'Subject to control': Shifting geographies of race and labour in US sugar agroindustry, 1930-1950

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 266-292

  Hollander, Gail M ^a  

^a FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AGROINDUSTRY; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; LABOR MARKET; RACISM;

FLORIDA [UNITED STATES]; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 33747156425     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1191/1474474006eu358oa     Document Type: Article

References (146)

1. A. French (Field Supervisor, USES, West Palm Beach), 'Weekly agricultural report, March 5', R.G. 211, Entry 199, Box 21, Farm Labor Market Reports, 1941-1943, Florida 1943 Folder (Washington, DC, US National Archives, 1942).
2. J. Moran, quoted in F. Manuel, Sugar production in Florida, National Defense Migration Hearings, 77th US Congress, 2nd session (1942), p. 12965.
3. L. Peake and R. Schein, 'Racing geography into the new millennium: studies of "race" and North American geographies', Social and cultural geography 1 (2000), pp. 133-42.
4. The renaissance is marked by the NSF-sponsored workshop on race and geography held at the University of Kentucky in 1997 and two subsequent special issues on the topic in Journal of social and cultural geography 1 (2000)
5. and Professional geographer 54 (2002).
6. P. Jackson and J. Penrose, 'Introduction: placing "race" and nation', in P. Jackson and J. Penrose, eds, Constructions of race, place and nation (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 1-26.
7. Kobayashi and Peake define racialization as 'the process by which racialized groups are identified, given stereotypical characteristics, and coerced into specific living conditions, often involving social/ spatial segregation and always constituting racialized places': A. Kobayashi and L. Peake, 'Racism out of place: thoughts on whiteness and an antiracist geography in the new millennium', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (2000), p. 393.
8. The idea of racialization is similar to Omi and Winant's theory of racial formation, which 'emphasizes the social nature of race, the absence of any essential racial characteristics, the historical flexibility of racial meanings and categories': M. Omi and H. Winant, Racial formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd edn (London, Routledge, 1994), p. 4.
9. See also A. Bonnett and A. Nayak, 'Cultural geographies of racialization: the territory of race', in K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile and N. Thrift, eds, Handbook of cultural geography (London, Sage, 2003), p. 300;
10. and C. Nash, 'Cultural geography: anti-racist geographies', Progress in human geography 27 (2003), pp. 637-48.
11. Omi and Winant, Racial formation
12. Ibid., p. 83.
13. Jackson and Penrose, 'Introduction', p. 5.
14. Several historical studies of geography and the social construction of race and racialization have emerged in recent years, including: D. Delaney, Race, place, and the law: 1836-1948 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1998);
15. A. Maddrell, 'Discourses of race and gender and the comparative method in geography school texts 1830-1918', Environment and planning D: society and space 16 (1998), pp. 81-103;
16. M. Domosh, 'A "civilized" commerce: gender, "race", and empire at the 1893 Chicago Exposition', Cultural geographies 9 (2002), 181-201.
17. S. Hoelscher, 'Making place, making race: performances of whiteness in the Jim Crow South', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93 (2003), pp. 657-86;
18. J. Winders, 'Imperfectly imperial: northern travel writers in the postbellum U.S. South, 1865-1880', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, 2005, pp. 391-410.
19. C.V. Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913, 2nd edn (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1971).
20. Ibid., p. 223.
21. To be precise, Hoelscher is attentive to the way the performance of race 'went hand in hand with material changes taking place', though he is not specifically concerned with questions of labour: Hoelscher, 'Making place', p. 671.
22. A. Herod, Labor geographies: workers and the landscapes of capitalism (New York, Guilford, 2001);
23. J. Peck, Workplace: the social regulation of labor markets (New York, Guilford, 1996).
24. Herod, Labor geographies, p. 256;
25. D. Mitchell, The lie of the land: migrant workers and the California landscape (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 7.
26. Ibid., p. 91.
27. Ibid.;
28. N. Foley, The white scourge: Mexicans, blacks, and poor whites in Texas cotton culture (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997);
29. H. Bauder, 'Landscape and scale in media representations: the construction of offshore farm labour in Ontario, Canada', Cultural geographies 12 (2005), pp. 41-58.
