Chapter 7. Spain vs. England
A brief history of how things got this way
On long drives to farm labor camps, with lots of time for my mind to wander, it would often wander to some fundamental questions: Why do Mexican workers come north for farm jobs and not the other way around? Why don’t we cross the border south in search of work? Why don’t we have to live apart from our families for months on end just to support them? The questions seem absurd on their face with a single obvious answer along these lines: The United States is rich. Mexico is poor. All in all, the citizens of the United States are just better off than those of Mexico. But why is that? In search of an answer, I found myself going back into history. Way back.
It was an ordinary day, some four billion years ago, when something extraordinary happened: A colossal object, the size of the planet Mars, collided with a still-forming Earth. Known to scientists as Theia, the impact of its impact is still with us. First, the mass of earthly debris Theia sent flying into space would soon form our moon, without which there would be no tides nor moonlight nor countless literary and musical references to our cosmic companion. Second, Theia’s giant whack would knock our gently spinning planet off-kilter by 23.5 degrees. This permanent lean, while modest, is the reason we have seasons.
Earth rotates on its axis once per day and revolves around the sun once per year. Were it not to lean, every place on Earth would get twelve hours of sunlight every day. Because we do lean, the amount of sunlight falling on any given spot depends on where our planet is on that year-long journey around the sun. In the Northern Hemisphere, we lean farthest from the sun in late December, on our Winter Solstice. That’s when days are shortest and the sunlight strikes at something of a glance, so the energy from any given beam of light is spread out over some distance. This makes it relatively cold. We lean closest to the sun in late June, on our Summer Solstice. That’s when days are longest and the direct sunbeams really warm things up. This makes summer just the right time for growing crops in this hemisphere, provided it’s a place with decent soil and plenty of it. One such place in North America is the State of North Carolina, midway between New York and Florida along the Atlantic Coast.
North Carolina consists of three geological regions. The Appalachian Mountain region in the western part of the state is filled with ancient mountains, far older than the Rocky Mountains in western states and hence relatively worn down (but still breathtaking). In the middle sits the Piedmont, from the French word for mountain foot, where you’ll find gently rolling hills. The capital city of Raleigh and most of the state’s other big cities such as Charlotte and Greensboro are in the Piedmont. To the east is the vast Coastal Plain, best known outside the state for the Outer Banks and other beaches saturated with tourists ever summer. But that’s just the thin coastal part. The plain part consists of vast expanses of land. Lots and lots of flat, tillable land.
It’s no surprise people have been growing crops on this land since they first stepped foot here, thought to have happened some twelve thousand years ago. For nearly all that time, they mostly grew crops to feed themselves and their families, or to barter with neighbors. Such subsistence farming eventually gave way to commercial farming, or the raising of cash crops. That took off in a very big way once the Europeans began to colonize this side of the Atlantic. But it would take those Europeans a few tries.
Spain and England were the most successful colonizers of the New World, evidenced by the fact their languages remain widely spoken across both continents today.[1] Spain is well known for sending the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus west in 1492. Much less known is the fact that King Henry VII of England also sent an Italian explorer this direction in 1497—a mere five years later. His name was John Cabot.
Columbus, despite botching his conclusion that he had arrived in India, rather succeeded in establishing a foothold for his Spanish sponsors. One hesitates to use a word like “succeeded” to describe anything Columbus did, given the genocidal doom he and his followers showered upon the tens of millions of men, women, and children who already lived here. But there is no question his journey would change the course of human history.
And what of John Cabot, England’s Columbus? He too made it across the Atlantic, landing quite a distance north of where Columbus made his landfall. Nobody knows precisely where. Cabot also believed he had arrived in Asia. Returning home with his exciting news, he set out again in 1498, this time determined to make it all the way to Japan. He was never heard from again and, in 1499, given up for dead.
Remarkably, more than a hundred years went by before England tried again to venture across the Atlantic. This gave Spain a massive head start in colonizing what would eventually be known as North and South America. Historian Juan Gonzalez explains:
[1] France and Portugal would, of course, also give it a go. French is still widely spoken in Canada and Haiti, as is Portuguese in Brazil.
That failure [by Cabot], along with the discovery of gold and silver in Mexico and Peru a few decades later, permitted Spain to catapult to the pinnacle of sixteenth-century world power. Meanwhile, the English, bereft of colonies and increasingly consumed by religious and political strife at home, were reduced to sniping at Spanish grandeur.
