Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor Highlight

The AFL ceased its work with majority-Latino unions in the Southwest, and refused to organize Latino workers for decades afterward. Thanks to pernicious anti-immigrant rhetoric echoing out from politicians, unions, and the media, Mexican workers were met with racism, xenophobia, and violence, scorned for “taking American jobs,” and enthusiastically exploited by employers. During the 1930s, President Herbert Hoover enacted a massive deportation raid on people of Mexican descent, in which up to 1.8 million Latinos—nearly 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens—were forcibly removed to Mexico. (President Eisenhower would reprise this racist campaign in 1954, when more than 1 million more Latino people were violently rounded up and deported.)