Mrs. Valdez and the 1933 Cotton Strike

Mrs. Valdez came from Mexico, where her father had been a sembrador , a small farmer or sharecropper, eking out a livable but bleak existence. She had barely reached adolescence when the Mexican revolution broke out in 1910. With the exception of a sister-in-law, neither she nor her immediate family participated in the revolution.^[5] As is the case with many noncombatants, her memories of the revolution were not of the opposing ideologies or issues, but of hunger, fear, and death.^[6] Fleeing the revolution, the family crossed the border into the United States. By 1933, she was twenty-four, married with two children, and lived in a small San Joaquin Valley town.

The agricultural industry in which she worked was, by 1933, California's major industry. Cotton, the most rapidly expanding crop, depended on Mexican workers who migrated annually to the valley to work.^[7] Large cotton ranches of over 300 acres dominated the industry. Here workers lived in private labor camps, the largest of which were rural versions of industrial company towns: workers lived in company housing, bought from (and remained in debt to) company stores, and sent their children to company schools. Work and daily lives were supervised by a racially structured hierarchy dominated by Anglo managers and foremen; below

them were Mexican contractors who recruited the workers, supervised work, and acted as the intermediary between workers and their English-speaking employers.

With the depression, growers slashed wages. In response farmworkers went on strike in crop after crop in California. The wave of strikes began in southern California and spread north into the San Joaquin Valley. While conducted under the banner of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU), the strikes were sustained largely by Mexican workers and Mexican organizers. The spread and success of the strikes depended on the familial and social networks of Mexican workers as much as, if not more than, the small but effective and ambitious union. The strike wave crested in the cotton fields of the San Joaquin Valley when 18,000 strikers brought picking to a standstill. Growers evicted strikers, who established ad hoc camps on empty land. The largest was near the town of Corcoran, where 3,500 workers congregated. The strikers formed mobile picket lines, to which growers retaliated by organizing armed vigilantes. The strikers held out for over a month before a negotiated settlement was reached with the growers and the California, United States, and Mexican governments.

Mexicanas were a vital part of the strike, and about half of the strikers at Corcoran were women. They ran the camp kitchen, cared for children, and marched on picket lines. They distributed food and clothing. Some attended strike meetings, and a few spoke at the meetings. And it was the women who confronted Mexican strikebreakers. In short, women were essential to this strike, though they have been largely obscured in accounts of its history. Mrs. Valdez went on strike and was on the picket lines. She was not a leader, but one of the many women who made the strike possible.