Latinx Encounters: How Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans Made the Modern Midwest (Latinx Histories)

The fields and orchards of the Midwest have offered seasonal agricultural work for countless Latinx migrant laborers.For more than a century, Mexican, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican migrants converged in the heartland’s agricultural industry to perform some of the most grueling labor needed to sustain the vital agribusiness of the region.In return, they were rewarded with dismal working conditions, poor government protections, and fierce hostility to their organizing efforts.Juan Ignacio Mora uncovers the everyday strategies these migratory laborers employed to fight for better economic conditions, offering a new history of the farmworker justice movement that transforms our understanding of the US heartland. Mexican, Mexican American, and Puerto Rican migrants arrived in the Midwest with vastly different circumstances of class, ethnicity, and immigration status, which fueled complex collaborations and conflicts.Contested notions of race tested their relationships, but migrant work