Latina Lives, Latina Narratives

Influential Essays by Vicki L. Ruiz

Miroslava Chávez-García

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000401943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book brings together the most influential and widely known writings of Vicki L. Ruiz, a leading voice in the fields of Chicana/o, Latina/o, women's, and labor history.

For nearly forty years, Ruiz has produced scholarship that has provided the foundation for a rich and nuanced understanding of the ways in which Chicanas and Latinas negotiate the structures impinging on their everyday lives. From challenging familial, patriarchal cultural norms, building interethnic social networks in the neighborhood and workplace, and organizing labor unions, to fighting gender and racial discrimination in the courts, at work, in the schools, and on the streets, Ruiz's studies have examined the countless struggles, roadblocks, and victories Chicanas and Latinas have faced in the twentieth century and beyond. The articles in this book are organized chronologically to reflect the evolution of Ruiz's intellectual contributions as well as her commitment to integrating feminist history, theory, and methodology, and show how she has generously offered insights, reflections, and humor in helping us define and shape who we are as mujeres, Chicanas, Latinas, scholars, teachers, and mentors.

With its narrative flow and engaging prose, Ruiz's scholarship connects with academic and public audiences and this collection fulfills a much-needed demand in the teaching of women's, Chicana/o, Latina/o, and labor history.

1
A PROMISE FULFILLED

Mexican Cannery Workers in Southern California

Since 1930, approximately one-quarter of all Mexican women wage earners in the Southwest have found employment as blue-collar industrial workers (25.3 percent [1930], 25.6 percent [1980]).¹ These women have been overwhelmingly segregated into semi-skilled assembly line positions. Garment and food processing firms historically have hired mexicanas for seasonal line tasks. Whether sewing slacks or canning peaches, these workers have generally been separated from the year-round, higher paid male employees. This ghettoization by job and gender has in many instances facilitated labor activism among Mexican women. An examination of a rank-and-file union within a Los Angeles cannery from 1939 to 1945 illuminates the transformation of women’s networks into channels for change.

On August 31, 1939, during a record-breaking heat wave, nearly all of the 430 workers at the California Sanitary Canning Company (popularly known as Cal San), one of the largest food processing plants in Los Angeles, staged a massive walk-out and established a 24-hour picket line in front of the plant. The primary goals of these employees, mostly Mexican women, concerned not only higher wages and better working conditions, but also recognition of their union—the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America, Local 75—and a closed shop.

The Cal San strike marked the beginning of labor activism by mexicana cannery and packing workers in Los Angeles. This essay steps beyond a straight narrative, chronicling the rise and fall of UCAPAWA locals in California. It provides a glimpse of cannery life—the formal, as well as the informal, social structures governing the shop floor. An awareness of the varying lifestyles and attitudes of women food processing workers will be developed in these pages. No single model representing either the typical female or typical mexicana industrial worker exists. Contrary to the stereotype of the Hispanic woman tied to the kitchen, most Mexican women, at some point in their lives, have been wage laborers. Since 1880, food processing has meant employment for Spanish-speaking women living in California, attracted to the industry because of seasonal schedules and extended family networks within the plants.²

During the 1930s, the canning labor force included young daughters, newly married women, middle-aged wives, and widows. Occasionally, three generations worked at a particular cannery—daughter, mother, and grandmother. These mexicanas entered the job market as members of a family wage economy. They pooled their resources to put food on the table. “My father was a busboy,” one former Cal San employee recalled, “and to keep the family going … in order to bring in a little more money … my mother, my grandmother, my mother’s brother, my sister and I all worked together at Cal San.”³

Some mexicanas, who had worked initially out of economic necessity, stayed in the canneries in order to buy the “extras”—a radio, a phonograph, jazz records, fashionable clothes. These consumers often had middle-class aspirations, and at times, entire families labored to achieve material advancement (and in some cases, assimilation), while in others, only the wives or daughters expressed interest in acquiring an American lifestyle. One woman defied her husband by working outside the home. Justifying her action, she asserted that she wanted to move to a “better” neighborhood because she didn’t want her children growing up with “Italians and Mexicans.”⁴

