Mexican Women And Wartime

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Mexican Women And Wartime
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Reenvisioning Rosie MEXICAN WOMEN AND WARTIME
DEFENSE WORK
In 1943, Avian, a subsidiary of the Douglas Aircraft Company, hoped to tap teen workers by converting the industrial arts shop at Garfield High School into a small-scale factory making bomb doors for combat air- craft. With the “Four-Four Plan:’ the school, located in East Los Angeles, delegated four hours of a student’s school day to defense work, and the sub- sequent four in classes. Recognizing a unique opportunity to earn money while attending school, Rose Echeverria became one of many students of Mexican descent who made the decision to volunteer for Avian’s program. “Where else could we get all this: our education, our training to work?” she asked. Although Echeverria did lament that her job would cut down on time available to acaqemics-compromising her dreams of going to college-the ninety-cent-an-hour wage represented a considerable raise in pay from her previous wbrk as a store clerk. Feeling a tremendous responsibility to help her mother suppbrt the household, Echeverria ultimately welcomed the op- portunity to make a contribution to her family, and the nation at large. This was “our opportunity to do something for the war effort and still graduate and make money along the way:’ 1
As defense companies increasingly looked to women of color for hiring pools, Rose Echeverria, like thousands of Mexican women, provided U.S. war production with essential labor. Married and divorced, first generation and second generation, mothers and daughters all participated in the wartime workforce in recdrd numbers. For those entering or already laboring in the manufacturing sector, lucrative, government-issued defense contracts meant
longer hours and better wages, especially with higher-paying defense indus- tries now competing for the labor of garment and food-processing workers. 2
Marie Echeverria, Rose’s immigrant mother, witnessed her workplace trans- form from a cannery into a bomb manufacturer, a shift that for her meant
going from “barely making it in this country” to “really [making] the moneY:’3
In helping to feed, clothe, and arm the U.S. military, women like Rose and Marie Echeverria thus ushered in an era of new workplace experiences while at
the same time challenging those workplace barriers that remained. Notably, in comparison to other aspects of their daily lives, the defense workplace tended
to provide more opportunities than limitations for Mexican women, likely due
in part to the prevailing notion that they, like all women, would work solely “for the duration” of the war, and thereby any changes in their social position
appeared less threatening to traditional racial and gender expectations. More- over, efforts to regulate the defense industry by wartime federal agencies like the Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPC) offered Mexican women new avenues of support in their pursuits for on-the-job equity.
Aircraft production, in particular, represented one of Greater Los Ange- les’s key employers of the Mexican community. At the beginning of 1939, air-
craft companies in Los Angeles County employed 13,300 workers; by the fall
of 1943 , the industry reached its peak at approximately 228,400 employed.4
Amid this unprecedented and exponential expansion, aircraft management
came to recognize the unqualified importance of utilizing women and work- ers of color to address labor shortages. After pursuing the Euro-American labor force, employers turned also to black and Mexican women, in addi-
tion to smaller numbers of Chinese women and Filipinas, making available light industrial positions that allowed women of color to break away from the harsh, dirty jobs of sweatshops, fields, and domestic work. As Tina Hill, an African American wartime riveter recalled, “Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen:s
Los Angeles aircraft plants also appeared relatively unique in their em- ployment practices, especially in contrast to other companies and areas of the
country.6 Whereas rigid racial divisions of labor informed hiring practices and job assignments in defense industries across the nation, in the City of Angels, aircraft factories hired black, Mexican, Asian, and white women to
labor side by side, allowing more intermixing between groups, and not just in the least desirable jobs. While racism still colored on-the-job experiences of
employees, particularly African American women, the multiracial nature of the workforce contributed to cross-cultural understanding and a breakdown of traditional racial boundaries.
7 4 i Wartime Defense Work
For Mexican women, the welcoming of women of color into wartime
work had particularly unique ramifications, affording them both a status of respectability and, at times, a claim to whiteness. Legally, Mexicans had
been considered “white” since the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, an accord that ended the U.S. war with Mexico and made Mexican nationals eligible for U.S. citizenship at a time when only “free white persons” could
naturalize.7 Given their legal status, Mexican Americans-in theory, if not
always in deed-thus claimed certain privileges of whiteness unavailable to their black counterparts, including the right to marry whites or to send their
children to white schools. Yet in the reality of the everyday, American society allowed few Mexicans any true semblance of “white” status, a social position that promised access to all of the social, economic, and political rights and
privileges that the United States could afford.8 For Mexican women, then,
the patriotic connotations associated with war work represented a new and significant avenue by which to garner esteem and place themselves- at least for the time being-more firmly on the white side of the color line.
BY M I o- 19 4 2, labor shortages in Los Angeles reached near dire levels as the
aircraft industry lost almost 20,000 laborers to the military at the same time
that nearly 5 50,000 newly created defense jobs awaited workers. 9 In an indus- try previously only open to Euro-American men, by January of 1944, 12,000 Mexican workers could be found working at Douglas Aircraft; at Lockheed,
10 to 15 percent of the total workforce at their two Los Angeles plants were Mexicans, and So percent of those were women. 10 African Americans found
similar job opportunities awaiting them. By February 1943, Douglas Aircraft had hired 2,200 black employees, while North American employed 2,500, and Lockheed Vega employed 1,7oo.U
Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to know exactly how many Mexican
and Mexican American women entered the ranks of defense labor during the war years. In his study of “Rosita the Riveter” in the wartime Midwest,
Richard Santillan points out that there are no accurate records on the total numbers of Mexican American women employed in the Midwest during
the war, particularly since defense industries typically categorized Mexican American workers as “white” as opposed to “nonwhite” in company records.
I have found that a similar situation exists in the Los Angeles defense in- dustry, largely because company records have long since disappeared. 12 In Los Angeles, given the long-standing Mexican population, it seems probable
that tens of thousands of Mexican American women joined the wartime workforce.
Wartime Defense Work I 7 5
An array of motivations drove Mexican women to join the war effort ea –
gerly and in great numbers. For most of her women friends, Rose Echeverria
recalled, the decision to enter the workplace naturally followed the outbreak
of the war and the departure of loved ones for combat duty overseas. As hun-
dreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans answered the call
to military duty, those left on the home front desired to do their part to bring
friends and family home. “Everybody down the street was gone and every-
body I knew was gone:’ Echeverria said. “So of the women that were left, my age on up, as soon as you could get a Social Security number, you went to
work; went to work in factories:’ 13
Prompted by rumors of war, Lupe Purdy, a Mexican citizen living in the
United States since 1922, immediately applied for U.S. citizenship so that she
could work in America’s defense industry and demonstrate her dedication
and loyalty to her adopted homeland. “I didn’t go to work because I wanted
more money;’ said Purdy, an assembler and riveter at Douglas Aircraft from
1942 to 1944. “I wanted to help my country. It was tough. It was hard work,
very hard work. Riveting is hard work. . . . I just felt very strongly that I should
do my part because they were hiring people to do these rush jobs of produc –
tion. I just felt that it was my duty that I should also do it:’ 14 Belen Martinez,
an assembler at Lockheed from 1942 to 1944, echoed Purdy’s sense of duty
regarding her decision to enter the wartime workforce. “We had to fulfill our
obligation to our country and to the boys that were fighting overseas:’ she
recalled. “We didn’t think about how much it was going to pay or how many
hours we [were] going to work or what was going to happen. We just had to
go in and do our duty. 15 Describing their relationship to the United States
with possessive pronouns-“my country;’ “our country”-women like Purdy
and Martinez demonstrate the sense of ownership and connection they felt
for the nation, in spite of their historically outsider status.
