbert G. Gonzalez and Raul Fernandez’s A Century of Chicano History, and Gonzalez’s Guest Workers or Colonized Labor? interpret Chicana/o labor and migration history through the lens of class. Acuña explores the historical origins of Mexican labor in North America prior to 1933, arguing that it emerged through three corridors of mass migration. These included the El Camino Real and Mesilla corridors, which Mexicans drawn by the cotton industry used to migrate to California. Acuña is the first Chicana/o historian to trace the major historical and geological corridors of Mexican migration to North America, making Corridors of Migration a seminal text. Gonzalez and Fernandez analyze the twentieth-century migration of workers from Mexico to the United States, their integration into American society, and the expansion of American empire. They maintain that the American elite shaped the formation of a community of Mexican American workers and that the rise of modern imperialism, globalization, and the concept of empire have changed the patterns of Mexican migration and immigration settlements in the contemporary United States. In Guest Workers or Colonized Labor?, Gonzalez focuses on Mexican labor migration through guest worker programs, asserting that the working-class Mexican population essentially served as forced labor for American elites. Continuing the research first put forth by Galarza on the Bracero program, Gonzalez contends that the Bracero program was the product of American economic imperialism, created to stop labor organizing and unionism in the agricultural fields, rather than a response to the World War II–era labor shortage.
For community interpretations of the history of Chicana/o labor and migration, readers should turn to Matt García’s A World of Its Own, José Alamillo’s Making Lemonade out of Lemons, and Gilbert Gonzalez’s Labor and Community. Employing a regional community historical analysis, García, Gonzalez, and Alamillo focus on community development, leisure space, and labor organizing among the Chicana/o communities of Greater Los Angeles and Southern California more broadly. García delves into cultural and leisure spaces and Mexican labor in the Pomona area of Los Angeles County from 1900 to 1970, establishing that Mexicans were important subjects in mainstream American society. He introduces a new type of labor history to the historiography of Chicana/o labor by using a cultural historical methodology, influenced by his graduate training under Chicana/o historian Vicki Ruiz. This methodology has permeated through the scholarship of many of Ruiz’s students over the past two decades, including that of Alamillo, who employs the same cultural historical approach in Making Lemonade out of Lemons. He details how Chicana/o workers in the lemon industry cultivated spaces of culture and leisure for their community in Corona, California. Maintaining the same focus on the citrus industry, Gonzalez concentrates more on labor organizing and community development among Chicana/o workers in the region during the same part of the early twentieth century. His volume is much stronger than those by Alamillo and García, because he integrates more of an economic focus, contending that Chicana/o labor is a product of American economic imperialism. Still, these three historical interpretations are all major contributions to Mexican labor and migration historiography.
What of the major gender interpretations in Chicana/o labor and migration historiography? Many studies have emerged over the last four decades, though the most notable are Ruiz’s Cannery Women, Cannery Lives and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s Gendered Transitions. Ruiz’s book reviews Mexican women cannery workers and labor organizing in California’s food processing industry from the 1930s to the 1950s, asserting that these women played a major role in the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America during the period. The text is noteworthy for highlighting Chicana workers, whom male historians of labor and Chicana/o studies have often overlooked in past scholarship. Hondagneu-Sotelo investigates how gender impacts the experience of migration and immigration settlements among Mexican Americans in the contemporary United States, paying particular attention to Mexican immigrant women’s drive to seek out better economic and living conditions. Hondagneu-Sotelo employs a micro- and macro-sociological approach to documenting the experience of gender among Mexican Americans in mainstream society. She debates other migration scholars and historians who have failed to include Mexican women in their scholarly work. Both Ruiz and Hondagneu-Sotelo are pioneers in the field of Chicana/o labor and migration studies for how they have incorporated gender considerations into their research.
