The Mexican Bracero Story, 1964 Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field, 1970 Salinas Valley tragedy In the wake of a bus crash in the Salinas Valley in September 1963 that claimed the lives of 32 braceros, Galarza was appointed to investigate the tragedy by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor of the U.S. House of Representatives. His report, published by the committee in April 1964, found that the accident was directly caused by negligence, exemplifying a practice in which flatbed trucks were illegally converted to buses, driven by poorly trained personnel. With safety officials and regulators indifferent to the situation, and businesses showing disregard for human life, he found that the accident had been imminent. He wrote a book on the accident, Tragedy at Chualar (1977). References Trade unionists from California Activists for Hispanic and Latino American civil rights Agricultural labor in the United States 20th-century American non-fiction writers Hispanic and Latino American autobiographers American autobiographers American writers of Mexican descent Latin Americanists Occidental College alumni Stanford University alumni Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Politicians from Tepic, Nayarit 1905 births 1984 deaths Southern Tenant Farmers Union people Mexican emigrants to the United States