“Attention! Migratory Farm Workers” Educational Bulletin no. 2

This educational bulletin for migratory farm workers (ca. 1938?) shares information about workplace rights. Migratory farm workers played essential roles in the agricultural industries of California. These workers, many of whom were Mexican, Filipino, or African American, struggled and struck for workplace rights in the 1920s and early 1930s. During the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl this preexisting population was joined by tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and landowners displaced from the American southwest. In acknowledgement of this growing farmworker population in the 1930s and amidst the New Deal expansion of federal protections, the federal government expanded programs to assist migrant farmworkers. These policies joined state level labor laws. Employers did not always follow the laws, however, and workers took to creating and distributing informational bulletins like this one to inform each other of their rights. The novelist John Steinbeck drew on his own experiences working in federal resettlement programs when he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, which landowners and agribusiness leaders pushed to ban in some parts of California. Steinbeck saved this bulletin and reflected on their historical significance in the attached text to Paul Muni. 

Teach with this item from Unit 1 of the curriculum guide, Reading Dangerously: Censorship and the Freedom to Read in 20th Century America.
 

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