In addition to patriotism, a desire for personal satisfaction also pulled
Mexican American women into the wartime workforce. For daughters raised
within rigid traditional Mexican families, defense work offered an escape
from under familial oligarchy. 16 Beatrice Morales had spent most of her life
under the protective wings of her father and brother and then at the early age
of fifteen, of her husband. But as she searched for defense employment on
behalf of her adopted sister, Morales realized that a wartime job outside the
home might be a welcome change in her own life. Given the choice between
working at the Burbank or downtown Los Angeles plants, the sheltered Mo –
rales could not even locate Burbank on a map. Ever determined, however,
the now twenty-seven -year-old Morales defied her husband and accepted her
76 I Wartim e Defense Work
first wage-earning job at the downtown Lockheed plant as a riveter. “I took the [employment] forms and when I got home and told my husband, oh! He hit the roof. He was one of those men that didn’t believe in the wife ever
working; they watH to be the supporter. I said, ‘Well, I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to go to work regardless of whether you like it or not:” Going to work daily to secure plate nuts and drill holes on the P-38 fighter plane drove
a permanent wedge between Morales and her husband, but it also signified an end to her previously sheltered lifestyle. Over time, Morales gained confi-
dence in her abilities and took pride in her expanded social autonomy. As she later reflected on her wartime experience, “I was just a mother of four kids, that’s all. But I felt proud of myself and felt good being that I had never done
anything lik~ tpat. I felt good that I could do something, and being that it was
war, I felt that I was doing my part:’ 17
Just as importantly, defense work offered women of Mexican descent an unprecedented opportunity for cleaner jobs at higher pay. Before securing a drill press position at Lockheed in southeast Los Angeles, twenty-three-year- old Adele Hernandez had bounced back and forth between jobs in packing
houses and nondurable manufacturing, making small but regular contribu-
tions to the family till. Yet the long, tedious hours spent picking fruit, hand- painting ceramics, and packing chiles with bare, stinging hands hardly seemed
to justify her pittance of a salary. Fortunately, her brother and sister obtained defeQse jobs at Lockheed and Douglas and, following in her siblings’ footsteps,
she secured an assembly position at Lockheed’s Maywood plant. “These little jobs paid nothing. After I worked packing the strawberries, I quit there to go
to work at Lockheed;’ remembered Hermindez. “I guess I was just looking for something a little better all the time; something a little cleaner:’ 18
Historically relegated to positions in agriculture or the domestic and ser- vice sector, women of Mexican descent, like their African American and
Asian American counterparts, increasingly found that jobs in wartime in-
dustries were not only plentiful but also paid very well. 19 During the 1930s, Mexican women packinghouse and cannery workers earned a modest aver- age wage of thirty to thirty-five cents an hour in piece-rate wages. 20 Garment workers fated little better, taking home wages of eight to ten dollars a week,
a far cry from the California minimum wage requirement of sixteen dol – lars for a forty-eight-hour work week for women. 21 The wages of Mexican
farm workers also remained substantially low during the Great Depression, with a typical migrant worker earning a mere $28o a year. 22 Likewise, during the 1920s, Mexican laundresses and domestics barely eked out a living of less than $zoo a year. 23 Assembly work in the aircraft industry thus offered
Wartime Defense Work J 77
a marked contrast, with wages beginning at sixty to sixty-five cents an hour,
with an extra six- to ten-cent-an-hour incentive for those employees will- ing to work the swing or graveyard shifts. Periodic five-cent raises left many
women earning an income of a dollar an hour or more by the time the war ended. According to wartime wage data surveys conducted by the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, welders were usually paid hourly wages of$1.32, light assembler, $1.10; riveter, $1.oo; inspector, $1.10 to $1.20;
filer, $1 .15 to $1.30; and punch press operator $1.10 to $1.15. And with ex- tended work schedules-defense employers typically mandated a six- or even
seven -day work week, and encouraged overtime-working women could now earn paychecks of forty to sixty dollars a week, an extraordinary sumY
Defense work also offered steady income for women accustomed to sea-
sonal jobs or work paid by piece rates. In the canning industry, women em-
ployees were paid solely on the amount of fruit they processed each day; male cannery employees, on the other hand, were typically paid hourly for exclu- sive positions in warehouse and kitchen departments.25 Moreover, because of
the seasonal nature of cannery work, jobs typically lasted just ten to eleven weeks per year. During the peak summer season, California canneries em- ployed from 6o,ooo to 70,000 workers, while in the winter months their labor
force fell to 1o,ooo to 13,000.26 Work in the garment industry offered little more stability. In Los Angeles, dressmakers received pay solely for the hours in which labor occurred, not for the total time spent at the workplace. As one
Mexican dressmaker explained a typical workday in the 1930s, “I come in the morning, punch my card, work for an hour, punch the card again. I wait for
two hours, get another bundle, punch card, finish bundle, punch card again.
Then I wait some more-the whole day that waY:’27
Defense work, on the other hand, provided a steady income and a sense of stability, two factors noticeably absent in seasonal and piece-rate labor. Prior
to her employment at Douglas Aircraft, Maria Fierro knew only the grinding labor of fields and canneries. Not until the local employment office referred Fierro to Douglas at the end of the packing season did she see her chance
to secure more lucrative work. Although Fierro lacked any technical skills in heavy manufacturing, Douglas began a vocational training program for
potential employees-a program Fierro eagerly embraced. Attending night training classes in riveting and welding for a total of 500 hours-daily from 6 to 10 P.M.-Fierro graduated to the position of assembler. The new job
allowed her employment stability for the first time in her life, and the fixed
wages- a far cry from her usual piece-work salary-gave her just enough added income to rear her three children without hardship. 28
78 i Wartim e Defense Work
Mexican American daughters made vital contributions to the family wage
economy before 1941, but during the war, the robust nature of their wages provided additional means of household support.29 For Mary Luna, entering
the assembly workforce at Douglas Aircraft in El Segundo meant her family
could now become self-sufficient without the assistance of the federal govern-
ment. “I remember I went home and my dad was so happy I had gotten a job.
That meant that we could get off of welfare …. It was just like somebody gave me a million dollars:’ 30 Likewise, Ernestine Escobedo recalled that she spent
the initial years of the war making relay devices at Advanced Relay, a job that
supplemented the monthly allotment checks sent home by her older brothers
in the service. The extra income assisted their widowed mother in opening a
Mexican restaurant in East Los Angeles, allowing Josephine Escobedo a more
productive living than her previous work as a domestic and seamstress.31
Word oflucrative defense wages spread rapidly throughout Eastside barrios
and, typical of Mexican and Mexican American women, friends and relatives
often joined the workforce as a group. Members of the Mexican community
went in search of jobs together and, once gainfully employed, encouraged their
siblings and peers to do the same. For Irene Molina, war work became a family
affair when she and her sister secured positions at O’Keefe and Merritt, a stove
company turned ammunition shell producer during the war. The two women
worked as an inspector and a welder, respectively, and eventually saw many
of their girlfriends from Roosevelt High join the payroll. 32 Often the presence
of friends or relatives on the production line eased parents’ concerns about
their working daughters. Concepcion Macias accepted an assembly job on the
night shift at Lockheed in downtown Los Angeles, a position her parents did
not seem to mind since the company also employed several of her girlfriends
from their neighborhood in East Los Angeles. 33 Eager for new employees, de-
fense plants encouraged such practices: Anna Gonzales participated in Doug-
las Aircraft’s 1943 “add a worker, win a bond” sweepstakes by persuading Filda
Manzanares to apply for a job at the aircraft plant in Santa Monica. Gonzales
received a fifty-dollar bond for her efforts; and Manzanares started her career
at Douglas with a twenty-five-dollar bond.34
Aircraft companies located in outlying areas of Los Angeles tapped into
diverse labor pools by building subassembly plants as well as creating new
bus routes into these areas. Thus in spite of the vast landscape of Southern
California, women got to work by navigating various transportation options,
whether walking, carpooling, or riding the local bus or streetcar. For most
workers, the ease of their commute depended upon the location of the de-
fense plant. The North American Aircraft plant, located in Inglewood, for
Wartime Defense Work 1 79
instance, was near the edge of Los Angeles’s black community. Lockheed’s subassembly plant, located at Seventh and Santa Fe in downtown Los An- geles, made it easy for the Eastside Mexican community to ride the Red Car or walk to work (whereas the Burbank location, nestled in a predominantly
white community, was much farther). 35
Others secured jobs well outside their home neighborhoods, and thus rode buses or streetcars, or engaged in ride-share programs, to get to work.
During her daily commute between East Los Angeles and the Douglas Air- craft plant in Long Beach, Irene Malagon piled into a car with five Mexican
girlfriends-and a sole male driver-likely in an effort to save money on gas
and to keep each other company on the two-hour round-trip. 36 Some women were apprehensive about traveling outside the barrio for a new job. Mary Hurtado remembered many of her packinghouse friends as too fearful to
leave their close-knit community in Orange County, but she and her sister, Annie, commuted daily from Fullerton to Long Beach to work at Douglas
Aircraft.37 Beatrice Morales, a resident of Pasadena, had never driven a day in her life-always depending on her husband to be behind the wheel – when she applied for a position at the Lockheed subassembly plant in downtown
L.A. “I figured my own way to the streetcar;’ she proudly recalled. 38
Although they were no strangers to factory work, a unique world of new experiences and challenges awaited Mexican and Mexican American women
once they arrived at the defense plant door. Aircraft plants were particu- larly vast- often so large that they resembled small towns. In fact, efforts to
hide the 1.422,350-square-foot Douglas- Long Beach facilities from poten- tial enemy bombers included the use of heavy camouflage netting to cover the plant in its entirety, with an assembly of fake canvas houses, wire trees, and painted streets to give the appearance of a tranquil suburban neighbor- hood from the air.39 On the inside, the hustle and bustle of the aircraft fac –
tory proved anything but serene. Most assembly workers, like riveter Mary Luna, worked in long, warehouselike buildings, full of “all kinds of planes and parts that everybody was working on:’40 In the windowless environment,
thousands of lights created “daytime” twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and tens of thousands of employees worked at any given time. 4 1 At peak
employment, North American employed 24,000 people; Lockheed, 90,ooo; and Douglas, 10o,ooo, a far cry from the number of employees at even the largest of manufacturing operations in Southern CaliforniaY Alma Dotson,
a black assembler at North American, quipped that she had “never seen so many people in all of [her]life” and that employees entered and left the plant “like cattle [crossing] the street in droves:’43
Bo I Wartim e Defense Work
For the first few days, even weeks, most new employees expressed awe and anxiety at the new work environment. On her first day at Douglas, Annie
Hurtado cried in a plane cockpit for two hours straight because her sister was nowhere to be found in the intimidating environment.44 At Lockheed, Mar-
garita Salazar remembers trying to come to work with other girls because she “used to get lost going from one department to another:’45 Clothing require-
ments of pants or coveralls, heavy shoes, and hairnets could prove equally unnerving, although some Mexican American women took the opportunity to wear zoot styles and their drape zoot suit pants on the assembly line. 46
Unbelievably loud noise levels, however, made perhaps the biggest impres- sion on defense workers of all backgrounds: African American riveter Rose Singleton remembered that she could hear the noise of Douglas rivet guns for
blocks arid blocks away from the actual factory, a sound that Mexican riveter Lupe Purdy described as “sheer torture:’47
At work on the Southern California aircraft production line, Mexican women worked in a vast variety of positions. In order to identify the specific types of work Mexican and Mexican American women performed in the air-
craft industry, I studied the entire run of the Douglas Airview News from
1942 to 1945. Although employee record cards from the era no longer exist, the company newspaper documented the names and department numbers of numerous Spanish-surnamed women, which I then cross-referenced with the
Douglas Aircraft Company telephone directory from 1943 and 1944. These company records reveal that Spanish-surnamed women could be found in an assortment of departments, including the telephone office, parts painting, de-
velopment, machine shop, and tank testing. The positions necessitated a va- riety of expertise and talents and offered an array of on-the-job experiences,
ranging from the cleanliness and relative safety of office work to working with chemical agents and laboring alongside heavy machinery. 48
But departments engaging in assembly work had by far the largest number
of Spanish-surnamed women employees. In general, about 75 percent of the entire airframe workforce labored in assembly positions, and most aircraft
plants assigned newly hired women workers of all backgrounds to jobs in- volving some aspect of assembly. 49 Mexican and Mexican American women
thus worked with parts large and small for the construction of bombers and transport planes, utilizing rivet guns, bucking bars, jigs, punch presses, and
electrical spot welders to assemble the wings and fuselages of World War II
aircraft. 50
Most women laborers described their defense work as not particularly dif- ficult to learn but arduous and physically exhausting given the long (often
Wartime Defense Work J 81
Douglas Aircraft employee Theresa Hernandez dons aspects of the wartime zoot look at
work. Long Beach Airview News, 12 October 1943, 20. Courtesy Boeing.
Celia Dominguez, a wing driller for the B-17 at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach, July 1943 .
Courtesy Boeing.
