Battle/fields: Braceros, agribusiness, and the violent reproduction of the California agricultural landscape during World War II

Journal of Historical Geography

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 143-156

  Mitchell, Don ^a  

^a SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Agriculture; Bracero program; California; Labor; Landscape

Indexed keywords

AGRICULTURAL HISTORY; AGRICULTURAL LAND; AGRICULTURAL WORKER; AGROINDUSTRY; POST-WAR; WORKING CONDITIONS;

CALIFORNIA; MEXICO [NORTH AMERICA]; UNITED STATES;

EID: 77953962856     PISSN: 03057488     EISSN: 10958614     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhg.2010.01.003     Document Type: Article

References (98)

1. Several excellent histories of the bracero program exist. See, especially, Kitty Calavita, Inside the State: the Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S., New York, 1992; Richard Craig, The Bracero Program: Interest Groups and Foreign Policy, Austin, 1971; Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: the Mexican Bracero Story, 1942-1960, Santa Barbara, CA, 1964; Otey Scruggs, Braceros, "Wetbacks," and the Farm Labor Problem: Mexican Agricultural Labor in the United States, 1942-1964, New York, 1988. The Department of Agriculture produced a very useful official history of the early years the program: Wayne Rasmussen, A History of the Emergency Farm Labor Supply Program, 1943-1947, Agricultural Monograph No. 13, Washington, DC, 1951. The first months of the program, together with key documents relating to its implementation and governance were compiled by the Farm Security Administration in "Consolidated Progress Report of the Mexican Farm Labor Transportation Program of the Farm Security Administration, Through November 20, 1942," available on line through The University of California's Calisphere, http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=hb9j49p4n9&brand=calisphere&doc.view=entire
2. Undated typescript, Octavio Rivas Guillen, Mexican Worker Describes Treatment Received in California, Ralph Hollenberg Papers, Materials Relating to the Farm Security Administration, Region IX, San Francisco, Calif., BANC MSS C-R 1, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Carton 4, File 3 (hereafter Hollenberg Papers).
3. Untitled, undated report, attached to Memo, Rutledge to Hewes, Beet Field Labor Difficulties in the Salinas Valley, in Hollenberg Papers, Carton 4, File 3.
4. See note 3.
5. Rutledge to Hewes, Beet Field Labor Difficulties in the Salinas Valley (note 3).
6. Cletus Daniel, Bitter Harvest: a History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941, Ithaca, 1981.
7. Clements to Cecil, 18 December 1936, in United States Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor (the La Follette Committee), Hearings on S. Res. 266, Violations of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor, Part 53, Exhibit 8752, p. 19696, quoted in Don Mitchell The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape, Minneapolis, 1996, 179. The politics of race in California agriculture is complex. Though Clements may have lamented the loss of Mexican workers, it was also the case that in 1941 unemployment among Mexicans resident in Southern California, 'a high proportion of [whom] ordinarily seek employment in agriculture,' was 'severe'. See, Farm Security Administration Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare, Western Region, Importation of Agricultural Laborers from Mexico (1942), Hollenberg Papers, Carton 5, File 33, p. 1.
8. Quoted in C. McWilliams, North from Mexico, New York, 1968, 190.
9. By some estimates, more Mexican workers entered the US illegally during World War II than were recruited through the bracero program. These estimate are not at all certain; what is certain is that significant numbers - tens of thousands - entered illegally, and that during harvest times the US border patrol frequently relaxed its policing of the border. Even from the earliest years of the program, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service endorsed the practice of returning illegal immigrants to Mexican border towns to be re-contracted as braceros, immediately eligible to return to the fields. This practice lasted, with variations and occasional lapses, until the program was killed in 1964. See the official Department of Agriculture history, Rasmussen, A History of the Emergency Farm Labor Supply Program, 1943-1947 (note 1), 220.
10. Calavita provides a good history of this opposition in Inside the State (note 1), chapter 6. For an account of how tenaciously growers, and their allies in universities and state agencies, fought this opposition, see Gilberto Gonzalez, Guest Workers or Colonized Labor: Mexican Labor Migration to the United States, Boulder, 2006.
