Poverty in the Valley of Plenty

In 1948, the National Farm Labor Union and Hollywood filmmakers who hated the virulently anti-union big farm grower DiGiorgio Fruit, the largest grape, plum, and pear grower in the world, made a film titled Poverty in the Valley of Plenty to expose the terrible conditions of the farmers. In 1947, DiGiorgio responded to a strike by firing all the strikers and replacing them with a combination of Filipinos, undocumented workers, and migrants coming to the U.S. through the Bracero Program. The last of these was an illegal move for the agreement between the U.S. and Mexico explicitly stated that braceros were not to be used as strikebreakers. The unions hated DiGiorgio so much that they waived all their wage and hour contracts to get the film made.

Here it is.

It’s an interesting document. I know the print is not very clear at all and that’s too bad. It’s notable that the workers here are all portrayed as white, given that there were already a lot of Mexican-Americans and Filipinos working these farms and that Ernesto Gallarza, one of the founders of farmworker organizing, was one of the NFLU leaders. Perhaps this was done for the rhetorical argument of claiming these were real Americans. That seems more likely given the unfortunate emphasis on the evils of illegal immigration as the real villain here. It’s not so much that the immigrants are being blamed as they are pawns of an evil corporation, but there’s certainly no sympathy for the immigrants either. That’s unfortunate but not at all surprising for 1948.

DiGiorgio responded by suing the NFLU for libel and going to court to end all screenings of the film. In 1950, the company won. The NFLU was destroyed and the union agreed to destroy all copies of the film, although as we see here, at least one survived.