30. M. Waters, Black identities: West Indian immigrant dreams and American realities (New York, Russell Sage, 1999).
31. D. Delaney, 'The space that race makes', Professional geographer 54 (2002), pp. 6-14.
32. Kobayashi and Peake, 'Racism out of place', p. 395.
33. See Winders, 'Imperfectly imperial' for an excellent discussion of this literature.
34. D. Massey, Space, place, and gender (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 88-89.
35. Jackson and Penrose, 'Introduction', p. 6.
36. K. Anderson, 'Constructing geographies: "race", place and the making of Sydney's Aboriginal Redfern', in P. Jackson and J. Penrose, eds, Constructions of race, place and nation (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 81-99.
37. E. Baptist, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's plantation frontier before the Civil War, (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
38. E. L. Ayers, The promise of the New South: life after reconstruction (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 4.
39. Ayers, The promise;
40. Woodward, Origins.
41. J. Cobb, The selling of the south: the southern crusade for industrial development, 1936-1990, 2nd Edn (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1993).
42. Woodward, Origins, pp. 211-12;
43. Hoelscher, 'Making place'.
44. Ayers, The promise;
45. Woodward, Origins.
46. M. Walker, 'Shifting boundaries: race relations in the rural Jim Crow South', in R. Hurt, ed., African American life in the rural South, 1900-1950 (Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 2003), p. 85.
47. See also Hoelscher, 'Making race'.
48. G. Hale, Making whiteness: the culture of segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York, Pantheon, 1998), p. 284.
49. Walker, 'Shifting boundaries', p. 85.
50. Hoelscher, 'Making place'.
51. 1941 pamphlet quoted in Hoelscher, 'Making place', p. 659.
52. D. Grantham, The South in modern America (New York, HarperPerennial, 1995), p. 156.
53. Ibid., p. 165.
54. M. Linder, 'Farm workers and the Fair Labor Standards Act: racial discrimination in the New Deal', Texas law review, 65 (1987), pp. 1335-93;
55. M. Linder, Migrant workers and minimum wages (Boulder, Co, Westview, 1992).
56. R. Gilmore, 'Fatal couplings of power and difference: notes on racism and geography', Professional geographer 54 (2002), p. 18.
57. W. Browne, 'Benign public policies, malignant consequences, and the demise of African American agriculture', in Hurt, African American life in the rural South, pp. 129-51.
58. R. Goluboff, '"Won't you please help me get my son home?": peonage, patronage, and protest in the World War II urban South', Law and social inquiry 24 (1999), p. 785.
59. G. Wright, Old South, New South: revolutions in the Southern economy since the Civil War (New York, Basic Books, 1987).
60. J. Heitmann, 'The beginnings of Big Sugar in Florida, 1920-1945', Florida historical quarterly 78 (1999), pp. 39-61.
61. M. Katz, In the shadow of the poorhouse: a social history of welfare in America, rev ed (New York, Basic Books, 1996), pp. 185 and 192.
62. C. Mott, interview with S. Terkel, in S. Terkel, Hard times: an oral history of the depression (New York, Pantheon 1970), p. 135.
63. W. Nielsen, The big foundations (New York, Orange Judd, 1972), p. 202.
64. Ibid., p. 203.
65. Ibid., p. 204.
66. Manuel, Sugar production in Florida, p. 12960;
67. Heitman. 'Big Sugar'.
68. A. Hanna and K. Hanna, Lake Okeechobee: wellspring of the Everglades (Indianapolis, Bobbs Merrill, 1948).
69. G. Hollander, Raising cane in the Glades: regional development and agroevironmental conflict in south Florida (doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa, 1999).
70. Bitting wrote a series of green-covered booklets for USSC known as 'the Little Green Library', which the company released as a public relations effort. The quote is from C. Bitting, Sugar and the Everglades (Clewiston, FL, United States Sugar Corporation, c. 1939), p. 8.
71. Ibid., p. 29.
72. C. Bitting, The fruit of the cane (Clewiston, FL, United States Sugar Corporation, 1940), p. 11.
73. C. McWilliams, Ill fares the land (London, Faber & Faber, 1945), pp. 173-74.
74. From testimony provided by USSC workers in Manuel, Sugar production in Florida, p. 12 972.
75. C. Bitting, Florida sugar (Clewiston, FL, United States Sugar Corporation, c. 1936), p. 2.
76. Letter from C. Bitting to Senator Claude Pepper, 4 June 1937, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library.
77. Grantham, The South in modern America.
78. Winders, 'Imperfectly imperial'.
79. Grantham, The South in modern America, pp. 165-66.
80. Bitting, Sugar and the Everglades, p. 12.
81. G. Burrows and R. Shlomowitz, 'The lag in mechanization of the sugarcane harvest: some comparative perspectives', Agricultural history 66 (1992), p. 63.
