The Working Life - Mexican workers - it’s your fault, America

[The Straight Story]

The Working Life

UC Irvine professor examines roots of our love affair with Mexican labor
By GUSTAVO ARELLANO
Thursday, March 8, 2007 - 3:00 pm
Orange County is at it again with its Mexicans. The latest front: the streets. Cities from Mission Viejo to Costa Mesa to Lake Forest have passed resolutions harassing day laborers with the threat of arrest. Meanwhile, anti-immigrant goons now make it a weekend habit to picket day-laborer sites in Dana Point, Laguna Beach—really, any city without a majority Mexican community but a need for cheap labor (let’s see them try their schtick in SanTana).

Antagonism toward Mexican workers in this county is nothing new, as UC Irvine Chicano Studies professor Gilbert Gonzalez can tell you. He’s the county’s preeminent labor historian and the author of Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950, a history of Orange County citrus pickers that remains the best exposé of the county’s much-mythologized orange groves. But in his latest work, Guest Workers or Colonized Labor?: Mexican Labor Migration to the United States, Gonzalez sidesteps county history to tackle the biggest question facing this country: why won’t the Mexicans stop coming?

The answer: it’s your fault, America.

Gonzalez’s thesis isn’t new. Blaming the United States for Mexico’s woes is one of the central tenets of Chicano studies, and is gospel for a Mexican ruling class looking to eschew responsibility for the woes of millions. But Gonzalez isn’t interested in whining; his specialty is empirical research, and the good profe delivers his thesis in well-researched, finely crafted prose.

Gonzalez begins by contrasting the relationship between Mexican laborers in the United States with those of Indian and Algerian indentured servants in Trinidad and France, respectively. It seems tenuous at first—after all, the United States only took half of Mexico, not the whole tamale—but Gonzalez argues that American economic domination in Mexico amounts to de facto territorial domination as well. He points to the early 20th century, when American capitalists bought millions of acres in Mexico then laid out railroad tracks deep into the country that connected it with the United States. This development not only displaced thousands of Mexicans, Gonzalez shows, but also provided them with arteries that led them to jobs in los Estados Unidos.

http://www.ocweekly.com/news/news/the-working-life/26819/

[Pangolin]

1. Is there an Orange county repuke who EVER worked

a whole day outside in the summer? I doubt it. The reason there are so many people hanging out at day labor sites is that there are people hiring them.

When the good citizens of Orange county learn to do all the needed work themselves they will not need to be disturbed by immigrant labor. Until then....STFU!!!

[sam sarrha]

2. mexico is exporting their poverty to increase the standard of living for the Have It Alls, which hav...

a standard of living second only to France.. the Uppity class thing the indigenous people are sub human and getting rid of them is a blessing that corporations here welcome .. for all the wrong reasons