11. On the ongoing struggle to reclaim withheld wages, see Pam Belluck, Settlement will allow thousands of Mexican workers in U.S. to collect back pay, New York Times (October 16, 2008) A19; Randall Archibald, Owed back pay, guest workers comb the past, New York Times (November 24, 2008) A1.
12. Among many other sources, see C.C. Teague to R. Wiser, Earl Warren Papers, F3640, Department of Agriculture, Farm Production Council, California State Archives (hereafter Warren Papers, FPC), File 725; Rasmussen, A History of the Emergency Farm Labor Supply Program, 1943-1947 (note 1); Otey Scruggs, The Bracero program under the Farm Security Administration, 1942-1943, Labor History 3 (1962) 147-168.
13. For a review of the ways in which landscapes is used, and how landscape has developed, in geography, see Don Mitchell, Landscape, in: D. Sibley, P. Jackson, D. Atkinson, and N. Washbourne (Eds), Cultural Geography: a Critical Dictionary of Key Ideas, London, 2005, 48-56.
14. Among others, see David Matless, Landscape and Englishness, London, 2005; Don Mitchell, California living, California dying: dead labor and the political economy of landscape, in: K. Anderson, S. Pile, and N. Thrift (Eds), Handbook of Cultural Geography, London, 2003, 233-248.
15. Carl Sauer, The morphology of landscape, in: J. Leighly (Ed.), Land and Life: a Selection of the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, Berkeley, 1963, 315-350.
16. Richard Walker, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California, New York, 2005, 1.
17. Walker, The Conquest of Bread (note 16), 51; Phillip Martin, Promise Unfulfilled: Unions, Immigration, and the Farm Workers, Ithaca, 2003, 17-18; Don Mitchell, Work, struggle, death, and the geographies of justice: the transformation of landscape in and beyond California's imperial valley, in: K. Olwig and D. Mitchell (Eds), Justice, Power, and the Political Landscape, London, 2008, 177-195, esp. 184.
18. Walker, The Conquest of Bread (note 16), 3.
19. Walker, The Conquest of Bread (note 16), 51.
20. George Henderson, California and the Fictions of Capital, Oxford, 1998, Chapter 2.
21. Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California, Berkeley, 1998, xiv.
22. Miriam Wells, Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture, Ithaca, 1996.
23. The best critical overview is Walker, The Conquest of Bread (note 16).
24. Henderson, California and the Fictions of Capital (note 20).
25. See David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, Chicago, 1982, Chapters 8 & 12.
26. Henderson, California and the Fictions of Capital (note 20), 43.
27. In addition to Henderson and Harvey, see Mitchell, Work, struggle, death, and geographies of justice (note 17).
28. Susan Mann and James Dickenson, Obstacles to the development of a capitalist agriculture, Journal of Peasant Studies 5 (1978) 466-481; Susan Mann, Agrarian Capitalism in Theory and Practice, Chapel Hill, 1990.
29. Walker, The Conquest of Bread (note 16).
30. Varden Fuller, The Supply of Agricultural Labor as a Factor in the Evolution of Farm Organization in California, United States Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor, Hearings on S. Res. 266, Violations of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor (Part 54, Exhibit 8762-A), Washington, DC, 1939, 19777-19898; and Hired Hands in California's Farm Fields: Collected Essays of California's Farm Labor History and Policy, Berkeley, Giannini Foundation Special Report, 1991; Lloyd Fisher, The Harvest Labor Market in California, Cambridge, MA, 1963.
31. These are explicitly material forms, relations, and processes, and are documented in such things as land ownership records, employment data, blueprints of housing camps, etc. They are also representational relationships, and are documented in such things as magazine articles and reports discussing the "racial fitness" of different kinds of labor, the ideological framing of class relations, etc.
32. Mitchell, The Lie of the Land (note 7), 34.
33. Cindi Katz, Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives, Minneapolis, 2004, 19.
34. Katz, Growing Up Global (note 33), x.
35. Harvey, The Limits to Capital (note 25), 229.
36. Pest No. 1 Label on M'Williams - Official Accused of Inciting Radical Outbreaks, San Francisco Examiner, December 9, 1939, in La Follette Committee Hearings, Part 61, Exhibit 9516, 22353-22354.
37. Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field, Santa Barbara, 1971 [1939]; John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, New York, 1939.