The English would not stay at home sniping forever. In 1584, nearly a century after John Cabot’s failed venture, Sir Walter Raleigh sent English explorers to Roanoke Island, just inside the present-day Outer Banks of North Carolina. Here, a hundred or so colonists gave it a go. It’s also where Virginia Dare became the first English child born in the New World. By 1590, however, the colonists had vanished with nary a trace and have been known ever since as the Lost Colony.[1]
The Spanish would also make an early visit to this area. In the early 1500s, they explored the Carolina coast and ventured several hundred miles inland, clear to the mountains, in search of gold. They also established a colony of five hundred settlers along the Cape Fear River near present-day Wilmington. But when starvation and disease cut their ranks in half, the survivors all went back home. Thus, both Spain and England would make early plays at colonizing this tiny spot on a two-continent playing field, with both attempts failing badly.
In the early 1600s, England would at last make enduring footholds in the Americas, first in Jamestown in 1607 and then at Plymouth Rock in 1620. By this time, however, Spain had put roots down across vast expanses of both North and South America, including much of today’s western United States. The Spanish advantage over England at this stage of history is difficult to overstate. For every square mile the English could claim in the early 1600s, the Spanish had something like one million. But Spain’s massive territorial advantage was not enough to maintain dominance. England would ultimately win this epic tournament, for several reasons.
One reason was Spain’s own problems at home. The gold and silver drained from the Americas not only led to massive inflation there, but it was also barely enough to pay off the staggering debt Spain had accumulated. Economically, the country was just treading water. Also, the Spanish Crown and Catholic Church were determined to keep a firm grip on the goings on in the Americas, with a massive colonial bureaucracy micromanaging its overseas affairs, whereas England was more inclined to let a purely capitalist invention, the joint stock company, do whatever was needed to keep tobacco and whatnot flowing back east. England’s literal dominion came to an end, of course, with the American Revolution in 1776, but the capitalist drive of English-speaking entrepreneurs only intensified after that.
The Anglo-American experience of the 1800s was marked by cutthroat enterprise, domination of non-Europeans, and expansion—most notably, the United States’ forceful takeover in 1846 of Mexico’s holdings north of the Rio Grande. The Latin American experience of this time was marked by social inclusion (intermarriage between Europeans and indigenous persons, for instance, was not taboo there as it was up north) and a disdain for land speculation. Land tended to remain in the hands of the elite, who passed it down from one generation to the next.[2]
Noteworthy too is this: In Anglo America, there was just one ruling government respecting one constitution. It got terribly messy at times (and still does), but there was always just one United States. In Latin America, there were, and remain, dozens of splintered nations scrambling to succeed, with the United States regularly interfering in order to advance its own goals.
Hence, Anglo America has been battling with Latin America for economic and political superiority—dominating more often than not—ever since our English ancestors made their second run here in the 1600s. Eduardo Galeano, writing from the Latin American perspective, summarizes things this way:
[1] The lost colonists spent a mere six years or so on Roanoke Island. But The Lost Colony, an outdoor theatrical production dramatizing their story, has survived a full eighty years longer than they did. First produced in 1937, its cast once included a young Andy Griffith, after his graduation from the University of North Carolina and before going on to become one of the most beloved television actors of all time.
[2] On the topic of land, one must also consider the many geographic advantages of the area now home to the United States, including the vast transportation system provided by the Mississippi River and other rivers connected to it, plus our lengthy coasts—replete with abundant ports and coastal waterways. This all makes it much easier to move goods from nearly anywhere to anywhere else in the United States than in, say, Mexico.
For those who see history as a competition, Latin America’s backwardness and poverty are merely the result of its failures. We lost; others won.
Those others? Those would be us, nowadays erecting ever-stronger walls at our southern border and selectively allowing in Mexicans to do our crop work.
In North Carolina, there is one crop that H-2A farmworkers plant, cultivate, and harvest more than any other. It’s been our mainstay crop for nearly four hundred years and was certainly the most important crop in this nation’s colonial history. In 1612, the Englishman John Rolfe planted tobacco seeds in the colony of Virginia, just north of Carolina, at Jamestown.[1] Within a few years, tobacco production had exploded, and England was importing more of it from America than from anywhere else. The fact England no longer had to rely on its archrival Spain for tobacco made it all the cheerier.
