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Goldman

22

these strikes the Mexican workers stood alone, that is they were not supported by organized labor.40

Siqueiros' mural was an isolated effort to protest these conditions.  The same [[margin]] (Fig.12) [[/margin]] cannot be said for New Deal images of the time.  George Samerjan's mural Lettuce Workers in the Calexico Post Office was rare for Section murals in that it depicted "stoop labor".  Nine men are choreographed against the sky.  Five wear characteristic large-brimmed sombreros, while four non-Mexicans have smaller hats or are bareheaded.  Shown in profile with almost Egyptian simplicity, the men occupy the foreground planes of the painting.  They are weeding growing lettuce plants with long-handles hoes.  Painted in blues, browns, ochres, dark greens and white, the clean stylized forms are simple and modernized.  No suggestion of strain, fatigue, or seat is permitted, though temperatures in the Imperial Valley (where Calexico is located) are known to rise well above 100° Fahrenheit.  In fact, many Mexican workers of the desert and semi-desert Southwest labored in physically punishing conditions, none of which are suggested in the mural.

In 1935, Dorothea Lange, photographer with the Farm Security Administration that documented rural life and labor during the Depression, photographed another [[margin]] (Fig.13) [[/margin]] group of stoop laborers imported into California between 1923 and 1930 from the Philippines, then a U.S. territory.  The Filipinos worked primarily in asparagus and lettuce.  Lange's photograph from the San Joaquin Valley, shot head-on from a worm's eye view, shows four men against the sky working among the grown heads of lettuce.  They offer a tremendous contrast to the antiseptic Samerjan mural.  Covered from head to foot against the blazing sun in dark hats and wrinkled shapeless clothing, the men are completely bent over as they grab among the plants with short-handled hoes.  The length of the back-breaking hoe is decisive, and became a major point of contention in the sixties and seventies when the United Farm Workers were organizing the lettuce fields.