The Nature of Citizenship: Race, Citizenship, and Nature in Representations of Californian Agricultural Labor

Home , Filipinos in Alaska, Helena Maria Viramontes, John Hay Whitney, Laurence Gronlund, Luisa Moreno, The Harvest Gypsies

By Sarah Dorothy Wald

B.A., Reed College, 2001

A.M., Brown University, 2004

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island May 2009

This dissertation by Sarah Dorothy Wald is accepted in its present form by the Department of American Civilization as satisfying

the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date ______

Arlene R. Keizer, Advisor

Date ______

Ralph E. Rodriguez, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date ______

Matthew Garcia, Reader

Date ______

Karl Jacoby, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date ______

Sheila Bond, Dean of the Graduate School

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CURRICULUM VITAE

Sarah Dorothy Wald was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan on November 23, 1979.

She received her B.A. in American Studies at Reed College in 2001. Wald completed her

A.M. in American Civilization at Brown University in 2004.

Wald’s article “‘We ain’t foreign’: Constructing the Joads’ White Citizenship” is forthcoming in The Grapes of Wrath: A Re-Consideration, an anthology edited by

Michael J. Meyer with Rodopi Press. She has written articles for the Encyclopedia of

American Environmental History and the Encyclopedia of American Environmental

Literature, as well as book reviews for History: Review of New Books.

Wald is a Graduate Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity

(2007-2009) and the Cogut Center for the Humanities (2008-2009) at Brown University, as well as a Brown/Wheaton Faculty Fellow (2008-2009). Her other fellowships include a Historical Society of Southern California/Haynes Research Fellowship (2007).

Wald has taught courses in American Studies, Environmental Literature, and

Environmental Justice Cultural Studies for the American Civilization Department at

Brown University and the English Department at Wheaton College. Wald received the

Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning Teaching Certificates in Higher Education I,

II, and III at Brown University. She has worked as a Teaching Consultant for the

Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning (2005-2009) at Brown University, and a

Writing Center Associate (2006-2009) at the Brown University Writing Center.

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

This dissertation could not have been completed without the advice and mentorship of

my dissertation committee, Arlene R. Keizer, Ralph E. Rodriguez, Matthew Garcia, and

Karl Jacoby. My committee improved the quality of my dissertation and assisted my

development as a scholar. Each one of my committee members modeled a form of

mentorship that I can only aspire to implement in my future work with students. They not

only mentored me on my dissertation, but also helped me prepare for a future of research,

publication, and teaching.

Arlene E. Keizer is dedicated to the development of independent scholars. The feedback she provided looked beyond the dissertation to improve my approach as a scholar. Whenever I was in a rush to complete the dissertation, Arlene encouraged me to slow down and spend more time developing my arguments and complicating my analysis. She taught me to temper my timelines with an attention to the quality of my work and the depth of my thought. She encouraged my attention to gender and to the literary questions I sought to address.

Ralph E. Rodriguez’s ceaseless support of my project motivated my work on it.

Ralph encouraged me to see the connections between my project and a wide range of other works. I always left our meetings with a list of books that reshaped my approach to the topic. He helped me place my scholarship in a broader framework of scholarly discourse. Moreover, Ralph encouraged my attention to detail at the level of sentence

construction, rooting out the passive voice and unnecessary commas. I am a stronger

writer because of the extra care he devoted to commenting on my work.

Matthew Garcia offered encouragement and mentorship throughout my years at

Brown. He pushed me to challenge my intellectual frameworks and to engage mediums

beyond the written word. He facilitated the development of the comparative ethnic

studies framework I bring to my research.

Karl Jacoby always approached my work with an eye to environmental studies.

He encouraged me think about environmental studies through a more international and

comparative lens. Additionally, Karl is a master story-teller. He has pushed me

throughout this project to think of ways that I could tell my story more effectively. The

extent to which I have succeeded can be attributed to his influence.

My time at a graduate student was greatly enriched by my experiences at the

Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the Sheridan Center for Teaching

and Learning, and the Writing Center of Brown University. Each of these centers offered me an interdisciplinary community of graduate students, committed faculty, and dedicated staff. The resources they provided improved my scholarship and allowed me a space to work. They also enriched the quality of my life as a graduate student at Brown.

Laura Hess of the Sheridan Center deserves special thanks for the time she invested to help me identify, articulate, and continually develop my teaching philosophy.

My dissertation was greatly improved by the careful readings provided by the

Cogut Center for the Humanities seminar, the Brown-Yale Latino Studies collaborative, and the Mellon Graduate Workshop organized by Kerin Holt and John Funchion.

Moreover, conversations and suggested edits from Jin Suk Bae, Liza Burbank-Glib,

Thomas Chen, Sara Fingal, Gillian Frank, Jonna Iacano, Jessica Johnson, Melanie

Kohnen, Eric D. Larson, Mireya Loza, Angela Mazaris, Ani Mukerji, Miriam Posner,

Felicia Salinas-Moniz, Mario Sifuentez, Margaret Stevens, Brian Sweeney, Aiko Takuchi and Miel Wilson greatly strengthened my scholarship. The mentorship I received in the department from Susanne Wiedemann and Caroline Frank deserves special commendation. The first several years of my graduate education were marked by

Susanne’s constant affirming presence in the basement with her piles and piles of books.

In addition to careful readings of dissertation chapters, Jeannette Lee provided the camaraderie necessary to finish the dissertation and apply for jobs.

I offer my sincerest thanks to Daniel Kim, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and the wonderful staff of the English Department for including me in their programs and projects. Bob Lee, Susan Smulyan, and Barton St. Armand also contributed significantly to my intellectual development at Brown. I appreciate the mentorship I received from the

English Department at Wheaton College, especially from Lisa Lebduska. In many ways the groundwork for my dissertation began with my training at Reed College. I thank

Jackie Dirks, Anne Baker, Laura Arnold Liebman, and Pancho Savery for always encouraging my scholarship. The feedback they provided on my senior thesis provided many lessons as I began the dissertation process.

The funding provided by the Cogut Center for the Humanities and the

Wheaton/Brown Faculty Fellowship supported the writing of this dissertation. The

Historical Society of Southern California/Haynes Research Fellowship and a matching travel grant from Brown University enabled the archival research necessary for this project. Jean Wood, Carole Costello, Roseanne Neri, Patricia Balsofiore, and Andrea

vii

Casavant helped me navigate the bureaucracy and regulations to successfully matriculate.

Whether I needed to reserve a room for a seminar or borrow a laptop for research, they were always there to help. These are the details that determine success.

Nothing could replace the friendship and support offered by Kyla Zaret, Jisun K.

Lee, Katie Prevost, Corinne Ball, and Megan Fischer. To Alan M. Wald and Angela

Dillard, your advice, support, and love are invaluable. I am also tremendously blessed by the love and support of my Aunt Debbie and Uncle Mike as well as my sister Hannah.

My grandparents Dorothy and Quentin Stodola did not live to see me finish the degree, but the values they instilled in me remain alive in the goals of this project. I have been unusually lucky in the support, friendship, and love I have received from a wide range of family and friends, too numerous to list in entirety in these acknowledgments.

I provide my sincerest thanks to Camilo Viveiros, Jr. Your companionship and your commitment to a better world inspire me every day.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Signature Page iii

Curriculum Vitae iv

Acknowledgements v

Introduction 1 Ecological Citizenship and Comparative Ethnic Studies

Chapter 1 31 “Settlers Galore, But No Free Land”: White Citizenship and the Right to Land Ownership in Factories in the Field and Of Human Kindness

Chapter 2 92 “The Highway is Alive Tonight”: Representing the Dust Bowl Migration

Chapter 3 149 The “Clouded Citizenship” of Rooted Families: Japanese American Agriculture in Rafu Shimpo, Kashu Mainichi, and Nakamura’s Treadmill

Chapter 4 216 “The Earth Trembled for Days ”: Domestic Disorder and Nature’s Violence in Yamamoto’s Short Stories

Chapter 5 273 Imperial Geographies and National Identities in Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Galarza’s Strangers in Our Fields

Conclusion 343 Denizenship in the Cultural Politics of Environment and Immigration

Works Cited 367

ix 1

INTRODUCTION

Ecological Citizenship and Comparative Ethnic Studies

On March 30, 1940, Louisa Moreno, the Spanish-language newspaper editor for the labor

union United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America

(UCAPAWA), addressed the left-wing American Committee for the Protection of the

Foreign Born. Her speech, “The Caravan of Sorrow,” expressed the concerns of El

Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española (The Spanish-Speaking Peoples’ Congress), a

popular front coalition uniting Latino residents (citizens and non-citizens) of the United

States.1 Moreno explained, “Long before the ‘grapes of wrath’ had ripened in

California’s vineyards a people lived on highways, under trees or tents, in shacks or railroad sections, picking crops – cotton, fruits, vegetables – cultivating sugar beets, building railroads and dams, making a barren land fertile for new crops and greater riches” (112). As Moreno declared, “The ancestors of some of these migrant and resident workers, whose home is this Southwest, were America’s first settlers in New Mexico,

Texas, and California, and the greater percentage was brought from Mexico by the fruit exchanges, railroad companies, and cotton interests in great need of underpaid labor during the early postwar period. They are the Spanish-speaking workers of the

1 For Moreno’s life and work, see Ruiz’s From Out of the Shadows; Griswold del Castillo and Larralde’s “Luisa Moreno and the Beginnings of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement in San Diego”; and Vargas (179-188).

Southwest, citizens and noncitizens working and living under identical conditions, facing

hardships and miseries while producing and building for agriculture and industry” (112).

By invoking the long history of border crossings in the Southwest and insisting on the border’s political history, Moreno complicated the category of citizenship used to determine belonging. She insisted that Mexican Americans belong where they live and where they work regardless of their legal status, proclaiming: “These people are not aliens. They have contributed their endurance, sacrifices, youth, and labor to the

Southwest. Indirectly, they have paid more taxes than all the stockholders of California’s industrialized agriculture, the sugar beet companies, and the large cotton interests that operate or have operated with the labor of Mexican workers” (112). With such statements, Moreno rejected definitions of political or cultural belonging on the grounds of ownership. Instead she asserted that the contributions and labors of communities in the

Southwest determine their relationship to that community, regardless of their official citizenship status. Moreno contended: “A people who have lived twenty or thirty years in this country, tied up by family relations with the early settlers, with American-born children, cannot be uprooted without the complete destruction of the faintest semblance of democracy and human liberties for the whole population” (112). In describing the threats to workers as an “uprooting,” Moreno tapped into a longer history of claiming political belonging through a relationship to the land.

Throughout the twentieth century laborers, artists, intellectuals, and advocates like

Moreno sought to expose the racism, xenophobia, and colonialism inherent in dominant representations of citizenship. Often they claimed roots and a natural belonging to the land to contest notions of ownership linked to white citizenship. In novels, short stories,

newspaper articles, pamphlets, and non-fiction texts, these advocates employed a trope that I term narratives of naturalization. Narratives of naturalization use images of nature to naturalize or denaturalize identities, subject positions, and national belonging. In the

legal process of naturalization, an immigrant becomes a citizen. He or she becomes

“naturally” part of the nation-state. Narratives of naturalization engage with images of

nature in order to claim a subject as part of the nation even if his or her legal naturalization is prohibited or unrecognized.

Dissident writers’ use of this trope allows us to see the constructed nature of the nation-state, exposing the processes by which some denizens come to be seen as legitimately part of the United States while others are named alien to it.2 They allow us

to recognize the racialized ways in which categories of “natural” and “unnatural”

operated to determine national belonging. Moreover, by asking who truly belongs to the land, such voices trouble conventional understandings of who owns it. The Nature of

Citizenship explores the words of such dissidents by examining how mid-twentieth-

century writers have represented Californian agricultural labor.

National Belonging and Natural Belonging

Through historically grounded narrative analysis of texts representing farm workers in

California, I demonstrate that cultural understandings of nature shape twentieth-century

notions of national belonging and the category of U.S. citizenship. Moreover, I assert the

continued cultural centrality of American agricultural landscapes to the creation of

2 Here and throughout my dissertation, I employ “denizens” in reference to Buff’s discussion of denizenship. In The Political Economy of Home, Buff defines denizenship as “the ways in which inhabiting a place as much as the officially defined boundaries of that place, lead people to make claims on that place” (4). I am particularly concerned with how claiming a relationship to a land, or a place, may provide a sense of political belonging. I’m interested in contesting the politics of white citizenship (constituted around property ownership) with a politics of denizenship.

national identity. That is, I contend that the cultural construction of the U.S. citizen

occurs simultaneously with the process through which the landscape itself becomes part of the nation. In making this argument, my project builds a bridge between the fields of ethnic studies and the environmental humanities through its investigation of the category of citizenship.

The Nature of Citizenship examines the ways we imagine ourselves as a nation alongside the ways we imagine the physical territory of the nation. While Benedict

Anderson established the role of the imagined community in the production of nationalism and the creation of a sense of national identity, I analyze the imagination of land, nature, and the environment in the creation of national identity and the legitimatization of national belonging. Contemporary debates over immigration often focus on who is a citizen and who should be a citizen. Yet, concerns about the national territory — the meaning of borders — remain central to the debate as well. In short, borders matter. But they matter not only in direct material ways; they also shape lived experiences by affecting the ability of people, goods, and capital to cross nations. Borders matter because they help give national identity to a landscape which does not inherently or essentially contain a national identity.3 The nation is imagined not simply through the

shared identities of a people who create a sense of community, but also through their

sense of the nation as a place.

Part of what the American people imagine they share is a national territory. But

what makes a place ideologically part of the United States? Today Hollywood signifies

American identity in the eyes of many U.S. residents as well as to cultural-consumers

3 Baker’s Heartless Immensity does an excellent job demonstrating how anxiety about the United States’ expanding borders in antebellum America shaped the nationalizing narratives of the period.

around the world. Yet only a century and a half ago California was part of Mexico. In the

nineteenth-century, its cities signified a different national identity invoking Spanish

colonialism and indigenous heritage. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, boosters, including businessmen and government officials, erased and replaced images of

Mexican authenticity as they recreated the public memory of Southern California’s colonial past.4 That is, the national identity of landscapes can change over time as

borders shift. As Mary Pat Brady argues in Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies, places

do not contain inherent static identities. They are constructed and constantly in flux.5 My

project examines the process through which agricultural landscapes are named as

American. That is, I examine the ways in which nature becomes nationalized and nation

becomes naturalized. Further, my study exposes the ideologies at play in contemporary

debates over immigration, national identity, and border security.

Specifically, my project demonstrates three ways in which “nature” matters to

citizenship in U.S. agricultural discourse. First, I suggest the centrality of land ownership

to the construction of white citizenship. By examining texts from across the political

spectrum, I contend that Great Depression farm narratives frequently construct the

individual white citizen landowner/farmer in opposition to groups of non-citizen, non-

white migrant farm workers. In such texts, the construction of race, citizenship, and

landscape becomes inseparable from the ideological creation of the nation-state. That is,

4 See Deverell’s White Washed Adobe.

5 See Massey’s discussion of a progressive sense of place as well.

the subject’s relationship to the agricultural landscape, through labor, informs the

construction of both race and citizenship.6

I examine the ways in which representations of nature are activated to

demonstrate either the “naturalness” or “unnaturalness” of national identity and the

nation-state. By examining Japanese American literary representations of agriculture in

the 1930s and 1940s, I expose how the texts’ pastoral motifs figuratively naturalize a

group denied legal naturalization. Critical theorists of race, gender, sexuality, and

national identity often expose the process through which identities are naturalized. That

is, they are concerned with the ways in which such identities come to be seen as stable,

moral, and always already existing.7 My project demonstrates the role that textual

depictions of nature and the natural environment play in the creation of such

“naturalized” identities. In doing so, my project also exposes the relationship between

legal naturalization (or citizenship) and naturalization as described by cultural critics.

Finally, I assert that twentieth-century U.S. agricultural discourse constructs the

agricultural landscape as a particular place in which national identity is manifest. By

examining anti-imperial renderings of the U.S.’s agricultural geographies, my project

exposes the nationalist ideologies operating in many representations of agricultural

6 In highlighting the role of labor in the relationship between nature and citizenship, I draw on Richard White’s assessment, in “Are you an environmentalist,” that the dominant way of knowing nature has been through labor, not recreation. White’s analysis helped me grasp the centrality of labor to any investigation of the relationship between citizenship and nature. Moreover, Mitchell, in Lie of the Land, demonstrates that the labor producing California’s image as Eden is made invisible, and consequently leaves the workers who perform that labor invisible. To understand the idealized relationship between the American Farmer and the American agricultural landscape requires rendering farm workers visible. The centrality of the farm workers’ invisibility in the national pastoral romance is seen even in the contemporary food justice debates which too often emphasizes “go local” ignoring labor conditions on local farms, and failing to emphasize solidarity with farm worker justice efforts like the Coalition of Imokolee Workers in Florida or PCUN in Oregon.

7 To provide just two brief examples of this usage, in Gender Trouble, Butler refers to “naturalized or essentialist gender identities.” Robyn Weigman, in discussing reproductive technologies, exposes the instability in “regimes of naturalized race and racialized nature.”

landscapes. In particular, it reveals the imperialist discourses operating in certain

portrayals of U.S. farms, whereby the relationship between the white U.S. citizen farmer

and the non-citizen farm worker operates as cultural shorthand for racialized

understandings of the “place” of the U.S. in the world.

Californian Agriculture: Contesting the “Official Story”

I focus on agriculture specifically because the ideal U.S. citizen has long been imagined

as the independent American yeoman farmer. If we examine the sets of narratives that

Priscilla Wald terms the “official story” or those stories invested with legitimacy and

authority by what Althusser would call the “ideological state apparatus,” we see that U.S.

agriculture has long mediated the imagined relationship between U.S. citizenship and

nature. For example, Hector St. John Crevecoeur’s Letters from An American Farmer

(1782) demonstrates the belief in farming as a transformative experience through which

the immigrant becomes American. Thomas Jefferson’s Query XIX in Notes on the State

of Virginia (1787) establishes the dream of a nation of small farmers, and Frederick

Jackson Turner correlates American agrarian idealism with the maturation of American

identity in The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893). This

idealization of the American farmer-citizen remains present in U.S. popular and political culture, despite the steep decline in the number of U.S. residents actually engaged in agricultural labor.

I utilize representations of Californian agriculture because, as historian Douglas

Sackman notes, California maintained a particular ideological significance in this national agrarian fantasy. The bounty and wealth of California justified manifest destiny and supposedly bestowed a divine blessing on U.S. endeavors. Consequently, Great

Depression depictions of Californian agriculture as an industrial factory with the

American citizen as exploited migrant farm worker threatened the very core of imagined

U.S. identity and the desirability of American capitalism. Representations of farming in

California hold particular significance for defining American citizenship as well as

justifying or attacking American political progress.

Additionally, Californian agricultural labor provides a significant site to study the

intersections of citizenship and race. Native Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese

Americans, Indian Americans, Filipinos, Mexicans and Mexican Americans have all

labored in significant numbers to produce California’s agricultural bounty.8

Constructions of race and citizenship remain core to discussions of who should be

allowed to labor in California’s fields and under what sorts of conditions such labor should be allowed. Thus, a study of Californian agricultural labor provides an ideal site

for analyzing multiple formations of racialized citizenship.

Furthermore, manifold works represent Californian agriculture. In this project I

examine works that have been canonized, such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath,

in relation to lesser known (but equally artistically adept) works like Sanora Babb’s

Whose Names Are Unknown. Moreover, the multiethnic literary history produced out of

Californian agricultural experiences allows me to examine key texts for Asian American

studies, such as Hisaye Yamamoto’s “Seventeen Syllables” and Carlos Bulosan’s

America Is in the Heart, alongside the writings of important figures in Latino literature

such as Ernesto Galarza and Helena María Viramontes. The comparison between Asian

American and Latino literary works is particularly important as Asian American and

Latino farmers and farm workers simultaneously negotiated discourses of racialized

8 See Almaguer; Daniel’s Bitter Harvest; and McWilliams’s Factories in the Field.

9 citizenship that rendered them alien in this period. Comparing works by Asian American and Latino authors of this period sheds light on the complexity of racial formation in a multi-ethnic society. The wealth and diversity of materials written about Californian farming and farm labor makes it a fruitful area to examine through a comparative ethnic studies approach.

Although the call for comparative ethnic studies in U.S. literature is far from new, too few academic works have yet risen to the challenge.9 I intend The Nature of

Citizenship to serve as a model for a historically grounded multi-ethnic literary study. In particular, my project refuses to read any work of ethnic literature as providing a sociological or historically representative picture of a particular group’s experiences, two faults plaguing some earlier attempts at comparative ethnic literary analysis. Instead, The

Nature of Citizenship demonstrates that literary representations can shed light on the discourses prevalent at a particular moment and that appropriate historical context allows mediated access to these discourses. The particular national significance of Californian agriculture, as well as the place of farming, farmers, and farm labor in U.S. mythologies, allows my study to contribute to a larger cultural studies project examining both nature and nation while remaining grounded in a specific time, location, and discursive formation.

Poverty in the Land of Plenty: California in the Great Depression

I begin my study with the Great Depression not because it offers the first important representations of U.S. agriculture or even of Californian agriculture (consider Helen

Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona, for example), but because the images created during

9 In constructing this comparative framework, I draw from the models built by TuSmith in All My Relatives (1993) and A. Robert Lee in Multicultural American Literature (2003).

this era, especially that of Steinbeck’s Joads, have served since their production as a touchstone for understanding Californian farms and farm labor.10 When the Consumers

Society of New York put out a pamphlet about local farm worker conditions in 1948,

they titled it “The Joads in New York.” Edward Morrow’s documentary The Harvest of

Shame (1960) claims to reveal “the 1960s Grapes of Wrath” while both T.C. Boyle’s

1995 novel The Tortilla Curtain, with its opening epigraph from Steinbeck’s classic, and

Bruce Springsteen’s 1995 song “The Ghost of Tom Joad” reveal the significance of Great

Depression images of California’s Dust Bowl migrants in contemporary discussions of

migration, race, and citizenship on the California-Mexico border. Thus I focus on a

particularly formative period for popular understanding of the relationship among race, citizenship, and nature in Californian agriculture.

The Nature of Citizenship examines the transformation of U.S. agricultural discourse from the Popular Front’s articulations during the Great Depression through the

wartime programs of Japanese internment and the Bracero Program.11 It is distinct from

earlier projects like Sackman’s in that it foregrounds writing by Asian American and

Latino authors. The final chapter of my project corresponds with the Bracero Program’s

completion in 1964. In the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of the Chicano movement, the

success of the United Farm Workers, and the popularity of political perspectives linking

U.S. civil rights contexts with Cold War foreign policy initiatives reshaped the discursive

context for representing nature and citizenship through depictions of U.S. agricultural

10 Both Hederson’s California and the Fictions of Capital and Street’s Photographing Farm Workers in California discuss the importance of pre-Great Depression representations of Californian agricultural landscapes and agricultural workers in California.

11 The Bracero Program was a guest worker program which brought an average of 200,000 Mexican workers a year to the United States from 1942-1964 (Ngai 139). Also see Anderson’s Harvest of Loneliness and The Bracero Program in California; Calavita; Craig; Galarza’s Merchants of Labor and Strangers in Our Fields; Garcia’s Operation Wetback; and Gonzalez’s Guest Workers or Colonized Labor?

11 labor. Despite these shifting material and ideological contexts, I demonstrate in my conclusion that the relationships between nature and citizenship articulated between the start of the Great Depression and the end of the Bracero Program remain central to understandings the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott of 1967 and provides the template for contemporary immigration debates.

Chapter Overview

To better understand the relationships among race, citizenship, and nature as they were transformed during the Great Depression, I consider texts written during moments in which the citizenship of agricultural laborers was contested. My first two chapters present the shared white popular understandings of citizenship shaping U.S. agricultural discourse across the political spectrum during the Great Depression. The first chapter,

“Settlers Galore, But No Free Land,” demonstrates the presence of this articulation in the work of both radical journalist Carey McWilliams, in Factories in the Field (1939), and right wing novelist Ruth Comfort Mitchell, in Of Human Kindness (1940). This chapter provides analyses of works from both the left and the right during a particularly divisive moment in Californian history; the chapter also challenges the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. I demonstrate that both McWilliams’s and Mitchell’s texts employ narrative strategies that establish the rights of white citizens to U.S. land ownership by contrasting them with non-white, non-citizen subjects’ relationship to rural landscapes.

