Mexican American Labor, 1790-1990

Historians of labour in the United States have given scant attention to Mexican American workers and their trade union activity. This panoramic history summarises the origins of this work force and the social and economic changes the workers experienced as industrialisation and capitalism transformed employment in the nineteenth century. He focuses on the Southwest and California in particular in recounting worker efforts to organise trade unions over the past one hundred years. As the author traces the historic evolution of struggles to gain economic equity and ethnic and gender equality, he introduces the individual experiences of many courageous workers.