Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
War II advisors were given many new responsibilities for regulating the
countryside and increasing farm production. The wartime work of UC
Cooperative Extension included forming fi refi ghting groups, mapping
rural sources of water, encouraging and training homeowners to grow their
own food in “victory gardens,” and even forming a kind of rural militia
for California countryside residents, where farm advisors were authorized
to sign up recruits (Crocheron 1946, 7-8). Cooperative Extension served
as a convenient point of access to rural communities and acted as a kind
of organizational technology for the state, allowing the implementation
of national policies on a broad but also very local scale.
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Advisors, however,
felt ambivalent about these new responsibilities. UC Director of Coopera-
tive Extension B. H. Crocheron was already resentful of the increased regu-
latory duties placed on advisors during the 1930s as part of the New Deal.
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After the end of World War II, he claimed that “no civil organization held
a larger place in the war life of California” than Cooperative Extension,
but he also struck a note of unease, terming the advisers' wartime activities
a “rude interruption” (1946, 1). Of all the responsibilities that advisors took
on during the war, their work in controlling the supply and placement of
farm labor was perhaps the most onerous and with the most potential for
confl ict.
In 1939 and 1940, as formal U.S. entrance into World War II began to
look more likely, growers began clamoring for permission to recruit labor
in Mexico for agricultural work in California and other western states.
Many growers probably recalled the labor conditions prevalent during
World War I, when farmworkers were harder to fi nd and commodity prices
were sky high. During the fi rst war, the United States and Mexico made
an informal agreement whereby U.S. growers were allowed to travel to
Mexico to recruit their own labor for agricultural work. This program was
very popular with growers because it allowed them to recruit their own
workforce, in numbers of their own choice, and with very few restrictions
on the treatment and labor conditions of the Mexican workers. For the
Mexican and U.S. governments, however, the legacy of this labor importa-
tion program was equivocal: growers had brought thousands of Mexican
citizens into the United States for farmwork with little or no thought about
these workers' fates when the war ended, U.S. soldiers returned home, and
the demands of wartime production declined. As a result, in the years
following World War I, the Mexican farmworkers faced a dire situation:
