Book Review

Cultivating California offers a fresh look at a topic that itself seems thoroughly well cultivated: California agriculture. "The diversity of California's agriculture is well known," writes David Vaught, "but the corresponding diversity and complexity of the labor systems that have sustained it remain something of a mystery." That is because books written about the evolution of agriculture in the Golden State so often tend to remain faithful to the basic storyline originally and compellingly articulated by Carey McWilliams in his Factories in the Field (1939), a popular study that is fundamentally a muckraking attack on growers. As such, Factories in the Field reflects the labor tensions of the 1930s.

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Vaught boldly challenges the McWilliams thesis and thereby provides readers with a much more nuanced and complex perspective on the subject of agricultural labor relations. His purpose, Vaught writes, is "to reassess the roots of the state's farm labor relations, and it is my contention that those roots are more likely to be found in grower, rather than worker, culture." Vaught is not necessarily pro-grower, however; nor is he antilabor. He believes that growers and workers deserve to be treated as something other than two monolithic categories.

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