The Tragedy that Transformed the Chicano Movement

The horrific deaths of thirty-two Mexican guest farmworkers, or braceros, in California in 1963 put the nail in the coffin of an already-controversial labor program. As historian Lori A. Flores writes, it also helped unify Mexican American activists, shaping the nascent Chicano movement.

On the afternoon of September 17, 1963, fifty-seven Mexican guest workers living at a labor camp in Salinas, California, finished up a 10-hour day harvesting vegetables and boarded a flatbed produce truck. As the truck crossed an unmarked railroad track, a freight train tore it in half. Twenty-three men died instantly, and nine more were fatally injured.

Flores writes that this was far from the first tragedy for braceros. The guest worker program, which began in 1942 under an agreement between Mexico and the United States, theoretically required growers to pay workers at the local prevailing wage and provide them with decent food, housing, and transportation. But, in reality, braceros often spent as much as 14 hours a day stooping to pick crops and lived in abysmal conditions. Many suffered permanent injuries and malnutrition. And the 1963 crash was not the first of its kind—in the Salinas area alone, dozens of workers had died in earlier truck-train collisions and other transportation accidents.

None of this was unknown to policymakers or the public. For example, on Thanksgiving Day 1960, the CBS documentary Harvest of Shame brought the stories of migrant farmworkers to the attention of viewers across the country. And, earlier in 1963, the House of Representatives voted to end the braceros program. But the growers who employed the guest workers continued to fight back, and the final outcome was still being debated in Congress.

Despite all this, Flores writes, the interests of farmworkers was not a primary concern for Mexican American civil rights organizations based in California cities. For example, in 1962, the Community Service Organization (CSO), the state’s most prominent Mexican American civil rights organization, refused a call by rising labor organizer César Chávez to focus on farmworkers’ needs.

In the aftermath of the crash, employers attempted to do damage control. They held a solemn public funeral for the deceased—whose names they learned only after an FBI fingerprint check since braceros were typically only known to their employers by their work number.

“Nameless before their deaths, the victims became mourned members of the Salinas community in a public display designed to position California agribusiness as sorry but not directly accountable for this loss of Mexican lives,” Flores writes.

To the extent that this was an attempt to save the braceros program, it failed. Congress ended it for good in 1964. However, California growers quickly turned to other legal and illegal channels to continue to import Mexican workers.

Meanwhile, the CSO and other Mexican American organizations threw their support behind the farmworkers’ movement, which became a major national cause as Chávez and the upstart United Farm Workers organized strikes and boycotts of grapes starting in 1965. In the years that followed, the Chicano movement proudly represented both urban and rural Mexican Americans.

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