The second chapter, “The Highway Is Alive Tonight,” utilizes representations of the Dust Bowl migration to further probe the relationship between the racialized construction of citizenship and the racialized construction of agricultural labor. In this chapter I compare John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) with Sanora Babb’s

Whose Names Are Unknown (written 1939, published 1996). Whereas the works by

Mitchell and McWilliams are situated squarely in California and explore changing patterns of labor, Babb and Steinbeck both begin their novels in Oklahoma and narrate a journey to California and the political awakening that occurs amongst white migrant workers when they face their fate in California’s fields. Here I contribute to the literary scholarship on Steinbeck as I offer one of the first examinations of the novel’s portrayal of race. Furthermore, the extant criticism of Babb’s novel is largely limited to the brief introduction that accompanies the novel and a recent doctoral dissertation.12 By comparing Steinbeck to Babb, I highlight the political difference between Steinbeck’s

New Deal sympathies and Babb’s alignment with the Communist Party. Significantly, both texts respond to the threat to national belonging (white citizenship) caused by lost natural belonging (rural dispossession). While Steinbeck reifies the “rightful” place of white citizens in rural landscapes, Babb depicts a rejection of white national identities allowing the rise of a multi-racial working-class alliance, thus contesting the link between national belonging and natural belonging.

My third and fourth chapters examine how Japanese American writers represented

Asian American farmers during the 1930s and 1940s. I am particularly concerned with how Japanese American writers implicitly responded to texts that viewed landownership as possible only for white citizens. Between one-half and one-third of Japanese

Americans in California were engaged in agricultural labor at the time of internment, serving as migrant workers, tenant farmers, and farm owners. Consequently, as Eiichiro

Azuma and Colleen Lye demonstrate, “The specter of the Japanese farmer” remained an ideologically essential justification for Japanese American internment during World War

12 See Battat; and Rodgers’s “Foreword.”

II. My third and fourth chapters examine literary representations by Japanese Americans

that challenged this Orientalist image of the Japanese farmer. In these chapters I compare

the racialized depiction of citizenship in relation to agricultural labor across a range of genres (newspaper articles, novel, short stories) as well as across the political spectrum, from articles by conservative newspaper columnists to novelist Hisaye Yamamoto’s markedly left sentiments.

My third chapter, “The ‘Clouded Citizenship’ of Rooted Families” demonstrates the centrality of agriculture to Japanese American claims to U.S. citizenship in the Los

Angeles area ethnic newspapers Rafu Shimpo (L.A. Japanese Daily News) and Kashu

Mainchi (Japanese California Daily News) as well as in Hiroshi Nakamura’s little known novel Treadmill. Nakamura wrote the novel, which concerns the internment of a Japanese

American farm family, during his own internment in Poston, Arizona. My fourth chapter, “‘The earth trembled for days’: Domestic Disorder and Nature’s Violence in

Hisaye Yamamoto’s ‘Yoneko’s Earthquake’ and ‘Seventeen Syllables,’” extends this analysis to Yamamoto’s postwar short stories, which exhibit a radical sensibility in line with her Christian anarchist philosophy.

Thus, Chapters 3 and 4 document some of the changes in the racial formation of citizenship and landownership occurring during and after World War II. In particular, both Nakamura’s novel and Yamamoto’s short stories place American agricultural discourse onto a world stage. Yamamoto in particular employs Cold War ideologies in order to launch her critique of the nation. By denaturalizing the nuclear farm family, she contests the naturalization of the nation-state. In doing so, her stories, like Nakamura’s novel, prove exemplary narratives of naturalization.

Chapter Five, “Remapping Imperial Geographies and Reclaiming National

Identities,” compares the anti-imperial geographies created by Filipino author Carlos

Bulosan’s fictional memoir America Is in the Heart (1946) and Mexican-American labor organizer Ernesto Galarza’s muckracking pamphlet about the Bracero Program,

Strangers in Our Fields (1956). Galarza and Bulosan remap the spatial relations of power that existed between nations in the post-World War II era. Both men produce texts that refuse to participate in traditional agricultural discourses even as they represent agricultural workers in California’s fields. Consequently, these works challenge the naturalization of U.S. territory and U.S. citizenship. Thus, the anti-colonial imaginary embraced by both texts revises the spatial relations between nations as both works emphasize that reterritorialization, revising the relationship between landscape and political identity, is necessary to achieve a more just future.

My conclusion briefly examines the literary output marking the 1970s success of the United Farm Workers alongside an analysis of contemporary immigrant rights struggles as depicted in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995). My reading of Viramontes’s novel shows the continued relevance of depictions of nature and citizenship to contemporary issues of immigration, farm labor, and environmental justice.

Moreover, in examining how texts by Japanese Americans, Filipinos, and Mexican

Americans worked through conceptions of citizenship and the process of naturalization, I demonstrate how oppressed groups participated in the formation and negotiation of their identities.

Literature, History and Ideology

Each chapter places works from the same historical moment into conversation. By

discussing the cultural assumptions that the narratives share, I expose the broader social

dialogue in which these representations engaged. I refer to this larger conversation as

U.S. agricultural discourse. By analyzing a specific set of texts through a specific

discourse, I expose the discursive process through which citizenship was naturalized and

nature was nationalized. Moreover, I examine the change over time in this discursive

formation, attending to the periods in which ideas of nature, citizenship, and the imagined

inherent relation between the two shifted.

Discourse functions as a form of institutionalized and accepted knowledge. It

determines the imaginative possibilities through which we may understand a

phenomenon or subject. In doing so, the discourse constructs the subject with which it is

concerned. Drawing from Foucault, I view U.S. agricultural discourse as that which

created the subject of the Californian farm worker as a non-white, non-citizen who owned

no land, and developed that subject in relationship to the U.S. farmer who was presumed to be a white landowning U.S. citizen. As discussed in Chapter 1, the literary representations published in 1939 consolidated the discursive formation of California’s

farmers and farm workers. Such discourses create knowledge and are immanently related to power. For example, the shift from the Depression-era construction of the Californian farm worker as a displaced white citizen Dust Bowl farm family to the contemporary perception of the undocumented worker migrating from Latin America involved a transformation of power relations. The knowledge generated by these representations contributed to the development of institutions and regulations that not only affect farm

workers, but also regulate the boundaries of citizenship and proper relationships to nature for us all.

The relationship between nature and citizenship that I examine in this dissertation is what Stuart Hall describes as an articulation. As Hall defines it, “An articulation is

thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under

certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and

essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made?”13 The interdependent relationship between nature and citizenship

expressed through U.S agricultural discourse functions as a unity of ideas and ideologies.

Yet there is nothing inherent, universal, or natural about naturalized citizenship and

nationalized nature. Although my focus is on identifying and teasing out the significances

of the nature-citizenship articulation itself, doing so necessitates an examination of the

conditions — ideological, political, economic — that allowed such an articulation to be

expressed and legitimized.

Stuart Hall asserts that discourses are the articulations of ideologies, when

ideologies are defined as world views or “mental frameworks” (26). Through

articulations, ideologies shape discourses, but discourses in turn validate or invalidate

ideologies. The texts, or discursive events, that construct discourses contain ideological

statements. These ideological statements, however, are not simply the product of

individual authors’ political beliefs consciously inscribed in the text. As Hall writes,

“ideological statements are made by individuals; but ideologies are not the product of individual consciousness or intention. Rather we formulate our intentions within ideology” (31). This process, by which our intentions are formulated and expressed

13 Grossberg’s “On Postmodernism” (141).

within ideology, is described by Fredric Jameson as the “political unconscious.” The

subject internalizes and is interpellated by the very ideologies spoken in society which are then unconsciously inscribed throughout the text and themselves become “acts” on

the discursive battlefield of power and knowledge.

Thus we can read a text, or a group of texts, produced in a particular cultural,

economic, and political moment to examine the ideologies through which the texts were

produced. In doing so, we expand our understanding of that cultural, economic, and political — what I term historical — moment. Moreover, by better perceiving the

historical moment and the ideologies through which the text was produced, we are offered new and useful interpretations of the literary text, and of the author who, in part, produces the text. For indeed, if the text is spoken through ideology and contributes to discourse, ideologies and discourses in turn produce the subject who speaks through the text.

My project engages the relationship between history and literature. As Melani

McAlister contends, cultural texts do not merely reflect or reproduce social constructions of a given moment.14 In their ideological articulations, such texts are constitutive of

social relationships. No single text is synonymous with the cultural or ideological beliefs

of a given moment, or given community. Texts exist in relationship to other cultural

articulations, and it is only through these relationships that the ideologies inherent to the texts can be understood.

Such a focus on narrative is particularly meaningful in a project examining the meaning of nation and citizenship. As Homi Bhabha argues, the nation itself is always

14 See McAlister (5).

under construction, and as such is always being articulated, always being narrated. That

is, the construction of the nation as timeless and natural is a narrative product. It can be

identified as textually produced when narrative analysis is applied to texts.15 The works I

examine both engage and challenge the official narrated stories of the nation. In

examining literary processes, I expose the narrative construction of the “natural” nation,

and particularly the naturalization of the national subject, the United States citizen. The texts I examine are part of a common discursive field. They engage in the discursive construction of the national subject, national nature, and the nation-state. They do not, however, merely repeat the “official” story of the nation. Instead, they demonstrate the constant construction of the nation through narrative and cultural articulation. These texts challenge a belief in national unity even as they affirm “official” relationships between public and private, the family and the state, and the citizen and nature.

While focusing my analysis on particular texts and the cultural work performed by these texts, it is important to remember that these texts also represent the statements of real people. They were written by activists, artists, intellectuals, and advocates. Many of

these individuals knew each other. They were friends and allies. Although neither Sanora

Babb nor Carey McWilliams ever met John Steinbeck, Babb and McWilliams often

socialized together. Both were good friends with Carlos Bulosan, who was linked romantically to Babb’s sister, Dorothy. Luisa Moreno, and her close friend and mentor,

Ernesto Galarza, were also part of this circle. In other words, although I am analyzing a

discourse produced by texts, these texts were written by individuals who formed part of a

community. A variety of political perspectives existed in that community, and vibrant

15 See Bhabha’s “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation” in Nation and Narration.

debates over Californian agriculture took place within it, in print and through spoken

conversations. In recognizing the importance of the authors to the texts they produce, each chapter contextualizes the texts within the political biography of their authors.

The Intersection of Ethnic Studies and Environmental Studies

Scholars such as Annette Kolodny and Leo Marx demonstrate the relationships between national identity and landscape that emerge in myths such as the frontier thesis and in motifs such as the machine in the garden.16 My project extends scholarly

understanding of this relationship by attending to the blurred line between legal and

cultural definitions of U.S. citizenship in literary representations of landscape. Moreover,

I examine the ways race shapes the literary imagination of both landscape and citizenship.17 In doing so, my scholarship not only revisits themes central to the classic

works of American Studies but also provides a bridge between historians and theorists

focused on race and citizenship and those focused on nature and the environment.

The Nature of Citizenship places texts by Asian American and Latino writers at its

core. I explore the dominant constructions of nature and citizenship as well as the ways

those excluded from white citizenship and land ownership responded. In doing so, I

create a nexus in which ethnic studies and the environmental humanities meet. Within

ethnic studies, the increasing concern with space and place most often engages cultural

geography, following Edward Soja’s call for the reemergence of a critical analysis of

space in cultural theory.18 Ethnic studies scholars rarely engage directly with the

16 See Marx’s The Machine in the Garden; Kolodny’s Lay of the Land, as well as Smith’s The Virgin Land.

17 Here, I build from Evans’s “‘Nature’ and Environmental Justice” in The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics and Pedagogy.

18 See Soja’s Postmodern Geographies. We see this application of cultural geography within a diverse range of ethnic studies projects such as Forman’s The ‘Hood Comes First, Haas’s Conquests and Historical

20 analysis of environment and nature developed in the environmental humanities. Their works do not often discuss the most prominent issues shaping environmental history and eco-criticism such as the impact of human power relationships on the environment, the

cultural construction of nature, and the influence of environment on human affairs.19

Although nature may not yet be a key word in ethnic studies, citizenship is quickly becoming a definitive site of analysis in the field. Historical works like Evelyn

Nakano Glenn’s Unequal Freedoms: How Race and Gender Shaped American

Citizenship and Labor and Erika Lee’s At America’s Gates; Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, literary studies like Colleen Lye’s America’s Asia, Lisa Lowe’s

Immigrant Acts and Gregg D. Crane’s Race, Citizenship and Law in American Literature, as well as works of anthropology and sociology such as Rachel Buff’s Immigration and the Political Economy of Home, Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship and Rhacel Salazar

Parreñas’s Servants of Globalization emphasize the racial construction of citizenship. As

Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects: Illegal Immigrants and the Making of Modern America

Identities in California and Villa’s Barrio-Logos. Like cultural geographers Harvey, Soja, and Rose, these scholars map out the ways in which power circulates through space. If, as Soja contends, global capitalism maintains its dominance through spatial control, the meanings of place can be contested as a way for communities to challenge global and national structures of inequality on a local level. Thus, these historians examine how dominant powers police communities through space, and how communities contest power relationships by using space in resistant ways to redefine the meanings of places. Not all examinations of space and representation emphasize the resistant possibilities of space and popular culture. For example, Avila examines the production of space in post-war popular culture to argue that “despite popular culture's capacity to incorporate diverse and often contradictory meanings within its fold, the cultural forms explored in the following chapters privileged a particular way of seeing the city and its people (xiii).” This privileged form of representation celebrated white suburban identity.

19 For example, in Barrio-Logos, Villa contrasts “barrio-zation” to” barrio-logic” as a dialectical process shaping Barrio social space. Villa argues that barrio residents developed a place-based community to resist the inscription of social space (such as police control and advertising) by dominant powers. The environmental impact of such battles, or the struggle to redefine environment are of passing concern to Villa, even as the barrio-zation he describes includes displacement and pollution central to contemporary environmental justice debates. This is not to down-play the importance of the above works in any way; each convincingly articulates the importance for examining space and place in the formation and contestation over identities. Yet, a gap exists between the conversations in which the two fields of environmental humanities and ethnic studies engage.

21 demonstrates, such studies provide a key comparative area between Latino studies and

Asian American studies. My project contributes directly to this comparative analysis of the racial formation of citizenship.

Recent scholarship in environmental history and ecocriticism seeks to incorporate critical race theory.20 This exciting new work focuses on the intersections of race, gender, and nature – most productively through the lens of environmental justice.21 Yet these fields have not examined the racial production of citizenship through an environmental lens. Moreover, in applying critical race theory to representations of rural landscapes, I am cutting against the grain in contemporary eco-critical thought. Much of the attention to environmental justice within eco-criticism emerged as a result of the environmental justice movements’ critiques of mainstream environmentalism’s wilderness focus.22 By focusing on farm labor and agricultural landscapes, The Nature

20 Myers’s Converging Stories evinces perhaps the most direct application of critical race theory to ecocriticism as Myers examines the confluences of discourses on nature and race throughout the nineteenth century. The Nature of Citizenship merges the historical specificity and conscious application of critical race theory apparent in Myers’s work with the concern for multi-ethnic textual production seen in scholarship by Stein and Murphy.

21 Julie Sze’s Noxious New York is the first text on environmental justice to self-consciously claim an American Studies/Cultural Studies perspective. Within Environmental History, Gottlieb’s Forcing The Spring has been central to rethinking the environmental movement, pointing out links between environmental and social movements from the progressive era onwards. Situated local historical studies by Peña and Pulido build upon Gottlieb’s sociological work in important ways. Both reveal the relationship between the (oppositional) identities of exploited peoples and the ways in which they redefined environment and thus environmental justice. Similar to environmental history, scholars engaging critical race theory in the environmental literary imagination frequently do so through an environmental justice framework. For example, The Environmental Justice Reader, edited by Adamson, Stein, and Evans, is the first anthology in the field to place the analysis of race and gender as central to eco-critical inquiry. This anthology builds off individual works such as Adamson’s seminal American Indian Literature which links perspectives on environment and environmental justice present in Native American literature with the same or similar landscapes present in traditional nature writing. Stein’s Shifting the Ground (1997) as well as Murphy’s Literature, Nature and Other and Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature apply an eco-critical analysis to sets of texts produced by authors from a variety of ethnic literary traditions including Asian American, Latino, and African American writers.

22 For example, Bennett and Teague, in The Nature of Cities, seek out urban environments for study while Buell’s Writing for an Endangered World places what he terms “‘green’ and ‘brown’ landscapes, the landscapes of exurbia and industrialization, in conversation with one another” (7). Building in many ways

of Citizenship asserts the significance of race in rural landscapes. My project also brings

the category of class to the foreground of eco-critical readings. In environmental literary

scholarship, labor emerges, if at all, as a destructive force, threatening nature and often

aligned with “the machine in the garden.”23 Thus, I attend to the experiences of those whose primary relationship to “nature” is through labor rather than recreation, a neglected perspective in environmental literary scholarship.

On Themes and Definitions

Prior to beginning the close readings that compose the body of this work, it is

worth noting several recurrent themes in my project as well as clarifying particular terminologies that emerge throughout the chapters. Let me begin with a discussion of how I employ gender and family in my study. As scholars such as Nira Yuval-Davis and

Anne McClintock assert, the construction of the nation cannot be adequately understood without attention to the constructions of manhood and womanhood upon which national ideologies rest. For example, the timeless mythology of the nation emerges in the image of the woman — the cultural guardian of the state — while the nation as modern,

forward-thinking and progressive is captured through depictions of men. As in this

example, gendered differences frequently function to naturalize the contradictions of

national projects. Attempts to remedy nationalism’s contradictions through gender also

on William’s The City and the Country, Buell shows the links between our constructions of “green” and “brown” landscapes in a variety of historical moments.

23 Environmental historians have done a far better job addressing class than environmental literary critics. For example see the work of White, Jacoby, and most recently, Lipin.

appear in the arenas of reproduction and production, the public and the private, and the

citizen and the denizen.24

In The Nature of Citizenship, I probe the gendered construction of the nation state

through narrative portrayals of family. By mobilizing commonly understood

representations of gender, families may be read as naturalizing the nation-state.

Specifically, in arenas such as law, political philosophy, and literature, familial

iconography justifies inequalities between inhabitants of the nation-state. Marriage, when presented as a foundational relationship between men and women, highlights the

relationship between the citizen-subject and the state.25 Families provide a means to

understand relationships within nations and between nations, as well as a way to theorize

the limits of the nation. For example, the relationship between parents and children

provided metaphors for rebellion during the United States’ revolution against Great

Britain in 1776 as well as a means to understand the United States’ imperial relations with the Philippines in the early twentieth century through such phrases as “little brown brothers.”

National kinship determines who can be part of the United States and who cannot be part of the United States. Thus ideals of women’s roles in the family and, consequently, the nation, shaped the citizenship laws that applied specifically to women.

Fears of racial contamination in the nation shaped the gendered manifestations of the nation’s exclusionary laws, including the targeting of Chinese women under the Page Act

24 Key scholars theorizing the mutual construction of nation and gender include Mayer in Gender Ironies of Nationalism; McClintock; and Yuval-Davis.

25 Cott. Szalay also employs such thought in examining changing literary depictions of the family in relationship to the New Deal.

(1875) and the significance of separating the citizenship of non-Asian women from their marital status in the Cable Act (1922).26 Consequently, through the textual presentation of families in farm narratives, I engage the gendered depictions of the nation, analyze the rhetoric of racial exclusion, and expose the familial manifestations of the United States’ imperial ideologies.

The family centers and defines many representations of the farmer-citizen and its foil, the non-citizen farm worker. In examining the narrative construction of the citizen,

I recognize that citizenship is more than a legal category. Whereas the state provides legal citizenship status, civil society provides what Lauren Berlant terms substantive citizenship. One’s rights and privileges in society are curtailed without the recognition of both legal and substantive citizenship. Scholars such as William F. Flores and Rina

Benmayor additionally recognize what is named cultural citizenship. Cultural citizenship recognizes the ways in which residents of the nation-state shape the political and cultural life of the nation, transforming the terms of belonging regardless of legal or substantive citizenship status.

These three categories of citizenship (legal, substantive, and cultural) help us understand the various types of citizens I refer to in my dissertation. Lauren Berlant frequently refers to the “abstract” or “universal” citizen, terms I use interchangeably.

The abstract or universal citizen is an ideal. It is the disembodied abstraction of citizenship that renders the presumed whiteness and maleness of the citizen invisible (or universal). The abstract citizen receives the promises of equality before the law. Yet because society’s construction of race renders whiteness and masculinity as invisible and

26 For the gender, marriage and citizenship laws in a U.S context see Bredbenner; Cott; and Gardner.

universal, the non-white non-male subject becomes embodied and marked as different.

This embodied subject is denied the equality promised to the universal or abstract citizen.

Mae Ngai describes the “alien citizen” as that person who has legal citizenship status but whose citizenship is not recognized in the eyes of the government or by other members of U.S. civil society (2). That is, the alien citizen has legal citizenship but not substantive citizenship. Usually this is because the alien citizen does not fit the racial construction of the abstract citizen. Instead the alien citizen may be marked by society

through a racial category understood by civil society as “alien” or “foreign.” The

treatment of Japanese American internees during World War II and Mexican Americans

deported during the Great Depression represent examples of alien citizenship.

Consequently, The Nature of Citizenship builds on the knowledge that citizenship

is a category constructed within particular understandings of race, gender, and sexuality.

Moreover, my project recognizes the relationship between citizenship and subjectivity through the term citizen-subject. Nancy Armstrong contends that the modern political subject emerges alongside the modern narrative subject, marked by the representation of

interiority.27 Priscilla Wald, meanwhile, contends that legal citizenship status provides

legal personhood. That is, Wald finds that supposedly “natural rights” are conferred by

legal standing, and without standing, personhood remains legally unrecognized and

unrecognizable.28 Drawing on both Armstrong’s and Wald’s analyses, The Nature of

Citizenship recognizes the relationship between the national subject, or citizen, called

into being by the nation-state, and the subjectivity linked to personhood in narrative

representations. In twentieth-century U.S. literature, subjectivity may often be

27 See Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction.

28 See Wald’s Constituting Americans (20-47).

interpreted as a demonstration of personhood which sets the stage to claim citizenship or the rights and privileges of a national subject. Thus in many texts subjectivity or interiority becomes a marker of cultural citizenship. Cultural citizenship-subjectivity is then utilized as a strategy for claiming the rights and privileges of legal citizenship and the recognition of those rights and privileges that substantive citizenship affords.

In other words, I refer to the citizen-subject to suggest the relationship between the personhood legally and ideologically granted by legal citizenship and the

consciousness and personhood presumed for the subject. Consequently I read debates over subjectivity as being deeply enmeshed with discourses of nationalism and national identities. I am less concerned with notions of global citizenship or consumer citizenship that rely (problematically) on the declining importance of the nation-state or an imaginary community of global civil society participants who exist somehow outside their national subjectivities.29 That is, such analyses frequently obscure the hierarchies of privilege

existing among and within nations.30

In addition to “citizenship,” the other most crucial of terms to The Nature of

Citizenship is “nature,” famously described by Raymond Williams as “perhaps the most complex word in the language.”31 I find philosopher Kate Soper’s analysis of the dual

political meanings ascribed to nature most directly relevant here. As she explains,

“nature” manages to describe both what is “out there” (not human) and what is “in there”

(the inherent, biological, and innate). This is the source of nature’s political difficulties,

29 For more on consumer citizenship, see Garcia-Canclini.

30 More useful are terms such as Ong’s flexible citizenship and Parreñas’s conception of partial citizenship which recognize the complicated relationships to citizenship that transnational migrants’ experience.

31 Williams’s Keywords (219).

or rather a leftist split between environmentalists who embrace a realist definition of

nature (and consequently demand its protection and perhaps assert its rights) and those

advocating against the “naturalness” of normative understandings of race, gender, and sexuality (i.e. opposing the concept of homosexuality as unnatural on the grounds that nothing is natural).32

I find two solutions to the post-modernism/realism debates within the

environmental humanities most satisfying. The first is the argument made by Daniel

Botkin that scientists have found nature to be far less stable than previously believed.

Ecologists have replaced climax theories of ecosystems (where ecosystems develop to a certain ‘climax’ stage and thus must maintain their balance to survive) with disturbance based models of ecosystem health. Such an approach more directly regards nature as fluid and changing in alliance with culture as fluid and changing. That is, Botkin debunks the ideological power of the term “nature” by claiming that even nature lacks the connotations of natural (unchanging, static, essential). The other is along the lines offered

by environmental historian Richard White, who eloquently defines nature as “at once a

physical setting where living beings exist in complex relationship with each other, and a

human invention. Humans create a shifting sense of cultural concepts about the physical

world and identify those concepts as nature. When they act, humans do so on the basis of

these cultural formulations but their actions rebound on an actual physical world.”33

White recognizes that nature’s physical manifestation and cultural manifestation can not

32 Soper’s work attempts to navigate the realist-postmodernist debates within the environmental humanities. Other key contributers to this discussion include Buell, Sue Ellen Campbell, Timothy Morton, and Dana Phillips. Many would identify this as the defining debate in the field these days, though I feel its growing stagnant as scholars increasingly recognize the applicability of post-modern insights alongside a recognition of material reality.

33 White’s “American Environmental History” (306).

be separated. That said, I analyze textual representations not actual ecosystems. While I am interested in examining discourses because of their material implications, the discussions of nature and representations of nature contained herein specifically refer to nature as a cultural construction rather than as a material manifestation.

Finally, the history of the term “naturalization” is best documented in Priscilla

Wald’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies. As she explains, the term

“evolved as a keyword along with the modern conceptions of political belonging that we have come to associate with the nation” (171). From its sixteenth-century origins the term came to mean “the conversion of something foreign – words and phrases, beliefs and practices – into something familiar or native.”34 The common etymology of native,

nature, and nation (from the Latin natio or birth) suggests the fascination with natural

history and taxonomy that arose along with modern forms of political power. Moreover,

its application in conferring rights in the face of the intermarriage of French and Scottish

royal families signified the centrality of birthrights (and the ability to bestow birthrights

on those who were not born with them) to the term’s discursive significance.

While Wald acknowledges the mingling of the legal definitions of the term with

the related term natural, ultimately she separates the two, asserting that naturalization “is

not meant to seem natural.”35 Her definition ignores what is perhaps the most common

usage of the term currently in American Studies and U.S. literary studies – which is the

naturalization of social categories such as race, gender, and sexuality. In this case

naturalization is exactly supposed to seem natural. The Nature of Citizenship aims to

bring Wald’s understanding of the legal origins of the term (and its implications for

34 Wald’s “Naturalization.”

35 Ibid.

29 modern political subjects) into conversation with the other sense of the term naturalization – the construction of social structures and identities as natural. I do this by examining the role depictions of nature play in the racial and gendered construction of citizenship. That is, I reassert the primacy of nature (as a social construction) into interpretations of the term naturalization. By merging three such understandings of naturalization (to become natural, to obscure social distinctions, and to gain the political rights of a native), The Nature of Citizenship blurs the lines between cultural and legal forms of citizenship. It generates a nexus for the discussions of naturalization in citizenship studies, ethnic studies, and environmental studies. Such an inquiry is urgent and necessary when human denizens on a given piece of land are classified as either natural or alien to it.

Contesting Narratives of Natural Legitimacy

In 1950 Luisa Moreno departed the United States with her husband. She refused to testify in the deportation hearings against labor organizer Harry Bridges, even though the government offered her citizenship as a bribe for her cooperation. When a warrant was subsequently issued for her own deportation, she exited “voluntarily” through Ciudad

Juarez, settling in Guatemala until the C.I.A.-sponsored coup against President Arbenz in

1954. She returned to Guatemala for the last years of her life, dying in 1992.36 The

United States labeled Luisa Moreno a “dangerous alien” on the grounds of her membership in The Communist Party. Although she asserted the belonging of those who labored on the lands claimed by the United States, she herself was subject to the forces which named as alien the very labor leaders seeking the full inclusion of America’s working class. In the legal precedents of the time, one could not naturally belong to the

36 Griswold del Castillo and Larralde.

30 nation-state without recognizing the “natural” legitimacy of that state and its dominant ideologies. Understanding the intersection of nature and nation is as important for understanding the contributions made by Luisa Moreno as it is for shaping our own interventions into the debates over citizenship, immigration, and the nature of the nation- state today.

CHAPTER 1 “Settlers Galore, But No Free Land”: White Citizenship and the Right to Land Ownership in Factories in the Field and Of Human Kindness

In 1939, Los Angeles real estate agent M.V. Hartranft published a novella entitled The

Grapes of Gladness: California’s Refreshing and Inspiring Answer to The Grapes of

Wrath, in which he proclaimed, “America still has a frontier! There is still an open way for homeless, even moneyless families, to the garden lands” (6). Hartranft’s unqualified assertion that California remained both a frontier and a garden might surprise those familiar with the desperation and dignity captured in Dorothea Lange’s photograph of

“The Migrant Mother” (1936) or John Ford’s film The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Yet the underlying ideology of Hartranft’s text, in which land ownership constitutes white citizenship, was shared in Depression-era works ranging from radical journalist Carey

McWilliams’s Factories in the Field (1939) to conservative novelist Ruth Comfort

Mitchell’s Of Human Kindness (1940).

Hartranft represents agriculture as the natural, and thus proper, role of the citizen.

He contrasts an indigenous, pastoral existence — “You could never starve a Californian

Indian” — with unnatural, industrial poverty (40).1 For Hartranft, the desires of his

1 Similar contrasts are found in Thoreau’s problematic depictions of the “noble savage.” Hartranft even quotes at length from the chapter “Economy” in Thoreau’s Walden. William’s The Country and the City and Marx’s The Machine in the Garden both discuss the way in which the ideas of city and country are produced in contrast to one another. The production of one depends upon the production of the other. The dynamics discussed by both Williams and Marx are at play in Hartraft’s text, and in the discourse around California’s migrant farmworkers more generally. The romanticization of Californian Indians in the 1930s

protagonists, the Hoag family, for agrarian self-sufficiency, suggests the quality of their

national character. It is their discipline and determination that separate the Hoags from

the Joads. The Indian imagery, which compares the Hoags to California’s indigenous

population, establishes the Hoags’ “natural” right to own their “native” land. Similarly,

Hartranft labels the Hoags’ determination to own land patriotic because, “If we don’t fill every rich tillable acre in California with our own American folks, then the Orient will fill it for us” (58). That is, Hartranft constructs the Hoags’ white Americanness in contrast to the non-white, non-citizen “Oriental.” While references to Native Americans imply a pastoral, indigenous, and non-violent relationship between a lost Native past and a potential white Jeffersonian future, “Oriental” farmers and farm workers suggest an danger to the nation through the threat to national territory. Thus, Hartranft narrates the

relationship between race and citizenship through the subject’s relationship to the land.2

Like in The Grapes of Gladness, the rural landscapes in Factories in the Field and

Of Human Kindness connote both ownership by white citizens and the “natural” belonging of those white citizens to the United States.3 In Factories in the Field, the

collapse of categories of citizenship and race demonstrates an opposition between the

was far from their image in the mid to late nineteth century, where the severity of their negative image justified in part the state sanctioned decimination campaigns, during which at least 8,000 Californian Indians were directly killed by state sanctioned violence, including massacres. Almaguer contends however this earlier image was “closely associated with the Indian’s traditional subsistence economy” (113) like Hartfrant’s use of the figure. See Almaguer (45-105).

2 In discussing race, I draw on Omi and Winant’s definition of “racial formation” as “the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings” (61).

3 Jeffersonian pastoralism references a train of thought usually linked back to Jefferson’s Query XIX in Notes On the State of Virginia, which describes the ideal nation as composed of economically (thus politically) independent farmers. For discussions of the frontier, the Jeffersonian myth and their relation see: Kocks; Conlogue; Roosevelt; Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation; Slotkin’s The Fatal Environment; Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence; Smith’s Virgin Land; Turner; Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land; and Marx’s The Machine in the Garden.

democratic potential of white citizen/settlers’ collective colonization efforts and the

fascist reality of capitalist land monopolization, resulting in a supposedly transient, non- citizen, and non-white workforce. Despite his progressive intentions, McWilliams’s text inadvertently affirms the presence of white citizen settlers and questions the belonging of

non-white, non-citizen workers to California’s rural landscape. Of Human Kindness

reaffirms the myth of the frontier and Jeffersonian democracy by rendering California as

a domestic garden in which hierarchies of race and class are naturalized and the threats of

non-white subjects are neutralized.4 The novel implies that when non-white, non-citizen

workers are properly contained, they are not a threat to American democracy or the

ability of white settlers and citizens to attain the American dream. Ultimately, both

works reify the relationship between white citizenship and rural U.S. land ownership.5

As McWilliams’s and Mitchell’s texts demonstrate, images of the American

nation were not conceived of solely through the image of the national body. The nation

was also conceived of territorially, through a pattern of conquest, settlement, and pastoral

democracy. Although this pattern bore little similarity to the material conditions many

Americans faced during the Great Depression, its ideological implications remained strong. Defining the national body as white, a process consolidated through the National

Origins Act of 1924, required defining rural land ownership, the territorialized identity of

the American state, as intrinsically linked to white American citizenship.

4 This text was written following a series of militant farm labor strikes in which a large number of the participants were non-white workers. See Daniel’s Bitter Harvest; Weber; Guerin-Gonzales; McWilliams’s Factories in the Field; Mitchell’s The Lie of the Land; Starr’s Endangered Dreams; and Taylor’s On the Ground in the Thirties.

5 There is an earlier history of California literature that deals with the relationship between citizenship and land ownership in California, including Jackson’s historical romance Ramona (1884) and Ruiz de Burton’s novel The Squatter and the Don (1885).

“An American Radical, Western Style”

Historians and literary scholars alike often underestimate Carey McWilliams’s influence on the public image of California’s migrant farm workers. While John Steinbeck and

Dorothea Lange may be among the best remembered of the “agrarian partisans” today, in

1939, the Associated Farmers singled out Carey McWilliams as “Agricultural Pest

No.1.”6 After the 1939 publications of Factories in the Field, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of

Wrath, and Lange and Taylor’s American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, Carey

McWilliams took to the airwaves and lecture circuits. He chaired the Steinbeck

Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers while Steinbeck, who McWilliams never met,

remained conspicuously absent from the public debate.7 McWilliams’s writings and activities on behalf of migrant farm workers led to his appointment as Commissioner of

Housing and Immigration (1939-1942) by New-Deal-elected Governor Culbert Olson as well as to Republican Governor Earl Warren’s campaign promise to fire McWilliams from his government post. Mike Davis called McWilliams, “The California left's one- man think tank during the New Deal era” while Michael Denning referred to

McWilliams’s writings as “one of the major intellectual accomplishments of the cultural

6 The best etymology for this widely cited epithet is found in footnote 6 of Aaron Sach’s “Civil Rights in the Field.” The term “agrarian partisans” was coined by Sackman in reference to the group of artists and intellectuals who advocated on the behalf of California’s agricultural workers in the 1930s, specifically Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, Carey McWilliams, and John Steinbeck. Several studies have considered McWilliams in light of this group of advocates. My insistence on citizenship as key to the relationship that the agrarian partisans articulated between environment and identity sets my work significantly apart from that of Shindo, Loftis, and Denning, while adding specificity to Sackman’s historical study. Moreover, my project extends the circle of agrarian partisans to include leftist authors and intellectuals such as Sanora Babb, Carlos Bulosan, and Ernesto Galarza, who not only shared the political perspectives of Lange, Taylor, and Steinbeck, but had personal ties to McWilliams.

7 For McWilliams, see Loftis’s Witness to the Struggle (171-173); Richardson; and McWilliams’s The Education of Carey McWilliams (78). For Steinbeck, see Benson’s The True Adventures of John Steinbeck: 371-372; and Parini (199-200). A number of factors contributed to Steinbeck’s absence. Steinbeck didn’t want the publicity. He had a failing marriage. Finally, he was afraid of retribution by the Associated Farmers.

35 front.”8 Yet significant analysis of McWilliams’s contributions has only been undertaken recently and discursive analysis of his works has lagged even more.9

The ideological contradictions structuring Factories in the Field are most apparent

when seen in the context of McWilliams’s biography. Carey McWilliams began his

professional career as a lawyer who socialized in California’s bohemian circles. During

the 1930s his practice increasingly moved to the left through his involvement with the

American Civil Liberties Union and labor law. As he explains in his autobiography:

“What prompted me, a busy young lawyer to undertake such a task? The answer is quite

simple. A series of dramatic large-scale farm labor strikes captured my interests. The

headlines were so insistent, the social drama so intense, that I was compelled to find out

what was going on” (74).10 During this period, the subjects of his writing shifted from artists and authors to social injustice.11 In 1939, he published Factories in the Field,

8 Davis’s “Optimism of the Will”; and Denning (18). Starr, in “The Light and the Dark,” claims, “More than any other single nonfiction writer, McWilliams – through prodigious research and heroic writing – came close to establishing the definitive story and image of the Golden State in the pre-1950 period” (15). In reference to McWilliams’s two works of regional history, Southern California: An Island in the Land (1946) and California: The Great Exception (1949), California historian Kevin Starr wrote, “All efforts to interpret California through narrative analysis are, in a sense, a series of footnotes to Carey McWilliams” (15). See Star’s “The Light and the Dark.”

9 Scholarship on McWilliams has generated one biography, a handful of articles, and a small collection of dissertations. References to McWilliams are included in works on intellectual radicalism in California or The Great Depression by historians. Almost all of these works are both explicitly biographical. No work has been published examining McWilliams’s individual texts as literature. See Canelo; Corman; Critser’s "The Making of a Cultural Rebel”; Critser’s "The Political Rebellion of Carey McWilliams"; Davis’s "Optimism of the Will”; Gantner; Geary; Klein; Meyer; Navarro; Robinson’s “Remembering Carey McWilliams”; Richardson; Sachs; and Starr’s “The Light and the Dark.” Noteworthy discussions of McWilliams are also found in Pagan; Garcia’s A World of Its Own; Starr’s Endangered Dreams; Stein’s California and the Dust Bowl Migration; Vaught’s Cultivating California; Vaught’s “Factories in the Field Revisited”; and Weber.

10 McWilliams’s The Education of Carey McWilliams (78). Certainly one should not rely on McWilliams’s autobiography as hard evidence of anything. It was blurred by memory and even more so by McWilliams’s conscious literary choices. However, other biographical works back up this particular interpretation of McWilliams’s life.

11 Loftis (62-76); Richardson; Critser’s "The Making of a Cultural Rebel”; and Critser’s "The Political Rebellion of Carey McWilliams.”

which claimed to expose the “hidden history” of California’s agriculture, followed by Ill

Fares the Land (1941) which looked at the causes and consequences of agricultural industrialization on a national scale.12

Factories in the Field was written during a transformative period for McWilliams’s

political perspectives, from his “political rebellion” in the 1930s to his growing comprehension of a “racial revolution” during the 1940s.13 This “racial revolution” did

more than transform progressive constructions of race; persons racially constructed as

non-white increasingly became included within the popular imagination of the American

nation. McWilliams’s developing analysis of race appears in his 1940s texts, including

Brothers Under the Skin (1943), Prejudice: Japanese Americans, Symbols of Racial

Intolerance (1944), and North From Mexico: The Spanish Speaking People of the United

States (1948). His participated actively in the campaigns he wrote about, including as

chair for the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee (1942-1944).14 McWilliams’s

seemingly prescient views on race, nation, and environment even earned him a biography

entitled The American Prophet (2005).15 In his autobiography McWilliams credits his

growing awareness of race with his post as California’s Chief of the Immigration and

Housing Commission along with the national scope of his research for Ill Fares The Land

12 For public reception of Factories in the Field, see Richardson (91-92).

13 These terms come from Carey McWilliams’s autobiography, The Education of Carey McWilliams.

14 For a more complete picture of McWilliams’s political activities, see Richardson; and McWilliams’s The Education of Carey McWilliams. The Sleepy Lagoon case arose as a precursor to the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 (which occurred just months before the 1943 Harlem rebellion). In 1942, following the murder of Jose Diaz and amidst the hysteria created by the criminilzation of Mexican American youth, over three hundred Mexican American youths were arrested and interrogated. Twelve youths stood trial and were convicted despite the lack of corroborating evidence. The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee helped get the convictions overturned on appeal. See, Pagán; McWilliams’s North From Mexico; Denning’s The Cultural Front (399); and Richardson (115-120).

15 See Richardson.

(1941). Consequently, Factories in the Field appears representative of a particular

moment in McWilliams’s own political transformation.16

Factories in the Field characterizes land ownership as the determining factor of

whether fascism or democracy will exist: socialist land ownership correlates with

democracy while capitalist land ownership results in fascism. Moreover, Factories in the

Field depicts the prevalence of non-white labor as a consequence of the monopolization

of land ownership. In other words, the rhetorical structure McWilliams employs links the presence of non-white labor in California’s agricultural fields with fascist land ownership. The text suggests that colonization by white migrants is necessary to

successfully transform California from fascist land monopoly into the paradise that

boosters claim it to be.17 In romanticizing white U.S. “colonization,” — a term he uses

as synonymous with socialist “collectivization” — McWilliams erases indigenous claims to California and also blames the California’s existing inequalities on Spanish and

Mexican systems of rule. Thus despite McWilliams’s avowedly progressive racial

politics, his text inadvertently embraces problematic romanticized notions of “white

citizenship” as socialist utopia.

Monopoly or Colony?

16 It is also important to note McWilliams’s work as the editor of The Nation for twenty years (1955-1975), where he actively encouraged and published the works of generations of progressive public intellectuals including Ralph Nader and Howard Zinn. See Davis’s “Optimism of the Will”; and Robinson’s “Remembering Carey McWilliams.”

17 Sackman contends that “Factories in the Field showed how the relationship of America’s many peoples to the land shapes and is shaped by the dynamics of class, race and citizenship” (Factories x). While I agree with his observation, literary studies like mine add to the historical understanding of works like those by McWilliams through a more in depth exploration of what, for example, Factories in the Field depicts as the relationship between “America’s many peoples and the land” and what appears to be meant by class, race and citizenship within such a work. Race appears conspicuously absent in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and conspicuously present in McWilliams’s Factories in the Field. A historically based literary interpretation reliant on close reading strategies is necessary to fully explicate the ideological meanings present in the texts.

Contemporary historians including Douglas Sackman, Matt Garcia, and Anthea Hartig

have demonstrated that the myths of the frontier, yeoman farmers, and Edenic existence

have never been true for California. Over fifty years ago, McWilliams advanced this argument as a central premise of Factories in the Field. 18 The work’s opening paragraph immediately takes California’s Edenic myth to task. It explains that a romantic image exists of “A fabled land, California . . . a wealthy and indolent province, blessed with a miraculous climate and steeped in beauty” (3). When McWilliams writes, “The legends about this land at the rainbow’s end thrilled a nation for decades,” he directly invokes the myth of Manifest Destiny, acknowledging the national function of the regional image (3). Yet, before the paragraph’s end he states that “there has long existed another California – a hidden California” (3). This book’s intention in uncovering this unknown history is “to dispel a few of the illusions and to focus attention on certain unpleasant realities” (4). Thus, readers are led to believe that we are no more likely to

find the California of our dreams than we are the leprechaun’s pot of gold. Moreover,

California as Eden is not newly lost, but has never existed.

Not only was California never an Edenic paradise, McWilliams continues, it was never an American frontier state. Thus, Jeffersonian pastoralism was unable to develop there. According to Factories in the Field, this was partially due to the appropriation of

Spanish patterns of colonization and the exploitation of the Mexican land grant system by the American empire. California was no “frontier” when it passed into American hands:

18 New Western historians often receive credit for debunking the frontier myth and paying attention to race and class in the formation of the West’s wealth. Yet, as Forrest G. Robinson points out, Carey McWilliams was among the most prominent participants in a long literary tradition of dissidence by Western writers. In Cultivating California, Vaught contends that the New Western historians’ understanding of California’s agricultural industry was fundamentally shaped by Factories in the Field. Vaught criticizes this trend, seeing contemporary historians repeating the mistakes of McWilliams. Vaught’s work has been accused of being too sympathetic to California’s owners.

“The ownership changed from Mexican grantee to American capitalist; the grant, as such

remained” (15). California’s status as a frontier had disappeared long before the

nineteenth-century American empire violently acquired California. McWilliams blames

Spanish colonialism and Mexican land regulation systems for California’s land

ownership patterns. He explains, “Through the instrumentality of the Mexican land grants

the colonial character of landownership in Spanish-California was carried over, and

actually extended after the American occupation” (12-13). By associating this land-

grant system primarily with Spanish colonialism and the Mexican state, rather than U.S.

industrial capitalism, McWilliams implies California’s system of land-ownership to be

anti-modern and un-American.19

By establishing California as an exception to the Turnerian rule, which claimed

Americans were produced through the frontier and settlement process, McWilliams

implicitly disputes claims by Californian land owners to American identity and

citizenship.20 For example, McWilliams writes, “There were at all times settlers galore,

but no free land” (103). No place remained in the newly American California for regular

U.S. citizens to find open land to conquer, settle, and farm. Only corrupt capitalists and

corporations who manipulated the system to achieve and expand the existing monopolies

benefited from the U.S. conquest of California. Consequently, McWilliams implies

California’s current land owners remain relics of a bygone era of un-American oligarchy.

19 For discussion of the Spanish land grant system see McWilliams (12-14). Interestingly, Daniel makes a similar rhetorical move when he states that California, in contrast to other Western states, entered the union needing to be “Americanized” rather than “civilized.” He describes the patterns of land-ownership as a failure of this Americanization process, thus likewise blaming Mexico for American capitalist agricultural exploitation (18).

20 See Turner. In Gunfighter Nation, Slotkin separates those who drew on Turner’s frontier thesis as “populists” from those who drew on Theodore Roosevelt’s version as “progressives.” While the populists described by Slotkin generally claim that reform is necessary because of the loss of the frontier condition, McWilliams claims that reform is necessary because the frontier condition failed to develop.

Through such logic, McWilliams criticizes the “Robber Barons” who benefited from the

Mexican-American War without problematizing Manifest Destiny or the U.S.’s

nineteenth-century land-grab from Mexico (28).

Additionally, by focusing on white U.S. “settlers’” inability to claim land due to

Spanish colonialism, McWilliams fails to address Native claims to California. While

McWilliams clearly disapproves of the violent exploitation (and attempted extermination) of Native peoples, he relegates them to the distant past, erasing any claim such groups

could make on California’s land in the present or future. Native Americans matter to

McWilliams’s argument in Factories in the Field not as California’s dispossessed land

owners but as an abused and exploited workforce. Rather than discussing indigenous

populations in the chapter devoted to “Land Monopolization,” McWilliams discusses

Native Californians in a later chapter focused on labor exploitation (53-55). According to

McWilliams, Native Californians disappeared as a significant labor force in California

when “primitive methods of wheat growing were discarded” (55) in the late nineteenth

century. Thus McWilliams regulates Native Americans to a “primitive” and distant past,

erasing a contemporary Native presence without ever fully describing or acknowledging

a past where California’s indigenous people’s controlled systems of land ownership. He

counters the myth of an American Eden in California, refuting the existence of a

Turnerian frontier and Jeffersonian democracy, without adequately exploring the role of

conquest and colonization in either California’s myth or its hidden history.

Once McWilliams dispenses with the mythic relations to the land he attacks in his

introduction, he proceeds with the “ugly fact[s]” (22). The first chapter of Factories in

the Field, “Land Monopolization,” emphasizes that California’s agricultural industry

developed its exploitative conditions because of oligarchic ownership of land.

McWilliams writes, “The character of farm ownership, established at the outset, is at the root of the problem of farm labor in California” (22).21 By emphasizing the ownership of

the land as the key determinant of the particular economic relations developed between

workers and owners, Factories in the Field delivers a Marxist lesson.22 Moreover, this chapter further explores the relationships between land, citizenship, and government. We are told: “The ownership patterns established by force and fraud in the decade from 1860 to 1870 have become fixed; the social structure of the State is in large part, based upon these patterns” (21). Factories in the Field portrays the relationship between citizen and land as essential to determining the form of government and the possibilities for democracy in the United Sates. The corrupt system of land ownership results in the corrupt economic system, whereby non-citizens are exploited as laborers. The economic base is disconnected from the citizenry and therefore prevents the development of democracy. Only when the land is owned by the citizens can economic democracy, and thus governmental democracy, develop. In other writings of the period, McWilliams advocated for the citizenship rights of exploited non-white labor, including the granting of citizenship to Filipinos. These demands are noticeably absent from Factories in the

Field. Here, while positing direct ownership of the land by citizens as the solution for

California’s ills, McWilliams fails to include non-citizen laborers. The omission likely

21 Interestingly, Richardson states that “McWilliams employs an antique definition of that term, popular among nineteenth-century radicals such as Henry George, which denoted a political arrangement in which businesses enjoyed special political privileges, concessions, and access (Lustig 1892)” (88). As Richardson states, David Vaught convincingly demonstrates the inaccuracy of McWilliams’s claims; “the concentration of land ownership in California never fit today’s definition of monopoly” (88). See Vaught (165-66).

22 McWilliams once claimed he had never read Marx. He was not a member of the Communist Party, although he was frequently asked to join. Interpretations vary on McWilliams’s opinions of communism. See Richardson.

results more from the rhetorical structure of McWilliams’s argument rather than from a

personal political shortcoming.