38. See the essay by Douglas Sackman that introduces the 1999 University of California Press republication of Factories in the Field.
39. McWilliams, Factories in the Field (note 37), 324.
40. It's important to be clear about McWilliams's position: it was not a racist one that valued white labor over Mexican or Asian - indeed, McWilliams was a lifelong crusader for racial justice - but rather a materialist one based on an assessment of the relative power of different groups and a sober assessment of how race worked in the fields. Sackman's essay (note 38) does a good job working through these issues.
41. McWilliams, Factories in the Field (note 37), 152.
42. The best history of California agricultural labor struggles remains Daniel, Bitter Harvest (note 6).
43. For the period before 1913, see Richard Steven Street, Beasts of the Field: a Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1789-1913, Stanford, 2004.
44. See, e.g. McWilliams, Factories in the Field (note 37), 186-187; more generally, see Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage (note: 21).
45. McWilliams, Factories in the Field (note: 37), 251.
46. McWilliams, Factories in the Field (note: 37), 153.
47. Fuller, The Supply of Agricultural Labor (note: 30); Fisher, The Harvest Labor Market (note: 30), argues that the point of a labor oversupply was flexibility not mere cheapness; but the two operated hand-in-hand.
48. Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, Berkeley, 2003, quotation from p. 40.
49. State Rural Resettlement, California Division of Rehabilitation of the (US) Resettlement Administration, "Statement in Support of Project to Establish Camps for Migrants in California," 22 August 1935, I.W. Wood Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Box 1, File: Documents Re: Migrant Laborers and Establishment of Camps, June-Dec, 1935, a-8, quotation from a, emphasis added; quoted in Mitchell, The Lie of the Land (note: 7), 176.
50. McWilliams, Factories in the Field (note: 37), 325. As is clear from this passage, it was not bigness as such that McWilliams railed against in Factories (as many of his later acolytes seem to think); Rather he was opposed to capitalist ownership and control over the labor process - and hence the modes of exploitation - that defined California farming. For a reminder of McWilliams' focus was not on the scale of farming (but one that misleadingly attributes his interest to an Americanist love for civil liberties rather than to the radical anti-capitalism that was at the root of McWilliams' work at this time), see Aaron Sachs, Civil rights in the field: Carey McWilliams as a public-interest historian and social ecologist, Pacific Historical Review 73 (2004) 215-238.
51. As McWilliams himself points out, this was all ceremony; as an appointed official his term expired when the new governor assumed office (Factories, xii-xiii). For a sense of how the Warren administration understood McWilliams - and the degree of satisfaction growers took in his departure - see the letters in Earl Warren Papers, F3640, Administrative Files, Industrial Relations, Immigration and Housing, California State Archives (hereafter Warren Papers, DIR/DIH), File 2291.
52. Carey McWilliams, Proposal in Re Farm Labor Authority, Paul Schuster Taylor Papers, BANC MSS 84/38c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter Taylor Papers), Box 42 Folder 15.
53. In 1941, Governor Olson responded strongly to claims of impending shortages and requests by growers to import 30,000 Mexican National workers, Press Release, Governor's Office, September 15, 1941, Taylor Papers, Box 39, Folder 13. A wide range of analyses conducted in 1942 showed no absolute shortage of labor in California or the American West; see, e.g. McEntire to Provinse, April 13, 1942, Calisphere (also in Hollenberg Papers, Box 5, Folder 33); Mills to McWilliams, January 7, 1942 and Mills to Miller, April 29, 1942, Hollenberg Papers, Carton 4, Folder 1; Mills to Silvermaster, April 27, 1942, Hollenberg Papers, Carton 4, Folder 2; N. Gregory Silvermaster, The Farm Labor Situation in 1942 and its Relation to the FSA, papers presented at Administrator's Staff Conference, Cincinnati, November 26, 1942, Hollenberg Papers, Carton 3, File 23. In general, see Otey M. Scruggs, Evolution of the Mexican farm labor agreement of 1942, Agricultural History 34 (1960) 140-149.
