Official proceedings of the annual meeting: 1929

532

ROBERT N. McLEAN

Competing with the beet growers are the melon, the cotton,
the grape, and the lettuce growers. California produces not less
than I80 distinct crops. There is not a month during the year
when some crop is not rolling to market. As yet, these various
industries are in the competitive period when it comes to the matter of recruiting Mexican labor.
Last fall I journeyed in my car from the San Joaquin Valley,
over the Ridge Route to Los Angeles. All day I traveled between
two lines of Mexican workers. There were decrepit Ford cars
loaded with household articles, small trucks doing both a passenger and a freight business, and every car had its quota of browneyed children. The walnut season was over in southern California, and the workers were journeying north in hope of finding
work in the cotton harvest, which was just beginning in California's great inland valley. But the grape harvest was over in the
valley, and those who had been engaged in it were journeying
south to look for work in the navel orange crop which was just
coming on. And so the two lines of workers passed each other,
spending time and money in traveling, because no one has shown
us how the various industries can coordinate, and budget, and
pool, their demands for Mexican labor.
The Mexican is often criticized for being a rover. He is here
today and somewhere else tomorrow; and one who couples a
permanent residence with the idea of respectability is sure that
the Mexican worker cannot be good for much, or he would not
always be losing or throwing up one job and moving his family
away in search of another. Now the Mexican's habits are not
migratory, but the habits of the industries which furnish him a
livelihood most certainly are. Perhaps no group of people have
ever been more fixed in their residence than the Mexican workers before they came to this country. In fact, before the present
revolutionary movement they were chained to the soil. The law
provided that a laborer could not leave the land upon which he
was born, until he had discharged his debt to his patron; and the
economic system under which he worked fixed it so that his debt