In the second chapter, “Empire and Utopia,” McWilliams contrasts two

alternative models of economic relationships to land: monopolization and colonization.23

As he explains, “the two stories represent a conflict between two types of development, land development under capitalism and land development under socialism” (39). The

“Empire” of the title belongs to Lux and Miller, a corporation formed by Charles Lux and

Henry Miller.24 McWilliams assert that Lux and Miller consolidate their land by

“brush[ing] [small settlers] aside like flies” (32). We are told, “it is apparent that if

Miller had used a shotgun instead of the courts, his methods [of land acquisition] could not have been more ruthless, or essentially more illegal, than they were” (35).25

Significantly, the government facilitates this land fraud. For example, “Miller and Lux

never had the slightest difficulty in getting special acts passed by the Legislature

validating their countless thefts” (32). McWilliams directly attributes Miller’s

recruitment of migrant labor to their corrupt land acquisition practices in which “the early

settlers had been squeezed out.” Without settlers, vast holdings of Californian land were

without laborers. Thus capitalists like Lux and Miller specifically recruited and exploited

“tramps” and “hobos,” or landless men (36). Miller and Lux prevented these men from settling down to keep a stream of available labor moving through their empire. Thus the

“Empire” exemplifies the way in which monopolistic land ownership led to government

23 The contrast between empire and failed utopia at the start of The City of Quartz provides one example of a number of ways in which Mike Davis’s rhetorical strategies echo those of Carey McWilliams.

24 For more on Lux and Miller, see Igler.

25 McWilliams’s use of hyperbole here is one of the trademarks of his writing style.

corruption and labor exploitation. The form of land ownership created the state’s social

and political structures.

In contrast, the “Utopia” that McWilliams describes is the socialist-inspired

Kaweah Co-operative Colony.26 McWilliams reclaims the Kaweah colony as a positive alternative model for land ownership. He dwells on the utopian possibilities of Kaweah prior to its collapse, as if to bring them alive again for the reader. According to Factories

in the Field, Kaweah colonists committed no crimes, published a weekly magazine with

an international readership, and constructed a model road all while the colony remained economically stable (43). Kaweah demonstrates that socialism allows technological achievement, artistic expression, and a stable society without economic collapse.

McWilliams decries its failure as the result of state repression. He writes, “The creation of the Miller and Lux empire was furthered at every step in its development by the State and the agencies of the State; the Kaweah experiment was consistently opposed, and finally, stabbed in the back by the state” (39). These tales of empire and utopia emphasize that McWilliams views appropriate government intervention (socialism) as essential for

economic justice, while inappropriate government collusion with the rich (fascism)

results in the repression of an achievable Californian paradise.

The inability of the socialist utopia to develop haunts Factories in the Field as the

road not taken, the road corruption prevented. The possibility of its return echoes

through the book, as McWilliams reminds the reader in several chapters of brief

26 The Kaweah Cooperative Colony was a socialist experiment in California from 1886 to 1892. The colonists, influenced by the writings of American socialist Laurence Gronlund, registered land claims of 12,000 acres, and planned to subsist in part from timber values. To get to the timber they built a road often described as an engineering marvel. However, soon after the road was completed, Congress created Sequoia National Park, which prevented the colonists from taking any timber. In 1891, the original land registration was determined to be invalid, and the colonists were ordered off the land.

considerations by the state of land colonization projects, including the land settlements at

Delhi and Durham (Chapter XII), and the migratory labor camps (Chapter XVI). These

were the very land colonization failures utilized by the press to defeat Upton Sinclair’s

EPIC program; in a twist, McWilliams reclaims them as an illustration that land

colonization can indeed work.27 The rhetorical effect of the continued presence of a

socialist alternative is to remind readers that a realistic solution to the farm labor problem

exists. This is particularly clear in McWilliams’s discussion of the government camps:

“But the migratory camps are not a solution: They are merely demonstrations of what might be accomplished” (303).28 The discussion of actual utopian plans and experiments

makes the socialist alternative seem less fanciful. The shortcomings of such colonies seem minimal compared to the extent of the misery caused by monopolized land ownership.

Moreover, the discussion of land monopolization and colonization efforts illustrates the unfeasibility of an individual settlement model for California’s future.

According to the text, if a society of economically independent, individually owned farms failed to develop in California in the first place, the industrial maturity of Golden State agriculture cemented Jeffersonian democracy as an unrealizable goal. McWilliams devotes significant sections of Factories in the Field to describing the process of industrialization and technological development. These descriptions demonstrate that the technological changes in agriculture, especially irrigation, require capital investments that

27 For more on EPIC campaign see Sackman’s Orange Empire (185-224). Also see Starr’s Endangered Dreams.

28 Denning contends that the difference between liberal and leftists was in part seen in whether they celebrated New Deal projects or saw them as mere demonstrations for future possibilities. He utilizes the above quote from McWilliams in that context (226).

prohibit an individual agricultural model.29 For example, the road construction and

irrigation projects undertaken at Kaweah rival what “private construction” could achieve,

but would be unattainable for individuals. Government cooperation and community

collaboration are requirements for a functional agricultural infrastructure. Thus the

industrialization of agriculture leaves open only two achievable possibilities for

Californian landownership: monopoly and collectivism. Each contains its own

consequences for the state’s social relations.

Social Consequences: Race and Citizenship

Factories in the Field engaged with existing progressive discourses on race during the

1930s. For example, the text contributes to the increasing celebration of ethnic pluralism

by U.S. progressives rather than “melting pot” assimilation.30 The discussion of the

history and contributions of each racial group involved in Californian agriculture bears at

least passing resemblance to the mission of the “Americans All…Immigrants All” radio

show (1938-1939). Each episode of this show, funded by the U.S. Office of Education,

discussed a particular ethnic minority and its contributions to American society.

Similarly, Factories in the Field highlights the contributions of each racial group to

Californian agriculture, after a brief discussion of their history in the state. Of the

Chinese, McWilliams writes, “But, by and large, it is correct to state that, in many

29 McWilliams’s Factories in the Field, Chapter IX “The Pattern is Cut,” discusses the role of irrigation and other technological advances in the industrialization of agriculture. For example, we are told, “But no single development in the whole process by which the transition from wheat to fruit was effected was of greater importance than the introduction of irrigation” (62) and “The development of fruit brought the growers into much closer relation with the cities than had formerly existed; it meant irrigation, and irrigation necessarily involved heavy capitalization” (64). As much of the discussion of Owens Valley in California: The Great Exception resulted from McWilliams’s correspondence with Mary Austin, it is likely McWilliams’s emphasis on irrigation here may be linked to Austin’s influence as well. See Richardson. For technology in American agriculture see Conlogue; and Marx’s The Machine in the Garden. For irrigation and the West see, Worster’s The Rivers of Empire; and Fierge’s Irrigated Eden

30 See Higham.

46 particulars, the Chinese actually taught their overlords how to plant, cultivate, and harvest orchard and garden crops” (71).31 The Japanese receive even greater thanks: “It is impossible even to approximate the enormous contribution which the Japanese made, in the course of a quarter of a century, to California agriculture” (110). Richard Weiss contends that the federal government emphasized ethnic diversity to highlight American difference from the racial hatred increasingly synonymous with Nazi fascism, and to inspire national unity as the threat of war loomed. The ethnic diversity education sponsored by the government, however, generally focused on white ethnics compared to the contributions by racial minorities discussed in Factories in the Field. McWilliams’s text picked up where liberal propaganda left off, supporting a more radical agenda through a broader definition of anti-fascism.32

By the time of the Depression, the influence of anthropologists such as Franz

Boas popularized beliefs that ethnic diversity resulted from learned cultural behavior as

opposed to biologically determined racial difference.33 Factories in the Field extensively

31 McWilliams overstated the available evidence in order to make his case for the specific contributions of racial minorities to California’s agricultural industry. See Chan’s This Bittersweet Soil.

32 In keeping with national trends, many of California’s anti-fascists, including McWilliams, utilized broader definitions of fascism encompassing racism and anti-unionism. For example, as Daniel Geary asserts, “Under the rubric of fascism, McWilliams described such American phenomena as union busting, anti-Semitism, nativism, militarism, capitalist exploitation, scapegoating, lynching, red-baiting, and vigilante justice. Antifascism, as a political posture that called for radical reforms toward economic reconstruction and racial equality in a democratic constitutional order, provided McWilliams with a basic continuity of political instinct” (912).

33 As Gould explains, while nineteenth-century scientific racism focused on biological physical differences, twentieth-century racism used demographics to declare ethnicity a genetic casual factor. Even as physical assessments of racial differences were fading, Mendelian genetic explanations of ethnic difference, where each ethnicity was discrete in a combination, such as three parts German and one part Italian, expanded. At the same time, ethnic identity became linked to “national origins” and separated from racial identity. Europeans were conceived of as white citizens of discrete nations with ethnic identity that was either changeable or immutable. Non-white person were conceived of legally as lacking national origins, or ethnic identity and thus lacking citizenship (national belonging) anywhere (Ngai 31-33). On Franz Boas and Margaret Mead’s influence on McWilliams, see Robinson, “Remembering Carey McWilliams” (421).

explored the reasons prejudicial associations had arisen about particular races.

McWilliams explains, “various racial farm-labor groups in California have not led

particularly well-adjusted lives while laboring in the fields. Occasionally . . . they have

catered to the popular prejudice against them in California” (142). For example, given

the predominance of males among Filipino workers and the prohibition against marriage

to white women, “What might be expected to happen under these circumstances has in

fact actually happened. Filipinos haunt taxi-dance halls, frequently enjoy the society and

charms of prostitutes and the State of California luxuriates in a feeling of general moral

uprightness” (144). Instead of demonstrating these stereotypes to be inaccurate,

McWilliams asserted that stereotypical behaviors resulted from social circumstance, not

biology. In this way, Factories in the Field unintentionally reinforced the perceived

veracity of many of the stereotypes it addressed, while placing blame for such behaviors

on the larger society that allowed oppressive economic conditions to exist, rather than on

the accused racial minorities. This is in keeping with popular discussions on race in the

1930s. The focus moved away from a depiction of racial minorities as the problem

towards an analysis of “racism” as the predicament. In emphasizing economic conditions

as the root causes of racism, Factories in the Field bears resemblances to such works as

Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), which contended that “Everything that is

done in any nation to eliminate unemployment, to raise the standard of living . . . is a step

in the elimination of racial conflict.”34

Factories in the Field then contributed to progressive understandings of race

prevalent during the Great Depression by celebrating the contributions of ethnic diversity,

separating cultural behavior from inherited racial difference, and emphasizing economic

34 Quoted in Weiss (575).

forces as the root causes of such behaviors. Yet it also obfuscated the difference between race and citizenship. One of the rhetorical oppositions that gives Factories in the Field its structure is between non-white labor and white labor. In chapters such as “The Pattern is Cut” and “Our Oriental Agriculture,” McWilliams discusses the similarity of the experiences of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Indian (“Hindu”), and Mexican workers. As

McWilliams explains, “The history of farm labor in California has revolved around the cleverly manipulated exploitation, by the large growers, of a number of suppressed racial minority groups which were imported to work in the fields” (104). Each group was

“recruited, exploited and excluded” (104). In contrast, “the influx of the dust-bowl refugees differs qualitatively and quantitatively from previous migrations” (306). The text repeatedly emphasizes the race of the Dust Bowl migrants, even embedding a quote from economist Paul Taylor: “Long lanky Oklahomans with small heads, blue eyes, and surrounded by tow-headed children; bronzed Texans with a drawl, clean-cut features and an aggressive spirit; men and women from Arizona, Arkansas, New Mexico, Missouri, and Kansas” (309). Strikingly, McWilliams discusses the increase of white laborers in the field in a chapter entitled “The End of a Cycle,” implying that white workers break the pattern of exploitation set by non-white workers. That is, the text produces the category of non-white non-citizen workers by discussing the Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Mexican workers in opposition to white Dust Bowl refugees. We are told “With the arrival of the dust-bowl refugees a day of reckoning approaches for the California farm industrialists” (306). McWilliams contrasts the experience of the white workers with the experience of a diversity of “suppressed racial minority groups” (104).

The contrast between white and non-white labor is textually equated with the contrast between citizen and foreign workers. That is, the text collapses the categories of race and citizenship. For example, “racial feeling” and “anti-foreign bias” are used interchangeably to describe the motivations behind California’s vigilante violence (136).

We are further told, “Historically, vigilantism is intimately related to the prejudice against the foreigner of a different color” (137). The language here is telling. Those of a

“different color” are different from those who are white. White is described as normative, and as the antithesis of foreign. The text implies, inadvertently, that “native” Americans are white and non-white workers are foreign. In the same passage we are told, “It is easier to whip up a frenzy of mob feeling against Mexicans and Filipinos, for example, than against native white Americans” (136). The text represents Mexicans and Filipinos as the antithesis of “native white Americans,” conflating citizenship and race. Notably,

McWilliams distinguishes between citizen and foreigner in the text, not between citizen and non-citizen. This is a problematic distinction when discussing Filipinos, Chinese, and Japanese workers who could not legally become citizens, while other immigrants such as Italians, Portuguese, and Polish workers could gain citizenship status. Thus race determine which workers remained permanently foreign and which became citizens.

Factories in the Field repeatedly describes non-white workers as if they lacked both citizenship status and the characteristics of citizens. Chinese, Japanese, Filipino,

Mexican and Indian workers are presumed to be foreigners. In describing non-white workers, the phrase “imported” is repeatedly used. In addition to implying that these workers were not born in the United States, the phrase denies the workers any agency in their immigration. Moreover, descriptions of these workers emphasize their supposed

transience.35 They are not depicted as intending to settle permanently in the United

States. Of the Japanese, McWilliams writes, “Being mostly men of middle age with no

settled homes, or families, they were highly mobile. They provided their own camping

facilities, such as they were, and asked no favors” (108). Without families or homes,

nothing in the text implies that such workers intend to stay in California, or that they fit

into popular patterns of assimilation. During the Great Depression, one’s relationship to

family was important to one’s citizenship status both legally and culturally. As such

historians as Nancy Cott have demonstrated, one’s role as head of family was envisioned

as a qualifying characteristic for citizenship status. This was reinforced through the

distribution of New Deal federal relief, where the relief one could receive was tied to the

relationship of an individual to his or her family.36 The men’s lack of family described by McWilliams illustrates a lack of roots, or “family ties,” connecting them to California,

and signifies that they will not be reproducing members of society.

However, McWilliams emphasizes that white workers, unlike non-white workers,

will settle in California. Rather than being “imported” like “peons and coolies,” the text

describes Dust Bowl workers as “not altogether solicited . . . they came like grasshoppers

driven before a storm” (308). Moreover, the text emphasizes that Dust Bowl refugees

migrated as families. Dust Bowl refugees came “bringing their possessions with them,

and they are in search of homes. Most of them are in California to stay. They are, in

general, white Americans” (309). This statement makes explicit the link between

families, homes, and permanence, using those descriptors to distinguish the “white

35 Not all migrant workers were transient. The citrus industry, for example, which utilized a heavily Mexican workforce, relied more on a model of fixed communities of family. See Garcia’s A World of Its Own; and Gonzalez’s Labor and Community.

36 See Cott; and Koontz (137-138).

Americans” from non-white migrants. This suggests that the Dust Bowl refugees, unlike

other migrant farm laborers, intend to settle in California because they are “white

Americans.” As we shall see, in Factories in the Field, McWilliams linked the growth of democracy in California to the perceived permanence of white citizens who could obtain residency and vote.

There are at least two significant problems with the elision of race and citizenship in Factories in the Field. First, as discussed below, it contributes to the discriminatory manner in which citizenship has been racialized as white. Secondly, the depiction of non-white workers as non-citizens was in many cases simply untrue. McWilliams himself provides the evidence within Factories in the Field that not all non-white workers were “foreigners.” Although the Issei were not allowed to naturalize, their

American-born children, Nisei, were citizens by birth. As McWilliams explains, Japanese immigrants sometimes got around measures preventing land-ownership by putting leases in their children’s names. Additionally, Factories in the Field acknowledges that many

Mexican Americans who were U.S. citizens were illegally “repatriated” during the Great

Depression: “Beginning in February, 1931, thousands of Mexicans, many of whom were citizens of the United States, were herded together by the authorities and shipped back to

Mexico, to get them off the relief rolls” (129).37 Peculiarly, Factories in the Field

employs “repatriation” as evidence of the susceptibility of foreign workers to deportation,

part of a pattern preventing unionization. Despite their citizenship, McWilliams

represents such workers as foreigners first. That some “Mexicans” are citizens is

incidental to their status as Mexicans. Their legal citizenship does not make them

37 400,000 persons of Mexican Descent were “repatriated” during The Great Depression; 200,000 were citizens. See Ngai (8).

Americans. Thus American born citizens can be described as “shipped back to Mexico.”

This is a particularly striking construction given McWilliams’s active objection to the

repatriation campaign; prior to penning Factories in the Field, he published an exposé on

the illegal deportations in American Mercury.38 Likewise, in 1940, he wrote, “Those

who see a potential enemy in every non-citizen should remember that the foreign born are

here not by accident of birth but by choice, usually because they cherish as dearly or more dearly than we do the principles of our government.”39 Factories in the Field could

have illustrated the citizenship characteristics of non-citizen workers, or the deprivation

of non-white workers’ civil rights, facts underscoring many of the legal cases and

political advocacy in which he engaged. Indeed, by the mid-1940s, the elision of race and

citizenship found in Factories in the Field is noticeably absent from McWilliams’s other

writings.40 Instead, Factories in the Field relies on a rhetorical strategy linking race to citizenship, even when it contradicted the details of his study.

By ignoring this denial of civil rights, McWilliams’s text inadvertently contributes to the creation of “alien citizens” described by historian Mae Ngai as “those persons who are American citizens by virtue of their birth in the United States but who are presumed to be foreign by the mainstream of American culture and, at times, by the

38 See McWilliams’s “Getting Rid of the Mexican.”

39 See “McWilliams Raps Anti-Alien Bills as UnAmerican.”

40 The Nation provides a particularly coherent almost weekly record of McWilliams’s writings during this period. From the late 1940s and early 1950s McWilliams was careful to depict non-white persons as American, consistently referring to people “of Mexican descent” and “Mexican Americans,” among other signifiers. For example, see “Is Your Name Gonzales,” and “Nervous LA.” The changes are also documented in the series of books he published during the 1940s from Ill Fares the Land (1941) through California: The Great Exception (1949). In his March 23, 1946 “Poverty Follows the Crops,” McWilliams does not allude once to the citizenship status of farm workers. His focus on racial injustice and an awareness of the “alien citizen” dynamic may have led to the shift in his analysis.

53 state” (2).41 The presumption of foreignness by the U.S. mainstream and the state was linked to racialized understandings of national belonging and the depiction of citizenry as white. The legal and popular presumption of Asian inassimilability contrasted with

Progressive Era assimilation campaigns aimed at Eastern European ethnics, who were included in popular understandings of whiteness during this period.42 As Ngai asserts, the 1924 immigration act, which was not fully implemented until the Depression, served to recognize and solidify this transformed interpretation of whiteness by deeming all

Europeans to be white.43 While the 1924 immigration law did not numerically restrict

Mexican immigration, increased documentation requirements and border regulation resulted in the classification of an increasing number of Mexican and Mexican Americans as “illegal.” Even as Mexican Americans, unlike Asian Americans, were not legally banned from naturalization, their status as “alien citizens” by virtue of their perceived racial difference solidified during the 1930s, as demonstrated by the repatriation

campaigns and the addition of the federal Census category of “Mexican” in 1930.44

41 In this project, I adopt Ngai’s contention that “laws not only reflect society but constitutes it as well, that law normalizes and naturalizes social relationships and helps to ‘structure the most routine practices of social life’” (12).

42 For a discussion of Progressive Era Americanization campaigns influence on white ethnic communities see Cohen; and Hingam. For the relationship to the Mexican-American community, see Garcia’s A World of Its Own; Gonzalez’s Labor and Community; Ruiz’s From Out of the Shadows; and Sanchez. For the relationship to the Japanese American community, see Yoo’s Growing Up Nisei (17-37).

43 As Ngai also points out, the 1924 legislation was adopted in part to prevent a flood of Eastern European WWI refugees; its solidification of whiteness was merely coincidental. On 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, also see Higham and Gardner. Others have argued that a resolidification of whiteness actually occurred in the post-civil war period, and/or during the period of Asian Exclusion. See Lee’s At America’s Gates; Takaki’s Iron Cages; and Roediger.

44 Both before and after the 1930 census, Mexicans were classified as legally white. See Ngai (54); and Lopez. On repatriation campaigns, see Balderrama and Rodriguez; Guerin-Gonzalez; Hoffman’s Unwanted Mexicans Americans in the Great Depression; and Sanchez.

During the 1930s, aliens (both “illegal aliens” and “alien citizens”) were increasingly

defined as those who were neither white nor black.

This analysis helps us understand the absence of black workers in Factories in the

Field. While white Dust Bowl workers migrated to California’s fields in significant

numbers during the Great Depression, they were not America’s only migrants. Black

workers also migrated west and a significant number labored in California’s fields.45 In

Factories in the Field, the presence of “negro workers” in Californian cotton fields is briefly mentioned, but is never developed. This is striking given the extensive treatment paid Mexican, Filipino, Japanese, Indian, and even Armenian workers in Factories in the

Field.46 The absence of black workers in the text may be explained by the disruption

they would pose to the text’s rhetorical opposition between white citizen labor and

foreign non-white labor. The history of slavery in the United States disrupts an easy

racial dichotomy in twentieth-century depictions of citizenship. The presence of African

American workers, who are treated as second class citizens and are undeniably

American, belies a contrast the conflation of citizenship and “whiteness.”47 That is,

McWilliams’s rhetorical emphasis on the contrast between white citizens and non-white

45 See Allmendinger; Johnson’s Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth; and McBrooome.

46 Earlier in California’s history, significant numbers of Armenian workers engaged in agricultural labor.

47 Not all black workers descended from U.S. slaves. By World War I, significant black immigration occurred from the Caribbean and West Indies. These newer immigrants were not part of mainstream consciousness during this period, especially where representations of California are concerned. For example, as Ngai points out, during the construction of the national origins report for the 1924 Immigration Act (approved 1929), the category of “the descendants of slave immigrants” was utilized as synonymous with descendants of free blacks, and voluntary immigrants from Africa. (26). In The Indispensable Enemy, Saxton discusses the hostility to black workers during Gold Rush California from white workers in part arising from the association of blackness with slavery, and its ramifications for asiatic racial formations.

foreign workers overlooks the citizenship status of non-white workers, which requires

ignoring the presence of black workers.48

If one contradiction present in Factories in the Field is the portrayal of non-white

workers as foreigners, a second significant contradiction is the rhetorical insistence that

non-white workers prevented unionization. For example, McWilliams explains, “the

extent to which the Japanese had monopolized field labor in the years from 1900 to 1913

made organization difficult, if not impossible. . . This barrier had to be broken down, and

the position of the Japanese shaken, before genuine organization could make any

headway” (102). The use of the word “monopolized” links McWilliams’s description of

Japanese immigrants to Japan’s supposed threat as a competing economy, as well as to

the anti-monopoly rhetoric of the white labor movement active in the anti-Chinese and

anti-Japanese agitations.49 McWilliams repeatedly describes scenarios where

unionization or collectivism fails because of the presence of non-white workers.

Moreover, Factories in the Field directly connects the rise of unionization to the increase

in white farm labor. This is seen in the section “First Organization efforts” and explicitly

stated in the final chapter, “The End of the Cycle.” McWilliams writes that the arrival of

white workers signifies that farm labor conditions will improve; “the jig, in other words,

is about up” (306).

The contention that non-white workers prevented unionization is problematic in

part because it is simply not true. McWilliams provides the very evidence of his own

48 In 1949, in California: The Great Exception, McWilliams refers to the “peculiar institution” of farm labor in California. He moves away from a citizen-non-citizen dichotomy to an understanding of slavery as the fundamental relationship between owner and worker in California agriculture. This switch is particularly interesting given the way understandings of blackness and slavery initially informed anti- Chinese agitation in California.

49 See Almaguer; Lye; and Saxton’s The Indispensable Enemy.

rhetorical inaccuracy. He quotes the California Fruit Growers Convention of 1907 that

the Japanese “are not organized into unions but their clannishness seems to operate as a

union would. One trick is to contract work at a certain price and then in the rush of the

harvest threaten to strike unless wages are raised” (114). This evidence that Japanese

workers are organized into unions of a different form is earlier interpreted as evidence of

their lack of interest in American unions (102). Later McWilliams compares the

portrayals of Japanese workers and I.W.W. workers in Wallace Irwin’s 1921 novel Seed

of the Sun (115). While pointing out that both groups responded to their treatment by the

protagonist through a form of work stoppage in demand for higher wages, McWilliams

remarks “Bad as the Japanese were, it seems that the I.W.W. were worse” (115). Here,

he directly connects the labor agitation of the Japanese worker to the labor agitation of

the I.W.W. union. McWilliams’s reading of Seed of the Sun provides strong evidence for

the Japanese inclination toward unionization and militant action. The same evidence is

likewise included for the other minority groups discussed. On strikes and organized labor

in 1927 and 1928, we are told, “While organized on a nationalistic basis, the Mexican

unions showed I.W.W. and syndicalist influences in their methods of organization” (130).

Additionally, “Filipinos no longer scab on their fellow workers, and they no longer underbid for work” (133). The text provides clear evidence that the non-white workers were engaged in militant union action.50 This contradiction in Factories in the Field

50 Numerous historians have documented the participation of non-white workers in unionization efforts. See: Almaguer; Gonzalez’s Labor and Community; Ruiz’s Cannery Women, Cannery Lives; and Weber.

belies the text’s rhetorical insistence that unionization was not possible with non-white workers in the fields.51

Factories in the Field explains the difference in the proclivity of white and non-

white workers to unionize through the category of citizenship. Foreign non-white

workers, McWilliams asserts, had no control over their entry or departure from

California, and even less control over their working conditions. The state of industrial agriculture in California necessitated a weak labor force fully under capital’s control.

McWilliams portrays these workers as powerless to control their entry to the US and powerless to decide the duration of their stay. He explained, “Here the practice has been to use a race for a purpose and then to kick it out, in preference for some weaker racial unit. In each instance the shift in racial units has been accompanied by a determined effort to drive the offending race from the scene” (134). The text characterizes non-white workers as vulnerable to deportation because they lacked citizenship. Moreover, these workers lacked the ability to vote, which McWilliams equates with political power in

Factories in the Field. Consider the following passage:

The Filipinos have been, by and large, powerless to protect themselves. Most of the 30,000 or so Filipinos in California are ineligible to citizenship. They cannot vote or hold public office. As “aliens” they are subject to a maze of discriminatory legislation; and, when they run foul of the law, as frequently happens, they are usually asked to accept ‘deportation’ as a condition of receiving a suspended sentence or being placed on probation. Local officials do not need to respect them, because they do not vote. The same situation, in general, has always existed with respect to the various alien groups that the growers have imported. Violence, in other words, has been encouraged not only because of race feeling

51 McWilliams’s other writings from the 1930s demonstrate this awareness as well. The militancy of non- white labor was asserted in his articles in The Nation, American Mercury and the Pacific Weekly throughout this period. McWilliams’s focus on a particularly mythic American relationship to land through farming appears to shift the presentation of his ideas with troubling implications.

against the victim, but because of the powerlessness of the victim to retaliate (139).52

“Alien”-ness is equated with the victims’ citizenship status and with their powerlessness.

As discussed earlier, the use of the phrase “imported” reinforces this lack of agency. The condition of alien workers under farm fascism is compared to the conditions facing residents of fascist states. Moreover, McWilliams attributes significant power to the ability to vote. The road to success, as he sees it, is not wild-cat strikes, but civil rights and electoral politics.

In contrast to this description of Filipino workers, McWilliams claims white workers would use their political power as citizens to develop unions and otherwise protect themselves. Factories in the Field tells us that “most of [the new migrants]… are determined to acquire legal residence in California” (323). Factories in the Field links stability with the citizenship status of white America. As American citizens, the Dust

Bowl refugees are expected to stay put, gain residency, and build political power.

McWilliams explained, “These despised ‘Okies’ and ‘Texicans’ were not another minority alien racial group (although they were treated as such) but American citizens familiar with the usages of democracy” (306).53 It is the familiarity with democracy and

the ability to wield some power within these systems of democracy that would ultimately

allow the new migrants to triumph over the fascist farm system in California, or so

McWilliams believed.54

52 The experience of Filipino workers will be discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 5 For selected works on Filipino Americans experience in this period, see Espana-Miram; Friday; Fujita-Rony; and Saniel.

53 This is yet another example in which McWilliams’s language choices and word order enforce an association between non-white subjects and non-citizens.

54 By 1946, McWilliams referred to this contention as naïve. See “Poverty Follows the Crops.” Weber demonstrates that Mexican workers demonstrated more proclivity towards militant labor action that white

It is important to note that McWilliams (likely unconsciously) implies that racial

minorities hinder unionization not only through their general lack of interest in unions and their susceptibility to deportation, but because they confuse the lines of social

conflict. The basic rhetorical strategy underlying Factories in the Field is the drawing of

opposites. The social conflicts discussed in the text can always be drawn across two

lines. For example, the anti-Chinese movement in California is in large part explained as

a class conflict between the larger growers on one side and “small farmers, manufactures,

and organized labor” on the other (80). The presence of the Chinese merely “confused”

the issue (80). In one of the contradictory statements found within Factories in the Field,

McWilliams acknowledges that the small growers and organized labor made a mistake in

failing to organize the Chinese. However, the overall point driven home is not that the

Chinese immigrants were subject to racial intolerance, but that the presence of Chinese

workers prevented white workers from challenging landed monopolies. The chapter

entitled “The Chinese” ends, “Had they substituted Henry Miller [of Miller and Lux], as a

symbol, for the proverbial John Chinaman, conceivably there might have been more point

to their rioting” (80). This is a significant message repeated throughout the text: The

presence of non-white workers muddled the ability of white Californians to identify the

clear social conflict. The presence of non-white “foreign” workers prevented the

development of a class-conscious, active, white citizenry.

Factories in the Field’s collapse of the categories of race and citizenship is

particularly striking given McWilliams’s own advocacy work in the 1930s and 1940s for

the civil rights accorded to racial minorities through citizenship. The ideologies present

“American” workers. As Weber argues, this may have resulted from the faith in voting and democracy for change held by white Dust Bowl migrants, and not shared by Mexican workers, radicalized prior to immigration.

in the language and rhetorical strategies of Factories in the Field appear inconsistent with

McWilliams’s other acts of political advocacy. As such, Factories in the Field may

indicate a broader failure of leftist intellectuals to challenge the ways in which citizenship

was racialized as white in the Depression era.

Who Owns the Land?: Fascism and Democracy

McWilliams found fascist tendencies in the land monopolization typical of capitalist

development in California. He wrote, “California, in these critical times, should be the

subject of close scrutiny. Here the mechanism of fascist control has been carried to

further lengths than elsewhere in America” (9). In the chapter “Farm Fascism,”

McWilliams explicitly compares the Associated Farmers to the Nazis in Germany.55 He

fears the rise of vigilantism, which enforces mob rule over federal protections. Moreover, he finds the collusion between local and state government and the state-wide agricultural industry indicative of fascism. He connects this fascist form of government to the presence of foreign labor through the land monopolies that make both possible.

McWilliams writes, “The existence of larger ownership units made possible the exploitation of cheap, coolie labor; while the availability of great reserves of cheap labor delayed the subdivision of the land and prevented land settlement by small individual owners” (103). The text implies that if small settlers had created a Jeffersonian democracy on a Californian frontier, or if a socialist colonization project had succeeded, non-white workers would never have been “imported.” Moreover Factories in the Field indicates that the exclusion of non-white labor and the increase in white workers is

55 Herbert Klein’s influence can be seen here. Klein, who co-authored several articles with McWilliams, occasionally under the pseudonym Clive Belmont, lived in Berlin from 1930-1934 as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Klein’s perspective on the role of the entrenched landed elite played in the rise of German fascism was particularly influential on the perceptions of the Associated Farmers developed by him and McWilliams. For a discussion of Klein’s influence on McWilliams, see Geary.

necessary for farm labor to unionize and thus re-colonize California.56 As demonstrated,

McWilliams contends that the citizenship status of white labor will allow white workers

to exercise a return to democracy in California. The causation presented in Factories in the Field is significant: Capitalist development leads to foreign labor which leads to mechanisms of fascist control. In contrast, white citizen labor leads to unionization which leads to socialist land colonization projects and democratic rule. Thus, non-white workers are denied agency and are seen only as pawns in a repressive system, while the potential for societal change remains in the hands of white workers.

Factories in the Field, disturbingly, insinuates that white American citizens ought to collectively own California’s farms, while leaving non-white, implicitly foreign, workers, out of the picture entirely. Consequently it suggests that non-white workers do not have a place in California. This is apparent in McWilliams’s account of the failure of frontier conditions and Jeffersonian agriculture to develop in California. In discussing the frontier’s inability to develop appropriately, McWilliams repeatedly references

“settlers.”57 This settler is the white American pioneer, the regular citizen unable to

cheat his or her way to the top of the profit game. In every reference to the potential

worker-owners, the settlers are unable to settle. For example, the land grant system is

“one of the means by which ownership was centralized and the settler excluded” (15).

Later, McWilliams writes, “In the whole sickening story of land fraud in the United

States there is no more sordid chapter than the methods by which, in less than a decade,

56 McWilliams does not use the term “non-white” labor. He describes the laborers as Japanese, Filipino, Hindu, etc in a formulation that captures both foreignness and race.

57 In the chapter “Land Monopolization,” for example, each section of the text includes explicit discussion of the ways in which settlers were excluded from those lands, such as “Railroad Grants” and “Land Speculation.”

California and its settlers were robbed of millions of acres of valuable land, land intended

for individual settlement” (19). The inability of settlers to settle informs the reader that

the independent American community of farmers never took root in California. The

injustice of land ownership, depicted by McWilliams as at the heart of California’s

corruption, is based ultimately on the assumption that white American citizens

(“settlers”) deserve land.

McWilliams undoubtedly never intended to construct a text that rhetorically

excluded non-white citizens from California. Yet his choice of words reveals the racial politics of his study as well as the racial politics often at play in popular front ideologies.

McWilliams’s language relies on the reader’s desire to see land directly owned and controlled by white American citizens. He references the brutal exploitation of Native

American labor, but never mentions the injustice of their lost land. Nor, in his conception, does the loss of land owned by Spanish colonizers and Mexican residents compare to the injustice served by the exclusion of white American “settlers.” Yet, in erasing the validity of indigenous and Mexican claims to Californian landownership, McWilliams reinforces the appropriation of the land for the U.S. By erasing the historical contest over

California’s national status, he naturalizes land ownership by U.S. citizens, a category

constructed as white.

We are told that “alien” workers prevent unionization and colonization. In contrast, the exercise of democracy by white migrants will lead to unionization and colonization. Factories in the Field contends that democracy will return to California when white workers “settle” the land in California in socialist colonization projects. This hints that, when fascism has left California, there will no longer be a need (or a place) for

non-white “foreign” labor. Migratory labor will be a trend of the past, and stable citizens

will preside over the state. Thus the rhetorical strategies employed in Factories in the

Field end with the disturbing implication of American socialist democracy as white

utopia.

In “Civil Rights in the Field,” Aaron Sachs contends that Factories in the Field has been significantly misread. He disagrees with historians’ most common readings of

Factories in the Field as either sharing a message with The Grapes of Wrath (primarily

concerned with the fate of white Dust Bowl refugees and critiquing industrial agriculture)

or as chiefly offering a socialist critique of land ownership. Instead Sachs contends that

McWilliams embraced a social ecological viewpoint according to which the abuse of

civil rights in California’s fields led to the exploitation of both labor and nature. Sachs correctly points out that McWilliams’s interests in civil liberties led him to migrant farm labor issues, and also correctly assesses McWilliams’s demonstrated interest in civil rights for non-white denizens of the United States. For example, McWilliams knew

Filipino author and farm labor organizer Carlos Bulosan in part through their shared work in the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born.58 Moreover,

McWilliams understood perhaps better than many the ways in which race and citizenship intersected in the oppression of the less powerful. However, in explaining that the racist exploitation of non-white foreign workers both resulted from and allowed the condition of capitalist agricultural development, McWilliams suggests that non-white foreign labor

on American soil was synonymous with the condition of fascist capitalism. He

simultaneously situates the labor of white citizens, whose civil rights would be respected

and who would demand respect for those rights, as necessary to American democracy.

58 See Denning; and McWilliams’s “Introduction,” in Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart.

McWilliams’s other writings during this period demonstrate an elision of race and citizenship categories similar to that in Factories in the Field. Yet, the exclusion of non- white labor from the American nation that Factories in the Field envisions is not seen in these works. For example, contrast the description of Filipino labor given above to

McWilliams’s description in his 1935 article, “Exit the Filipino”:

The Filipino, militantly race-conscious, began to protest against his exploitation in California at an early date, and has grown increasingly rebellious. . .The Filipino is a real fighter and his strikes have been dangerous . . . On September 3 a union of white workers employed in the packing sheds returned to work under an agreement to arbitrate. In fact, they were told to return to work by Joseph Casey, A. F. of L. official. But the Filipino field workers refused to call off the strike. Today, after his brief but strenuous period of service to American capital, the Filipino faces deportation, as a fitting reward for his efforts.

Here McWilliams refuses to represent Filipino workers as passive victims. He contrasts the militant union activity of the Filipinos with the corruptness of an “American” union.

Moreover, in sarcastically referencing deportation as a fitting repayment for hard labor, the passage asserts that Filipino workers belong in the United States. Along with other immigrants, they have contributed to the nation and should be rewarded. How can we understand such an intellectual rupture in McWilliams’s published writings?

Daniel Geary points out that, “While antifascism gave McWilliams a clear sense of what he opposed, it led him to divide the world into two opposing camps—fascist and antifascist” (919). McWilliams’s desire to divide the story of Californian agriculture into these two opposing camps contributes to the problematic conflation of race and citizenship within Factories in the Fields. Moreover, Factories in the Field’s rhetorical strategy suggests the limitations of the myth of American agrarian democracy. Factories in the Field narrates the relationship between race and citizenship through the subject’s relationship to the land. Rural landscapes, imagined as produced through the

transformation of the frontier to a pastoral Jeffersonian farm, connoted both ownership by

white citizens and the “natural” belonging of those white citizens to the US nation. It is

possible that the questionable racial politics implicit in the text’s rhetorical structure

resulted from the limitations of larger ideologies surrounding American pastoral

landscapes. That is, the relationship between white citizenship and rural land ownership

that McWilliams invoked in order to characterize “farm fascism” as un-American led

McWilliams to unintentionally write non-white workers out of the United States’ rural

landscapes.59 If we borrow Judith Butler’s definition of discourse as the limits of

acceptable speech, McWilliams’s text may be interpreted as exposing those limitations

for the categories of white citizenship embedded in depictions of democracy via land

ownership, precisely because of McWilliams’s careful analysis of race and citizenship in

other forums. Factories in the Field lacks strict ideological consistency.60 The text

provides support for a multitude of heterogeneous political positions. Factories in the

Field inadvertently excludes non-white workers from its utopic vision as a result of the

rhetorical structure employed by McWilliams, not as a result of McWilliams’s personal

political platform regarding race and citizenship, which were quite progressive.

Significantly, at the time of its publication, Factories in the Field was favorably

received by Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, and Filipinos. McWilliams was

actively engaged with California’s communities of color. These communities’ civic

59 Later works such as North from Mexico that explicitly include non-white workers in the American nation reflect in part McWilliams’s changing political ideologies. More importantly, the setting for such works is quite different from Factories in the Field. By setting, I do not mean the physical geography that McWilliams describes, but the imagined geography – the American Southwest versus the American farm or pastoral landscape. Traditions of American radicalism have long included a focus on rural land and land reform. Factories in the Field exposes similar logic to that which allowed Californian Henry George’s combination of radical land reform and anti-Chinese agitation in the late nineteenth-century. See McWilliams’s North from Mexico; and Saxton’s The Indispensable Enemy.

60 Butler’s Gender Trouble (xxviii-xxix).

organizations sponsored speeches and lectures following its publication. Favorable

reviews of Factories in the Field and references to McWilliams as an anti-racist advocate

for Japanese Americans can be found not only in the left-wing Japanese American paper

Doho (which published letters and guest columns by McWilliams), but also in the more conservative Kashu Mainichi and Rafu Shimpo. Both Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi condemned and red-baited agricultural strikers, yet celebrated McWilliams’s text by employing it to support the Issei pioneer narrative they endorsed – a narrative which, in part, celebrated Japanese American contributions to the nation.61 McWilliams believed that with a higher level of political organization, communities of color in California could have found even more opportunity for political advancement through the publicity his

work accrued. Thus, it is important to recognize that as problematic as the rhetorical

structure of Factories of the Field may be, McWilliams made use of the work and his

connections in ways that aimed to be helpful to those oppressed by racial and/or

citizenship status.

Regardless of McWilliams’s anti-racist intentions, and in spite of the ability of

ethnic communities to employ the work positively, Factories in the Field demonstrates

the problematic consequences of the assumed relationship between U.S. citizenship and

U.S. land ownership for “alien citizens” and non-citizen “aliens” alike. By the mid-

1940s, the elision of race and citizenship found in Factories in the Field is noticeably

absent from McWilliams’s writings. Yet, during the Great Depression, Factories in the

Field was not alone among anti-fascist depictions of Californian agriculture in its utilization of a relationship between U.S. citizenship and U.S. land to refute the

61 See “Factories in the Field: Doho’s Book Review”; “McWilliams Raps Anti-Alien Bills as UnAmerican”; and “Committee Takes Steps to Help California Aliens.”

67 entrenched claims of “Americanism” by large growers perceived as a fascist threat.62

While McWilliams’s particular formulations were unique, especially his concern for civil rights and narration of regional history, the problems with his work are indicative of the larger ideological moment in which he wrote. Comparable ideological structures undergirded the anti-communist literary responses to works like Factories in the Field.

“Nothing Matters but the Truth”: California’s Elite Responds

According to Carey McWilliams, Republican novelist Ruth Comfort Mitchell was livid about Factories in the Field. She used her political connections to force the cancellation of his column in Westways. She also responded with a novel, Of Human Kindness (1940), arguably the most artistic of the conservative responses to The Grapes of Wrath and

Factories in the Field.63 In her book, she defended California’s agricultural system by refuting accusations of un-American fascism while affirming the myth of the white citizen farmer’s relationship to nature. Mitchell represents California as a pastoral elite

utopia where categories of class, citizenship, and race are respected. Mitchell, a

significant regionalist author in her own right, published poetry collections, sixteen

62 In Endangered Dreams, historian Kevin Starr situated the struggles between migrant farm workers and the Associated Farmers (the association of California’s agri-businessmen) during the Great Depression as an expression of the growing contest between far right (fascism) and far left (communism), domestically mirroring conflicts on the world stage. For further discussion of the Associated Farmers see Sackman’s Orange Empire (218-224). For the reception of the Grapes of Wrath in the context of World War II, see Simmonds. For discussions of anti-fascist literary movements during the era see Denning; and Wald’s Trinity of Passion. In California, the focus on migrant farm laborers by the overlap of “the cultural front” and “the anti-fascist literary crusade,” resulted from the belief that specific resemblances existed between the Associated Farmers, an organization of California’s growers, and the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany. Carey McWilliams proclaimed the Associated Farmers, “the first organization of its type to appear in United States, and as it has many points of similarity with organizations of a like character in Nazi Germany, it warrants careful scrutiny” (Factories 231). For a discussion of McWilliams’s anti-fascist writings, see Geary; and Richardson (73-83).

63 See McWilliams’s oral history Honorable in All Things (93). Responses included journalist Frank J. Taylor’s review, “California’s Grapes of Wrath” the pamphlet distributed by George Thomas Miron entitled, “The Truth About John Steinbeck and the Migrants” and Hartraft’s Grapes of Gladness. See Shillinglaw’s “California Answers the Grapes of Wrath.”

novels, and articles in Women’s Home Companion, Good Housekeeping and Macall’s,

was also the wife of Californian senator and Associated Farmer Sanford Young.64 Her

novel renders unfeeling communist agitators as seducing the young, manipulating the weak, and threatening the national marriage. A regional and national crisis becomes a family romance, in which Mary Banner, the protagonist, becomes both victim in need of defense by the national elite, and a heroine for speaking out against the seductive lies of the “sob sisters.” Above all, Of Human Kindness reasserts California’s pastoral image of capitalist land ownership and white U.S. citizenship.

The Long Perspective

In Great Depression representations of Californian agriculture, getting “the truth” right

mattered.65 Those indicted in the assault on California’s Edenic image often responded

as victims of falsehoods, lies and slander, while worker advocates sought to demonstrate

their authority and authenticity through fieldwork, experience, and observation.66 For example, novelist John Steinbeck retorted to the Los Angeles Times, “I know what I was talking about. I lived, off and on, with those Okies for the last three years.”67 Likewise,

M.V. Hartranft asserts in The Grapes of Gladness that “this is not a work of fiction. All

64 Sackman’s Orange Empire and Loftis’s Witness to the Struggle each dedicate a paragraph to Of Human Kindness in its historical context. Shillinglaw provides a more sustained discussion. Colongue’s Working the Garden provides what may be the only literary analysis of the work.

65 Baskind convincingly contends that Life Magazine’s philosophy around photography emphasized pictures as somehow more true to life than words in part to meet this growing demand for the “true story” during the 1930s. The majority of the reviews of The Grapes of Wrath during the 1930s focused on whether or not the novel was accurate, and some even assumed the Joads were real people. Life Magazine contributed to this trend when it utilized Horace Bristol’s photographs on separate occasions to demonstrate “the truth” heralded by The Grapes of Wrath, the novel and The Grapes of Wrath, the film. Factories in the Field was likewise swept up in this trend and most frequently interpreted as the catalogue of evidence for The Grapes of Wrath. See also Loftis’s Witness to the Struggle (166-167).

66 See Shindo (5).

67 Shillingslaw (144).

events narrated in this book are authentic local history” (7). Conversely, Associated

Farmer Roy Pike characterized Factories in the Field to the La Follette Commission as a

“mastery of misstatements” and “distortion of the truth” in its depiction of all farmers as

“indecent Simon Legrees,” a reference to the brutal overseer from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.68

The biographical sketch that Mitchell created for her protagonist, Mary Banner, in Of

Human Kindness, closely matched her own life story. Both moved from San Francisco to

Northern California to marry cattle ranchers, but continued regular visits to the city.

Mitchell’s husband served in the California Senate and many believed his election was

the result of his wife’s campaigning.69 Similarly, the reader of Of Human Kindness is led

to believe Mary Banner’s community reputation will result in Edward Banner’s senate

seat. Regardless of Mitchell’s intentions, this similarity allows the reader to feel the

testimony as being directly Mitchell’s as it is Mary Banner’s, assisting the novel’s claims

to objectivity and truth. Mary Banner’s heroic act is to speak up for her community, and

the reader can easily impart such motives to Mitchell. This contributes to the novel’s sense of witness; it allows the novel to present itself more easily as a fictionalized version of “the truth.” And, as Mary Banner tells the reader, “nothing mattered but telling the truth.”

The novel emphasizes Mary Banner’s perspective as superior, more objective, and more accurate than the other figures. She is implicitly an outsider, referred to affectionately as a “[city] slicker” by her husband, even in the novel’s final pages. As the

68 Sachs (216). The similarity of Roy Pike’s and Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s language is striking. The language in Of Human Kindness is found widely in the statements and publicity work by the Associated Farmers. Much of my analysis of the novel could be fruitfully applied to those historical documents.

69 See Loftis (169). Once in office, Sanford Young focused on banning cruel hunting traps, stopping narcotics trafficking, and introducing anti-picketing ordinances.

reporter Kent Dexter says, “I have the distinct feeling that you don’t belong here at all!”

(251). She learns the art of moderation from her close friend Burton Doane. He chides

those who are short-sighted and urges, “You mustn’t lose your perspective, Mary

Isabelle” (107). According to the novel, she offers a balanced view and a woman’s

touch, in contrast to the quick temper of her husband, Ed, and the “sentimental, one-sided

thinking” of her communist-influenced son (178). As one of the farmers says, “Mrs.

Banner, you just bend over backwards trying to be fair, don’t you?” (221).

The novel itself appears to go out of its way to offer its own “balanced view.”

Mary offers feminine sympathy and even empathy to all except the most malevolent of

communist agitators. The moderate, truth-telling voices in the novel arise from the right.

Mr. Startlett, is able to speak to the farm children, who are unduly influenced by their

teacher, Miss Emory, by treating them “like reasoning human beings” (191). He reminds

the farmers to watch themselves because “If she’s [Emory] way off to the left, remember,

most of us are too far to the right. We’ve got to do some fact-facing ourselves” (190).

The calm reasoning of such characters, including the minister, links with Mary’s own

self-consciousness, to be the objective, moderate (yet still conservative) voice of reason

in the novel. Indeed,“[Mary] told herself she sounded as far to the right as Pinky Emory

did to the left, but it was the truth” (179). Her self-consciousness adds to the rationality,

objectivity and perspective the narrator attributes to her.

Mary Banner’s class position implicitly suggests the supposed superiority of her knowledge. When Mary Banner moves her family into a larger house, the narrator repeatedly emphasizes the view from the second story window. Mary thinks, “Perhaps it was a symbol – the Banners getting above their stubborn acres, above their problems,

getting the long look, the perspective” (133). From this window, the Banners rule over

their farm, but also provide leadership on social issues beyond their land. This view provides their long perspective, such as upper story view from another house proves useful when Mary witnesses the communist agitators at work. She is relegated indoors while the heroic nurse Helga attempts to rush a pregnant migrant to the hospital so the men can force non-working squatters from a farmer’s lands. The pregnant migrant’s presence justifies the men’s refusal to move – they are protecting a fellow worker’s wife.

