Barrio Boy

Ernesto Galarza (1905-1964) was a prominent Mexican American labor activist, professor, and writer. He was born in a small Mexican village named Jalcocotán. When he was eight years old, he immigrated to America with his mother and two uncles. He settled in Sacramento, where he attended school and did odd jobs, including working as a farmworker. His mother died when he was young, and he was raised by his uncle José. He went to Oriental College on a scholarship and earned his master’s degree in history at Stanford and a PhD at Columbia. He worked with the Pan-American Union analyzing labor, education, and infrastructure issues in Latin America and was a prominent labor organizer in California’s farmworker movement. His 1964 book Merchants of Labor detailed the injustices of the Bracero program, which brought Mexican workers to the country for short-term contracts on farms. His exposé, which sold 10,000 copies and went through two printings, was instrumental in the abolition of the program. He was a professor at the University of Notre Dame, San Jose State University, and the universities of California at San Diego and Santa Cruz. In 1976, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.