Small Town with One Road (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Gary Soto, the son and grandson of farm laborers, grew up during the 1950s and 1960s, a period during which migrant farm workers were routinely exploited, working without benefit of union contracts or government regulations. The hardscrabble existence he describes in “Small Town with One Road” was, to an extent, the life that Soto and his family lived. Soto hoed cotton and beets, and his father, a worker for a large agricultural company, died in an industrial accident (a fall from a ladder) when the poet was five years old. As a child, Soto could never imagine climbing out of poverty. “The likelihood of going beyond that was minuscule,” he says in an interview in Speaking of Poets: Interviews with Poets Who Write for Children and Young Adults. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s, farm workers, most of whom were either Mexican or Mexican American, began to organize, calling for safer working conditions and a living wage. In 1980, more than twenty percent of Mexican Americans lived below government-defined poverty levels. Many of these people were recent illegal immigrants from Mexico, some five million of whom crossed the border to flee inflation and look for a better life during the 1970s. Cesar Chavez was to Mexican and Chicano farm workers what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was to African Americans during this time. Fighting tirelessly to improve the life of field workers, Chavez, the leader of the militant but nonviolent United Farm Workers (UFW) union, won the first collective bargaining agreement between growers and workers in 1966. The UFW used boycotts, especially of grapes and lettuce, to prod growers into bettering working conditions for field workers and to keep the gains they had already negotiated. On the heels of Chavez’s success with the UFW, civil rights groups addressing the concerns of Mexicans and Chicanos sprung up across the country. By the late 1980s, Hispanics constituted the country’s second-largest minority and established themselves as a voting bloc that could no longer be ignored. In Texas and California especially, Chicanos used their political power to fight discrimination and press for changes in education and immigration policies.

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a boom in publishing by and about Mexican Americans. Writers such as Helena Maria Viramontes, Sandra Cisneros, Alma Luz Villanueva, Gary Soto, Ron Arias, Juan Felipe Herrera, Francisco X. Alarcon, Ray Gonzales, Rudolpho Anaya, and Lucha Corpi, riding the wave of success of Latin-American writers — such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa and others — in the 1960s, have articulated the Chicano (and Chicana) experience to millions of readers worldwide. One of the early promoters of Mexican-American literature has been Arte Publico Press, a Houston-based publisher of Latino writing. Fueling this explosion of Chicano literature has been the tremendous increase in the number of Spanish speakers in general, and Mexicans and Mexican Americans in particular, in the United States. In the Los Angeles area alone, Mexican Americans number more than two and a half million. Partially because of the language barrier, this population historically has been ignored by the mainstream publishing world. However, with the critical and popular successes of writers such as Sandra Cisneros and Laura Esquivel, more publishers are taking notice. Soto has given up teaching and devoted himself to cultivating a readership for Mexican-American writing. His forays into writing children’s literature is a political, as well as artistic, endeavor, as he seeks to reach out to this often neglected community.

Compare & Contrast

• 1965: Because of poor working conditions and below poverty wages for farm workers, the union of United Farm Workers initiates a public boycott of grapes.

  1966: The first collective bargaining agreement between farm workers and growers in the continental United States is signed.

  1970: Some grape growers sign agreements with the union, and the union lifts the grape boycott.

  1973: The relationship between grape growers and farm workers once again deteriorates, and the grape boycott is reinstituted, along with a boycott on lettuce.

  1978: The UFW lifts boycotts on grapes and lettuce because some of their conditions have been met.

  1985: After several changes in the California labor laws, the unionized farm workers begin to march again for better wages and improved working conditions.

• 1970-78: Between four and six million illegal Mexican immigrants come to the United States, many of them settling in California and working as migrant farm laborers.

  1978: More than ten percent of California’s labor pool is made up of Mexican migrant workers.

  1986: The Immigration Act is passed by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan. The law fines employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. It also gives amnesty to any immigrant who can prove their entry into the United States before 1982.

  1988: To date, more than two million illegal aliens, most of whom are Mexican, have applied for amnesty under the terms of the 1986 Immigration Act.

  1990: According to the 1990 U.S. census, people of Mexican origin form the largest Hispanic community in the United States, with more than 13 million people.

  1993: The United States gains its greatest number of legal immigrants from Mexico, with 109,027 people moving into the country.

  1997: Four-fifths of the Hispanic populations (29.3 million people) live in seven states: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Arizona, and New Jersey.