Thus in a strange twist of logic, the communists want to prevent the pregnant woman’s

removal in order to ensure the workers’ continued resistance.70 The would-be red Pinky

Emory throws herself under the wheels of the ambulance to die for “The Cause” by

preventing the ambulance’s escape. Only Mary witnesses the accident from her high-up

view. She rushes into the fields to testify that the ambulance driver did not purposefully murder Pinky. Miraculously, her words satisfy the riot-hungry mob and diffuse an eruptive situation. Her high perspective provides the better and more accurate view in the novel and it justifies Mary’s position of community leadership.71

This is perhaps the climactic scene in the novel. Throughout the narrative, Mary feels threatened by Helga, the former girlfriend of her husband Ed. Helga represents to

Mary all she feels she ought to be, and physically cannot be.72 Mary’s presence at the

70 In one of the many parodies of Steinbeck’s works contained in Mitchell’s text, this scene echoes Mac’s pretended expertise at midwifery from In Dubious Battle.

71 This is strikingly opposite of the view promoted by Moya’s reading of Under the Feet of Jesus in Learning from Experience where the most accurate view is held by the person below.

72 “But she had respect for her, and admired her with authentic humility, for Helga was everything she wasn’t and longed to be – big, stunning to look at with her keen green eyes and her opaque white skin from which the youthful freckles had faded, the glory of her mahogany hair with the red flames in it” (93). Mary may also be read as replacing the pioneer woman Hegla with an assimilated American female.

labor dispute results partly from her desire to compete with Helga, and partly from

bravery motivated by the need to protect her son Ashley. Thus the dedicated, “frail,”

American woman rises to new heights in motherly duty, inspired by the communist threat

to her family. When the time comes for her heroics, Mary’s strong desire to tell the truth

motivates her. Simply by speaking out against the communist lies, Mary takes up the

banner as the novel’s hero, and becomes the targeted enemy of the communist leader, the

“Black Widow.” The centrality of her truth-telling in becoming such a threat to the Reds

demonstrates the centrality of falsehoods to their success.73

The heroic truth-telling by Mary Banner contrasts with the continued lie-making of the communists and “sob sisters” within the novel. Mitchell repeatedly warns her readers to watch out for left-wing spin in their sources of information: “And one mean chiseling rancher – like Joe Cosgrove – gives ‘em a target. Always undercutting the prevailing wage, charging them fifteen cents to ride out to the field, shacks a self- respecting pig wouldn’t live in. One heel like that can do more harm than all the rest of us can live down. They tell the world about him, and the world laps it up” (221). There is just enough fact, such as the one bad farmer, mixed in with the lies, to confuse the world and tarnish California’s image.74 In all of their decisions, the farmers consider the

publicity implications. For example, “These people were being fooled and inflamed, and if the growers were tricked into violence the sob sisters would be waiting to tell the world about it, to smear more mud on the state’s name” (226). In this way, the novel portrays

73 As Conlogue points out, Mitchell’s contention that the “long perspective” as the more accurate directly contradicted the assessment of the long perspective in The Grapes of Wrath as deceiving (112).

74 Pinky Emory is described as “a persuasive talker who mixes just enough fact with her fiction to get these children completely bemused” (190).

Mary Banner and the farmers she represents as victims. In this narrative, it is the farmers who are abused and attacked, and who must be protected. Mary, as a female protagonist,

provides a better victim than her large, strong, and loud husband.

The novel further affirms the victim status of the farmers through the perspective

of visiting east coast reporter Kent Dexter. Mary thinks, “It would be nice to have him, to

show him the whole picture, to have an advocate of their own to balance the many

minstrels of the migrants” (248). The arrival of Kent Dexter gives both the reader and

Mary the opportunity to see the state through his eyes. He invites Mary on a road trip to

research migrant conditions, recreating what appears to have been a popular journalistic

rite of passage in the discovery of the truth about California’s migrant workers. John

Steinbeck prepared for his 1936 article series “The Harvest Gypsies” with a series of road

trips visiting the migrant camps.75 Frank J. Taylor stated in his Forum article that he had

taken “two reportorial tours.”76 When Carey McWilliams wrote his newspaper series,

“The Factories in the Field” (prior to his book-length manuscript), he too took a road trip

around the state with friend Herbert Klein.77 In Of Human Kindness, Mary Banner turns

American mobility to her advantage. If she can get a long view from inside her large

house, she further refines that view through her automobile trips.

Moreover, Mary’s conversations with Dexter provide a place to rebut the

accusations made of the Associated Farmers, as do the conversations with her son Ashley

who is “under dangerous influence” (84). In this way, Mary does not defend herself but

75 See Baskind; and Benson’s The True Adventures of John Steinbeck.

76 See Taylor’s “California’s The Grapes of Wrath.”

77 See McWilliams’s The Education of Carey McWilliams (75); Loftis (141-142); Richardson (78); and Sachs (216).

defends those she knows best. She tells the reporter, “There’s one man here who’s mean

and cheating and cruel – but he’d be just the same in his disposition if he sold hardware

or ran a skating rink! And I know dozens and hundreds of ranchers who pay decent

wages and give decent living quarters when they’re not even making a profit” (258).

Similarly, Mary explains to Ashley, “Ashley, you must realize why he [Edward Banner]

feels as he does. He has had such a struggle to keep our ranch, and to develop it, added to

the struggle Grandmother had, when she was left alone to run it, and to let Dad have an

education. And think of the years it took to pay off the mortgage” (83). Mary provides a

more reasoned view, and the long view. From that position she can best defend and

explain that California’s farmers are indeed living the life of pastoral plenty earned from

hard work and direct contact with the land.

The “Star-Spangled” Banners

The struggle for control of Californian agriculture’s image hinged, in part, on determining who the real Americans were. In his series for the San Francisco Chronicle,

John Steinbeck proclaimed his aim to explain “how [the Dust Bowl migrants] live and

what kind of people they are” (22). Mitchell’s response could be described as an

illustration of how the Associated Farmers live and what kind of people they are.

Mitchell asserts the American pioneer roots of the Associated Farmers. She describes the protagonist’s family as “The Banner Family, San Joaquin Valley pioneers, third

generation in California; plain people, poor people, proud people; salt of the earth” (5).

This is decidedly not the description of California’s land owners that one would draw from McWilliams’s work. Mitchell emphasizes their frontier heritage and lack of

inherited wealth. The image, in fact, borrows closely from that of the celebrated

proletariat of the Depression.

Significant attention is given to the regional roots of the family. This family heritage,

dwelled upon in the novel, emphasizes that the tale is of national importance, and that the family represents the future not only of the region but of the nation.78 Mary Banner is

the child of Southern gentility, an orphan with Tennessee roots raised in the San

Francisco home of her frail aunt with Chinese servants. Her husband’s father was a

French immigrant with a fancy for the fiddle who married a “New England woman, strict churchwoman, no foolishness about her; hard worker” (217). By the novel’s end, the daughter’s husband Lute Willow has joined the Banner bunch, adding some Oklahoma blood to the national mix. In case the reader missed the association of the family name, the daughter Sally is nicknamed “Star-Spangled.” The Banner family embodies the symbol of national unity and pride.

The novel further emphasizes the family’s American-ness through their relationship to the land. The Banners are the descendents of pioneers, and they know how to till the soil: “Salt of the earth the seat of their toil had dripped down into, the earth they loved and labored over and worked their will upon” (6). They are romanticized Jeffersonian farmers and the inheritors of the western frontier. From the opening description of the

Banners, this pastoral imagery of the American farmer is manifest. Both Banner children spend time working in the fields alongside the other field hands, and the parents toil endlessly. Mitchell repeatedly emphasizes the pastoral beauty of the landscape. As Mary asks the reporter Dexter, “Can you see the beauty of it here?” (257). Even on the novel’s

78 As argued in Chapter 2, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath similarly described the Joads as representative of multiple American regions.

final page, Mary finds comfort in the earth, which is “relaxed, exuding the warmth it held

in the day” (359). The seasons dictate their lives, and relief is found in the cool breeze

outside.79 Jeffersonian democracy lives on in the men’s informal councils, in which the

men consult Ma Banner as well as their wives. Mitchell describes a land in which

farmers are still farmers, not businessmen. They are not as “some chap called them

‘Bankers with pitch forks’” (258). The novel denies the industrialization of agriculture.

Of Human Kindness emphasizes that the Banner wealth is hard-earned and well

deserved. The text introduces Ed Banner as a poor man. One of his professors states, “I

wish he had capital behind him; he’d go far. Well, I believe he will anyway, with only his

head and his hands” (13). The novel downplays Mary’s wealth. Rather than the fortune she believed she would receive, Mary discovers her inheritance is only $100 a month.

Ironically, the insignificance of such an amount to the narrator (who bursts into tears

discovering she is not rich), might have confirmed the Banner family’s unearned wealth

for a Depression-era audience. Rather than capital for the farm, Mary’s money goes into

personal luxuries and comforts as she adjusts to life on the ranch.

At the end of the novel, the Banners suddenly discover oil on their land, promising

substantial future wealth. The oil appears in the final pages as if a blessing on the Banner

name; indeed the house they move to is called “Banner’s blessing” by neighbors.

Mitchell implies that the future senator’s fortune comes as a benediction after a time of

hard work and struggle. She emphasizes the Banners’ constant work, “sixteen hours out

79 In her emphasis on the seasons and nature as a place of comfort, it is worth considering the extent to which Mitchell’s text conforms to the established gendered conventions of nature writing and pastoral reflection.

of twenty-four” (6).80 In this way, the novel counters accusations of corrupt land deals

and inherited wealth found in works like Factories in the Field and The Grapes of Wrath.

Moreover, it offers a vision of the American Dream as reality: success will come to those

who work hard; those who fail are weak and lazy.

The novel explicitly addresses the Banner family’s “land hunger.” There is never an

implication of land bought unfairly, or land purchased that keeps another from owning.

Rather, this land hunger is a driving force behind Ed Banner and his mother, of whom we

are told, “Dragging a living and more out of her flat acres, reducing her mortgage, buying

more land, a bit here and a little there to straighten her lines. Land hungry always” (24).

The novel depicts this land hunger as natural and justified. It is the American way. The

Banners even have a “land look” on their faces when discussing the purchase of new

tracts (123). In the novel, acquiring more land is a labor of love, like the upkeep of the

“flat acres” themselves. Mitchell explains, “Land was a hunger and a thirst to them, a lure and a challenge” (123). It is the American march across the continent, repeated always and individually in California. We are frequently told that Banner is a “marching name”.

Land ownership seems justified if it is purchased through hard work; there are no fallow acres in Of Human Kindness. In the novel, Dust Bowl refugees squat on farmers’ lands for living quarters; they do not till the soil. The novel depicts the Associated Farmers as working the land while the migrants, unduly influenced by agitators, expect free rewards while refusing to work.

At the same time that the novel represents the Banners as typical of the California’s

owning class of farm families, Of Human Kindness emphasizes that there is no one clear

80 This emphasis is particularly significant given the labor movement’s struggle for the eight-hour day. It was in 1938 that the Fair Labor Practices Act of the New Deal made the eight-hour day legal practice throughout the nation, although farm labor was excluded.

type of Californian farmer. The diversity of California’s land-owning farmers is

repeatedly demonstrated. For example, when the community of farm women come

together to help Mary with her new home, we are told, “young, old, all the ages in

between, some of them ‘pretty well fixed’ and some of them struggling valiantly on

mortgaged ranches and all of them working . . . they were tired and tireless, proud and

upstanding, and frank and friendly and kind” (152). Ruth Comfort Mitchell disputes the

representation of all farmers as large land owners, a refutation that would achieve

scholarly recognition at the end of the twentieth century with the work of David Vaught.

She explains:

They’ll be big growers who have all-the-year pay-rolls of five hundred men and simply droves in the peak seasons, and little ranchers who hire no help and do it themselves, and the ones in between, like the Westovers and the Howards and the Banners, who hire help, and work themselves-oh, how they work!-and make money sometimes and have to put most of it right back into the ground, into the wells, into the equipment! (259).

The women and the men express a diversity of opinions about the “migrant problem.”

Both rational and less rational voices are heard, but the leadership of the sympathetic

minister’s family and the kindness of Mary Banner have perhaps the greatest effect (147,

150, 295). Of Human Kindness characterizes the Associated Farmers as inclusive,

comprising white land-owning citizenry from across the class spectrum. This prevents the

Association from being seen as a monolithic corporate enterprise. Instead of a fascist operation, it is depicted as democracy in action. It is not until the final part of the novel that Mitchell uses the phrase “Associated Farmers” (256). Perhaps, by then, the “lies” of the sob sisters will have been displaced by a return to the older vision of such farmers as all-American, with a pioneer, Jeffersonian, and Edenic relationship to the land.

Citizens, Relief and Labor

The novel represents the Associated Farmers as living in harmony with the land and

respecting existing structures of class, citizenship and race. Advocates including Carey

McWilliams and John Steinbeck proclaimed outrage in their writings for the treatment of

white Dust Bowl refugees as if they were not white. The threat to white citizenship was at the crux of the injustice to which they responded. Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s novel counters by tentatively embracing the possibility of white citizenry for Dust Bowl

refugees.81

The novel repeats many of the “Okie” stereotypes. As Mary explains to her son,

“Ashley, it isn’t because they come from a certain state. It’s because they’re a certain

kind of people – unfortunate, yes, and not to blame for their misfortunes, of course, but

ignorant and shiftless” (81). Yet, the novel does not portray all Oklahomans as unsavory.

The assimilation of Lute, “the okie-dokie boy,” through his wedding to Sally

demonstrates that the right kind of Oklahomans will get ahead. When Edward Banner

spouts his prejudiced views of “Okies,” Mary reasons, “Oh, come, now surely they’re not all like that!”(68). Indeed, we are assured that Lute, despite his apparent laziness, is different from the other “Okies.” He was not tractored out and his family still owns land in Oklahoma. He mostly came because he wished to see the California he had heard so much about. Family land ownership is central to Lute’s acceptability. Although his daughter’s choice initially horrifies Edward Banner, by the novel’s end he fully accepts and defends Lute.

The novel characterizes “Okies” as salvageable citizens. As Helga explains,

“They’re good people Ed; come of decent American stock” (95). As such, they have the

81 For understanding racial representations of poor white farmers, Foley is relevant even though he discusses Texas rather than California.

seed of potential within. The novel repeatedly emphasizes Helga’s work with the relief

agencies, where she aims to make good citizens out of the migrants. As Mary explains,

“Yes! Helga’s going to help make citizens for us. The things she has to fight are greed

and ignorance.” Strikingly, this configuration denies Dust Bowl migrants their citizenship. Legally they are citizens, but in the eyes of the Associated Farmers, they lack the characteristics that grant them citizenship privileges. Yet, in contrast to many depictions of Asian Americans, Okies have the whiteness that will allow their citizenry; they must simply be instructed in it. The language in the novel is reminiscent of

Progressive Era assimilation programs aimed at Eastern European immigrants.82 Such a narrative strategy allows the Associated Farmers to claim ownership over the New Deal relief programs:

Then the spokesman said, “Ain’t right to keep pushing us from piller to post!” Mary said, “No, it’s not right, and it’s not going to be done any more. You hav’nt’ understood. California does more for unfortunate people than any other state in the Union. See – I’ve written it down on this paper for you – where the nearest Government Camp is, and the FSA – that means Farm Security Administration – where you can get food until you find work” (345).

Whereas McWilliams makes clear the government camps are only a demonstration of what might be possible on a much larger scale, for the migrant workers directed by Mary

Banner, the camps are the only destination. Knowledge imparted there by health officials

may provide the Dust Bowl migrants’ salvation and turn them into upstanding citizens.

The novel represents “Okies” as future citizens through their implicit contrast to

an “unassailable alien” Asian work force. As Colleen Lye argues, in Depression-era

representations of Dust Bowl refugees, the image of rural whiteness was reconstituted

through its relationship to the Asiatic racial formation previously utilized in California’s

82 See Higham.

agricultural discourse (153). The relationship to the land was central to this definition of citizenship. The specter of Asian immigration had become linked to land ownership earlier in Californian history, and particularly fueled concerns over growing Japanese tenancy. The Alien Land Act of 1913, which barred “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from land ownership, was a reaction to these fears. This understanding allows us to see the Banners’ “land hunger” in a new light. Notably, in Walter Irwin’s Seed of the Sun

(1921), the Japanese are likewise characterized as having a primeval “land hunger.” The

same phrase is used in both works. Mitchell suggests that the Banners have a patriotic

duty to own and work land to prevent Japanese land ownership. The “land hunger” of the

Banners must compete against the “land hunger” of the unseen Oriental. Mitchell

contrasts the laziness of the Dust Bowl migrants with the perceived physiological

efficiency of the Asian work force.83 In Of Human Kindness, it is the Dust Bowl refugees’ lack of land ownership that signifies their need for citizenship education. Once citizens, these Dust Bowl migrants are expected to take their place in the harmonious race and class structure through which the novel characterizes California’s agricultural relations.

Mary Banner frequently models this form of “American classless society,” as in her relationship to the painter Abernathy (295). He offers to paint Mary’s new house for free in payment for the care she previously took of him when he fell ill. Mary explains,

“You were working for us when it happened and we were so glad to take care of you”

(141). The novel presents Mary as a good employer, who takes personal responsibility for the health and well-being of her employees. The payment she gets in return for her kindness illustrates the loyalty and hard work appropriate for the employee. After

83 See Lye for a discussion of the image of Asian workers in agriculture in this period.

accepting Abernathy’s offer, Mary observes that “he looked and moved like one of Snow

White’s most amiable dwarfs but his little figure blurred in her gaze” (143). She figures

herself as a princess and her employee as her personal servant. Moreover, the dwarf

simile belittles Abernathy, mirroring through size their place in the pastoral hierarchy.

Consequently, Of Human Kindness exposes the inequality and the patronizing attitude of

the novel’s idyllic image of class relations in California.

Disturbingly, the novel makes clear that Mitchell sees a parallel between this

model of good employee-employer relationships and the Southern plantation system. Joe

Cosgrove, the novel’s “bad” farmer, is repeatedly called a “Simon Legree.” The emphasis

on Cosgrove as an exception within a majority of good farmers reads almost like a

defense of slavery. Moreover, after Mary treats an old black migrant farmer with respect,

he exclaims, “You’ quality, ma’am, I can tell that; Southern quality” (175). When her son asks how the old man guessed his mother’s origins, she explains, “I suppose he

always associates decent treatment with the old ideal. But I’m a Californian, Ashley –

Southern quality is a picturesque thing, but California common sense and common

humanity is necessary for us!”(178). Their exchange implies that Mary Banner’s vision

of true Californian kindness and “classless society” (295) resembles the imagined

benevolence of the former slave system of the south with added Western practicality.

Historians including Steven Stoll, Douglas Sackman, Matthew Garcia, and Don

Mitchell have exposed the way myths of California’s fields as gardens of plenty obscured

the labor and laborers that made the agricultural landscape possible. If Mary can be seen

as a model for appropriate behavior for the elite farm owner, then her cousin’s Chinese

servants, Duane’s black servants, and her friend Glenda’s Mexican servants exemplify

the novel’s treatment of race and class as synchronous. The upward mobility allowed

Lute is precisely that denied non-white workers in the text. The interactions between

non-white workers and the Banner family naturalize the subservient role of Mexican,

Chinese and black workers and justify their patronizing treatment by the Banners. The

emphasis on black, Chinese, and Mexican workers as domestic servants removes such

workers from associations of violence, militancy, and the frontier, by positioning these

workers in the civilized and tranquil space: “the home.”84 The disruption to the text’s

pastoral idyll arises neither from the white or the non-white work force, but rather from

the more “venomous” communist agitators. By figuring the disruptive forces in the text

as white communist agitators rather than non-white or poor white laborers, characterizing

such communists as venomous snakes disrupting the orderly Edenic garden, Mitchell

further naturalizes a false vision of California’s fields as harmonious and California’s

laborers as content.85

Furthermore, Mitchell neglects to mention Native Californians or the territory’s

Mexican past even once. By ignoring this history of conquest, Mitchell constructs

California as a mythic timeless space, outside of history, and always already belonging to

the United States and to wealthy U.S. citizens, like the Banners.

The Communists

84 For the association of the frontier with violence see Slotkin’s works. For the relationship between domesticity and frontier wilderness see Kolodny’s The Land Before Her; and Kaplan’s “Manifest Domesticity.”

85 The discussion of the garden imagery in Of Human Kindness requires reference to Marx’s Machine in the Garden. Technology is not disruptive in Of Human Kindness. The threat to the pastoral order is communist agitators, who are figured through the loss of Eden. The threat of communism here is not synonymous with the modernity and loss of innocence associated with urbanism. Yet the protection of pastoralism probably reached new heights during the period following the 1920 Census, which announced for the first time a greater percentage of Americans living in urban spaces than rural.

The sympathetic portrayals that provide the long view in Of Human Kindness do not

extend to the novel’s two communist characters, both of whom are portrayed as immoral

or unnatural women. A seemingly empathetic but grotesque portrait is rendered of the

communist sympathizer, schoolteacher Pinky Emory. As Ashley’s sweetheart Nadine

explains, “Why, we call her Pinky because she’s pink, and I guess maybe she’ll be a red

some day” (89). Mary perceives Pinky as ugly, ungainly, and neurotic; she sees her as unnatural, possibly homosexual. As Pinky discusses the plight of the migrant workers,

“Her face was crimson and tears filled her eyes and ran down over her sallow face. Her hands were clenched and her whole thin body shook and jerked. Mary felt an admixture

of apprehension and compassion. Here was utter sincerity, hysterical but genuine” (91).

Pinky is a character to pity, as Mary Banner does. Pinky evokes Mary’s sentimental

feminine empathy: “All the way back to the Banner Ranch Mary wondered about

[Pinky]. What had happened to her – or what hadn’t happened to her – to make her like this? A bleak and bitter childhood? A wrong, long festering? Or just a starved emotionalism feeding hungrily now on the raw meat and rank wine of revolutionary thinking?”(93). This sympathy and empathy provides a thin veil for Mary’s harsh critique. According to Mary’s logic, something must have gone terribly wrong to make

Pinky “like this” (a communist). Pinky is unloved, and yet is perhaps to blame, given her own self-deprivation. The novel depicts Pinky as always hungry but denying herself food.

She is a character who fails to reproduce, in contrast to Mary’s fertile Sally (whose frequent pregnancies announce the passage of the time in the book). Pinky appears dead set against the laws of nature, and she dies pathetically for her crimes. After being scorned by the beautiful Black Widow, she throws herself under the wheels of the

ambulance. It is not clear if she dies for “The Cause” or because of the denial of the

Black Widow’s affections. Either way, her actions are to be perceived as perverse and

her radical inclinations as indicative of neurosis.86

The novel’s other communist, nicknamed the Black Widow Spider by Mary Banner,

is unfeeling, cruel, and beautifully seductive:

She was a tall girl, willow slim in her white slacks and the thin white sweater which was drawn down revealingly over her round little breasts. Her ebony hair grew in a perfect widow’s peak and her eyes were black and lustrous under sharply arched black brows. Her face was all mother-of-pearl save for the crimson mouth which was full and rather loose, and there was the same crimson covering her nails (205).

It is not simply the woman’s beauty that is remarked upon, but her revealing style of dress and indulgent use of make-up. Her “rather loose” mouth implies her rather loose sexual mores. The Black Widow’s voice is “sultry, persuasive,” linking her communist rhetoric to her sex appeal (207). We are told, “The girl insinuated herself between two men who looked like cotton-pickers, putting red-taloned fingers on the shoulder of each, and leaning so low over one of them that the white wool over her breasts grazed his face”

(206). The implication is that her physical beauty allows her evil sway, as she slinks past men’s rationality to manipulate them through her sexuality.

Indeed, this is precisely what the Black Widow Spider does to Ashley Banner.