Some teenagers had no specific, goal-oriented rationale for laboring in the food processing industry. They simply “drifted” into cannery life; they wanted to join their friends at work or were bored at home. Like the first women factory workers in the United States, the New England mill hands of the 1830s, Mexican women entered the labor force for every conceivable reason and for no reason at all. Work added variety and opened new avenues of choice.⁵

In one sense, cannery labor for the unmarried daughter represented a break from the traditional family. While most young mexicanas maintained their cultural identity, many yearned for more independence, particularly after noticing the more liberal lifestyles of self-supporting Anglo co-workers. Sometimes young Mexican women would meet at work, become friends, and decide to room together. Although their families lived in the Los Angeles area and disapproved of their daughters living away from home, these women defied parental authority by renting an apartment.⁶

Kin networks, however, remained an integral part of cannery life. These extended family structures fostered the development of a “cannery culture.” A collective identity among food processing workers emerged as a result of family ties, job segregation by gender, and working conditions. Although women comprised 75 percent of the labor force in California canneries and packing houses, they were clustered into specific departments—washing, grading, cutting, canning, and packing—and their earnings varied with production levels. They engaged in piecework while male employees, conversely, as warehouse-men and cooks, received hourly wages.⁷

Mexicana family and work networks resembled those found by historian Thomas Dublin in the Lowell, Massachusetts, mills in the antebellum era. California canneries and New England cotton mills, though a century apart, contained similar intricate kin and friendship networks. Dublin’s statement that women “recruited one another … secured jobs for each other, and helped newcomers make the numerous adjustments called for in a very new and different setting” can be applied directly to the Mexican experience. Mexican women, too, not only assisted their relatives and friends in obtaining employment but also initiated neophytes into the rigor of cannery routines. For instance, in the sorting department of the California Sanitary Canning Company, seasoned workers taught new arrivals the techniques of grading peaches. “Fancies” went into one bin; those considered “choice” into another; those destined for fruit cocktail into a third box; and, finally, the rots had to be discarded. Since peach fuzz irritated bare skin, women shared their cold cream with the initiates, encouraging them to coat their hands and arms in order to relieve the itching and to protect their skin from further inflammation.⁸ Thus, as Dublin notes for the Lowell mills, one can find “clear evidence of the maintenance of traditional kinds of social relationships in a new setting and serving new purposes.”⁹

Standing in the same spot week after week, month after month, women workers often developed friendships crossing family and ethnic lines. While mexicanas constituted the largest number of workers, many Russian Jewish women also found employment in southern California food processing firms.¹⁰

Their day-to-day problems (slippery floors, peach fuzz, production speed-ups, arbitrary supervisors, and even sexual harassment) cemented feelings of solidarity among these women, as well as nurturing an “us against them” mentality in relation to management. They also shared common concerns, such as seniority status, quotas, wages, and child-care.

Child-care was a key issue for married women, who at times organized themselves to secure suitable baby-sitting arrangements. In one cannery, the workers established an off-plant nursery and hired and paid an elderly woman who found it “darn hard … taking care of 25 to 30 little ones.” During World War II, some Orange County cannery workers, stranded without any day care alternatives, resorted to locking their small children in their cars. These particular workers, as UCAPAWA members, fought for and won management-financed day care on the firm’s premises, which lasted for the duration of World War II.¹¹ Cooperation among women food processing workers was an expression of their collective identity within the plants.