82. See also Wright, Old South, New South for an extensive analysis of the southern labour market.
83. Ibid.
84. For example, agriculture wage rates in 1941 in Iowa were $3.10 per day, $1.55 in Florida, $1.25 in Alabama, and $1.15 in Georgia: October 1941 USDA, Bureau of Employment Security, Farm Labor Report, 1941, R.G. 211, Entry 197, Box 1, Records of WMC, Bureau of Placement, Rural Industries, 1940-1943 (Washington, DC, US National Archives).
85. Peck, Work place, p. 34.
86. L. Kyriakoudes, "'Lookin' for better all the time": rural migration and urbanization in the South, 1900-1950', in Hurt, African American life in the rural south, pp. 10-26.
87. C. Hahamovitch, The fruits of their labor: Atlantic Coast farmworkers and the making of migrant poverty (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
88. L. Levine, 'Florida: report of visit on January 14 through January 26, 1942 to United States Employment Service Office', R.G. 183, Box 68, Bureau of Employment Security, Labor Market Survey Reports, Florida, Reports of Field Visits: Florida Folder (Washington, DC, US National Archives, 1942).
89. Exhibit C, Florida Legal Services, 1941, p. 5.
90. Levine, 'Florida: Report of visit'.
91. Ibid.
92. Goluboff, 'Won't you please help...?', p. 789.
93. Levine, 'Florida: report of visit'.
94. A. French (Field Supervisor, USES, West Palm Beach), 'Summary of daily reports of farm placement activities' (Washington, DC, US National Archives, 1942).
95. Ibid.
96. Quoted in H. Jones, The dispossessed: America's underclasses from the Civil War to the present (New York, Basic Books, 1992), pp. 185-86.
97. The USES agricultural report of 20 January, 1943 reported that in Palm Beach, Hendry and Glades Counties, bean pickers were earning $12 per day versus $4 per day for cane cutters: WMC, USES, Weekly Agricultural Labor Report for Florida, 1/20/43, National Archives.
98. A. French (Field Supervisor, USES, West Palm Beach), 'Summary of daily reports of farm placement activities, week ending December 4', R.G. 211, Entry 199, Box 21, Farm Labor Market Reports, 1941-1943, Florida 1943 Folder (Washington, DC, US National Archives, 1942).
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid.
101. J. H. Shofner, 'The legacy of racial slavery: free enterprise and forced labor in Florida in the 1940s', Journal of Southern history 47 (1981), pp. 411-26.
102. Wright, Old South, new South.
103. C. Heinicke and W. Grove, 'Labor markets, regional diversity, and cotton harvest mechanization in the post-World War II United States', Social science history 29 (2005), p. 276.
104. Burrows and Shlomowitz, 'The lag in the mechanization of the sugarcane harvest'.
105. S. Baldwin, Poverty and politics: the rise and decline of the farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1968).
106. Shofner, 'The legacy of racial slavery';
107. Jones, The dispossessed.
108. Goluboff, 'Won't you please help...?', p. 778.
109. Cosely and Perkins [sic], quoted in "ibid.,", pp. 786 and 788.
110. FBI report, quoted in Jones, The dispossessed, p. 181.
111. Shofner, 'The legacy of racial slavery'.
112. J. Tiedtke (USSC), Transcripts of the Hearings of the State WFA and USDA Wage Boards, 1942-1946, R.G. 224, Entry 10, Box 10, Florida Folder, Belle Glade, Labor, Nov. 16, 1942 (Washington, DC, US National Archives).
113. USES, Research and Statistics Unit, Agricultural Labor Report by Counties and Crops as of May 13, 1942, R.G. 211, Entry 199, Box 21, Farm Labor Market Reports, 1941-1943, Florida 1942 Folder (Washington, DC, US National Archives, 1943);
114. USES, Research and Statistics Unit, Agricultural Labor Report by Counties and Crops as of April 21, 1943, R.G. 211, Entry 199, Box 21, Farm Labor Market Reports, 1941-1943, Florida 1943 Folder (Washington, DC, US National Archives, 1943).
115. A. French (Field Supervisor, USES, West Palm Beach), 'Weekly agricultural report', Florida Folder (Washington, DC, US National Archives, n.d.), p. 1.
