Ernesto Galarza (August 15, 1905–June 22, 1984) was a

Mexican-American Mexican Americans ( es, mexicano-estadounidenses, , or ) are Americans of full or partial Mexican heritage. In 2019, Mexican Americans comprised 11.3% of the US population and 61.5% of all Hispanic and Latino Americans. In 2019, 71% of Mexica ...

labor organizer, activist, professor, poet, writer, storyteller, and a key figure in the history of immigrant farmworker organization in California. He had a dream of giving better living conditions to working-class Latinos.

Early life

Born in Jalcocotan in the Mexican state of Nayarit, Galarza immigrated with his mother and two uncles to California. As recalled in his autobiography, ''Barrio Boy'', the young man successfully navigated the cultural differences in the public school system, received a scholarship to

Occidental College Occidental College (informally Oxy) is a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1887 as a coeducational college by clergy and members of the Presbyterian Church, it became non-sectarian in 1910. It is one of the oldes ...

in Los Angeles, and then went on to earn a master's degree in history at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1929.

Career

Galarza worked with the Pan-American Union (now the

Organization of American States The Organization of American States (OAS; es, Organización de los Estados Americanos, pt, Organização dos Estados Americanos, french: Organisation des États américains; ''OEA'') is an international organization that was founded on 30 April ...

) in Washington D.C. from 1936 through 1947 publishing analyses on educational, labor, and infrastructure issues in Latin America. In 1947, he completed his doctoral dissertation on the electricity industry in Mexico and earned a Ph.D. from

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

. Galarza worked as a labor organizer and a key leader in laying the groundwork for the emergence in California of the farm labor movement. Galarza began organizing farmworkers in California in 1948 as research and education director of the American Federation of Labor's short-lived National Farm Labor Union strike against the

DiGiorgio Corporation DiGiorgio corporation was a fruit-growing corporation and eventual conglomerate in the 20th century. Once a vast company, owning much of California's central valley farm land, and multibillion-dollar corporation, a massive restructuring in the 199 ...

in Arvin, California that lasted 30 months, and entangled the company and the union in suits and counter-suits for the following 15 years. Altogether between 1948 and 1959, Galarza and the union initiated some twenty strikes and labor actions. Although primarily an intellectual and scholar whose weapons were words, Galarza initially played an activist's role with the AFL as the leader of several strikes. But he was completely thwarted by the bracero program and so abandoned the union leader's weapon of direct economic action for the intellectual's weapon of words in hopes of killing the program. A prolific writer, Galarza's best-known work is ''Merchants of Labor'' (1964), an exposé of the abuses within the Bracero Program. The book was instrumental in the ending of the program, which in turn opened the door for

Cesar Chavez Cesar Chavez (born Cesario Estrada Chavez ; ; March 31, 1927 – April 23, 1993) was an American labor leader and civil rights activist. Along with Dolores Huerta, he co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which later merged ...

to begin unionizing immigrant farmworkers in 1965. In 1956 Galarza was awarded the Bolivian

Order of the Condor of the Andes The Order of the Condor of the Andes ( es, links=no, La Orden del Cóndor de los Andes) is a state decoration of the Plurinational State of Bolivia instituted on 12 April 1925. The Order is awarded for exceptional merit, either civil or military, ...

.http://departments.oxy.edu/library/geninfo/collections/special/galarza/timeline.htm accessed 10/11/10 The Ernesto Galarza Applied Research Center at the University of California Riverside and other California elementary and secondary schools bear his name. His many books include: * ''Barrio Boy'', 1971 * ''Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story'', 1964 * ''Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field'', 1970

Salinas Valley tragedy

In the wake of a bus crash in the Salinas Valley in September 1963 that claimed the lives of 32 braceros, Galarza was appointed to investigate the tragedy by

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Adam; el, Ἀδάμ, Adám; la, Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, ''adam'' is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as " ...

, chairman of the

Committee on Education and Labor The Committee on Education and Labor is a standing committee of the United States House of Representatives. There are 50 members in this committee. Since 2019, the chair of the Education and Labor committee is Robert Cortez Scott of Virginia. Hi ...

of the

U.S. House of Representatives The United States House of Representatives, often referred to as the House of Representatives, the U.S. House, or simply the House, is the lower chamber of the United States Congress, with the Senate being the upper chamber. Together they ...

. His report, published by the committee in April 1964, found that the accident was directly caused by negligence, exemplifying a practice in which flatbed trucks were illegally converted to buses, driven by poorly trained personnel. With safety officials and regulators indifferent to the situation, and businesses showing disregard for human life, he found that the accident had been imminent. He wrote a book on the accident, ''Tragedy at Chualar'' (1977).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Galarza, Ernesto Trade unionists from California Activists for Hispanic and Latino American civil rights Agricultural labor in the United States 20th-century American non-fiction writers Hispanic and Latino American autobiographers American autobiographers American writers of Mexican descent Latin Americanists Occidental College alumni Stanford University alumni Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Politicians from Tepic, Nayarit 1905 births 1984 deaths Southern Tenant Farmers Union people Mexican emigrants to the United States