late-night) hours, extended six- or seven-day work weeks, and lengthy com-
mutes. Unlike riveter Lupe Purdy, who described the “sheer torture” of her
job, Beatrice Morales considered her riveting position “a lot of fun;’ but she
also described the workday as “tiresome:’ ”I’d come home pretty tired;’ Mo-
rales explained. ‘1t the beginning I was riding the streetcar and when I didn’t
get a seat, then I had to stand up. It was a little bit rough:’ 51 For those working
on the swing or graveyard shifts, the challenges proved even greater. Finding
Wartime Defense Work i 83
it difficult not to take care of household chores or childcare during the day, most late-night women workers struggled to stay awake or, like Mary Luna, found quick fixes . “That’s where I learned how to drink coffee;’ Luna remem –
bered. “I couldn’t hardly keep awake being my first job and working [the
graveyard] shift. I even tried smoking but I couldn’t hack it;’ she recalled.SZ As the war dragged on, women frequently requested transfers to daytime hours in order to help their bodies recuperate from severe sleep deprivation Y
Most assembly work also took an enormous amount of strength and phys- ical agility, as workers crawled around inside of tight areas and climbed lad-
ders to get to hard-to-reach places in need of drilling and riveting. Moreover, outside of bench work, assembly positions typically required a good amount of standing, often taking a toll on employee health. Wing driller Margarita
Salazar spent long hours on her feet, a position that eventually led to varicose veins. As such, she was compelled to seek a new, more sedentary position in the tool distribution shed. 54 But in spite of the toil and hazards associated
with laboring with large machinery, defense work continued to attract large
numbers of women workers by offering high wages.55
Central to these economic opportunities was the “equal pay for equal work” principle articulated by both the federal government and the labor movement during the war years. The War Manpower Commission (wMc) recommended that employers adopt a uniform wage scale for men and
women, and in 1942 the National War Labor Board, in two separate opinions, upheld-although did not require-the policy of equal pay.56 Additionally, both the American Federation ofLabor (AFL) and the Congress oflndustrial
Organizations ( c 10) argued for the inclusion of equal pay clauses in labor contracts, although for less than altruistic reasons. As women’s historians
have detailed, union leaders feared the possibility of employers embracing the employment of women for far less money, and thus jeopardizing the post-
war job security of male workers. By and large, male unionists supported the equal pay movement in order to protect wages of “men’s jobs” in the face of
female substitutes. 57
Yet while new job categories and pay opportunities opened up for women, sexual segmentation of labor by no means met its demise. Rather, as Ruth
Milkman argues, “new patterns of occupational segregation by sex were es- tablished ‘for the duration: “58 Although numerous women did work in du- rable manufacturing alongside men for equal wages, industrial employers
more often promoted men to higher-paying supervisory positions or heavier jobs. Foremen typically determined merit increases and upgrading for em-
ployees under their supervision, and male prejudices about women’s inferior
84 I Wartime Def ense Work
statllS and abilities tended to keep women workers paid at lower rates with less opportunity for promotion. 59
Rosie the Riveter’s work- what was once a “man’s job” – also often took
place in predominantly women-only departments, under sex-typed job clas- sifications tha,t aJlowed for supposed “female” qualifications of dexterity, atten –
tion tb detail, ability to tolerate repetition, and lack of physical strength.60 Prior
to the war, aircraft employees (the majority male) had undergone years of training to manage diverse tasks and operations in the manufacturing process. Yet in order to speed up production during World War II, aircraft companies adopted an assembly line system, dividing the work as much as possible in order to simplify each task. Female wartime workers were thus given just a few weeks’ job training and taught a relatively simple repetitive operation, bro-
ken down by task.6 1 “My job was simple;’ remembered Mary Luna. “It wasn’t where I was working on a plane; I was working on a panel. All we did on that was rivet the panels. They were standing by themselves. It wasn’t hard:’62 At
Lockheeq, Margarita Salazar recalled that she “did the same thing for about
a year: drilling, drilling, always drill work:’ 63 These jobs, although fast-paced and requiring significant stamina, paid less. As a result, women war workers
earned considerably fewer dollars than their male counterparts.64
Yet war work in any job category meant a vast improvement in women’s social and economic circumstances overall, particularly for women of color.
As Sherna Gluck points out, women received better wages working in de- fense mahufacturing jobs than they did in traditional women’s work, and
their labor challenged customary definitions of womanhood. 65 In spite of
their repetitive nature, jobs like riveting and bucking required strength and expertise. As one wartime riveter described, “The riveter used a gun to shoot
rivets through the metal and fasten it together. The bucker used a bucking bar on the other side of the metal to smooth out rivets. Bucking was harder than shooting rivets; it required more muscle. Riveting required more skili:’66 Thus
amid the hardships and bustle of the shop tloor, women workers fell into a routine and became experts in their respective positions. Note the sense of pride and accomplishment in Beatrice Morales’s description of her wartime
labors with fellow riveter Irene Herrera: “She was as good a bucker as I was a riveter. She would be facing me and we’d just go right on through. We’d go one side and then we’d get up to the corner and I’d hand her the gun or the buck-
1
ing bar or whatever and then we’d come back. Her and I, we used to have a lot
pf fun . They would want maybe six or five elevators a day. I’d say, ‘let’s get with it: “6i Although a certain amount of monotony came with the job, “Riveting
Rositas” experienced a sense of both personal and economic satisfaction.
Wartime Defense Work I 85
Employers’ decision to simplify jobs that had belonged to men in previ-
ous years, relabeling them “female” positions, did lead to conflicts on the factory floor. Men often mightily resented the women whose arrival signaled the loss of their special status as craft workers. As Marye Stumph, a Euro-
American worker for Vultee recalled, “men got all up in arms” when she was sent to work on a spot-welding machine.68 Torch welding had been a male field prior to the war, requiring special training and offering a skilled workers’
wage. But as more and more aircraft facilities adopted electric spot welding, a “lighter” form of work, women welders replaced their male counterparts. 69 “It
wasn’t anything that anybody couldn’t do;’ Stumph stated. ” [But] they didn’t
want any women on there and they all protested:’ In Stumph’s case, the male protests proved successful, and management transferred her to the machine
shop/ 0 But as the war years progressed, electric spot welding became an in- creasingly female domain, including for a significant number of Spanish- surnamed women ? 1
In spite of the largely sex -segregated nature of the work environment, men and women still labored in close quarters with one another on the factory
floor. Employers typically assigned a small number of male workers to assist a team of women, particularly in the more physical labor oflifting and carry-
ing heavy loads.72 Margarita Salazar remembers that in her Lockheed riveting crew of twenty or thirty, there were about four men: “They would put the
wing in its proper place so you could work on it-moving things and doing the heavier work:’73
Many Mexican women, accustomed to strict rules of chaperonage, initially found the mixed-sex nature of the defense shop floor unsettling. Beatrice Morales remembered “feeling just horrible” about her assignment at Lock-
heed as an assembler, where she had to work closely with males. Never hav- ing worked with a member of the opposite sex, let alone interacted in close
quarters with a man other than her husband, Morales had a difficult time adjusting comfortably to her new position. Eventually, she recalled, “I just
made up my mind that I was going to do it:’74
The challenge that women’s workplace presence posed to traditional gen – der roles only added to the tensions. Katherine Archibald observed in her
1947 study of a wartime shipyard that “underneath the formality and po- liteness a half-concealed resentment still persisted, not against women as women, but against them as rivals of men in a man’s world:’ Anxious about the threat to their breadwinner status, and especially fearful of women’s en-
trance into skilled jobs, men reacted to working women with a range of emo- tions, from hesitation and indifference to outright hostility.75
86 Wartim e Defense Work
Sexism thus pervaded factory floors, as most women workers experienced “teasing” and sexual harassment by men who “resented women coming into
jobs” and “let you know about it:’76 Never having worked a day outside the home in her life, and fresh with a rivet gun in hand, Beatrice Morales spent
her first hours on the job at Lockheed listening to a fellow male coworker berate her. “You’re not worth the money Lockheed pays you;’ her coworker
exclaimed.77 Such degrading treatment proved more than a little unnerving to new employees. “My first night I wanted to quit;’ said Mary Luna about
her experience as a riveter at Lockheed. “I went in there. It was all men. Right away they said, ‘Oh, no, here they come: ” 78
While gendered segmentation of the labor force continued during the war
years, ethnic and racial segmentation at times lessened. Particularly in large- scale Los Angeles defense facilities-like aircraft-black, Mexican, Euro- American, and some Chinese and Filipina women worked together for the
first time. At Douglas Aircraft, departmental assignments of workers reveal women of various ethnic and racial backgrounds working side by side in defense production. 79 Moreover, interviews with former “Rosies” of the three
major Southern California aircraft facilities- Douglas, Lockheed, and North
American-also speak to the multicultural nature of their wartime working conditions. “They had all nationalities;’ Josephine Houston claimed, calling it a regular “United Nations” on the assembly line.80 Mary Luna, Beatrice
Morales, and Margarita Salazar echoed similar impressions, commenting on the “mixture” of Anglo, black, and Mexican women workers_BI Few women
recalled women of Asian descent on the shop floor, although defense com- pany newspapers highlighted small handfuls of workers with a Chinese or Filipino background employed in production.82
The well-integrated nature of Southern California aircraft can by and large
be attributed to the forthright stance taken by aircraft company management. The sheer number of exclusionary job orders filed by the local United States
Employment Service (usEs) office in Los Angeles for “whites only;’ or with stipulations for “no Mexicans” and “no Negroes” or “colored workers;’ attests
to the widespread persistence of prejudicial attitudes by local businesses dur-
ing the war years.83 Smaller employers frequently rationalized discrimina- tory hiring practices with claims that white employees would engage in slow- downs or strikes if faced with an integrated workforce. As the manager of the National Car Loading Company in Los Angeles claimed, his refusal to hire
Mexican and black workers was “entirely an employee problem;’ since inte- gration would lead to the “disruption of his entire office force:’ 84 But behind
these claims also lay the deep-seated racism held by managers themselves
Wartime Defense Work ! 87
Mexican, black, and white women work alongside one another on a cockpit enclosure at
Douglas Aircraft in January 1945 . Courtesy Boeing.
