Perhaps more than any other Chicano scholar, David Maciel in recent years has made intellectual society in Mexico aware of the Chicano experience in the United States. From his two-volume anthology Aztlán: Historia contemporánea del pueblo chicano (1976) to his 1978 anthology La otra cara de México: El pueblo chicano, plus his various pieces in Mexican journals, Maciel has promoted Chicano scholarship south of the border. His latest effort, Al norte del Río Bravo, is consistent with the objectives of Maciel’s earlier publications.
As part of a new series on working-class history in Mexico written by distinguished Mexican scholars, Maciel’s study emphasizes the overflow of that working-class experience into the United States. Since the United States conquest of Mexico’s northern borderlands, Mexican workers have migrated to the United States in search of employment. Maciel adds to Mexican working-class historiography by expanding it to include Chicano workers. Aimed at a Mexican audience that still knows relatively little about Chicanos, this work cuts no new research grounds in treating the Chicano working class. The importance of Maciel’s study is not to contribute new data or a new interpretation, but to synthesize a body of mostly published material for Mexican consumption. This material primarily covers the involvement of Chicano workers in a variety of agricultural, mining, and urban industrial unionizing efforts since the 1930s.
Maciel’s view of Chicano workers closely follows the theme first outlined by Juan Gómez-Quiñones in an often cited article, “The First Steps: Chicano Labor Conflict and Organizing, 1900 to 1920” (Aztlán, Spring 1973). Gómez-Quiñones argues that the foundation of Chicano labor history is militant class struggle. Once in the United States, Chicano workers became class-conscious and engaged in a series of conflicts against southwestern capitalists. Hence, Chicano working-class history equals a history of strikes and class agitation.
No one can deny that Chicano workers have participated in class struggle. This is an important facet of Chicano history and we need more studies of particular examples of Chicano labor militancy to understand the full dynamics of this process. Where Maciel and Gómez-Quiñones, as well as other Chicano historians pursuing the same conceptualization, err, however, is in their inability to acknowledge that working-class life involves more than just the job experience and involvement in labor strife. In the first place, many Chicano workers have not actively engaged in labor militancy. They may in fact practice forms of “passive resistance,” but this is an area unexplored by Chicano historians. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Desert Immigrants, 1981), perhaps class militancy is not central to the immigrant experience, which is so vital in understanding Chicano labor history. Beyond the debate of whether classconscious militancy has or has not been integral to the history of Chicano workers, especially immigrants, the Gómez-Quiñones-Maciel school of Chicano labor history fails to examine workers’ lives beyond the work place, such as in the home, within the family, and in the community. European and United States historians, such as E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, have clearly shown the relevance of exploring working-class culture in order to understand better working-class consciousness and politics. Chicano historians can and should do the same. As it stands, Maciel’s study, and that of other like-minded historians, remains rather traditional labor history, resembling that done during the first half of this century; that is, it concentrates principally on institutionalized aspects of labor history: unions and strike activities.
Still, as an introduction to Chicano labor history for readers in Mexico, Maciel’s monograph serves a useful and important educational purpose. If Chicanos cannot appreciate their history without knowing Mexico, so too, Mexicans cannot understand their history without knowing the United States, including the Mexican experience within the “Colossus of the North.”