England adored its colonies for its tobacco revenues and couldn’t get enough of the crop. Virginia production topped a million pounds by 1640 and would spread: first to Maryland and then to the colony of Carolina, which in those days consisted of both present-day North Carolina and South Carolina. The Carolinas would become over the years and remain to this day the number one tobacco-growing region in the United States.
Thus, it was the English colonizers from Virginia, bringing the commercial production of tobacco to the Albemarle region in the far northeast corner of the state, starting in earnest in the 1650s, who would be the Europeans to take root in the Carolinas once and for all. For the next century and a half, English colonization would spread south and east across the entirety of present-day North Carolina.[2]
By the 1660s, tobacco had become a major export crop from the Carolinas. In 1677, growers in Albemarle produced two thousand hogsheads, or barrels of it. Production would grow for the next three hundred years, reaching staggering volumes in the late 1900s, fueled by the demand for snuff, chewing tobacco, pipe tobacco, cigars, and—chiefly—cigarettes.
Tobacco was not the only agricultural commodity fueling North Carolina’s colonial era. Others included rice and indigo—a flowering plant used to make blue dye. Another went by the awkward name of naval stores and consisted of tar, pitch, and turpentine for the building of ships. That tar, incidentally, is the reason this is known as the Tar Heel State, though the precise origin story remains a matter of debate.[3]
Naval stores were produced from the majestic long-leaf pine trees that once blanketed most of the Coastal Plain and Piedmont. The long-leaf part of the name is no exaggeration. The needles of one of these can be longer than my size-12 shoe. During the colonial period, Carolina sent thousands of barrels of products derived from the long-leaf pine back to England, which desperately needed them, having by then cut down all its own pine forests. The same thing would, in time, nearly happen here. There are only a few stands left.
In the colony of Carolina as elsewhere, the people who did most of the brutally hard work of commercial agriculture were enslaved Blacks. Starting in 1619 with the arrival of the White Lion at the coastal port of Point Comfort in Virginia, and the trading of more than two dozen captive Africans on that ship for provisions, the astonishing success of a young United States relied heavily on the atrocity of slavery.
By 1729, there were six thousand men, women, and children living in bondage in North Carolina and another thirty-two thousand in South Carolina, where farms tended to be larger. Slavery then grew, more slowly in North Carolina compared to neighboring states, due in part to a coastline difficult to navigate and fewer harbors. Still, it grew. By 1860, just before the Civil War, there were nearly four hundred thousand enslaved Blacks in North Carolina alone. Most of them worked in agriculture, with a small number doing domestic work and trade work such as carpentry and tanning.
Across the United States, things changed abruptly in 1865 with the end of the Civil War and passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery across the Union. For a brief time, during the Reconstruction period, the introduction of racial equality to the South appeared imminent. General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, known colloquially as the “forty acres and a mule” order, mandated the transfer of four hundred thousand acres of land from former enslavers to ten thousand formerly enslaved Blacks. The idea was to let Black Americans be landowning farmers too, competing on equal footing with White farmers. One can imagine how well this went over with the White folks. The part about the mule, incidentally, was only a rumor, repeated until settling into lore but never part of the order.
President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination put an end to any hope of racial equality in a postwar America. His successor, Andrew Johnson, never an ideological soulmate of Lincoln, rescinded Special Order No. 15 and let the enslavers keep all their land. The noble aims of Reconstruction only slid farther downhill after that. But Southern landowners still needed labor. And newly emancipated Blacks still needed work. Thus was born the era of sharecropping and tenant farming across the state and, indeed, much of the South.
With sharecropping, Black and poor White farm families were granted the right to grow crops and live on a parcel of land in return for giving harvested crops to the landowner, who would sell those crops and give some of the proceeds back to the laborers. One arrangement was known as “farming on the halves,” whereby a sharecropping family lived rent-free on a landowner’s property, paid half of the seed and other growing costs out of their own pocket, planted and harvested the crops (sometimes working alongside members of the landowner’s family), then split the market proceeds fifty-fifty with the landowner. Oftentimes, sharecropping workers had little or no say in what they were paid and may have had to borrow money from the landowner in order to make ends meet until the crops came in. Landowners could, in practice, do pretty much whatever they wanted. Sharecropping was only marginally better than slavery.
