GALARZA, ERNESTO

(1905-1984), labor organizer, historian, professor, and community activist. Galarza was a quintessential man of all seasons. He filled his diverse roles with a sense of responsibility and commitment. When once asked how he was able to do so much, his response was both practical and existential: "When I felt the need to be involved in labor organizing, I did that. When I wanted to write, I wrote."

Galarza's life, although atypical of the Mexican-American experience, also reflected various aspects of that experience. Like millions of other Mexican-Americans, Galarza was a child of an immigrant family. He was born near Tepic, the capital of the state of Nayarit, at the beginning of a great upheaval in Mexico that resulted in the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Dislocated by the revolution, the Galarza family migrated to the United States. After settling in Sacramento, Galarza began the process of acculturation into American life. The history of the young Ernesto was set down years later in his marvelous autobiography, Barrio Boy (1971). More fortunate than other Mexican-American children in his ability to adapt to the American public school system, Galarza became a successful "scholarship boy." After graduating from high school, he earned a B.A. from Occidental College in Los Angeles and then an M.A. in history from Stanford in 1929. He later received a Ph.D. from Columbia University with honors in history.

Galarza might easily have pursued a career as a scholar, but his commitment to social causes led him instead to work with the Pan-American Union from 1936 to 1947 where he dealt with education and labor in Latin America. In the post-World War II period, Galarza, seeing the plight of poor farm-working families in the United States and no doubt remembering his own family's labor in the fields of Sacramento, joined the National Farm Labor Union and returned to California. For the next several years, he worked at the difficult task of organizing farm labor in the face of bitter opposition from the large California growers. During this period he also researched the condition of the braceros, the Mexican contract workers in the California agricultural industry. This led him to write his most significant book, Merchants of Labor (1964), an exposé of the exploitation of braceros.

During the 1960s Galarza turned his attention to urban Mexican-Americans and the effort to organize community-based groups to deal with the many social problems in the barrios. A teacher at various universities, he was always concerned about education. During the last year of his life he worked in San Jose to improve the public school education provided to Mexican-American children.

Galarza's decision to address educational issues was perhaps the result of his awareness of how much his own educational success was, for the most part, an anomaly within the Mexican-American community. Historically, for most Mexican-Americans, public school education via the so-called Mexican schools had been a bad experience. These segregated schools in the barrios were characterized by inferior physical conditions, congestion, insensitive teachers, limited access to high school education until the 1930s, more emphasis on a vocational as opposed to an academic curriculum, and an unwillingness to relate to the culturally different child. By his own example, Galarza hoped to obtain for other Mexican-Americans the sort of education he had had.

Ernesto Galarza, Barrio Boy (1971); Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (1964); Ernesto Galarza, Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field (1970).

Mario T. García

See also Labor; Mexico-U.S. Relations.