“When the farmers started using “illegals” they weren’t illegal. CA had a Bracero program where the labor force crossed the border legally and went home during the off seaon. I don’t remember when that was stopped, but it was phased out a number of years ago. Now they have a mess.”
I graduated from HS in Northern California in1958. It was about that time that the Bracero Program was terminated because the Blacks (who were left here with nothing to do after the defense plants and shipyards closed after WWII, locally Kaiser Shipbuilding in Richmond) complained that the “Guest Workers” were taking their jobs. But guess what, the lazy Blacks didn’t really want to do the kind of back breaking work that picking crops entailed. That left the farmers with few options. But also you should go have a look at the “accommodations” our farmers provided for their Mexican workers. These places were slums of the first order so don’t be too supportive of their “efforts,” as they didn’t treat their workforce at all well.
As far as growing cotton here is concerned, it is a crop that should never have been allowed owing to the amount of water it requires. Same for rice.
I am well aware of some of the housing provided by the farmers for the illegals. My uncle wasn’t one of them. I don’t know where his workers stayed, but they didn’t show up to work again after they were paid; and they spent their wages on alcohol, gambling, and whores. That is why he and his neighbors invested in a cotton picking machine. He had one family to help that stayed in the old ranch homestead under conditions that my father’s family had lived in just a decade before. The rest were day workers.
I went with my teen church group to provide Christmas cheer out at a migrant camp in December 1954, or ‘55. The conditions were deplorable, and not all of the workers were Mexican. Some of them were from the Southern states. I’ve never forgotten the experience.
I never was so cold in all my life (and I now live in Wisconsin). The hovels had dirt floors, and babies were running around clad in just diapers and runny noses. This was in the San Joaquin Valley.
My uncle went into cotton after WWII after he had been enslaved in the dairy business by the War Department. He was alone on the ranch with no help and milking a herd of cows twice a day was more work than he could handle alone. He transformed the ranch into crops.