From South Texas to the Nation

Get me more Mexicans!,” South Texas cotton growers, undoubtedly, commanded labor agents since the 1920s, when migrant families absconded northward to work in the sugar beet fields of Colorado. This developed as revolutions emerged on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in South Texas in the early twentieth century. Consequently, John Weber contends niftily that South Texas growers perfected a model of labor relations ultimately emulated by the nation. This entailed a gross surplus of Mexican workers (both U.S. citizens and nationals of Mexico) stripped of civil and labor rights. The revolutions that complemented each other encompassed the civil war in Mexico, with its fallout after 1910 to roughly the early 1920s, and the modernization of the Texas economy from cattle ranching to agribusiness. The former shoved refugees to El Norte; the latter extended them employment in the fields of cotton and vegetables. Weber’s diligently researched narrative also surveys the systemic means by which South Texas growers conquered rancher-controlled political machines during the Progressive Era and utilized law enforcement agencies, such as the Texas Rangers, to terrorize Mexican workers

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