They saved the crops labor, landscape, and the struggle over industrial farming in Bracero-era California - Mitchell, Don (University of Georgia Press, 2012)
Includes bibliographical references and index
The agribusiness landscape in the "war emergency": the origins of the bracero program and the struggle to control it -- The struggle for a rational farming landscape: worker housing and grower power -- The dream of labor power: fluid labor and the solid landscape -- Organizing the landscape: labor camps, international agreements, and the NFLU -- The persistent landscape: perpetuating crisis in California -- Imperial farming, imperialist landscapes -- Labor process, laboring life -- Operation wetback: preserving the status quo -- RFLOAC: the imbrication of grower control -- Power in the peach bowl: of domination, prevailing wages, and the (never-ending) question of housing -- Dead labor -- literally: (another) crisis in the bracero program -- Organizing resistance: swinging at the heart of the bracero program -- The demise of the bracero program: closing the gates of cheap labor? -- The ever-new, ever-same: labor militancy, rationalization, and the post-bracero landscape
At the outset of World War II, California agriculture seemed to be on the cusp of change. Many Californians, reacting to the ravages of the Great Depression, called for a radical reorientation of the highly exploitative labor relations that had allowed the state to become such a productive farming frontier. But with the importation of the first braceros-guest workers from Mexico hired on an emergency basis after the United States entered the waran even more intense struggle ensued over how agriculture would be conducted in the state. Esteemed geographer Don Mitchell argues that by delineating the need for cheap, flexible farm labor as a problem and solving it via the importation of relatively disempowered migrant workers, an alliance of growers and government actors committed the United States to an agricultural system that is, in important respects, still with us. They Saved the Crops is a theoretically rich and stylistically innovative account of grower rapaciousness, worker militancy, rampant corruption, and bureaucratic bias. Mitchell shows that growers, workers, and officials confronted a series of problems that shapedand were shaped bythe landscape itself. For growers, the problem was finding the right kind of labor at the right price at the right time. Workers struggled for survival and attempted to win power in the face of economic exploitation and unremitting violence. Bureaucrats tried to harness political power to meet the demands of, as one put it, the people whom we serve. Drawing on a deep well of empirical materials from archives up and down the state, Mitchell's account promises to be the definitive book about California agriculture in the turbulent decades of the mid-twentieth century
Keywords: 1900 - 1999; Geschichte 1900-2000; Geschichte 1935-1964; BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Labor; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Labor & Industrial Relations; HISTORY / United States / 20th Century; Agricultural laborers; Foreign workers, Mexican; Human geography; Migrant agricultural laborers; Geschichte; Wirtschaft; Migrant agricultural laborers -- California -- History -- 20th century; Agricultural laborers -- California -- History -- 20th century; Foreign workers, Mexican -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Human geography -- California; Migration; Landarbeiter; USA; Kalifornien; Mexiko