Simply to get revenge on Mary, she seduces and then scorns Ashley. The scene in which she casts him out is fantastically cruel. The Black Widow’s love for Ashley is as hollow as her love for the working class. She uses this group for her own means and does not

86 Shillingslaw contends Pinky Emory is depicted as a lesbian, thus communism is represented by the dual sexual deviance of Pinky’s lesbianism and the Black Widow’s promiscuity. It is reasonable to wonder if Mitchell intended the Black Widow as an attack on Caroline Decker or Dorothy Healy, who was referred to as the “Queen of the Communists” by the right-wing press, fitting in with the novel’s ongoing references to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Many farm labor novels of the period feature the character of the young female organizer.

care if their children starve. In the title scene of the novel, Mary Banner discovers

migrants squatting on her land and refusing to move on. Trying to avert a dramatic

confrontation involving her husband and the other farmers, she brings them milk for their

baby, directions to the Government Camp, gas money to get them there, and the gift of

rationality, asking them to understand how they would have felt with squatters on their

former land in Oklahoma. She succeeds in winning them over with her kindness just as

the Black Widow arrives. The Black Widow declares the milk poisonous and knocks it

out of the desperate mother’s hand, where the dogs and a hungry toddler lick it off the ground. One of the migrants cries out, “That thar’s not poison! That’s th’ milk a’ human kin’ness!” (348). The communist, the Black Widow, represents nothing if not the absence of kindness. With her black widow’s peak, blood red lips, and dark eyes under sharply arched brows, the Black Widow even bears a noticeable resemblance to the vain

Queen in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). While the similarities between film and novel are perhaps coincidental, Mary Banner’s kindheartedness ultimately protects her from the envious and unenviable behavior of the Black Widow

Spider’s “venomous poison.”87 This poison offers simultaneous associations to the red

apples offered by the vain Queen of Snow White, the snake in the Garden of Eden, and, of

course, the bite of the black widow spiders found in California. Communism is

associated with all three.

Ruth Mitchell’s communists also bear a certain resemblance to unflattering portraits

of communists in Steinbeck’s works. Pinky Emory’s admiration of the Black Widow is

87 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs associates Snow White with the natural world. She finds peace in natural harmony. This association between Snow White and Mary Banner further presents her as the princess ruling over a natural harmonious garden disrupted by the dark unnatural Queen.

satirically reminiscent of Mac’s mentorship of Jim in In Dubious Battle. Just as Mac

endangered a birthing mother to gain the respect of migrant workers, the Black Widow

attempts to prevent a pregnant woman from being taken to the hospital to deliver her

baby, in order to strengthen her influence over the crowd. The scene in which Pinky

Emory is killed and the Black Widow holds up her body for the crowd, giving an

insincere speech, is likewise reminiscent of Mac’s display of Joy’s body. Moreover, as

Anne Loftis points out “the vignette of a nursing mother who has lost her milk reads like a parody of the last scene in The Grapes of Wrath” (170).88 In re-writing moments from

Steinbeck’s novels, Mitchell combats representations of the farmers and the laborers

scene by scene. In doing so, the novel implies that while the scenarios that Steinbeck

writes about do occur, these events may be distorted by their interpreters.

Through her portrait of the Banner family, Ruth Comfort Mitchell insists upon the dangers of communism to the American family and thus to the American nation. In the novel’s narrative, Ashley is seduced by communism via the Black Widow. The loss of their son to communism threatens Ed and Mary’s marriage. Enraged by the betrayal of his son, Ed proclaims his marriage to Mary to be the biggest mistake he ever made.

Broken-hearted Mary considers the proposal of the newspaper reporter and decides to divorce Ed. The Banner family’s strife signifies a national crisis as from the revolutionary period forward marriage has been considered the foundation of the nation.89 Ultimately,

Mary and Ed realize that the abandonment of their marriage will hurt their entire community. Ed’s closest friends inform him that he will win his senate seat because of

Mary; “what we’d stood for – our family – our – our marriage –” (356). The American

88 See Loftis.

89 See Cott.

unity and pastoral order at the heart of Mary and Ed’s marriage provides the strength and

inspiration to overcome the communist plot in America’s garden. When Mary decides

against running off with Kent, she decides that it is not the escapist flight to Budapest that

will save her and the nation, but the reuniting of her family. Ashley makes a similar

discovery, survives his encounter with communism, and finds his pastoral rural roots

deeper than ever before.

In The Grapes of Wrath, Ma Joad famously proclaims “We’re the people. We’ll go

on.” Yet in Of Human Kindness, the Banners are the people. It is the marching sound

heard in their name that will go on. This is the truth that Mary must tell in the novel’s

final page for, the “truth was all she had left to give” (359). As Of Human Kindness

draws to a close, the picture of California as pastoral elite utopia is reasserted. Despite the best efforts of the communist agitators, the categories of class, race, and citizenship

are never fully disrupted in the novel. As the family romance is reconfigured as regional

and national crisis, the Banner family triumphs against the communist threat.

Conclusion

At the end of Hartranft’s The Grapes of Gladness (1939), the Hoag family finds a book

about their friends, clearly Steinbeck’s Joads. They set out in their jalopy to rescue Ma

Joad and show her that in Southern California free land still exists, and hard work will

lead to success. The text strongly implies that white citizens belong in California’s rural

landscape as farm owners, and as entrepreneurs (the young children even begin their own

business). The failure to thrive is the result of personal characteristics unbecoming of

American citizenship. The Hoags’ success proves that the American Dream is still alive,

at least for some. There are no living non-white characters in the text. Yet, Hartranft

establishes the Hoags’ position as California’s landowners in reference to the

construction of non-white subjects’ relationship to the land. The Hoags’ nativeness to the

landscape is produced in relation to the supposedly vanished Californian Indian. Their patriotic duty to work the soil is demonstrated through the envisioned “yellow peril” that would monopolize the fields. In Of Human Kindness and Factories in the Field, as in

Grapes of Gladness, the production of white Americans’ belonging to and ownership over California’s rural landscape depends on the constructed relationship between non- white subjects and California’s rural agricultural landscapes. Both Of Human Kindness and Factories in the Field emphasize the role of “citizenship” as a marker of race, natural belonging, and national belonging. Mitchell displaces indigenous history and California’s recent Mexican past to claim the land as naturally belonging to (white) U.S. citizens.

Conversely, McWilliams associates California’s patterns of land ownership with Spanish colonialism to claim collective ownership as specifically modern and American,

rendering both Mexican and Native Californians’ claims to the land invisible and

inconsequential.

Factories in the Field rhetorically opposes the democracy arising from white citizen landowners in collective agricultural endeavors to the fascism structuring the relationship between supposedly transient non-white, non-citizen workers and the not- quite American landowners. In collapsing the categories of race and citizenship,

McWilliams contributes to the creation of the “alien citizen” whose presence was affirmed both culturally and legally during the Great Depression through the application of the 1924 National Origins Act, the 1924 Cable Act, and the various amendments that followed them both. Although McWilliams’s text is in dialogue with progressive anti-

racist ideologies of its time period, the work ultimately implies that the presence of non-

white, non-citizen workers in rural agricultural landscapes was somehow un-American.

The contradictions of liberal anti-racist ideologies are exposed when this politics

intersects with persistent mythic visions of American farms as arising from the frontier

and developing into a pastoral middle landscape.

Of Human Kindness refuses to admit that the frontier and pastoral ideals were not

lived realities in California. Through imagery connoting a peaceful domestic garden, invaded by unnatural and venomous communists, the text naturalizes and harmonizes the subservient place of poor white and non-white workers in agricultural landscapes. In both texts the refusal to see non-white ownership of Californian rural landscapes as a productive possibility for democracy highlights the imagined relationship between U.S. citizenship and U.S. rural landscapes. Ownership of agricultural landscapes invoked myths of American identity, and natural belonging to the American nation. While

McWilliams could imagine non-white workers in urban settings (in Factories in the Field non-white workers signified a rural landscape made urban), non-urban settings remained reserved for both authors as the particular domain of white citizens. Only white citizens could be settlers.

The Great Depression generated a crisis in the ideological relationship between white citizenship and nationalized U.S. land ownership in California. Both

McWilliams’s and Mitchell’s texts react to the new visibility of white workers in

California’s fields. The presence of white migrant workers leads McWilliams to claim that the Associated Farmers are fascist and un-American. Mitchell reasserts the

Americanness of white farm owners and proposes that the Dust Bowl migrants require

91 instruction to achieve proper white citizenship. As I also assert in readings of John

Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown in the following chapter, land ownership consolidates white citizenship in a variety of textual sources depicting Californian agricultural labor on the eve of World War II.

CHAPTER 2 “The Highway is Alive Tonight”: Representing the Dust Bowl Migration

The highway is alive tonight But nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it goes I'm sittin' down here in the campfire light Searchin' for the ghost of Tom Joad – Bruce Springsteen, 1995.

During the Great Depression, American families took to the highways with an unprecedented visibility.1 Of these families, none were more publicly represented than the migrants from the economic, political, and ecological disaster known as the Dust

Bowl. The visibility of Dust Bowl migrants served as a public reminder of the dislocations and uncertainty caused by the Great Depression. As one of Dorothea Lange’s photographic subjects asked, “Do you reckon I’d be out on the highway if I had it good at home?”(35).2 The mobility depicted in Dust Bowl migration narratives challenged popular representations of the nation’s onward march towards a better and brighter

1 For numbers on overall migration, Dust Bowl migration and migration from Oklahoma during the Great Depression see Stein’s California and the Dust Bowl Migration. Stein points out that overall migration to California during the Great Depression was lower than migration during the decades both preceding and following the 1930s.

2 Lange and Taylor (35). This quote, labeling a picture of a young black woman at the crossroads in the South, captures the way in which the Dust Bowl migration was placed in a larger narrative of rural exodus. Lange and Taylor’s work spanned the nation moving westward from the South. Black migrants were present only in the photographs of the South. The visual absence of Asian and Latino bodies is most notable in the photographs of the Salinas Lettuce Strike in California. The majority of the striking workers were Mexican and Mexican Americans, but Lange’s photos published in American Exodus do not record racial diversity or racial difference amongst the workers, although such photos were part of her oeuvre. One of the most helpful works I’ve found for thinking about the relation of the Southern migration, the Dust Bowl migration, and the depictions in Lange and Taylor’s An American Exodus is Gregory’s The Southern Diaspora.

93 future. Instead of class mobility and modernity, narratives of highway travel became a constant reminder of the failure of America’s rural fantasy. 3

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Sanora Babb’s Those Whose

Names Are Unknown (written 1939, published 2004) reconfigure the imagined relationship between nature and citizenship in response to the changing material conditions of the Great Depression. By comparing Steinbeck’s classic with the lesser known work of novelist Babb, a communist party member during the 1930s, this chapter suggests both the possibilities and limitations of the representations of white citizenship by the Popular Front in this period. Both Steinbeck’s and Babb’s novels depict a threat to national belonging (white citizenship) stemming from lost natural belonging (rural dispossession). While Steinbeck’s novel reifies the relationship between whiteness and national belonging, Babb’s characters reject nationalism, prefiguring a class-based identity where non-white characters provided leadership and education for the newly politically conscious, oppressed, white workers. The relationship between citizenship and nature in these texts depends upon the racialized and gendered meanings of both.

Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath depicts a crisis in the meaning of American nature, as the Joads’ rural displacement exposes the failures of both the frontier myth and

3 If as Kocks contends, the frontier state, where the government gave away land, prefigured a welfare state, then the loss of the safety valve prefigured the rise of the safety net. During the 1920s, California became the ultimate car-tourist destination. It was not simply the images of roads that altered during the Great Depression, but the image of taking the road to California. See Ott’s “Landscapes of Consumption.” Ott documents how auto-tourists sought to differentiate themselves from migrants, while works by progressive advocates sought to distinguish the hardships of transience from tourism. For example, in American Exodus, Taylor and Lange feel the need to explain that California migrants were not simply camping. For more on representations of mobility, the automobile and highways see Donovan; Lewis and Goldstein; Scharff; Flink; McShane; and Rae. Regarding literary representations of the automobile and highway, see Dettelbach; Lackey; and Primeau.

94 the myth of California as American Eden.4 I contend that the loss of the idealized

Jeffersonian relationship between American citizen and pastoral landscape in The Grapes of Wrath is enmeshed in discourses of racialized citizenship. The novel depicts migrancy

— the Joads’ new relationship to nature — as incompatible with the privileges and rights of white American citizenship. Yet the novel affirms the white citizenship of the Joads against depictions of non-white foreign others, and the un-American fascism of

California’s landowners. The relationship of citizens and non-citizens to American nature cements this racialized citizenship. Although Steinbeck does not offer a prescriptive solution to the Joads’ destitution in the novel, he illustrates the failure of

California’s social and political systems through the incompatibility in the novel between the Joads’ migrancy and their Americanness. The changing gendered relationships within the Joad family further establish the need for a changed government to address this crisis. Such change might emerge through governmental reform or revolution. By the novel’s end, Tom and Rose of Sharon, the new Americans, serve as both threat to the

American nation and reimagined ideal citizens.5

Steinbeck’s environmental imagination has long been recognized as important to

The Grapes of Wrath. In one of the earliest critical responses to the novel, Edmund

Wilson indicted Steinbeck for depicting his characters as little more than animals. Recent scholarship convincingly asserts that while Steinbeck relies heavily on natural

4 Loftis’s Witness to the Struggle; and Sackman’s Orange Empire.

5 This reading could also be applied with slight variations to Steinbeck’s pamphlet “Their Blood Was Strong” which collected his 1936 series for the San Francisco Chronicle, “The Harvest Gypsies.” See reprinted The Harvest Gypsies. The relationship between racialized and gendered nature and citizenship are similar in the pamphlet and in the novel, and if anything, more explicit in the prescriptive pamphlet.

symbolism, he carefully sets his characters apart from the animal kingdom.6 Their ability

to transcend their conditions makes them truly human. Steinbeck’s relationship with

biologist Edward Ricketts, and their co-authored book Sea of Cortez, is often read as the

key to Steinbeck’s environmental ideas.7 Scholars disagree on the extent of Ricketts’s

influence on Steinbeck, as well as Ricketts’s exact philosophical beliefs. However, there is a consensus that Steinbeck’s belief in “organismal thinking” and an idea he called “the phalanx” shaped his work. In the “organismal conception,” individual organisms worked together as a greater species organism; individual species also worked jointly as a larger ecosystem organism. The sum of these individuals was greater than their parts. Thus the

great movements of history were in part to be understood as the movements of this

organism. The phalanx was Steinbeck’s governing metaphor for the individual’s

relationship to the group in both nature and humanity. Many of Steinbeck’s works deal

with the theme of maintaining individuality while merging with the collective. Arguably,

this is the most popular reading of The Grapes of Wrath.8

Surprisingly, little work has been done to analyze the formation of race within

The Grapes of Wrath. The Joads’ whiteness is occasionally recognized; Alexander

Saxton points out the slippage between radical egalitarianism and racial egalitarianism in

the work. Similarly, Michael Denning asserts that “racial populism deeply inflects”

6 See Wilson’s “From Classics and Commercials” and Wilson’s “The Californians: Storm and Steinbeck.”. For more recent works rebutting Wilson see Griffin and Freedman; Condor; Bluestone; and Werlock.

7 See Steinbeck and Rickets’s The Sea of Cortez; Astro; Benson’s The True Adventures of John Steinbeck; Parini; and Beegel, Shillinglaw and Tiffney.

8 Certainly, there is more than a hint of environmental determinism within Steinbeck’s narratives and indeed a very different type of “naturalism” (rather than literary naturalism) brought to his characters. These particular ideas of Steinbeck’s were perhaps atypical for his historical period. James C. Kelley argues that John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts’s ideas “almost literally anticipated” deep-ecology. The developing field of ecology influenced Steinbeck’s ideas. See Benson’s The True Adventures of John Steinbeck; Parini; and Beegel, Shillinglaw and Tiffney.

Steinbeck’s works, whereby the “noble whiteness” of the Joads contrasts with “the minstrelsy of Tortilla Flat’s Mexican Americans.”9 With the notable exception of Louis

Owen’s study on the figure of the Indian, race has largely been assumed to be marginal to the major themes of Steinbeck’s novel.10 Yet the construction of “Americanness” and citizenship within The Grapes of Wrath depends on the novel’s construction of

whiteness.

The way the novel defines whiteness corresponds with the legal standards of

citizenship that emerged during the time of its production.11 The implementation of new immigration and citizenship laws during the 1920s and 1930s reflected and shaped changing American notions of race and citizenship. The 1924 National Origins Act, for example, consolidated the category of whiteness, by defining all Europeans as white. The categories of “national origins” in the act contrasted with racial categories that lacked national specificity: “The new taxonomy was starkly represented in a table of the population of the United States published in 1924, in which the column ‘country of birth’ listed fifty-three countries (Australia to Yugoslavia) and five ‘colored races’ (black,

9 In “Rethinking the Politics of The Grapes of Wrath,” Cunningham takes issue with Denning’s reading of “racial egalitarianism” in the text. While Cunningham acknowledges the racist mythologies at work in Steinbeck’s The Harvest Gypsies, he believes Steinbeck replaces a call for justice focused on the deserving white poor in The Harvest Gypsies with a class-based solidarity in The Grapes of Wrath. Cunningham finds racism present in the text solely through the absence of non-white workers. However, as my reading demonstrates white racial citizenship is actively constructed in the text and provides the means for the reader’s political education and the grounds for the Joads change in consciousness and move towards collective action.

10 Denning; Owens’s Trouble in the Promised Land; and Saxton’s “In Dubious Battle.” In 1997, Peter Lisca could write, “with the exception of one chapter on the figure of the Indian in Louis Owens’s monograph, The Grapes of Wrath has not been especially fertile territory for ethnic studies” (559). See Lisca’s Text and Criticism.

11 Recently, a handful of scholars also connected the depiction of gender in The Grapes of Wrath with Steinbeck’s understanding of the environment. For discussions of nature and gender in the novel see, Cederstrom; Hendrick; and McKay. For discussions of gender see Gladstein’s “From Heroine to Supporting Player”; Hayashi, Tesumaro, ed.’s Steinbeck’s Women; and Motley. For discussions of race and environment see Owens’s Trouble in the Promised Land.

mulatto, Chinese, Japanese, Indians).”12 Thus the population table defined national

belonging as white and denied nationality to those categorized as not-white. Meanwhile,

the 1922 Cable Act defined the citizenship of married white women separately from their

husbands’ status for the first time. Prior to this act, married women’s citizenship derived

from their husbands.

Yet the separation of marriage and citizenship occurred alongside a re-affirmation

of the links between race and citizenship, and race and marriage. Immigration laws

during the 1920s and 1930s increasingly differentiated between those who were citizens

by birth and those who were citizens by naturalization; they also discriminated between

those citizens by birth eligible for naturalization, and those citizens by birth (“aliens

ineligible for citizenship”) who could not naturalize, namely Asian Americans. Women

who lost their citizenship through marriage to a non-citizen could regain it only if they

were eligible for naturalization.13 The legal consolidation of white citizenship occurred

alongside the increasing participation of white immigrant and ethnic Americans in

national politics (FDR’s Democratic Party) and multi-ethnic class solidarity. During the

Great Depression white workers increasingly looked to the federal government rather

than ethnic organizations for services and protection.14 Thus new forms of political participation by ethnic white workers arose during this period of reified white citizenship.

12 Ngai; and Lye (27). It is important to recognize that Ngai differs from the established reading of the 1924 Immigration Act as the culmination of nativism. Whereas Higham focuses on the causes for the Act, Ngai examines its results, and its consequences during the period of its implementation, which was still being established during the 1930s.

13 See Gardner.

14 As Cohen discusses, the reduction in the percentage of the foreign born population certainly played a part in these trends as did the growing availability of mass produced items and media.

The Grapes of Wrath firmly established the racialized Americanness of the Joads.

The collective narrator in the novel explains: “We ain’t foreign. Seven generations back

Americans, and beyond that Irish, Scotch, English, German. One of our folks in the

Revolution, an’ they was lots of our folks in the Civil War – both sides. Americans”

(242). With roots in the American Revolution and in northern Europe before that, the

reader is assured of the Joads’ whiteness. Their history flows back to a mythic American

past beyond recollection, encompassing the totality of official American experience

starting with the revolution and including both sides of the Civil War. Moreover, they

express a new national unity — the embodiment of the post-Civil War history of the

United States.

More specifically, the Joads epitomize the mythic American Westerner, who often

is envisioned as embodying the best of the American character.15 The Joads are

descendents of pioneers, and the novel’s rhetoric evokes images of blond-haired, blue-

eyed homesteaders, supposedly the most American of Americans. The Joads’

relationship to the land evokes this pioneer mentality. The collective narration explains,

“Grampa took up the land, and he had to kill the Indians and drive them away. And Pa

was born here, and he killed weeds and snakes” (33). The suggestive equivalence of

conquest (“kill the Indians”) and cultivation (“killed weeds and snakes”) fits with the

mythic frontier model of settlement. In both colonial and frontier traditions, white

settlers claimed ownership over the land because they saw themselves as “improving” the

15 See Kolodny’s Lay of the Land; Marx’s The Machine in the Garden; Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation; Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence; Slotkin’s The Fatal Environment; Smith’s The Virgin Land; and Turner.

landscape in contrast to the perceived negligence of Native Americans.16 The work of

the white family made the land productive. When the Joads claim ownership of their

homestead through their work on the land and the improvements wrought by that work,

they participate in the literary conventions of frontier narratives. 17

Similarly, the Joads participate in frontier narrative conventions when they

perceive the landscape as a fertile woman. In the frontier myth, masculinity is asserted

through the conquest of a feminized landscape.18 Tom inscribes this relationship onto the

Oklahoma homestead: “Joad carefully drew the torso of a woman in the dirt, breasts, hips, pelvis” (22).19 In his act of drawing the female figure into the Oklahoma earth,

Joad inscribes his ownership over it, and in doing so, asserts his Americanness. Through

this gendering of the landscape, the Joads are reborn as America’s rightful owners.

Through the collective narration, the reader is told, “That’s what makes it ours – being

born on it, working it, dying on it. That’s what makes ownership, not a paper with

numbers on it” (33). When they are dispossessed of their farm, the Joads are thus

dispossessed of privileges of their American citizenship.20

16 See Brown (42-74); and Cronon’s Changes in the Land.

17 Allmendinger; Heyne; Johnson’s Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth; Kolodny’s The Land of the Land; and Smith’s The Virgin Land.

18 Johnson’s Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth.; Kolodny’s The Land of the Land; and Smith’s The Virgin Land.

19 Tom’s response to the landscape echoes other famous literary westerners, including James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo and Owen Wister’s The Virginian.

20 On gender and the frontier and pioneer landscapes of the West, see Evans; Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land; Smith’s Virgin Land. According to George Bluestone, Tom’s sexualized relationship to the landscape demonstrates romantic ties to the earth that establish him as a true proletarian figure. On the Joads and the myths of frontier see Cassuto; Loftis’s Witness to the Struggle; Owens’s Trouble in the Promised Land; and Sackman’s Orange Empire.

100

Yet, in the face of this threat to the Joads’ citizenship, the novel depicts the Joads as drawing strength from their position as white Americans. The novel carefully constructs the Joads’ whiteness against racialized others in the text.21 At the novel’s beginning Tom Joad establishes the common working-class bond with a white truck driver in order to catch a lift. The truck driver is not supposed to give rides, but Tom places him in the position of either giving Tom a ride or being someone “any rich bastard could kick around” (7). This class-based relationship is cemented through common whiteness when the driver tells a joke about a “nigger” that Joad appreciates enough to try to remember later (10). Working-class migrants define their whiteness against blackness in the novel.22 Given the long-standing tradition in Californian literature and politics associating unionization with whiteness this construction of the Joads’ whiteness to demonstrate their class position is not surprising.23 The text explicitly references race most often in stories told between migrants. For example, as Dust Bowl refugees gather

21 Surely, as several Steinbeck scholars have asserted, The Grapes of Wrath is designed in part as a preemptive response to accusations by the Associated Farmers of un-American communist sympathies. For example, Frederick Carpenter asserts “this group idea is American, not Russian; and stems from Walt Whitman, not Karl Marx” (567). There are no outside agitators in the novel. Instead, the oppressed characters’ interest in unionization comes through spiritual revelation, and is couched in the language of Whitman and Emerson. The Joads’ increasing class consciousness is depicted as arising organically from American intellectual traditions rather than as the result of foreign influences. The Joads’ depiction as definitively American affirms they are not Russian. As Nicholas Visser points out, Tom Joad laughs whenever he is called a red, and the reader laughs too when Joad jokingly replies, “Sure I’m bolshevisky” (199). A Red, we are told (and the Joads have to ask), is simply any man who wants 30 cents an hour when being paid 25. For discussion of right-wing response to The Grapes of Wrath see Shillinglaw’s “California Answers The Grapes of Wrath.” According to Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation, Gilbert Seldes’ Mainland (1936) similarly emphasized “the Frontier and the West as the cultural sources and regional base of an indigenous American radical tradition, characterized by such movements as the Whiskey Rebellion, Jeffersonian agrarianism, Jacksonian leveling, John Brown abolition and Lincoln Republicanism, Populism, and the radical unionism of the IWW” (281). Slotkin further connects this trend with the regional folkloric work done by the WPA and the Federal Writer’s Project.