At Cal San, many Mexican and Jewish workers shared another bond—neighborhood. Both groups lived in Boyle Heights, an East Los Angeles working-class community. Although Mexican and Jewish women lived on different blocks, they congregated at street car stops during the early morning hours. Sometimes friendships developed across ethnic lines. These women, if not friends, were at least passing acquaintances. Later, as UCAPAWA members, they would become mutual allies.¹²

Cannery workers employed a special jargon when conversing among themselves. Speaking in terms of when an event took place by referring to the fruit or vegetable being processed, workers knew immediately when the incident occurred, for different crops arrived on the premises during particular months. For instance, the phrase “We met spinach, fell in love in peaches, and married in tomatoes” indicates that the couple met in March, fell in love in August, and married in October.¹³

Historians Leslie Tentler and Susan Porter Benson, studying women workers on the East Coast, have also documented the existence of female work cultures. However, unlike the women Tentler studied, Spanish-speaking cannery workers were not waiting for Prince Charming to marry them and take them away from factory labor. Mexican women realized that they probably would continue their seasonal labor after marriage. Also in contrast, Benson, delineating cooperative work patterns among department store clerks from 1890 to 1940, asserted that women experienced peer sanctions if they exceeded their “stint” or standard sales quota.¹⁴ Mexican cannery workers differed from Eastern clerks in that they did not receive a set salary, but were paid according to their production level. Collaboration and unity among piece rate employees attested to the strength of the cannery culture. Although increasing managerial control at one level, gender-determined job segmentation did facilitate the development of a collective identity among women in varying occupations and of diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Of these work-related networks, the cannery culture appeared unique in that it also included men. Comprising 25 percent of the labor force, men also felt a sense of identity as food processing workers. Familial and ethnic bonds served to integrate male employees into the cannery culture. Mexicans, particularly, were often related to women workers by birth or marriage. In fact, it was not unusual for young people to meet their future spouses inside the plants. Cannery romances and courtships provided fertile chisme, which traveled from one kin or peer network to the next.¹⁵

The cannery culture was a curious blend of Mexican extended families and a general women’s work culture, nurtured by assembly line segregation and common interests. Networks within the plants cut across generations, gender, and ethnicity. A detailed examination of the California Sanitary Canning Company further illuminates the unique collective identity among food processing workers. Cal San, a one-plant operation, handled a variety of crops—apricots and peaches in the summer, tomatoes and pimentos in the fall, spinach in the winter and early spring. This diversity enabled the facility, which employed approximately 400 people, to remain open at least seven months a year.¹⁶

Female workers received relatively little for their labors due to the seasonal nature of their work and the piece rate scale. In the Cal San warehouse and kitchen departments, exclusively male areas, workers received an hourly wage ranging from 58 to 70 cents an hour. On the other hand, in the washing, grading, cutting, and canning divisions, exclusively female areas, employees earned according to their production level.¹⁷ In order to make a respectable wage, a woman had to secure a favorable position on the line, a spot near the chutes or gates where the produce first entered the department. Carmen Bernal Escobar, a former Cal San employee, recalled:

There were two long tables with sinks that you find in old-fashioned houses and fruit would come down out of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Forty Years of Narrating Latina Lives
• 1 A Promise Fulfilled: Mexican Cannery Workers in Southern California
• 2 Dead Ends or Gold Mines?: Using Missionary Records in Mexican American Women’s History
• 3 “Star Struck”: Acculturation, Adolescence, and Mexican American Women, 1920–1950
• 4 Situating Stories: The Surprising Consequences of Oral History
• 5 “We Always Tell Our Children They Are Americans”: Méndez v. Westminster and the California Road to Brown v. Board of Education
• 6 Tapestries of Resistance: Episodes of School Segregation and Desegregation in the U.S. West
• 7 Una Mujer Sin Fronteras: Luisa Moreno and Latina Labor Activism
• 8 Nuestra América: Latino History as United States History
• 9 Citizen Restaurant: American Imaginaries, American Communities
• 10 AHA Presidential Address Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900–1930
• 11 “Ongoing Missionary Labor”: Building, Maintaining, and Expanding Chicana Studies/History, an Interview With Vicki L. Ruiz, by Leisa D. Meyer
• 12 Pathways in Oral History: Vicki L. Ruiz
• Permissions and Acknowledgments
• Index