who, even when faced with numerous examples of successful workplace inte-
gration, used the potential threat of work stoppages as an excuse to continue putting their own prejudices into practice.85
Larger aircraft factories, on the other hand, eventually adopted a low-
tolerance policy for overt racial tensions. According to Susan Laughlin, the former director of Lockheed’s women’s counselor program, wartime manage-
ment initially expressed concern over integrating African Americans into the workforce, generally viewing them as a population difficult to “assimilate:’86
But as labor shortages became increasingly acute, employers became more
and more willing to approach the issue head-on. For instance, in 1941, local black leaders with the Los Angeles Urban League initiated a meeting with Lockheed and other leading aircraft companies, imploring management to integrate the industry without delay. Their suggestions did not fall on deaf ears. Soon thereafter, Lockheed officials began to comply, encouraging su-
pervisors to take responsibility for integration in their own departments. 87 By midwar, white Lockheed workers had no doubts about management’s stance
88 I Wartime Defense Work
on integration: the Lockheed Star celebrated the hiring of the 1ooth black employee, and the black YMCA regularly received charitable donations from the employee buck-o’ -the-month club.88
Thus while wliite women in cities like Detroit and Baltimore led hate strikes in objection to laboring alongside black women, Los Angeles aircraft
company management fired white workers who refused to work with blacks.89
As Josephine Houston recalled, southern white women who made a fuss at North Americaq Aviation were told to do their job “whether [a coworker] was black, white, green, brown;’ or face the consequences.90 “We just didn’t accept
a problem;’ Laughlin explained. Management asked hostile white workers to find work elsewhere if they refused to abide by company rules, and, in time, “they pretty well accepted it” if they wished to remain employed.91
This blurring of the industrial color line was unprecedented in scale, of- fering new opportunities for women of color to be paid equal wages for equal work. In the food-processing industry, as historian Vicki Ruiz demonstrates,
Spanish-speaking women were given the harshest work for the lowest pay, earning considerably less than their Euro-American counterparts.92 African American wo111en, moreover, had been completely shut out of industrial jobs
for much of the twentieth century.93 But as labor shortages in Southern Cali- fornia became more acute, aircraft companies increasingly hired Mexican
and black women to work alongside white women in assembly positions. To be sure, African Americans were still the most likely laborers to be found in the most arduous, dirtiest defense jobs. But for the first time, black women
also had a relatively good chance of securing higher-paying assembly posi- tions. By 1943, at Lockheed, for instance, the 3,ooo African Americans work- ing at the cotnpany were employed in assembly positions rather than custo-
dial work.94 For those women of color accustomed to lower wages and little to no access to the production line, integration offered a welcome change.
In spite of the workplace gains, few women of color received promotions to supervisory posts or upgrades to higher-paying positions. Gender and ra-
cial discrimination no doubt played some role in the arbitrary method in which work tankings were assigned. For example, Rose Singleton, an African
American resident of Los Angeles, applied for an inspector position at Doug-
las in the early years of the war, passing the examination with flying colors. But upon seeing her test results, personnel explained that she would be hired
as a riveter instead, as white southerners would refuse to work under her. 95
Additionally, as the aircraft industry’s newest workers-a majority of whom found themselves assigned to jobs considered to be lesser skilled and more routine- many women of color simply did not hold the seniority considered
Wartime Defense Work I 89
necessary for advancement. Women universally may have found it difficult to receive wartime promotions, but women of color in particular found these positions significantly out of their reach.96
The general lack of African Americans in managerial positions often led to their differential treatment on the shop floor. In a 1943 letter to President Roosevelt, Mary Hines, a black woman war worker, expressed her frustra-
tion over the “little consideration” given to African American employees at Lockheed. According to Hines, her white, southern supervisors were “nasty” and refused to give good write-ups to blacks. “I don’t see why there [aren’t]
some colored supervisors and group leaders to represent us;’ she wrote. ”As
far as I can see the Negro workers do just as much work and more as the white workers:’97 Similarly, a black woman known as “JK;’ a former domestic
who became a sheet metal worker in the machine shop at North American Aviation, recalled that her departmental lead man “tried to give all the best work to the white ladies;’ leaving JK and her fellow black coworker with “dirty work” like metal filing. 98
Likewise, not all war industry employers and workers welcomed the Mexican population, and it was not unheard of for company management
to express particular distaste at the hiring of Mexican women. In August of 1944, for instance, the owner of Arrowhead Food Products refused to hire three qualified Mexican women as pie makers for the simple reason that he believed all Mexican females “were not clean” and “w[ore] dirty dresses:’ 99
Oftentimes war-related industries also refused to hire any workers born in Mexico, claiming an extra burden in the clerical work necessary to seek em-
ployment permission from the federal government for non-U.S. citizens. Bermite Powder Company in Saugus, California, had a long track record of
discriminating against Mexican aliens, and in the cases of Lola Impusene and Sally Orozco-both Mexican citizens-refused to put in the paperwork time necessary to hire the women because, as members of the “San Fernando Mexican colony;’ they were “without a proper sense ofloyalty to the employer and of responsibility toward their work:’ 100
When Mexican women were faced with discrimination, however, the
wartime workplace offered them more options to protest and challenge un- equal treatment than they had in earlier years. First and foremost, acute labor
shortages meant that Mexican workers could leave intolerable job situations with more security since alternative employment would be relatively easy
to attain. Such could likely have been the case when, in 1944, two Mexican women at Gillcraft Aviation Co. were reprimanded by a supervisor for speak- ing Spanish on the job. Rather than abide by his order to speak English only,
90 i Wartime Defense Work
the women simply decided to resign. Although a fellow coworker brought the matter to the attention of the shop floor foreman-and even offered to speak with the Mexican consulate on their behalf-the women urged him to forget
the matter and instead chose to walk off the job, no doubt well aware of the favorable labor climate awaiting them. 101
But perhaps the most significant change to the wartime workplace was the unprecedented presence of the federal government. President Roosevelt’s
Executive Order 8802, issued on 25 June 1941 to ban employment discrimi- nation in government and the defense industries based on “race, creed, color,
or national origin;’ established the FEPC in order to investigate violations.