So-called tenant farmers had it slightly better as they rented land outright, grew then sold their crops, paid rent out of the proceeds, and kept the rest. Sharecropping and tenant farming remained widespread in the later decades of the 1800s but declined and eventually came to an end in the 1900s. This is when growers found men and women willing to work for a simple wage and only when needed: migrant workers.
With the advent of motor vehicles and an expanding road system after the turn of the century, farmworkers were no longer tied to year-round jobs where they happened to live. They could travel with the crops, working perhaps in Florida during winter months and traveling up and down the East Coast during summers. Hence was born, in the early 1900s, the era of migrant farmwork that remains with us to this day. The basic idea is the same now as ever: Workers arrive at a farm when they’re needed and leave once their work is done. The main thing that’s changed is the ethnicity and birthplace of those farmworkers. Until the 1970s, most migrant workers in Eastern and Southern states were poor Whites and Blacks.
In Western states, ever since the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, there was a steady stream of workers from Mexico. It was then quite easy to cross the new border. They were especially welcomed during wartime. Shortly after the United States entered World War I in 1917, the country allowed employers to bring Mexican workers for six-month contracts to work on farms and railroads, after which the workers would return home. The arrangement came to be known as the Bracero Program.[4] The first iteration of this program ended in 1921, but Mexicans continued to come here for work, without authorization, even after the establishment of the US Border Patrol in 1924.
With the Great Depression in the 1930s, and record numbers of American citizens out of work, many people here did not look kindly upon Mexican workers holding American jobs. Hence, our government began deporting them by the hundreds of thousands.
Things changed when the United States formally entered World War II in 1941. Employers in Western states successfully argued that they needed the Mexican workers back. In 1942, the American and Mexican governments agreed to launch a second Bracero Program intended to last only a few years. Bracero II did lapse officially after the end of the war but was recertified in 1951 with passage of the Mexican Farm Labor Program. The program ran for a total of twenty-two years, eventually providing more than four hundred thousand Mexican workers per year, primarily to growers in California, Texas, and other Western states. Nearly five million contracts had been signed under the program when Congress allowed it to expire in 1964. The program by then had been widely criticized by labor unions, religious groups, and community organizations, chiefly for the maltreatment of workers. Also, lawmakers believed there were enough US workers to fill these jobs if only workers were paid higher wages. This may have in fact been true, but the point was moot. Unauthorized Mexican workers kept coming, and growers in the United States kept hiring them.
While World War I had triggered the first Bracero program out West, it had a different but equally consequential effect in Eastern and Southern states. First, it cut off the flow of immigrant labor from Europe, which had until then provided farm labor, especially in the Northeast. It was also a driver of the epic wave of relocation known as the Great Migration by giving Blacks a compelling reason to go north, thanks in part to “work or fight” laws that made them either go fight in Europe or work low-paying jobs on Southern fields. And they couldn’t just work a few days a week to make ends meet. Vagrancy laws would send them to jail if they failed to work a full six days. The revival of the then-dormant Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina around this time was motivated in part to fight these “slackers.” It’s little surprise that half a million Blacks left the South between 1916 and 1921.
Just after the end of World War I, an agricultural price crash only increased the formation of a permanent class of migrant farmworkers. With fewer job opportunities in any one place, Blacks who did not go north permanently had to range ever farther to find year-round work. From the 1920s through the 1970s, America’s Blacks comprised the largest ethnic group in the various streams of East Coast migrant farmworkers, but significant numbers of poor White families were relegated to the precarious life of migrant farmworkers, too. Their lives were vividly illustrated in the transformative CBS News television documentary Harvest of Shame, broadcast the day after Thanksgiving in 1960.
In the span of fifty-two minutes, legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow and producer David Lowe followed caravans of migrants and their families from Florida to New Jersey and back again, introducing Americans to their third-world living and working conditions, the “sweatshops of the soil.” Like Upton Sinclair’s landmark book The Jungle had fifty years earlier, creating numerous meat safety laws through its vivid depiction of the brutal lives of meatpacking workers in Chicago, Harvest of Shame is credited with prompting the passage of national health and safety laws that would begin to improve the living and working conditions of migrant farmworkers.[5]
After decades of Black migration to the North, and with poor Whites in the South, unburdened by racial barriers, able to move into more lucrative lines of work, somebody still had to do farmwork in places like North Carolina. Mexican workers had been filling those jobs in Western states for decades, and the supply of more such workers willing to come north for work was all but endless. Hence, by the 1980s, Latinos would become the largest ethnic group among North Carolina’s farmworkers. Most were then undocumented workers from Mexico. That would change, thanks to a bipartisan effort in Washington, DC, to radically reshape US immigration policy.
