ABSTRACT
In 1973, Puerto Rican migrants working for the Shade Tobacco Growers Association, in Connecticut, walked out of their jobs in protest over living conditions. Their protest gave birth to the Agricultural Workers Association (ATA). By 1976, ATA had 9,000 members and offices in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. ATA joined the United Farm Workers (UFW) in 1977, but the merger failed, according to the UFW, for financial reasons, thus ending the effort to organize farmworkers in the Northeast. However, other reasons underlay the failure to organize Puerto Rican farmworkers. I argue that such disorganization often arises from workers’ own attempts at organization and that the exploitation of workers requires such disorganization. ATA’s creation and its victories ultimately curtailed the use of Puerto Rican farmworkers in U.S. agriculture and led to the demise of the Puerto Rican government’s Farm Labor Program. Growers’ preference for the H-2 work visa program in the 1970s, as well as the increase in undocumented migrants and the hostile climate for labor organizing of farmworkers, ended their use of Puerto Ricans. These developments established important foundations for the reliance on the deportable and low-wage labor that characterizes seasonal migration today and which undermined the work of activists fighting for social justice. ATA was the result of a new agrarian labor regime rooted in global and neoliberal capital. The making, remaking, and unmaking of Puerto Rican farmworkers reveals the dynamic processes in which labor relations are immersed and the structural forces in agriculture that have shaped Puerto Ricans as colonial migrants, U.S. citizens, and farmworkers.
