Latinx Encounters

The fields and orchards of the Midwest have offered seasonal agricultural work for countless Latinx migrant laborers. For more than a century, Mexican, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican migrants converged in the heartland to perform some of the most grueling labor needed to sustain the region’s vital agribusiness. In return, they were rewarded with dismal working conditions, poor government protections, and fierce hostility toward their organizing efforts. Juan Ignacio Mora uncovers the everyday strategies these migratory laborers employed to fight for better economic conditions, offering a new history of the farmworker justice movement that transforms our understanding of the US heartland.

Mexican, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican migrants arrived in the Midwest with vastly different circumstances of class, ethnicity, and immigration status, which fueled complex collaborations and conflicts. Contested notions of race challenged their relationships, but migrant workers and their families made inroads in workers' rights and nurtured a shared culture, negotiating collective bargaining agreements and forming the first punk rock band. Capturing the relationship between the Midwest, the Texas-Mexico borderlands, Mexico’s interior, and the colonial archipelago of Puerto Rico, Latinx Encounters unravels a transnational history of migratory labor, farmworkers' rights, and the rapidly changing food industry.