The exact same forces that hire Mexican labor to work the agricultural fields of Imperial Valley are the first to cry ‘patriotism’ when those workers organize.

‘Class War In Imperial Valley’ by S.L.G. from Labor Defender. Vol. 10 No. 5. May, 1934.

Because the agricultural workers of the Imperial Valley led by the militant Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union are for the third time since the beginning of the year preparing to strike against their intolerable conditions and starvation pay, having won their demands in the lettuce pickers strike and the pea pickers strike, the ranchers and growers of the Valley have declared open war against them.

Their faithful ally in this war is the Mexican Consul Enrique Terrazas who is making every effort to help the ranchers force his countrymen into a company union, which as one Valley paper puts it, is set up to “give a fair deal to the employers” and to smash the militant C and AWU.

But the Mexican Workers in Imperial Valley have learned the fighting strength of their union and despite arrests, terror and mass deportations, they are refusing to join this fake union. They know that the Mexican consul is surrounded by contractors and foremen who have cheated and underpaid them in the past. They have learned the power of united action and they see that this Mexican union is a vicious attempt to divide them from their thousands of Hindu, Filipino, Japanese, Negro and white fellow workers who fought beside them in the last strikes.

This determination of the agricultural workers to stick by their union was proven at many meetings where in the presence of vigilantes, police and all the other agents of reaction, they voted openly against the Mexican “yellow dog” union and for the Cannery and Agricultural workers’ Industrial Union.

This militancy is getting the shipper-growers plenty mad. Their vigilantes have robbed, beaten and kidnapped many investigators who have gone into the valley. The official police have carried through mass arrests of hundreds of strikers. The Mexican officials have obligingly deported more hundreds across the border to terror

and starvation in their native land. An Imperial Valley Peace officer is quoted in the ‘San Diego Sun’ as stating: “If that (Federal) court in San Diego grants a permanent injunction interfering with officers and keeping them from breaking up those agitators’ meetings here in the valley, there will be bloodshed. I won’t do anything, but there are some people who will.

Latest report received from the Los Angeles District of the International Labor Defense show that “some people have already begun to do something.” Dr. Alexander Irvine, 70-year-old author and minister and E.O. Jones a newspaper man were seized by vigilantes, driven into the desert and beaten, Dr. Irvine’s niece was also kidnapped. Five Mexican workers and two white workers, one of them the I.L.D. organizer in the Valley, were seized by 30 growers as they were released from jail, driven thirty miles out into the desert and threatened with lynching if they dared to return. Among the four Mexican workers was a boy of 19 and his father. Their family consists of ten children and the mother. They have lived in the Valley for years and they are left to starve. Witnesses who testified at a recent trial in the Valley were arrested, brutally beaten, their homes raided and then they were chased out.

Every Valley newspaper is helping whip up the fury with appeals to patriotism, Americanism and vicious attacks against Communism and even the Federal Commission whose reports suggest that the condition among the workers are intolerable. And one of whose members stated that it wasn’t illegal to belong to the Communist Party. The growers further criticize the government “as aiding and abetting the workers by issuing food orders to them while they were out on strike, while, at their very elbows ranch foremen were offering work at which men could make $2 to $4 a day and families of workers could earn as high as $8 and $10 a day”. (New York Times). This is a glowing tribute to the fighting solidarity of these workers who rarely make that much a week.

The International Labor Defense of Los Angeles is doing splendid work in defense of the fighting agricultural workers; not only by defending them in court when they have been arrested, but by sending committee after committee into the battlefield to investigate and expose the war, bombarding Senator Wagner of the Labor Board with demands for investigating the activities of the growers and the Mexican consul; bombarding the State department with demands for the recall of Terrazas by the Mexican government; demonstrating before the Mexican consulate; building the widest possible moral and material support and defense of the agricultural workers in Imperial Valley.

They must be supported in this work by every other district of the I.L.D. Trade Unions must be drawn into the struggle to demand the rights of these workers to organize into unions of their own choosing.

War has been declared. The International Labor Defense must accept the challenge and teach these vigilantes who choose to take the weapons of violence into their hands that mass action is a powerful weapon in the hands of the working class. Protests, resolutions and telegrams should flood the office of Gov. Lynch Rolph at Sacramento, California. The battle of Imperial Valley is the battle of every worker and fighting farmer, Negro and white in the United States. Victory in Imperial Valley against the forces of fascist reaction will mean victory against the system of divide and rule, lynch terror, and the destruction of the fundamental rights guaranteed the American masses by the Constitution of the United States.

Labor Defender was published monthly from 1926 until 1937 by the International Labor Defense (ILD), a Workers Party of America, and later Communist Party-led, non-partisan defense organization founded by James Cannon and William Haywood while in Moscow, 1925 to support prisoners of the class war, victims of racism and imperialism, and the struggle against fascism. It included, poetry, letters from prisoners, and was heavily illustrated with photos, images, and cartoons. Labor Defender was the central organ of the Scottsboro and Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaigns. Editors included T. J. O’ Flaherty, Max Shactman, Karl Reeve, J. Louis Engdahl, William L. Patterson, Sasha Small, and Sender Garlin.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1934/v10n05-may-1934-orig-LD.pdf