For African and Mexican American populations, the issuance of Executive Order 8802 represented a mixed bag of both hope and frustration. In theory,
the order signified a bold sea change, as it represented the federal govern-
ment’s first formalized effort to guarantee equal employment opportunity in the United States. And yet in reality Roosevelt had only reluctantly issued the
order, responding to a threat by union leader A. Philip Randolph and other black activists to hold a march on Washington in order to protest discrimina- tory employment policies prevalent in America’s defense industries. Alarmed
by the prospect of 1oo,ooo determined African Americans converging on the capitol, the administration adopted the fair employment policy only
grudgingly, refusing to strengthen the order with any meaningful enforce- ment power. 102 For the Mexican population, the FEPC represented a particu-
larly acute disappointment given the federal government’s desire to maintain appearances in light of its Good Neighbor Policy. Upon the agency’s initial implementation, FEPC officials had planned to hold public discrimination
hearings in each region of the nation in order to intimidate noncompliant employers into abiding by federal nondiscrimination policy. But fearful of the international ramifications of exposing the rampant and systemic discrimi- nation against Mexican workers throughout the Southwest, federal authori-
ties cancelled critical hearings in El Paso in an effort to save face. The move
left hundreds of hopeful Mexican laborers without the powerful weapon of
public attention to their plight. 103
In spite of the agency’s weaknesses, the FEPC can be credited for exposing
prejudice in war industries, chipping away at racial stereotypes, and breaking
down racial barriers faced by minorities. Historians have long critiqued the overall efficacy of the agency, pointing to its ineffectiveness in ameliorating the nation’s most incendiary social problem due to a lack of enforcement power.
More recently, however, the work of scholars like Andrew Edmund Kersten and Megan Taylor Shockley point to a reevaluation of the FE P c, demonstrating
Wartime Defense Work i 91
the ways in which the agency facilitated an important and changed relation-
ship between the federal government and African Americans, in spite of its
many flaws. Indeed, in wartime Los Angeles, given the experiences of African
Americans and Mexican Americans who utilized the agency, it seems that the
FEPC offered a significant new avenue for redress, legitimizing demands for
equality and encouraging protest among people of color. 104
Throughout the war, African Americans remained the population most
likely to lodge complaints with the FEPC, followed by Mexicans, who were
classified as a national group. According to federal estimates, between 70 and
So percent of the FEPC’s “national origin” complaints involved peoples of
Mexican descent. In Los Angeles, specifically, by December of 1944, one hun-
dred complaints of discrimination against Mexicans were filed with the local
FEPC office, seven of them on the basis of discrimination due to citizenship
status. Grievances typically addressed a wide range of issues, including wage
differentials, refusal to hire and promote, work conditions, and firings. 105
It is not entirely clear why African Americans utilized the FEPC more fre-
quently than their Mexican counterparts. In Los Angeles, for instance, African
Americans filed 276 discrimination complaints-almost triple the number of
Mexican cases, and in spite of the fact that the Mexican population outnum-
bered blacks in the Southern California region by at least four to one. Na-
tionwide, So percent of the FEPc’s work was on behalf ofblack complainants,
no doubt attesting in large part to the harsher racial climate faced by African
Americans during World War Il. 106 But perhaps this discrepancy can also be
explained, to some extent, by the lack of a nationally broad-based organization
for Mexican American interests during World War 11. 107 In Southern California
in the early 1940s, El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Espanola (the Spanish-
Speaking Peoples Congress) (El Congreso) showed tremendous promise in
its Latino civil rights platform and promotion of Latino cultural preservation.
Moreover, El Congreso activists like Luisa Moreno formed interracial coali-
tions in Los Angeles during the war years, working closely with members of
the black community to assist the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee in its
effort to release the youths wrongfully convicted of the murder of Jose Dfaz. 108
Yet in spite of their collaborative antiracist efforts, a national network of El
Congreso branches never came to fruition, and red-baiting would undermine
fledgling chapters in California in the postwar era. 109 Additionally, the League
of United Latin American Citizens, the largest Mexican American organiza-
tion in the nation, focused its civil rights efforts primarily on the state of Texas
until the postwar era, when it would play a more prominent role in Southern
California. 110 At a time when African Americans could call upon the National
92 I Wartime Defense Work
With an FEPC sign hanging above them, black, Mexican, and white women sew together at
the Pacific Parachute Company in San Diego, California, 1942. FSA/owi -/61177, Courtesy
of the Library of Congress.
Association for the Advancement of Colored People for assistance, the advo-
cacy needed to encourage members of the Mexican community to utilize the FEPC on a widespread scale at times paled in comparison.
Most Mexican and Mexican American women responsible for registering
complaints with the FEPC seem to have done so on individual initiative alone. Mindful of the Mexican community’s historic distrust of the federal govern-
ment, FEPC employees did attempt to make the agency more accessible (and less intimidating) to the Mexican population, hiring Spanish-speaking em- ployees in Los Angeles and advertising in the Spanish-language media.U 1
Even so, it still must have taken great courage for women of color to voice
their concerns regarding potential or current employers to an outside federal agency, particularly given fears of workplace reprisals. Yet in spite of the real or imagined r.isks and concerns involved, more and more women of Mexican
descent recognized the potential of state structures to give credence to their claims of discrimination and to strengthen their negotiating power.
Wartime Defense Work I 93
Certainly Mrs. Francisco Torres recognized the risks when she visited her local FEPC office to wage a complaint on behalf of her husband in December of 1944. Thirty-four-year-old Francisco Torres had worked for Southern Pa-
cific Railroad since he was a teen, starting as a water boy and working his way up over a period of twenty years to the position of section hand, a job where he earned fifty-eight cents an hour with no opportunity for overtime. Accord-
ing to Mrs. Torres’s complaint, her husband recently developed a kidney con- dition and the family doctor had recommended a change of work and more adequate living conditions. Although Southern Pacific had announced the availability of a carman helper position-a job that paid seventy-five cents an
hour and included overtime privileges-the foreman had repeatedly refused to upgrade Torres, a situation that Mrs. Torres attributed to her husband’s Mexican national origin.
Not surprisingly, Southern Pacific officials denied Mrs. Torres’s claim, stat-
ing that the company utilized employees based on manpower needs, without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin. However, once pressed more
firmly by FEPC officials, management did find that the manpower situation “ha[d] become a little less acute during the past week or two:’ enabling the superintendent to transfer Torres to the desired position. 112 Whereas women and men like the Torreses found that individual complaints to management
often carried very little weight, the FEPC and other state structures did, at times, put just enough pressure on company officials to assist members of the Mexican community in breaking down barriers.
While Torres utilized the FEPC to help her husband, other Mexican
women registered grievances on their own behalf. In May of 1945, thirty- six-year-old Artemisa Carranza was referred by her local USES office to a job as a wrapper at Atlas Export Packing Company, a manufacturer of packing
boxes and liners for war materials shipped overseas. When Carranza arrived at the company to start her position, however, she was advised that no open- ings existed and told to leave. Confused, she returned to the employment
office, only to witness a troubling telephone conversation between a USES placement officer and the Atlas personnel department. “I will refer another one to you:’ said the USES officer. “She is all right. She is white:’ Carranza immediately confronted the USES official. “Wasn’t I hired because I am a
Mexican?” she implored. The USES official admitted as much, and asked a fellow USES coworker if a “Report of Discriminatory Hiring Practices” form
should be filled out. When the USES employee replied, “Oh, well, what’s the use;’ Carranza made the decision to instead take her grievance to the president’s FEPC.
94 ! Wartime Defense Work
Upon receiving Carranza’s complaint, Ignacio Lopez, a special examiner for the FEPC , contacted the president of Atlas Export and explained the fed- eral committee’s goal of eliminating discriminatory practices in war indus- tries. Company president D. E. Partridge immediately denied any policy of discrimination, arguing that not only had the wrapper position been filled prior to Carranza’s arrival, but Carranza was unqualified for the job since she did not have “knowledge of the different types of paper used” in the pack- ing process. Finally, the president argued, the company had hired numer- ous male Mexican employees in the past and thus could not be accused of discrimination.
