From South Texas to the Nation

From South Texas to the Nation scrutinizes the role of south Texas in the creation and maintenance of an “agro-empire” dependent on the exploitation of Mexican and Mexican American workers (p. 3). Looking beyond what he calls the “tendentious historical heritage of mythology and Lone Star bluster,” John Weber effectively argues that the confluence of Mexican laborers who left a ravaged revolutionary-era Mexico and “emergent capitalists” who came to south Texas from the crowded farmlands of the American Midwest and Southeast facilitated and perfected an exploitative labor system in the region that spread to other parts of the United States (ibid.). South Texas growers took a migrant-worker system already used in California and further immobilized laborers by using the state to coerce migrant workers to stay in south Texas through de facto and de jure limits on worker mobility, thus creating a caste-like labor system. Weber starts his book by using HemisFair ’68 (the 1968 World's Fair held in San Antonio) as an example of mythology and bluster. He links the fair organizers’ attitudes, ranging from oblivious ignorance to brazen racism, to the attitude of the Anglo elite in San Antonio and across much of south Texas. Facilitated by these anti-Mexican attitudes, arriving growers created a system that, helped by the state, counted on workers who needed to migrate and could be forced to be mobile through a loss of rights and poverty wages. These innovations created a legacy of fear and uncertainty—“the primary legacy of the South Texas farm boom” (p. 229). That farm worker conditions remained stagnant from the Mexican Revolution in 1910 through the bracero era reinforces the lasting significance of these labor developments. South Texas leaders viewed these workers, immigrants, and Mexican Americans as “more beasts of burden than citizens” (p. 231

Caste · De facto · Economic history · Elite · Ethnology · Ignorance · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Racism · Sociology · State (computer science · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

• Constructing disposable farmworkers

  Open Access•C Keegan•Political Geography•2024

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