54. FSA "Importation of Agricultural Laborers," Hollenberg Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Box 5, Folder 33, p. 3. See also, McIntire to Provinse, April 13, 1942, Calisphere; Gregory Silvermaster, The Farm Labor Situation in 1942 and its Relation to FSA (note: 53); Paul Taylor, Effects of war on the social and economic status of farm laborers, Rural Sociology 8 (1943) 139-149.
55. Mills to McWilliams, January 7 (note: 53).
56. Press Release, Governor's Office, September 15, 1941; Rasmussen, A History of the Emergency Farm Labor Supply Program, 1943-1947(note: 1), 200.
57. McWilliams, Proposal in Re Farm Labor Authority (note: 52).
58. For particulars, see Farm Security Administration, Statement of Policy for the Recruitment and Employment of Agricultural Workers in the United States, Part I: Domestic Agricultural Workers, and FSA Instruction 478.1, Recruitment and Transportation of Domestic Agricultural Workers, both in Procedural Manual, Farm Labor Transportation Program, September 8, 1942, Calisphere.
59. McWilliams, Factories in the Field (note: 37), 283.
60. McWilliams, Factories in the Field (note: 37), 299.
61. This, of course, is the thrust of the 'Working Day' chapter (among others) in Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, New York, 1987 edn. It is also, as one of my reviewers pointed out, at the heart of Marx's 'General Law of Capital Accumulation;' see, especially 575-576.
62. California Farm Bureau Federation press release, no date (early December), in Charles Teague Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter Teague Papers), Box 58, Folder E. The California Farm Bureau Federation had been preceded by the Casa Grande, AZ Farm Bureau, which on October 13, only a couple of weeks after the first braceros had arrived, blasted the program as - socialistic' L.I. Hewes Jr. Replies to a Criticism of Mexican Labor Program, November 3, 1942 and Albee to Douglas (plus attached press release) September 5, 1942, Hollenberg Papers, Box 4, Folder 1.
63. Though also interestingly complex: the Pacific Rural Press, often a mouthpiece for big growers complaints against the FSA, put onus on growers themselves, saying that by subscribing to the importation program, they would end up 'wearing a yoke prepared by the Farm Security Administration - But it made these claims in the context of a nativist argument about the need to get whites to do stoop labor: 'it's our job, not the job of the Mexican.' ' The idea of having laborers from Mexico harvest our crops,' according to the Press, was 'like the idea of having other nations win the war for us.' Pacific Rural Press, Has the White Man Lost His Hinge? October 3, 1942; typed out copy in Taylor Papers, Carton 39, File 22.
64. Daniel, Bitter Harvest (note: 6), 228.
65. Fisher, The Harvest Labor Market (note: 30); Gonzalez, Guest Workers or Colonized Labor? (note: 10); Galarza, Merchants of Labor (note: 1) and Ernesto Galarza, Farm Workers and Agribusiness in California, 1947-1964, Notre Dame, 1977; for the contemporary case, see Martin, Promise Unfulfilled (note: 17).
66. See C.C. Teague, Fifty Years a Rancher (self published, no date); in general, see Lawrence Jelinek, The California Farm Bureau Federation, 1919-1964, PhD dissertation, Department of History, UCLA, 1976. Jelinek summarizes the matter succinctly: 'In keeping with the climate of opinion during the 1940s and 1950s, the California Farm Bureau carried out incessant civics lesson on the merits of free enterprise and free government. When it came to farm labor policy, it believed in neither' (246-247). See also Jelinek, Harvest Empire: a History of California Agriculture, San Francisco, 1979.
67. Mexican Agreement, in Procedural Manual, Farm Labor Transportation Program, September 8, 1942, Calisphere.
68. Cooperative Employment Agreement, Procedural Manual, Farm Labor Transportation Program, September 8, 1942, Calisphere.
69. See the letters in Warren Papers, FPC, File 724.
70. See Ray Wiser to Senator Hatfield and others, February 19, 1942, Warren Papers, FPC, File 724.
71. On Teague, see his memoir, Fifty Years a Rancher (note 66); Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage (note: 21), 45-46 et seq.; and Henderson, California and the Fictions of Capital (note: 20), 10-11.
72. Teague to Wickard, March 22, 1943, Teague Papers, Box 58, Folder B.
73. Plan for Importation of Agricultural Labor From Mexico to California, Teague Papers, Box 58, Folder D.
74. E. Rutledge to E. Rowell, February 3, 1943, and L. Hewes to J. Lannan, February 13, 1943, Hollenberg Papers, Box 4, Folder 3.
75. See Mitchell, The Lie of the Land (note: 7), 89-90.
76. P. McGrady to Col. P. Bruton, July 8, 1943, Hollenberg Papers, Carton 4, File 2.
77. L. Hewes to J. Davis, Hollenberg Papers July 9, 1943, Carton 4, Folder 2.
