| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America. By Zaragosa Vargas. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. xvi + 375 pp. Illustrations, notes, index.)

In this moment of transformation in the labor movement, it is refreshing to read a book whose central premise is that labor rights matter to more people than just those who are affiliated with unions. Zaragosa Vargas's ambitious monograph explores the ways in which the struggle for fair wages and humane work conditions influenced the Mexican American civil rights movement of the first half of the twentieth century. In breadth and scope, Vargas's book is a more focused study of the relationship between Mexican Americans and labor unions offered by Juan Gómez-Quiñones over a decade ago in his encyclopedic Mexican American Labor, 1790–1990 (Albuquerque, 1994). Vargas updates and hones our knowledge by exploring how individual Mexican Americans contributed to the advancement of the U. S. labor movement in part as a strategy for gaining greater respect as American citizens. In doing so, Mexican American laborers and their advocates continuously pushed the labor movement to be more radical, more inclusive, and more committed to equality than it might have been without them.

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