Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers ...

Professor Zaragosa Vargas has penned an extraordinary book. Labor Rights Are Civil Rights not only demonstrates the long-standing integration of workers' rights and civil rights but also provides a provocative, comprehensive sweep of Mexican-American labor history. I highly recommend it. --Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in 20th Century America Zaragosa Vargas has provided us with an insightful and revealing study of the crucial role of Mexican and Mexican American workers in struggles for union rights and civil rights in Southwestern agriculture and industry during the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on his extensive original research he has effectively situated those struggles in the context of both national and international political changes, producing a book that should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of these decades. --David Montgomery, author of Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century Labor Rights Are Civil Rights is a brilliant and much-needed contribution. Vargas not only compels us to re-think 20th century American working-class and civil rights history, but he tells a powerful transnational story, reminding us that so-called U.S. history doesn't stop at the Rio Grande. --Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination Zaragosa Vargas stunningly chronicles the vast oppression and previously hidden history of Mexican American workers, especially women. His hard-hitting, comprehensive narrative shows how their battles for labor rights, like those of African American workers, simultaneouslybecame struggles for freedom. This is a major work exposing the radical and working-class roots of the civil rights movements of the twentieth century. --Michael Honey, author of Black Workers Remember, An Oral History, and Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights. Impressively grounded in primary sources and bolstered by a sharp analysis of the best of the secondary literature, the book is simultaneously a powerful piece of synthesis and a strong and original new interpretation. --David Gutierrez, University of California, San Diego