1966 march deserves a place in state history
Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy includes a little-known event that energized labor rights
La marcha, as it was called, began July 4, 1966, and ended on Labor Day. Farmworkers marched southeast from the Rio Grande Valley to Harlingen and then turned to Corpus Christi before heading northwest to Austin. At night, they rested in places arranged by churches and student organizations. A melon workers strike had begun a month earlier and the organizers wanted to up the pressure on Gov. John Connally and the Texas Legislature to improve working conditions and increase the minimum wage. When the marchers got close to Austin, after walking approximately 500 miles, they were joined by 10,000 supporters. News reporters announced that the rally was the largest in Texas history.
If you’ve never heard of this march, you can be forgiven because it’s rarely taught or discussed. This weekend, as we celebrate the life of Martin Luther
King Jr., and when we mark César Chávez Day in March, we need to remember the risks taken by Texas farmworkers. They were inspired by national civil rights and labor leaders, including King and Chávez, but the farmworkers faced such long odds for political victory that they only received limited support from national organizations. For that reason, I believe these Texans’ struggle for expanding freedom is all the more remarkable and deserves a bigger place in our history.
“Fifty years ago the farmworkers had the courage to throw down their sacks for picking melon and hold a picket sign to demand better wages,” Rebecca Flores, a former United Farm Workers representative in Texas, who was a high school secretary at the time of the strike, told the San Antonio Express-News on the 50th anniversary in 2016. “They had all the forces against them — the politicians, the judges, the sheriff — and they stuck it out.”
In the 1960s, Texas farmers had the reputation across the United States of paying the lowest wages, allowing children to work in the fields and mistreating guest workers. The Bracero Program, which permitted Mexican men to work legally in the United States on short-term labor contracts, creat
ed an oversupply of labor. In Texas, it was common for farmers to pay farmworkers 40 to 50 cents an hour.
Chávez and Dolores Huerta, the co-founders of the National Farmworkers Association, helped bring pressure on the U.S. government to end the Bracero Program. In California, the competition for farm labor rose immediately, and growers began paying higher wages. Throughout California, large-scale growers offered domestic farmworkers as much as $2.45 an hour, and within the California Legislature, representatives began talks to establish a commission to oversee collective bargaining between employers and unionized workers.
In Texas, things did not go as smoothly. The Legislature was not willing to make many reforms. Its only change was to end child labor and abolish state laws that exempted child farmworkers from attending school. In 1963, Rep. Eligio “Kika” de la Garza introduced House Bill 165, which placed children employed in agriculture under the same child labor laws applied to other Texas children. The bill passed, and children younger than 14 were required to attend school and could not be employed in agriculture. Unfortunately, employers did not follow the reforms. The following year, the U.S. Department of Labor found Texas farmers to be illegally employing 1,763 minors, of which 363 were under 9 years old, 941 under 13, and 454 between the ages of 14 and 15. Only Georgia had close to the same number of child labor violations, with 1,113 children illegally employed in agriculture.
On March 17, 1966, Chávez led a 25-day march for 300 miles from Delano, Calif., to Sacramento. Chávez and Huerta hoped that the march would inspire other farmworker communities across the nation to replicate this form of social protest.
In May 1966, Eugene Nelson and two Starr County merchants, Margil Sánchez and Lucio Galván, organized a rally in Rio Grande City to recruit workers to form a union. Starr County farmers paid among the lowest wages in the nation in large part because employers could easily hire undocumented workers for very little pay.
The next month, 1,400 melon workers employed by La Casita Farms and five other corporations went on strike. Their main demand was for their hourly wage to be raised from 50 cents to $1.25. The strikers voted to become affiliated with the NFWA in expectation of receiving financial assistance from the union. Chávez supported the affiliation but was not prepared to heavily invest in Texas, since the political atmosphere did not support improved working conditions or wage hikes.
During the first days of the strike, hundreds of outsiders came to observe and help the strikers. As the strike drew media attention, A.Y. Allee, captain of the Texas Rangers, traveled to South Texas and told the Rangers to keep the strikers under control. Particularly troublesome for the captain were the activities of Nelson, the strike leader, who was organizing blockades of roads in which strikers sat outside farm entrances to prevent trucks carrying the daily harvest from leaving the farms.
The same technique was used along the international bridge to Mexico. To dissuade Mexicans across the border from coming into Starr County, Nelson and other strikers met workers on the bridge and asked them to return home. This was a way of preventing scab labor from replacing the huelgistas (strikers). Because this was an effective strategy, Allee ordered Nelson and the other organizers to be arrested for disturbing the peace. Judges tried to keep the organizers and union leaders in jail by imposing fines of up to $2,000. During the strike, many people were beaten and arrested, and the lead organizers were repeatedly jailed.
To bring public attention to the problems experienced by Texas farmworkers, the strikers decided to replicate the Sacramento march. The Rev. Antonio Gonzáles from Houston, Baptist minister James Novarro, the Rev. Sherrill Smith from San Antonio and the Rev. Robert Peña from Rio Grande City would lead the march, and Nelson was to coordinate activities on the way to the Capitol. They expected to meet Connally in Austin and ask him to introduce a bill to set the state’s minimum hourly wage for farm labor at $1.25.
Chávez and Andrew Young, the executive director of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, greeted the marchers at St. Edward’s University in Austin. Chávez and Young were there to provide advice and help negotiate. The strikers and members of the NAACP, the Texas AFL-CIO and the IAW, along with U.S. Sen. Ralph Yarborough and Chávez, gave electrifying speeches supporting the minimum-wage demand. At the end of the rally, Connally issued a public statement opposing the strikers.
The marchers returned to the Rio Grande Valley and resumed the strike for another year.
It ended when Hurricane Beulah made a direct hit on South Texas in late September. In January 1967, the 60th Texas Legislature passed House Bill 208, which was meant to improve housing conditions in the labor camps. Connally vetoed the bill. If the legislation had been adopted, labor camps would have been required to meet minimum health standards such as providing toilets and meeting sanitary conditions, and would have been supervised by health inspectors. The governor likewise continued to oppose any bill that placed restrictions on the use of pesticides and herbicides in the fields.
Despite Connally’s obstructive practices, a few years later a U.S. Senate subcommittee’s investigation brought changes to Texas. A congressional investigation had obtained critical information proving that the Texas Rangers had used excessive force against the melon strikers. This evidence was used in charges filed in federal court in Brownsville. After losing at trial, the Rangers appealed; the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s decision. In Allee v. Medrano (1974), the justices ruled that local police and the Texas Rangers had selectively arrested labor organizers as a means of ending the strike. The court also ruled that some of Texas’ anti-picketing laws were unconstitutional, and it prohibited the Rangers from intervening in farm labor strikes from then on.
In the end, although the melon strike did not change the legislative agenda in Texas, it was a monumental success in energizing social activism and inspiring a new generation of youths to demand immediate change. Soon, Texas youths joined a national movement organized by college students to end segregation and remove social barriers impeding the social mobility of Mexican Americans.
By the late 1960s, the collective pressure placed on the state government by Mexican American and African American activists inspired by MLK and Chávez led to the beginning of desegregation, though there is still important work remaining to be done in the struggle for equality. Menchaca is a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. This piece is an excerpt from her new book, “The Mexican American Experience in Texas: Citizenship, Segregation, and the Struggle for Equality.” She is the author of “Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans” and “Naturalizing Mexican Immigrants: A Texas History.”