laws. The literacy test was rigidly applied,
as were provisions against foreign recruit-
ment of labor and against admission of
people likely to become public charges. In
Texas the new Texas Emigrant Agent
Law, banning out-of-state recruitment of
laborers in Texas, added another legal
restriction to prospective Mexican immi-
gration. Yet illegal immigration contin-
ued. It took the coming of the Great
Depression in October 1929 to turn the
flow of Mexicans back to Mexico.Migrant Workers
Used to harsh exploitation at home,
Mexican peasants who immigrated to the
United States in the early 20th century
were likely to regard as improvements
living conditions that native-born
Americans would have considered intol-
erable. The $1 to $3 per day paid to an
unskilled agricultural worker in theUnited States in 1914 would have
seemed a pittance to many Americans,
but to a Mexican peasant who had
received 16 cents per day in Mexico it
seemed like good wages.
Nevertheless, the life of a Mexican-
American farmworker in the 1910s and
1920s was not an easy one. Job opportu-
nities in the manufacturing and service
industries were expanding for Mexican
Americans, more of whom found
employment in steel mills, construction
work, automobile factories, vegetable and
fruit canning, meat packing, utility
companies, hotels, and restaurants. Yet
most Mexican Americans continued to
work in the fields, doing the nation’s
“stoop labor”—so called for the hard
and monotonous chore of stooping to
pick crops. Stoop laborers typically
worked from dawn to dusk in the hot
southwestern sun, coming home at night
to miserable living conditions—tents,
barns, or shacks without running water144 ATLAS OF HISPANIC-AMERICAN HISTORY
Migrant Mexican laborers at work
picking (top to bottom) carrots, lettuce,
and spinach(National Archives)THE LUDLOW MASSACRE
In 1913, when a multiethnic group of 12,000 miners in Ludlow, Colorado, working for John
D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel & Oil Co. began a strike, they were attacked by guards and
evicted from company-owned housing, forcing them to live in tents. On April 20, 1914, state
militiamen, together with the company guards, attacked the tents, first by shooting at them
and then by burning them to the ground. Eighteen people, half of whom were Mexican
American, were killed; among the dead were a number of children. Miners from through-
out the region retaliated, killing numerous company guards. Finally, the U.S. Army was called
in to restore order. President Woodrow Wilson personally asked Rockefeller to negotiate a
settlement with the strikers, but he refused.During a 14-hour battle on April 20, 1914, National Guardsmen soaked strikers’
tents in kerosene and set them on fire. The smoke from the blazing tents suffocated
13 women and children. (Library of Congress)