La casa de esclavos modernos: Exposing the architecture of exploitation

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

Volumn 71, Issue 4, 2012, Pages 451-461

  Mitchell, Don ^a  

^a SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84873392221     PISSN: 00379808     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/jsah.2012.71.4.451     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (49)

1. This paper was presented as the Plenary Address at the Society of Architectural Historians annual meeting in Detroit, 19 April 2012. I have tried to retain as much of the filavor of that presentation as possible. The empirical material reported here is drawn from Don Mitchell, They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). The analysis is original to this paper.
2. Wayne Rasmussen, A History of the Emergency Farm Labor Supply Program, 1943-47 (Washington, D. C.: United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1951), 200;
3. Otey Scruggs, "Evolution of the Farm Labor Agreement of 1942", Agricultural History 34(1960), 140-49.
4. McEntire to Provinse, "Importation of Agricultural Laborers from Mexico", 13 April 1942, carton 5, file 33, Hollenberg Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
5. In addition to Rasmussen, A History, good histories of the bracero program, including especially the mechanics of its operation, debates over its administration, and its foreign policy implications, include Otey Scruggs, Braceros, "Wetbacks", and the Farm Labor Problem: A History of Mexican Agricultural Labor in the United States, 1942-1954 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988);
6. Otey Scruggs, "The Bracero Program under the Farm Labor Administration, 1942-1943", Labor History 3(1962), 149-68;
7. Kitty Calavita, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I. N. S. (New York: Routledge, 1992);
8. Richard Craig, The Bracero Program: Interest Groups and Foreign Policy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971).
9. An attempt at recasting the history of the program as a transnational history situated within the context of modernizing Mexico is Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
10. On the question of bracero domination in California-a topic to be discussed in more detail below-see especially Ernesto Galarza, Farm Workers and Agri-Business in California, 1947-1960 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977);
11. Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (Santa Barbara: McNally and Loftin, 1964);
12. Ernesto Galarza, Strangers in Our Fields (Washington, D. C.: United States Section, Joint United States-Mexico Trade Union Committee, 1956).
13. See the sources in notes 4 and 5. The international agreement between the United States and Mexico allowing for the importation of Mexican National workers, the standard work contract, and other early documents governing the program and detailing the rights of imported workers can be found in Farm Security Administration, Procedural Manual, Farm Labor Transportation Program, 8 Sept. 1942, available in Calisphere (California Digital Library), http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb9j49p4n9/?query= farm transportation program&brand=calisphere (accessed 4 June 2012).
14. Later documents, including amended international agreements, standardized work contracts, and contracts between government agencies and farm labor associations can be found as appendices to California Senate Fact Finding Committee on Labor and Welfare, California's Farm Labor Problems, Part 1 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1961).
15. Such evasions are detailed in Galarza Strangers in Our Fields
16. and Mitchell, They Saved the Crops.
17. The reports of CCIH and the role that housing conditions played in labor unrest are detailed in Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
18. see also Cletus Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).
19. Carey McWilliams, "They Saved the Crops", The Inter-American, Aug. 1943, 10-14.
20. See Varden Fuller, "The Supply of Agricultural Labor as a Factor in the Evolution of Farm Organization in California", Hearings on S. Res. 266, Violations of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1939), 19777-898.
21. Rasmussen, History of the Emergency Farm Labor Supply Program, 21-22.
22. Farm Production Council, Report of the Activities of the California Farm Production Council, July 1 to December 31, 1943 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1944), hereafter Report of Activities I;
23. Lawrence Jelinek, "The California Farm Bureau Federation, 1919-1964" (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1976), 235-36.
24. Frank M. Shay, Report of the Activities of the Farm Production Council, July 1, 1943 to March 1, 1947 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1947), 5.
25. Report of Activities I, 5-12.
26. "Major Activities of the Farm Production Council", 1 Sept. 1943, file
27. See Fuller, "The Supply of Agricultural Labor;"
28. Lloyd Fisher, The Harvest Labor Market in California (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953).
29. On the braceros as an officially supplementary labor force, see President's Commission on Migratory Labor, Migratory Labor in American Agriculture (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1951);
30. United States Department of Labor, "Mexican Farm Labor Program, Consultants Report", October 1959, file 65
31. On the cultural, as well as the economic, importance of the wage see Geoff Mann, Our Daily Bread: Wages, Workers, and the Political Economy of the American West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
32. see for example, the ones collected in Jose-Rodolfo-Jacobo, Los Braceros: Memories of Bracero Workers, 1942-1964 (San Diego: Southern Border Press, 2004). For a more optimistic view of bracero life
33. see Cohen, Braceros.
34. Jelinek, "California Farm Bureau Federation", 238.
35. Fisher, Harvest Labor Market in California, 124.
36. see also Don Mitchell, "Battle/Fields: Braceros, Agribusiness, and the Violent Reproduction of the California Agricultural Landscape during World War II", Journal of Historical Geography 36(2010), 143-56.
37. see also Gilbert Gonzalez, Guest Workers or Colonized Labor: Mexican Labor Migration to the United States (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 61.
38. Galarza, Merchants of Labor, 200-201;
39. Calculated from Alain De Janvry, Phillip Le Veen, and David Runsten, Mechanization in California Agriculture: The Case of Canning Tomatoes (San Jose, Costa Rica: Inter-American Institute of Agricultural Sciences, 1980), Table 4.2
40. and Henry Anderson, A Harvest of Loneliness: An Inquiry into a Social Problem (Berkeley: Citizens for Farm Labor, 1964).
41. see Craig, The Bracero Program; on the various sinews of the end of the program as they were unwound in California
42. See, Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939);
43. Carey McWilliams, "Proposal in Re Farm Labor Authority", 11 June 1942
44. Richard Walker, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California (New York: The New Press, 2005);
45. Jelinek, "California Farm Bureau Federation;"
46. Anonymous, "Has the White Man Lost His Hinge?" Pacific Rural Press 3 Oct. 1942
47. This is the overriding point of Gonzalez, Guest Workers or Colonized Labor?
48. McWilliams quoted in Calavita, Inside the State, 21.
49. Fisher, Harvest Labor Market argues convincingly that what California growers wanted more than anything, even more than cheap labor, was flexible labor.