Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

To address labor shortages around World War I, contractors imported Mexican workers by the thousands. A number of them brought revolutionary military experience with them, and the global Marxist current was at least as strong in Mexico as it was in California. American military intelligence tracked Mexican communists through the CAWIU, singling out men such as Frank Samora (union secretary), Francisco Medina (chapter founder), and Fred Martínez (YCL organizer).40 Behind them were the Chicana-led networks that ensured the strikers lived to see another day, financing the effort with sweat and discipline. Prominent radical Filipino labor organizers such as Carlos Bulosan and Larry Itliong cut their teeth in the same California 1930s farmwork milieu. The planters’ depiction of the CAWIU as Mexican and Filipino workers misled by communists is belied by the obvious fact that a handful of underfunded outside agitators couldn’t possibly have organized California’s Spanish- and Tagalog-speaking agricultural workers the way the CAWIU did. Rather, Party organizers like Darcy and Decker eschewed the top-down turn in Moscow and fit themselves to the diverse rank-and-file tradition of California communism.