Border Fantasies: Immigration and Cross-Border Organizing, 1948–55

NAWU’s fights in the Imperial Valley demonstrated how easily grower control over deportable workers could defeat union campaigns. Even if Labor Department officials removed braceros during strikes, growers could replace them with undocumented workers. If Border Patrol swept the fields, Galarza reported, replacement workers were back “within a few minutes after the raid.” Frustrated by a foreign reserve army of labor, overzealous union members sometimes became a nativist workers’ border patrol, blocking labor contractors’ vehicles and performing citizens’ arrests.¹ But what chance did the NAWU have against a transnational labor market that growers structured? The union was virtually powerless to