Mexican American Farm Workers
Among the most hard-pressed workers during the Great Depression were those who labored in the nation’s agricultural field, orchards, and processing plants. Agriculture was a big-time corporate business by the 1930s, and in California and other parts of the Southwest it employed hundreds of thousands of poor Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. Seizing on the spirit of social protest sweeping the country in the early 1930s, many of these workers went on strike for better wages and working conditions. Here, women from Mexican American communities are heading to the cotton fields near Corcoran, California, to urge workers to join a major strike of cotton pickers. Though the workers in Corcoran won some wage improvements in this 1933 strike, the fierce battle between employers and workers in American agriculture was far from over and continues to this day. Library of Congress.