78. McGrady to Bruton, July 8, 1943 (note: 76).
79. For an incisive analysis of just how limited this power was - just how effective grower violence had been in debilitating workers abilities to claim what was theirs and what was just - see the reports of the La Follette Committee that investigated California agricultural labor conditions in 1939 and 1940. These reports were released in 1942 and 1944. Though they were drowned out in the cacophony of war, they provide incisive and detailed testimony not only of how growers viewed their prerogatives over labor, but also of just what conditions on the ground were really like as the first bracero workers entered the state.
80. See Rasmussen, A History of the Emergency Farm Labor Supply Program, 1943-1947 (note: 1); Scruggs, Evolution of the Mexican farm labor agreement of 1942 (note: 53); and The Bracero program under the Farm Security Administration (note: 12); see Teague to Wiser March 24, 1943, Warren Papers, FPC, File 725.
81. See Teague to "Fran," March 27, 1943, Teague Papers, Box 58, Folder A.
82. See note 72; Teague to Warren, March 24, 1943, Warren Papers, FPC, File 735.
83. Among others, see Teague to Warren, March 24, 1943 (note 82) and Teague to Earl Warren, March 30, 1943, Teague Papers, Box 58, Folder D. In an undated address that year to the California Chamber of Commerce, Teague complained that the FSA had allowed Mexican union members to become braceros and that the strikes in Salinas were due entirely to the fact that CROME activists were present in the field. But then he went on to say that agricultural labor is, in fact, unorganizable, and so US unions would be foolhardy to even attempt it. Address by Charles C. Teague at the State-Wide Meeting of the California State Chamber of Commerce, Agriculture and Industry, Teague Papers, Box 58, Folder B.
84. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address at Monterrey, Mexico, April 20, 1943, The Public Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Compiled by Samuel I. Rosenman, Vol. 12, New York, 176.
85. Calavita, Inside the State (note: 1), 23.
86. Rasmussen, A History of the Emergency Farm Labor Supply Program, 1943-1947 (note: 1), 41-46.
87. Calavita, Inside the State (note: 1), 24, quoting Fisher, The Harvest Labor Market (note: 30), 124.
88. Rasmussen, A History of the Emergency Farm Labor Supply Program, 1943-1947 (note: 1), 219.
89. Rasmussen, A History of the Emergency Farm Labor Supply Program, 1943-1947 (note 1), 40.
90. Schoonover to Alison, July 28, 1943 and Anglim to Dechant, July 29, 1943, Hollenberg Papers, Carton 4, Folder 1.
91. All quotation in this paragraph from Davis McIntire to John Provinse, April 13, 1942, Calisphere.
92. Quoted in Calavita, Inside the State (note: 1), 21.
93. On California farm mechanization during the war, see the brochure, Labor Saving Devices for California Farms, Taylor Papers, Carton 40, File 35; on mechanization in California in general see David Runsten and Phillip Leveen, Mechanization and Mexican Labor in California Agriculture, Monographs in US-Mexican Studies, 6 (1981), Program in United States-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego; Walker, The Conquest of Bread (note: 16), Chapter 5; on the evolution of the labor process during the bracero era, see Ronald Mize, Mexican contract workers and the U.S. capitalist agricultural labor process: the formative era, 1942-1964, Rural Sociology 71 (2006) 85-108.
94. McIntire to Provinse, April 13, 1942 (note: 91).
95. McIntire to Provinse, April 13, 1942 (note 91).
96. See note: 94.
97. During the war years, California agriculture reported record profits, despite growers frequent complaints of profit losses due to FSA induced labor shortages or other exogenous factors. Growers reap huge return for vegetable crop, Fresno Bee (January 2, 1943); in 1940, the average income per farm in California was $3741; in 1945 it had increased to $8681, in constant dollars ($11,161 in nominal dollars) - a $132% increase. Nationally, the increase was 94%.
98. See Roche to Warren, and Brennan to Warren, Earl Warren Papers, 1942-1953, Department of Agriculture (3640), California State Archives, File 717; State Department of Public Health, Twenty-Eight Infant Deaths - Kings and Fresno Counties, October and November 1949, July 31, 1950, Warren Papers, Governor-Governors Commissions, Committees, Conferences, Agricultural Labor of the San Joaquin Valley, 1942-50 (3845), File 3; The Governor's Committee to Survey the Agricultural Resources of the San Joaquin Valley, Agricultural Labor in the San Joaquin Valley: Final Report and Recommendations, Sacramento, 1951, 227-231.