N.A.C.L.A. When the war was over the growers weren't willing to give up their -labor supply, and they lobbied in Washington for Public Law 78 which was enacted in July 1951, making the bracero contracting system a permanent institution. Between 1950 and 1960, well over 3 million Mexican nationals were employed in more than 20 states throughout the country - the bulk of them in Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona and Arkansas. "Within the seasonal migrant, labor force, nearly one out of every two jobs came to be held by a ,contracted Mexican " (22). MEXICAN AGRICULTURE AND THE RESERVE ARMY OF LABOR While the growers were actively organmng for the mass importations of Mexicans into the fields of the Southwest, developments in Mexico made available the millions of workers who where marching north as part of America's reserve army of labor. Beginning in the late 1850s, the Mexican Government initiated structural changes to break up Mexico's feudal-type land structure, and in the process threw millions of peasants off the land and into the job market. The 1910 Revol-ution completed the process with the triumph of a more industrially-oriented bourgeoisie over the more feudal sectors of the landed oligarchy, breaking their hold over the agricultural labor force. While the Revol-ution's agrarian reform did result in the transfer of large amounts of land from the oligarchy to the peasants in the form of ejidos, it left the best lands in the hands of a highly-concentrated, commercial sector dominated by U.S. agribusiness int-erests. (During the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz in the late 1800s, North American investors had already begun to penetrate northern Mexico: growers acquired enormous acreage of arable ,land in the Mexicali valley and cattle magnates and mining companies moved deep into the states of Sonora and Sinaloa). Today, 16% of Mexico's farms units control 51 % of the cultivable land {23). The 'Clevelopment of the highly capitalized commercial sector •22. Ibid. 23. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, .• Social -Aspects of Agrarian Structure in Mexico•, in R. Stavenhagen (ed.), Agrarian Problems & Peasant Movements ln Latin America, p. 241. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1970. 88
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