116. Levine, 'Florida: report of visit' (emphasis added).
117. A. French (Field Supervisor, USES, West Palm Beach), 'Summary, farm labor report, Southeastern Florida Area, week ending 16 April' (Washington, DC, US National Archives, 1943).
118. Shofner, 'The legacy of racial slavery'.
119. A. French (Field Supervisor, USES, West Palm Beach), 'Summary of daily reports of farm placement activities, week ending January 29', R.G. 211, Entry 199, Box 21, Farm Labor Market Reports, 1941-1943, Florida 1943 Folder (Washington, DC, US National Archives, 1943).
120. Federal Writers Project, Florida: a guide to the southernmost state (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 474.
121. A. French (Field Supervisor, USES, West Palm Beach), 'Summary of daily reports of farm placement activities, week ending February 13', R.G. 211, Entry 199, Box 21, Farm Labor Market Reports, 1941-1943, Florida 1943 Folder (Washington, DC, US National Archives, 1943).
122. For example, a sugarcane cutters job announcement sent to Mississippi in 1941 read as follows: 'Job: Title: Cane Cutters (Colored): 'No "City" men wanted as they become pool-room habitues, brawlers, etc. Constituted authorities exercise strict supervision over colored population and company makes every effort to cooperate in eliminating undesirable characters': quoted from Florida State Employment Service, 'Cane cutter employment position announcement', R.G. 211, Box 5, Entry 28, Records of the War Manpower Commission, Florida, 1941 Folder (Washington, DC, US National Archives).
123. A. French (Field Supervisor, USES, West Palm Beach), letter to F. Hathaway (Dir., Florida State Employment Service), 6 Feb 1941, R.G. 211, Entry 198, Box 5, Farm Labor Market Reports, 1941-1943, Florida 1942 Folder (Washington, DC, US National Archives).
124. G. Hill (Special Assistant to the Deputy Administrator, War Food Administration), letter to J. Taylor (Deputy Administrator, War Food Administration), 17 May 1943 (Washington, DC, US National Archives).
125. G. Hill (Special Assistant to the Deputy Administrator, War Food Administration), letter to C. Taeuber, Acting Chief, Div. of Population and Rural Welfare, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 11 May 1943 (Washington, DC, US National Archives).
126. M. Fortas (Acting US Secretary of the Interior), letter to C. Davis, War Food Administrator, 24 June, 1943 (Washington, DC, US National Archives).
127. French, 'Summary of daily reports, January 29', 1943.
128. In her novel Their eyes were watching God, Zora Neale Hurston deflates this myth. Tea Cake warns Janie on their arrival in Belle Glade, 'Yuh can't live on de muck' thout yuh take uh bath very day. Do dat muck'll itch yuh lak ants' (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, [1937] 1978, p. 193).
129. French, 'Weekly agricultural report', n.d., p. 1.
130. Quoted in Jones, The dispossessed, p. 195.
131. French, 'Weekly agricultural report', n.d., p. 2.
132. French, 'Summary of daily reports, December 4', 1942.
133. French, 'Weekly agricultural report', n.d., p. 2.
134. Hahamovitch, The fruits of their labor.
135. D. Grubbs, 'The story of Florida's migrant farm workers', Florida historical quarterly 40 (1961), pp. 103-22.
136. Baldwin, Poverty and politics.
137. Ibid.
138. A. French, Farm Labor Report, Southeastern Florida Area, week ending April 16, 1943 (Washington, DC, US National Archives).
139. Work Agreement (Jamaican Worker), OFA Form OL-601-W, 21 Apr 1943, R.G. 224, Entry 8, Box 11, Records of the Office of Labor, Gen. Corr., 1945-1947, Laborers, 18, Jamaica Folder, 1945 (Washington, DC, US National Archives).
140. A. French, Farm Labor Report, Southeastern Florida Area, week ending April 2, 1943 (Washington, DC, US National Archives).
141. Anon., The West Indies (BWI) temporary alien labor program: 1943-1977, a study prepared for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Immigration of the Committee on the Judiciary (Washington, DC, US Government Printing Office, 1978), p. 10.
142. Ibid., p. 11.
143. Senator Spessard Holland's testimony, quoted in Anon, The West Indies, p. 13.
144. Kramer, The offshores, p. 39.
145. Delaney, 'The space that race makes', p. 6.
146. Omi and Winant, Racial formation, pp. 81-83. The US state, the authors argue, is 'inherently racial', and institutions (education, immigration law, family law, and so on) work to 'organize racial identities.'