Union Advocacy, Rising Liberalism, Indifferent Labor, 1955–59

By 1956, NAWU’s leaders needed to change tack. Organizing and striking would fail if grower power over guestworkers and undocumented laborers remained unbroken. The union experimented with cross-border organizing strategies to help manage a transnational labor market, but those attempts failed. H. L. Mitchell had been advocating for farmworkers since the Great Depression with little to show. In California, Galarza was dispirited by his unsuccessful struggles against growers and bureaucrats, as well as the physical toll of driving thousands of miles over rural California roads in an old car, which sent him to the operating room for four compressed vertebrae.