In 1986, under President Ronald Reagan and Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill Jr. (Republican and Democrat, respectively), the United States enacted the sweeping Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA. One of its key provisions was to make it against the law for employers to hire undocumented workers. To compensate for the effect of that provision, i.e., to supply growers with workers once they could no longer hire those without work authorization, IRCA also dusted off and modified a decades-old temporary labor program known as H-2. In 1952, the United States had established this nonimmigrant visa program with passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act. As did the two Bracero programs, it authorized the temporary and seasonal employment of foreign workers, known by this time as guestworkers. The original H-2 guestworkers were primarily Florida sugarcane cutters from Jamaica.[6]
The term guestworker is a translation of the German Gastarbeiter. In Germany, such workers had once been known as Fremdarbeiter, for foreign worker, until under the Third Reich, the term came to mean subhuman. Hence, Germany came up with the kinder euphemism used worldwide today. The euphemism may be kinder, but as historian Cindy Hahamovitch writes, the entire concept can be viewed as something less than kind:
[1] He would later, famously, marry a Native American woman named Pocahontas.
[2] Of course, there were already people living here when the Europeans arrived. Among them were the Tuscarora, the Cherokee, and at least a dozen other tribes of Native Americans. Our European ancestors got them out of the way by taking their land by force, enslaving them, concentrating them onto reservations, and exposing them to smallpox. The enormity of this colonial-era crime, committed by both England and Spain across North and South America, defies modern-day comprehension.
[3] North Carolina is also known as the Old North State, an apparent throwback to when the Carolina colony was divided in 1729, when everyone thought of this half as the older part. My favorite nickname is North Cackalacky, which can refer to the state or to a resident. The origin of this one is also something of a mystery, with many stories bandied about, and I hesitated to refer to anyone as a Cackalacky until being told numerous times this is not offensive. I sure hope I was told the truth. I use it all the time.
[4] The Mexican colloquialism for contract worker is a corruption of brazo, Spanish for arm, in which the letter z is pronounced like the c in face.
[5] Interestingly, the landmark documentary referred only to the harvesting of fruits and vegetables. Tobacco, the dominant crop of North Carolina and much of the South, was not mentioned, even though Murrow rarely appeared without a lit cigarette in his hand and the proud sponsor of the show was Philip Morris, maker of Marlboro cigarettes. The Surgeon General’s finding of tobacco’s link to early death, and the start of the long decline of cigarette smoking, was still four years away.
[6] Their world is vividly depicted in the 1990 documentary H-2 Worker by filmmaker Stephanie Black.
Unlike immigrants who stay, settle, and in some cases naturalize, vote, and qualify for social services, guestworkers exist in a no man’s land between nations; they provide labor to their host societies but often fall outside the protections of those societies’ labor laws. Ineligible for social benefits in their host country, they are often poorly protected by their home governments, despite the value of the remittances they send home. Guestworkers exist somewhere on the spectrum between slavery and freedom.
With the 1986 passage of IRCA, the United States would issue not one but two types of guestworker visa, each with numerous conditions for the hiring of foreign labor: The H-2A for agricultural work and the H-2B for nonagricultural jobs. There is no cap on the number of H-2A visas that can be issued.[1] In 1987, the United States certified a mere forty-four. But year after year that number grew steadily, then took off like a rocket starting around 2012. Nowadays the US certifies nearly four hundred thousand H-2A visas each year. The H-2A is now the longest running temporary visa program in US history. It is, indeed, our Bracero III.
So it is that Mexico provides farmworkers to the United States and not the other way around. Across the United States, the annual arrival of H-2A farmworkers has become as predictable as the seasons themselves. Every spring, thanks to the epochal whack from Theia, as the tilt of the Earth allows the sun to bring us higher temperatures and more hours of light, thousands of buses bring us farmworkers from Mexico. By winter, as that warmth goes south, so do the farmworkers, to rejoin their wives, children, and parents for a few months of reunion before boarding those buses again.
[1] The number of H-2B visas is limited to sixty-six thousand each year, although the government can, and has, lifted this cap from time to time.