Upon further investigation, however, Lopez uncovered information that contradicted Partridge’s claims. According to the original work order, Atlas Export requested three female wrappers from USES and quite clearly speci- fied “no colored or Mexican:’ An additional report revealed that Atlas would not consider workers of “Mexican extraction” given the lack of separate ac- commodations for nonwhites. “30 or 40 employees would quit if a non-white were hired in;’ Partridge offered as justification.
Armed with the damning evidence, Lopez attempted to set up a meet- ing with Partridge. In the end, however, no meeting between the two par- ties occurred. Perhaps alarmed by FEPC pressure, Partridge’s tune changed dramatically. On two separate, subsequent occasions he contacted the FEPC offices in order to extend an invitation to Artemisa Carranza to work at a new Atlas Export plant in Alhambra. His demonstrations were too little and too late. Carranza had already secured employment elsewhere, and the new plant was simply too far away from her home. But having spoken her mind and seen her initial grievance reach a satisfactory conclusion, Carranza thanked the FEPC for its services and most likely took some comfort in her small victory. 113
The increased presence of union activity in aircraft plants provided yet another forum for Mexican women to remedy workplace conditions. The Depression era years of 1936- 37 witnessed the beginning of the labor move- ment in the Southern California aircraft industry as Lockheed Corporation welcomed with open arms the International Association of Machinists- American Federation of Labor (IAM-AFL) after witnessing a protracted sit- down strike by the more radical United Auto Workers-Congress oflndustrial Organizations (UAW-CIO) at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. Although it would be another six years before the National Labor Relations Board over- saw official union representation of the Santa Monica plant, by 1941 the UAW- CIO had successfully organized North American Aviation and immediately
Wartime Defense Work I 95
engaged in a wildcat strike, at the time a seeming bellwether of more labor
activity to come. With the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, strikes came to a halt, with no labor stoppages occurring in the Los Angeles aircraft industry
for the remainder of the war. This being said, union locals in general experi- enced steady growth in the aircraft industry during World War II, due in no small part to the intense and aggressive campaigns for union representation at the three major Douglas Aircraft plants. By war’s end, Douglas El Segundo
and Douglas Santa Monica received IAM-AFL representation; the UAW-CIO captured support of the Long Beach plant. 114
As more and more women of Mexican descent obtained employment in
the wartime aircraft industry, their experience and familiarity with labor or- ganizing grew. According to former Lockheed riveter Hope Mendoza, most
Mexican workers had no trouble joining unions at the aircraft workplace since “during the war, all the barriers were down:m In 1944, recognizing the importance of Mexican employees at Douglas Aircraft, the organizing com-
mittee of the CIO placed an ad in the Los Angeles Spanish-language daily
La Opinion, asking workers at the Long Beach and Santa Monica plants to vote for the UAW -c 1 o in upcoming union elections. 116 Many Mexican women took advantage of improved pay and working conditions provided by union
contracts, or to enlist official grievance procedures. As an example, Consuelo Andrade filed a grievance in 1944 after her foreman denied her complaint
that stated that she had been improperly classified as a Tool Crib Attendant “B;’ when, in fact, she had consistently been doing the work of a higher-paid Tool Crib Attendant”/’ employee. As a member of the UAW-CIO Local887 at
North American Aviation, Andrade brought her complaint before the union
and, upon arbitration hearings, won the desired ”/’ classification with over a year of retroactive pay. 117
Of course Mexican women aircraft workers were not all of like mind when it came to involvement in union activities. Some, like Mary Luna, fondly at- tributed better working conditions to the IAM-AFL’s collective bargaining ef-
forts at Douglas Aircraft in El Segundo. 118 Evidence also suggests that a good number of Mexican American women, including Angela Fuentes and Alicia Shelit, became active in UAW-CIO Local148 at Douglas Long Beach, find-
ing the union a useful mediator when conflicts with management or fellow employees arose. Shelit’s experience with the local ultimately prepared her to
spend many years of the postwar era as a u A w union steward.U9 But others, like aircraft worker Lupe Purdy, disliked paying union dues and only joined the
union because it was a requirement for her to remain employed at Douglas. 120
Despite their differing opinions, the presence of union organizing made a
96 I Wartime Defense Work
significant difference in the work lives of Mexican women. As Mary Luna
explained, “After we got the union, then we started getting more raises …
vacation pay, sick pay, and all that . . . I saw the improvements that they gave us right away:’ 121 Especially for those women who had never before worked in a unionized industry, opportunities for collective bargaining offered an impor-
tant avenue to fight for an improved standard of living and to exercise more control over their work lives.
Mexican women also found opportunity in the fact that they tended to oc- cupy a kind of”racially in-between” social position in the wartime workplace,
receiving a noticeable level of tolerance over blacks. Indeed, the unique racial positioning of the Mexican population developed out of a long and compli-
cated history in the Southwest, where historically Mexicans faced denigration as foreigners and members of an inferior “mongrel” race yet legally could make claims to whiteness. Federal and state laws accepted people of Mexican
descent as “white” -or at the very least did not define them specifically as “Negro” or “colored” – thereby shielding Mexicans, to some extent, from the
legalized ahd at times more pervasive forms of segregation and exclusion blacks faced. 122 In the face of federal pressure to diversify shop floors, wartime employers appear to have practiced similar racial stratification, at times pre- ferring “tacially ambiguous” Mexican employees to their black counterparts.
Indeed, CS histotian Josh Sides argues, often in industrial Los Angeles, “the specter ofblack integration mitigated, to a de~ree, anti-Mexican sentiment:’ 123
In their attempts to prove compliance wi.th federal antidiscrimination laws, industry managers frequently made it a point to boast of the number of Mexicans on their payroll, even as they refused to hire any black employees. Approached by USES for discriminatory hiring practices in 1944, California
Almond, for instance, stated in unmistakably racialized terms that it would hire “‘only high type persons’ and therefore would not employ negro women
or men;’ especially given the large number of white women employed. How- ever, the manager explained that his company did “employ other minority group members such as Mexican and Chinese;’ workers who apparently met management’s “very high standard:’ 124
Other manufacturing companies insisted that while amicable relations existed between white and Mexican women workers, the introduction of
black women to the assembly line was another matter. The L.A. Paper Bag Company, for instance, argued that its refusal to hire black women stemmed
from the presertce of a large number of southern white women employees. According to the company’s secretary, white newcomers seemed to get along
favorably with their fellow Mexican co-workers, but the firm felt that it was
Wartime Defense Work I 97
“avoiding trouble by not hiring colored help:’ 125 Similarly, the owner of E. J. Jenkins Service Company told USES investigators in 1944 that the women of his plant were “like ‘a family; and while the workers there did not pro- test Mexican co-workers, he felt that the hiring of Negroes would cause con- flict:’1 26 Charlcia Neuman, a Euro-American war worker at Vultee Aircraft,
perhaps put it best: during the war, blacks “were just treated very badly;’ she
explained. But “then there were the Mexican girls. They were treated just like we were. There was no such thing as brown; they were white as far as we were concerned:’ 127 Her interpretation of the social position of women of Mexican
descent speaks to a privilege of whiteness available to some members of the Spanish-speaking community-particularly those with lighter skin-a privi-
lege that African Americans could simply not attain. Interestingly, whereas former black war workers spoke quite openly about
racial discrimination in the workplace, women of Mexican descent tended to recall racism as it occurred outside the realm of employment. In their memo- ries of World War II, most interviewees recounted little to no discrimination
on the job, and instead focused on discriminatory experiences in society at large. Beatrice Morales expressed disappointment for her difficulties in find- ing housing in Pasadena, a city where landlords refused to rent to Mexicans;
Rose Echeverria described Garfield High School as a divisive environment where Mexican and white students did not interact without conflict; Annie
Hurtado was refused service by a San Bernardino hairdresser simply because she was a Mexican.128 Thus in spite of their day-to-day familiarity with rac- ism, these women-and many others-never expressed discontent regard- ing workplace relations. Indeed, as historian Naomt umonez observes, the -World War II workplace appears to have provided women of Mexican descent with a “temporary refuge” from racism. 129 Given their ambiguous racial sta- tus, in combination with the fact that war work was often perceived as an
impermanent situation for America’s women, Mexican women garnered a certain level of reputability on the wartime factory floor.
