On Friday, February 25, 1938, Police had arrested roughly 200 of them in the previous week in cracking down on what city leaders characterized as a revolution. Almost all of the inmates were charged with illegal picketing or blocking a sidewalk, crimes they committed in an effort to improve wages and working conditions in the pecan shelling industry. The chief of police, like many political and economic leaders in South Texas, feared that these signs of worker activism could prove disruptive and potentially transformative. In one sense, the leaders had little reason for concern. In spite of these conditions, however, the agricultural and semi-industrial workers of South Texas waged a sustained, if largely unsuccessful, campaign of labor organization…show more content… Meetings took place in San Antonio and Laredo in March 1936 to announce the founding of a new labor organization called the Confederation of Mexican and Mexican-American Laborers. While the labor movement unraveled in Laredo, CIO unions, primarily the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), began to push into other parts of South Texas in late 1930s. These efforts were part of the larger effort by the CIO to organize the South, including Texas, during the late 1930s and into the 1940s. The efforts to organize the region’s workers fell in line with the CIO’s priority strategy and their biggest threat was the non-support of local employers, politicians, and law enforcement. UCAPAWA efforts to organize field workers in 1937 and 1938 were abandoned by the union as hopeless, while the union struggled slightly longer to organize workers in the packing sheds. The lack of federal protection for agricultural unions was the main reasoning as to why much of union efforts weren't working. The seasonal nature of the work also made successful organizing more difficult as unions had little chance to take root in an area that the workers had to leave. Worker organizational efforts in the Lower Valley, the ready availability of replacement workers in border towns just across the Rio Grande made any effort to emulate workers elsewhere in protesting their treatment seem foolhardy and doomed to
