Not a sweet deal: Mexican migrant workers in the sugar beet farms of the Midwest and Mountain states, 1900--1930

During the 1900--1930 period, hundreds of thousands of Mexican farm laborers in Texas migrated every year to work in the sugar beet fields of the Great Lakes, Mountain and Plain states. Current historical literature explains that the Mexicans traveled north to escape the racial discrimination they experienced in the Lone Star state and to take advantage of the higher wages and better conditions offered by the beet growers. The findings of this research indicate however, that the wages paid to Mexican agricultural migrant workers in the beet fields, and their net earnings, were not significantly higher than those paid by Texas cotton ranchers and vegetable farmers. Here, as well as in the sugar beet farms, Mexican migrant laborers suffered considerable wage, racial and social discrimination. I argue instead that surplus labor in the US Southwest, a high demand for unskilled labor in the sugar beet industry and the lure of higher paying factory jobs in the industrial cities of the Midwest drove the labor migration stream to the North. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...