Amid the multicultural nature of the Southern California wartime work- force, then, women of Mexican descent walked a fine color line. Represented variously as nonwhite foreign “others” and as “almost whites:’ growing num-
bers hoped that their entrance into “respectable” labor might improve their
social status. In 1943, a group of Mexican women food-processing workers in Northern California made pointed claims to privileges of “whiteness” by re-
fusing to share facilities and work side by side with African Americans. Prob-
lems began at Pacific Fruit Express in Oakland, California, when the com- pany attempted to integrate restrooms utilized by both black and Mexican
98 i Wartime Defense Work
female workers. Although race relations remained harmonious in the com-
pany’s Los Angeles facility-where management provided separate, on-site restrooms-an entire crew of Mexican women had refused to use the same
toilets as African American women in the Northern California plant. More- over, a half a dozen of the Mexican women had left their jobs for this reason alone. The company’s spokesperson stated to WMC officials that while the
facility did not object to hiring African Americans, black women simply “did not mix well” with Mexican women. “The Mexican women were good work- ers and the company labor problem was not acute;’ management explained,
and thus “[we] did not see any reason to antagonize the present workers:’ 130
Since the advent of World War II, white women nationwide had railed
against the integration of workplace restrooms-a symbol of social equality. Stereotyping blacks as dirty and diseased, white women frequently engaged
in hate strikes and work stoppages so as not to be forced to use the same toilets, showers, and locker rooms as their black counterparts. In Detroit and Baltimore, white women workers desired a certain modicum of social dis-
tance between the races, reinforcing, as historian Eileen Boris observes, that “a domestic’s touch could be ignored in ways that bodily closeness at the job
apparently could not:’ 131
Similarly, the Mexican women of Pacific Fruit Express hoped to stress to management, and the general public, a sense of entitlement to better treat-
ment than their African American counterparts. In a society that denigrated blackness, these wartime cannery workers entered into what historian Neil Foley terms a “Faustian pact” for privileges of whiteness, embracing racism
toward African Americans in an effort to improve their own social position. 132
Reinforcement of racist boundaries separating white from black, as historian
Gary Gerstle argues, represented one of the key ways for ethnic populations to enjoy the full fruits of acceptance in U.S. society. 133
And yet in many wartime workplaces interethnic and interracial relations and friendships blossomed in spite of racial hierarchies. If nothing else, the diversity of wartime hiring pools allowed women to encounter and interact
with other ethnicities and races outside of neighborhood enclaves. Until she was assigned to work with a black woman in aircraft assembly, Mary Luna had never met an African American, as she lived in the city of Hawthorne,
a “sundown town” where blacks were not allowed in the vicinity after sun- set.134 Likewise, Rose Singleton, an African American living in Westside
Los Angeles, recounted befriending a Mexican girl from East Los Angeles
at the Douglas plant in Santa Monica. Typically working the swing shift, the women would keep each other company on the nightly bus ride until they
Wartime Defense Work I 99
reached their respective destinations. 135 During the 1920s and 1930s, inter- ethnic, cross-cultural friendships or “work buddy” relationships formed with
frequency on cannery and packinghouse shop floors. 136 But blacks and Mexi- cans had tended to occupy distinct occupational niches prior to World War II,
as African Americans were often confined to domestic work and excluded from industrial jobs. Thus the on- and off-site workplace connections and
communication of the Second World War fostered new ruptures along old racial boundary lines. 137
The diversity of the defense workplace also offered invaluable opportunity
for cultural exchange and understanding. African American assembler Jo- sephine Houston remembered eating lunch on the job with Euro-American women, never feeling the same social distance that she had experienced be- tween blacks and whites in the South. 138 Helen Studer, a middle-aged Euro-
American woman, fondly remembered her friendship with a fellow Douglas war worker, a young woman of Mexican descent who exposed her to a slice of
Mexican culture on the factory floor: “She’d always bring this hot good stuff to eat. One day she had something, and I said I’d seen those things and won- dered what they were. She said, ‘Well, tomorrow, I’ll bring you one: She did
and it must have been extra loaded with hot stuff, cause I took one bite and I like to-Whew, I couldn’t get my breath. Oh, it just tickled her to death:’ 139
The memory of eating Mexican food for the first time clearly made a last- ing impression on this former riveter. But beyond sharing “exotic” culinary
delights, women of Mexican descent found that the diverse defense work- place also led to a general breakdown of negative racial stereotypes about their community. During the zoot suit scare, Belen Martinez remembered
Euro-American women at Lockheed expressing surprise that she did not carry weapons or engage in violence. Never having encountered Spanish-
speaking peoples before, Martinez’s southern coworkers had been taught two things: Mexicans “kill” and “always had knives:’ Only after working side by side with Martinez did her Euro -American peers come face- to- face with their
ignorance. 140
Given the large numbers of Mexicans employed by the aircraft industry, opportunities also arose for women of Mexican descent to meet coworkers who shared similar ethnic ties to Mexico. Mary Luna grew up in Hawthorne,
a city directly south of Los Angeles, and attended Inglewood High School, where she encountered few families or young people of Mexican descent. In fact, most of Luna’s high school friends were Euro-American, or what she
termed ‘1merican” girlfriends. Once at Douglas, however, Luna immediately befriended a group of Mexican American women with whom she socialized
100 Wartime Defense Work
both on and off company time. 141 Sharing advice, engaging in chisme (gossip), and swapping stories to while away the long and tedious workday, the kin and friendship networks-or “comadres” -of workers like Luna reinforced ethnic
commupity ties within American defense industries. 14 2
Perhaps as importantly, defense work provided Mexican women with opportunities to embrace an “almost white” social status. Just years earlier,
women of Mexican heritage had found themselves relegated to the status of “inferior newcomers;’ worthy only of low-status, low-paying jobs.143 In the
1940s skilled war jobs offered first- and second-generation women a civic opportunity to prove themselves not only loyal, patriotic Americans but citi- zens capable and deserving of upward social mobility. As Rose Echeverria explained, “We felt that if we worked hard and that if we proved ourselves, we, too, couid become doctors and lawyers and professional people:’ 144 Al- though “whiteness” did not always follow Mexican women workers outside
factory gates, their racially in-between social status, in combination with the patriotic connotations associated with their war work, contributed to a soft- ening of racial boundaries. Ultimately, Mexican women strived to achieve ac-
ceptance from the Los Angeleno populace on their own terms, both at work
and at play.
Wartime Defense Work I 101