| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Matt Garcia, A World of its Own: Race, Labour and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press 2001)

TO UNDERSTAND the history and culture of southern California and much of the southwest of the United States, it is necessary to understand the Mexican heritage which underlies and supports it. Matt Garcia's book is a strong contribution to bringing that heritage alive in economic, cultural, and human terms. In his discussion of the citrus industry of southern California, Garcia, half-Mexican and half-Anglo himself, brings to light an often hidden world of Mexican immigration and labour in the area's once-premier industry, the growing and harvesting of citrus crops in areas now pimpled with tract housing. Chicano cultural development is mixed with the study of community-building to show how the physical layout of Greater Los Angeles — a landscape of Chicano barrios, suburbs, and strip malls — developed.

Garcia, who teaches ethnic studies and history at the University of Oregon, discusses the racism that led white growers to select workers they believed more easily exploited, immigrant Mexicans and Asians, and the deliberate segmentation of the work force by race, language, gender, generation, and citizenship to combat unionization.

While discussing strikes, boycotts, and political organizing as responses to exploitation, Garcia also looks at the alternative cultural expressions that challenged the discrimination which permeated the Los Angeles area. While his seeming digression into the worlds of little theater and dance halls may not seem immediately relevant to his discussion, a blended, and therefore more complete, history emerges, one that sees people not just from the viewpoint of their economic roles, but from their artistic and playful sides as well. With that approach the reader sees a world of human beings, not just statistics.

The highly-profitable southern California citrus industry began in the 1870s, promoted by state and local governments and by the economically dominant Southern Pacific Railroad, creating townships where citrus groves often came right to the doorsteps of the growers' homes, melding urban and rural landscapes. By the early 1900s crops were worked by Chinese, Sikh, Japanese, Mexican, Filipino, and white employees on farms averaging 10 to 30 acres in size. Despite ethnic and wage differences, workers attempted to organize but were thwarted in 1919 when alleged organizers were physically removed from the area by white growers, one of numerous vigilante anti-union actions in the citrus groves.

After World War I growers began favouring immigrant Mexican workers for the year-round (as opposed to seasonal) labour required. Company towns or segregated labour camps were built. Fear of Filipino intermarriage with whites spurred the shift to Mexican labour, and by 1940 the 22,000 Mexican men working in the orchards represented almost 100 per cent of the labour force. In the 1920s a state Commission of Immigration and Housing began pressuring growers to provide more decent housing, aided by local white educators and social workers whose Americanization programs were not readily accepted by the growing numbers of Mexicans. Workers resisted employer efforts to control their physical space by establishing colonias, communities which were Mexican-centred, some of which grew into large and complex communities on the edges of Southern California's citrus suburbs.

Immigration restrictions were favoured by white growers, except for their Mexican work force, which caused debate in Congress on how best to protect a "white man's country." Growers argued that they did not have much use for Mexicans, but "we take him because there is nothing else available." With the advent of the Great Depression, however, government visa policies effectively cut off Mexican immigration into the United States. Both the American and Mexican governments supported repatriation of Mexicans to their native country. But those who stayed participated in union battles during the Depression decade and began shaping a culture independent of their immigrant parents. The Padua Hills Theater in Claremont, founded in 1931 and surviving into the 1970s, drew white audiences to Mexican-themed plays with Mexican performers, bridging a cultural gap and bringing awareness of Mexican-American social conditions to a larger community. That continued in later years with the growth of dance halls and concert venues for traditional Mexican music and an emerging Mexican-influenced rock and roll. That expansion into the larger, Anglo community led to the development of social and political organizations to combat de facto segregation.

Passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935 excluded agricultural workers from union organizing protections and employers continued to resist employee organization, often with violence. World War II, which brought stability to unions organized into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), saw the birth of the bracero guest worker program, which lasted from 1942 through 1964. Mexican contract workers were brought into the United States to plant and harvest, and many Mexican women were hired in packinghouses, creating a new women's work culture. Packinghouse workers were covered by the NLRA, but employer-imposed divisions of the workforce combined with fear of losing the best jobs — however low-paid and dangerous — they ever had kept unions out. Tensions developed between Mexican nationals and Mexican-Americans, leading to the murder of a bracero in 1952 which stirred their communities into heated discussion and led Mexico to recall some 500 contract workers from southern California. The end of the bracero program in 1964 opened the floodgates of illegal immigration, which is an issue on the front pages today.

Matt Garcia does an excellent job of interpreting the past, including the recent past and the anti-immigrant backlash in California. Exploring the issues of illegal immigration may be beyond the scope of his book, but demands addressing. The Mexican-American community itself, Garcia notes, is divided on the issue. A larger perspective would have been useful. In a simplified nutshell, Mexico has large oil reserves, and in the 1970s borrowed heavily in an effort to enter the First World. Oil prices dropped, however, and Mexico found itself deeply in debt. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund agreed to lend Mexico the money to pay the interest on what it owed, in exchange for creating an "investment-friendly" climate — reduced government services, opposition to free trade unions, low wages, non-enforcement of environmental laws, and the like. Hundreds of American-owned factories known as maquiladoras opened on the other side of the border, and employed large numbers of young women. Unemployed young men sought work where they could find it, mainly by crossing the border illegally, and often at great risk (some 2,000 migrants have died in southern Arizona's deserts over the last decade) into the United States. Jobs await them from employers looking for cheap and docile labour, even though hiring undocumented workers is illegal. The problem of "illegal aliens" in the United States is a creation of the US's own policies and employer greed. And immigrants have always been useful scapegoats when the economy is awry, especially if they are darker and speak a foreign language. A World of Its Own urges us to look beyond a world of our own to see how race and class play out not just in Greater Los Angeles, but in the larger world.


Albert Vetere Lannon Southwest Labor Studies Association, Arizona

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