22 For critical race theory on the “possessive investment in whiteness,” see Ignatiev; Lipsitz; and Roediger. For a discussion of the white working class fear of blackness in Gold Rush California (and its ramifications for later racial dynamics in the state), see Saxton’s The Indispensable Enemy.

23See Saxton’s The Indispensable Enemy.

101

around the campfire, they relate an incident about a white woman, “a lady back home,

won’t mention no names – had a nigger kid all of a sudden. . . Never did hunt out the

nigger” (423). These shared racial anecdotes not only link the migrants to one another,

but also communicate the Joads’ whiteness to the reader.

Whiteness also emerges in relationship to Native Americans in the text, as

suggested by the Joads’ pioneering past. Within the frontier myth, the white American

pioneer emerges as the “true” American through the conquest of Native Americans and

the feminized landscape, having assimilated the best qualities of the wilderness into his

American core. Through the death of the Indian, the pioneer thus becomes native.24 As

Sherman Alexie once wrote, “In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally

written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts” (94).

This is precisely the tendency at work in Steinbeck’s novel. Native Americans, as a living presence in the United States, are of little interest to the novel (shown by a trite statement that full-blooded Indians have it rather good on reservations).25 When one of

Steinbeck’s migrants retells his adventures as a recruit against Geronimo (338), he not

only destroys the Indian, he takes on the qualities associated with Native Americans.

This is also how we can read the half-Cherokee character Jule, who has retained just

enough “Injun blood” to have more carefully honed intuitions than the other characters

(354). The presence of one half-Indian character among the mass of white Dust Bowl

migrants captures the novel’s appropriation of indigenous qualities into white national

identity.

24 Bird; Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places; Deloria’s Playing Indian; and Huhndorf.

25 Jule, who is half-Cherokee, states “Wisht I was a full-blood. I’d have my lan’ on the reservation. Them full-bloods got it pretty nice, some of ’em.” (353).

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As Louis Owens contends, the Indian, as imagined in the American Wilderness,

stands in for lost American potential. Within the novel images of Indians represent the

lost quintessential spiritual relationship with nature necessary for human happiness and

survival. Owens contends, “In attempting to destroy the Indian, Steinbeck suggests,

Americans damaged, if not destroyed that element within themselves that connected them

with the earth, the intuitive self” (Promised Land 66). The figure of the Indian becomes

symbolic of the landscape itself. The destruction of the Indian, such as the tragic

shooting of the mythic figure in Chapter 23 stands in for the destruction of American

nature by the American army.26 Through this depiction, Steinbeck collapses Native

Americans and nature into the same category. This process both racializes nature and naturalizes race, much the way Steinbeck’s feminization of the landscape both genders nature and naturalizes gender.

Regional and racialized understandings of the South (and the West in contrast to the South) mark the novel as well. Popular mythologies depicted the West as the region where the white male American citizen could be free, exemplified by Huck Finn’s desire to “light out for the territories.” In Steinbeck’s novel, the wavering line separating slave from freeman in Californian agriculture threatens the image of the West as a site of

American freedom. Moreover, because the American West has often stood for American promise, this possibility of white slavery jeopardizes the image of America as a whole.

The growing specter of slave labor and slavery in the Californian Eden imperils national

26 The migrant story-teller describes the death of the Indian: “Ever see a cock pheasant, stiff and beautiful, ever’ feather drawed an’ painted, an’ even his eyes drawed in pretty? An bang! You pick him up – bloody an’ twisted, an’ you spoiled somepin better’n you; an’ eatin’ him don’t never make it up to you, ‘cause you spoiled somepin in yaself, an’ you can’t never fix it up” (339). The destruction of the American Indian is equated with the destruction of an innocent, wild, and beautiful American landscape, and both have ramifications for the loss innocence and potential of the American Adam rendered here as Dust Bowl migrant.

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unity and national identity. Thus, images of African Americans, and particularly of

slavery, haunt the novel.27

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination (1992),

Toni Morrison asserts that blackness operates as an oppositional force to construct

whiteness in the work of many white American authors. Moreover, Morrison asserts, the

use of blackness and the black body in American literature has been central to the

shaping of national identity. There are no black bodies in The Grapes of Wrath.

However, Steinbeck repeatedly references the specter of slavery, the owners’ comparison

of the Okies to blacks in the South, and the Okies’ reaffirmation of whiteness through

joking and derogatory reference to blackness. The Okies distance themselves from

African Americans to separate themselves from the caste markings of racialization, to

make themselves superior to someone, and to establish themselves as freemen. American

political history makes clear the connection between freedom and citizenship. One could

not be a citizen if one did not have the ownership over oneself to consent to be governed.

The slave citizen was an impossibility.28 The Dust Bowl migrants, in establishing their

freedom (rather than slavery), establish themselves as free white American citizens. The

Joads rely on their white pioneer heritage to mark them as white Americans rather than

27 Avery Gordon theorizes the persistence of haunting as a sociological fact and literary trope as a way in which the violence of the past continues to affect the present in invisible as well as visible ways, and as representative of the ways in which power itself moves through society as not always visible or tangible. Even though slavery was officially outlawed, and black characters do not appear in the book, we can understand the presence of slavery through its association of blackness as the markers of power’s movement through the novel. Moreover, as both Almaguer (34-41) and Saxton contend, in the mid-late nineteenth-century, free labor ideology (as described by Eric Foner) led to symbolic opposition by white Californian residents to the immigration of blacks, free or slave. This earlier moment of racial conflict and the association of black labor with slavery during the Gold Rush also haunts representations of the Great Depression, regardless of agricultural associations. Finally, the way in which slavery haunts works such as Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath must be distinguished from the reworking of slavery by contemporary authors as discussed by Keizer.

28 See Cott; Lopez (40); and Stanley.

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black slaves or former slaves, even as the migration of blacks, including former slaves, to

the region is made invisible in the novel. 29

In Love and Theft: Black Face Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Eric

Lott examines how the white working class played black both to gain control over racial

stereotypes associated with blacks and to enter a space of permitted transgression.

During the Great Depression, images of small-scale farmers focused both on white Dust

Bowl refugees and African American sharecroppers in the South. Photographs,

government reports, and newspaper articles depicted the two groups as having a similar

relationship to nature.30 Indeed, the closeness of the Joads to American nature marks

them as both American and free. At the same time, however, this closeness also aligns

them with other groups racialized as close to nature, such as African Americans and

Native Americans. Yet Steinbeck’s white migrants assert their ownership over the land,

just as a tenant speaks of his “property” (37). Migrants both idealize the relationship to

land and assert a racialized, gendered, nationalistic propriety over it. Such assertions by

The Grapes of Wrath’s characters highlight the historical difference in white tenancy and

black southern tenancy.31 Although the migrants do not engage in “minstrelsy” or

specifically play black, they walk the line between loving and hating the image of

blackness with which they entertain themselves.

29 See Arax; and Leseur. For an examination of the racial formation occurring among poor whites, Mexicans and African Americans in Texas, see Foley.

30 Consider, for example, the images in Lange and Taylor. The stereotypes of poor Southern whites in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932) were also similar to stereotypes of poor blacks.

31 Foley elaborates on the differences between sharecropping and tenacy (tenants own their own tools), as well as the regional differences in the systems of agricultural land ownership, whereby white farm laborers in the south could move up the agricultural ladder in a way white farm laborers in the West could not, thus contributing to the shifting racial meanings white Dust Bowl migrants encountered in California. See also Daniel’s Bitter Harvest (16). An excellent description of the originals of the agricultural ladder can be found in Jamieson’s Labor Unionism (5).

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The owners employ similar images of blackness for a markedly different purpose.

One states, “Why, Jesus, they’re as dangerous as niggers in the South! If they ever get

together there ain’t nothin’ that’ll stop ‘em” (245). This fearful comparison between

western white migrants and Southern blacks establishes the role of the white migrants who underpin California’s economy. In addition, this comparison makes the threat to the

Joads’ freedom clear. The owners run their farms as plantations, using coerced labor.

The use of white labor to perform tasks of slave agriculture suggests a threat to idealized

Jeffersonian democracy by the post-bellum development of coerced labor conditions in

Western agriculture. As in the post-bellum South, “free labor” can be treated as slave labor under the right cultural and economic conditions.

As free white labor comes to be treated as coerced “slave” labor, the white migrants become racialized as “Okies.” As they migrate westward, the Joads first hear the term “Okies.” As the Joads enter California, a gas station attendant comments to a fellow worker: “Well, you and me got sense. Them goddamn Okies got no sense and no feeling. They ain’t human. A human being wouldn’t live like they do. A human being couldn’t stand it to be so dirty and miserable. They ain’t a hell of a lot better than gorillas” (229). This dehumanizing and animalistic language echoes racist and derogatory stereotypes traditionally used against people of color. Exposing this racialization of migrancy, however, is a double-edged sword. By highlighting the falseness of the accusations against the Joads, the novel seems to critique the power of racism by exposing its underlying operations. However, at the same time, part of the novel’s outraged tone depends upon white migrant workers forced to experience “racism”

(as Okies), more frequently seen against African Americans. The indignation created by

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the novel depends upon the readers’ realization that white American citizens are being treated as if they were black or foreign, thus not like white Americans, who presumably deserve better. In other words, the novel critiques racist prejudice when it is visited upon white migrants, but falls short of criticizing racism against non-white groups or individuals.

The assumption that white workers deserve better treatment than non-white

workers recurs in the novel’s implicit comparison of Dust Bowl refugees to Asian and

Mexican laborers, depicted in the novel as “foreign.” White migrant workers are repeatedly called “Outlanders, foreigners” (245) by better-off Californians, making the

rebuttal “We ain’t foreign” (242) all the more poignant. Because the text provides

descriptions detailing the depth of the migrants’ Americanness, the accusation rings

shockingly false. Yet, the same treatment is not given to non-white workers in the text.

The narrator explains: “They imported slaves, although they did not call them slaves:

Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos. They live on rice and beans, the business men

said. They don’t need much. They wouldn’t know what to do with good wages. Why,

look how they live. Why, look what they eat. And if they get funny – deport them”

(241). According to the novel, the weakness of exploited foreign laborers is their lack

of citizenship status. They cannot rebel without being deported. While the tone of the

passage and other negative depictions of the owners signals to the reader that their words

are not to be believed – “They wouldn’t know what to do with good wages,” - the

narrative does not explicitly contradict the lies told by the owners about non-white

laborers, as it does for white laborers. Rather, the text implies, while these lies may work

against foreigners, they will not work against white Americans. Nowhere does the novel

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contest the depiction of non-white workers as “imported slaves,” a description that denies

the agency of non-white immigrants and ignores the U.S. citizenship of some non-white

workers.

Given the context in which Steinbeck wrote and the knowledge available to him,

the refusal to counter such images of non-white workers was very likely a conscious narrative decision. Steinbeck was not ignorant of the militancy of Mexican and Mexican

American laborers. As Steinbeck knew, they were often far more organized that white

migrants.32 During the Great Depression, 400,000 persons of Mexican descent were

“repatriated” to Mexico, including the illegal deportation of 200,000 Mexican American

citizens.33 Race, more than citizenship, protected militant workers from deportation.

Steinbeck chose to make his migrants white in The Grapes of Wrath, just as he

transformed the Mexican and Mexican American strikers he used for models in In

Dubious Battle (1936) to white workers.34 Some have asserted that Steinbeck made a

strategic decision to highlight the whiteness of his workers, believing a national audience

would be more sympathetic to them.35 It seems equally likely that Steinbeck truly

believed that, regardless of the attempted militancy of Mexican and Mexican American

workers, only white “American” workers could successfully unionize. Indeed, he makes

such a case in The Harvest Gypsies, contending that white workers are more disposed to

32 For example, in The Harvest Gypsies, Steinbeck stated “Recently, led by the example of the workers in Mexico, the Mexicans in California have begun to organize” (54). Indeed, as Weber shows, Mexican and Mexican American workers proved far more militant than white workers despite the predictions of McWilliams and Steinbeck to the contrary.

33 See Ngai (8). See Balderrama and Raymond; Guerin-Gonzalez; Hoffman’s Unwanted Mexicans Americans in the Great Depression; and Sanchez.

34 See Benson and Loftis’s “John Steinbeck and Farm Labor Unionization.”

35 For example, Saxton, in “In Dubious Battle,” sees the influence both as a strategic decision and arising out of a radical history of slippage between racial and radical egalitarianism he links between Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Steinbeck’s writings.

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fight for their rights, beholden to higher living standards, and more likely to garner public

sympathy than non-white workers. This was a common refrain among white progressive

farm worker advocates of the time, despite the demonstration of non-white worker militancy in the strikes of 1933-1934.36

Regardless of Steinbeck’s motivations, his novel depicts “foreign workers” as a

non-threat to the agricultural industry. The narrator explains: “the imported serfs were

beaten and frightened and starved until some went home again, and some grew fierce and

were killed or driven from the country. And the farms grew larger and the owners fewer”

(241). Any resistance offered by these workers failed to stop or even slow the growth of

industrial agriculture. In contrast, the homegrown militancy of the white workers

emerges as an unstoppable threat to California’s agricultural industry. The Grapes of

Wrath portrays the groundswell of a future American revolution: “In the souls of the

people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, heavy for the vintage” (363).

The bulk of the blame for this coming revolution is laid on the owners, whom the narrator

repeatedly criticizes for ignoring “the three cries of history”: that when land accumulates

in the hands of too few, it is taken away; that when the majority are hungry they will

meet their needs through force; and that repression only serves to increase the bonds

among the dispossessed (247). We are told by the narrator, “Only means to destroy

revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on” (247). Thus the narrator

endorses actions by the owners that will halt the revolt and faults their reactions for its

growing strength. Steinbeck constructs white worker militancy against a false depiction

of non-white worker passivity and complicity in labor exploitation.

36 For strikes of 1933-1934 see Daniel’s Bitter Harvest; Guerin-Gonzales; McWilliams’s Factories in the Field; Mitchell’s The Lie of the Land; Taylor’s On the Ground in the Thirties and Weber.

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The Grapes of Wrath neither promotes nor celebrates a coming revolution. Rather

the novel depicts such a revolution as an inevitable result of growers’ treatment of white

workers as if they were foreign or non-white. That is, the revolt stems from the un-

American treatment of white American workers. The novel depicts the transformation of

California to an un-American space. Specifically, the narrative implies that the behavior of the owners is un-American. They foment this revolt out of their own selfishness and ignorance. We are told, “Now farming became industry, and the owners followed Rome, although they did not know it” (241). The statement is an accusation. Americans desired an emulation of Greek democracy, not the fall of decadent and imperial Rome. By comparing California to Rome, Steinbeck represents California as a place outside of or foreign to, the United States. The Joads have to go through “Border Patrol” to gain entrance. Of the government camp, where the Joads are treated like “people” again, we are told, “This here’s United States, not California” (347). The lack of democracy and the lack of respect for white American citizens, such as the Joads, thus mark the owners’ oligarchy as unpatriotic.37 Additionally, the owners’ relationship to nature further sets

them apart as less American than the Joads who exhibit the desire for a truly American

(Jeffersonian) relationship to nature. The owners, who “imported serfs,” moved towards

a feudal relationship to land. They “farmed on paper; and they forgot the land, the smell,

the feel of it, and remembered only that they owned it, remembered only what they

gained and lost by it” (241). In contrast, the Joads formerly worked their own land. The

37 In 1939, the impending explosion of World War II was not far from many observers’ minds. Thus frequent references to fascism in describing California’s growers at once carried a connotation of immediate threat from abroad, and encapsulated a much broader range of domestic concerns. Geary explains that McWilliams alone used fascism to describe “union busting, anti-Semitism, nativism, militarism, capitalist exploitation, scapegoating, lynching, red-baiting, and vigilante justice.” See also Richardson’s American Prophet (73-83); Weiss; and Wald’s Trinity of Passion.

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Californian owners lack the Joads’ more Jeffersonian approach to American agriculture.38

In Steinbeck’s novel, the identity of the individual is determined by relationship to other humans and to the environment. The Joads and other migrants are deeply connected to the land. Their community and their culture is built into the soil they till.

The tenant farmers think, “This land, this red land is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us” (89). When the Joads abandon their homestead, they abandon a certain sense of themselves: “How can we live without our past? How will we know it’s us without our past?” (91). Their relationship to the earth connects them to their history, memory, and identity. Through the Joads, the novel questions how much the changed relationship to land will change the American people.39 Without a frontier to

38 This recognition of Steinbeck’s invocation of the myth of Jeffersonian democracy came early. In 1941, Chester E. Eisenger published “Jeffersonian Agrarianism in The Grapes of Wrath,” arguably the most important work on the subject. In Trouble in Paradise and Steinbeck’s Revision of America, Louis Owens counters Eisenger, asserting that Steinbeck critiques rather than celebrates the Jeffersonian small farmer. As Hoerst Groene discusses, part of the difficulty in any clear reading of the novel’s response to Jeffersonian mythology is the changing role of technology in society. William Conlogue makes clear that the industrialization of agriculture could only be reconciled with a Jeffersonian mythos for so long. Yet the attack in the novel is clearly leveled at men, not at machines. Steinbeck was certainly aware of the ways in which technology contributed to the environmental ruin of the Dust Bowl. He was friends with Pare Lorentz, the filmmaker responsible for the government documentary, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). Steinbeck’s characters exclaim, “But you’ll kill the land with cotton” to which the banks respond, “We know. We’ve got to take the cotton quick before the land dies. Then we’ll sell the land” (33). It is not technology that Steinbeck blames but the human misuse of technology. Indeed, The Grapes of Wrath makes quite clear the benefits of technologies like the flushing toilets and hot water showers found at the government camp. While the novel critiques individualism and a frontier mentality, it celebrates a Jeffersonian relationship to the landscape and idealizes modes of Jeffersonian democracy. In partaking of the pastoral design present in American literature, The Grapes of Wrath depicts the machine in the garden representative of capitalism rather than technology. Steinbeck’s focus on the farmer could also be seen as part of the Turnerian tendency in his application of the Frontier myth. See Marx’s The Machine in the Garden; and Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation.

39 Such a question held particular poignancy during the Depression. The period of the most rapid urbanization in the United States was from 1880 through 1920. The 1920 census was the first to find the urban population slightly greater than the rural (51.2% to 48.8%). By the Great Depression, the nation had already catalogued a worthy cultural history of urban anxiety. Yet while anti-urbanism was often balanced in earlier periods with the promising potential of modernization and industrialization, such hope was often absent during the Great Depression. During the Depression, the fear of urban poverty combined with the public image of forced rural exodus; even the work of photographers documenting rural displacement -

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conquer, and without land to till, will the men still be men? Will the old traditions be

lost? Grandpa and Grandma cannot survive the journey. They are too old to change.

Moreover, when the Joads are kicked off their farm: “it took somepin outa Tom. Kinda

got into ‘im. He aint’ been the same ever since” (47). Yet, the novel repeatedly reminds

the reader that the Joads’ changed relationship to environment and to each other, fostered

by their dispossession, does not change their status as white American citizens.

The novel reinforces this status through the narrative’s depiction of the Joads’

“natural” democratic tendencies. Wherever the Dust Bowl refugees go, democracy

springs up with them. Although the ways in which democracy emerges is transformed

throughout the journey, it is never lost. This democracy first emerges in the squatting circles of the men.40 Indeed the squatting circles represent the ideal of the American

citizen as a property-owning white male. At the novel’s start, we are told “The bigger

boys squatted beside their fathers, because that made them men” (35). One’s relationship

to the squatting circle determines one’s role in the family decision-making process. On

the road, this democracy is altered, but still it exists. Steinbeck writes, “At first the

families were timid in the building and tumbling world, but gradually the technique of

building worlds became their technique. Then leaders emerged, then laws were made,

then codes came into being” (201). Significantly, American democracy springs

organically from the roadside campsites. The Grapes of Wrath depicts this urge towards

Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans - appear similar to the photographs of urban poverty popularized earlier by Jacob Riis. Thus, at a time of economic uncertainty and the failure of urban modernity, the public was also reminded of the failure of America’s rural fantasy. The failure of the myths of American nature (frontier, farm, Eden), which were by and large rural myths, took on weighted significance during this period.

40 For more on squatter’s circles see Timmerman.

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self-government as intrinsic and again as rooted in the landscape, which further

naturalizes the Joads’ citizenship.

Yet the novel also portrays migrancy as incompatible with democracy in the novel

because it represses the natural urges of people towards self-government.41 We are told

by the narrator, “The moving questing people were migrants now. Those families which

had lived on a little piece of land, who had lived and died on forty acres, had eaten or

starved on the produce of forty acres, had now the whole West to rove in” (293). The

loss of stability and rootedness is one of the greatest challenges confronted in The Grapes of Wrath. Jeffersonian democracy emphasized the stability of the small farmer, which made him the ideal citizen. The Joads lack both economic and geographic stability, which renders them and other migrants a particularly unstable political force. Political organization was difficult if not impossible during migrancy, shown in the novel through the political repression caused by forced mobility. A fellow migrant worker explains the burning of Hoovervilles to Tom as: “Some says they don’ want us to vote; keep us movin’ so we can’t vote. An’ some says so we can’t get on relief. An’ some says if we set in one place we’d get organized” (253). Instead of American democracy, the Joads encounter a proto-fascist state that will only respond to violent revolution.

41 This is similar to the message of McWilliams’s Ill Fares the Land (1941). McWilliams contended that migrancy creates politically disempowered peoples. He repeatedly described migrancy as a shadow state, or a form of invisibility, explaining that migrants “pass across the land like shadows; they do not demonstrate on the steps of city halls or state capitols” (IFL 5). According to McWilliams, it is the state of migrancy that prevented the migrants from speaking, in part because they could not establish residency, which was required for political efficacy. He explains, “As most of the migrants have not acquired legal residence, and therefore cannot vote, they can be discriminated against with political immunity” (IFL 323). In objecting to settlement laws, he explained, “the underlying assumption is that forced migration prevented political representation of citizenship” (IFL 351). They could not speak for themselves, and speaking for them failed. There were voiceless, both politically and in the public imagination, where attempts to represent them were “rather like the people themselves: Fragmentary, scattered, unorganized.” (IFL9). The political repercussion of this silence and invisibility was political impotence.

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The experience of the Joads on the road contrasts with their experience in the

government camp. Of the road, we are told: “The movement changed them; the

highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed

them. They were migrants.” (292). But in the government camp, stability, self-

government and respect quickly turn migrants back into “people” – that is American

people. When the Joads arrive at the government camp, Tom asks the watchman, “‘You

mean to say the fellas that runs the camp is jus’ fellas – campin’ here?’ ‘Sure. And it

works.’” (299). Once they have settled into the government camp, Ma exclaims, “Why,

I feel like people again” (319).

Michael Denning argues that a liberal reading of the novel would view the government camp as a celebration of the New Deal. Meanwhile a radical reading would see it as merely a small prototype of what might one day be possible. Yet in my reading,

The Grapes of Wrath implies something different. The government camp is a failure.

The Joads have to leave the camp, as there is no work. They would starve if they stayed.

The government camp is neither a celebration of the New Deal nor an example of the good things to come under communism. If anything, the government camp reveals the

New Deal’s shortcomings. Respect, home, and a small corner of democracy are nothing

without land. The possibility for improvement throughout the novel is always, “if a fella

had an acre…”(352). We are told that the “fallow fields which might produce food but

not profit” are “a sin and the unused land a crime against the thin children” (243). As the novel proceeds, it becomes clear that if the changed American relationship to land — the replacement of homesteads with industrial monopolies — is not rectified by California’s oligarchy, the migrants will rectify the situation on their own.

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Yet while Steinbeck’s characters demand a return to the land, the novel does not

endorse a return to the past. Steinbeck describes Ma as the “the citadel of the family”

(75), and as the source of strength. She never once wishes to return home. Indeed, when

Pa confesses “Spen’ all my time thinkin’ how it use’ ta be,” Ma responds confidently,

“This here’s purtier–better lan’” (439). As the family’s voice of reason and virtue, her

words signal that the migrants need to reform California, rather than lament the past. In

contrast, Connie continually seeks to return to the past, with negative results. He “Said it

would a been a good thing if he stayed home an’ studied up tractors” (283). He abandons

his pregnant wife and family responsibilities, earning him disapproval and disrespect. We

are repeatedly told, “Connie wasn’t no good” (283). In abandoning the Joads, he neglects

his familial duties. Only by remaining and coping with their new situation, Steinbeck

implies, will the Joads be able to reclaim their American citizenship.

Significantly, the novel discredits the crucial myths (Frontier, Eden, and

Jeffersonian) that celebrate the relationship of the American citizen to the American land.

The inability to go further west and the Joads’ discovery that Eden was “stole a long time

ago,” undermine the previous relationship among land, citizenship, and nature (212). The

novel depicts the changed relationship between citizen and government through the

changing role of the family. Early American political thought understood the

relationship between the family and the government in two ways. On one hand, the

family was the defining political unit. The male head of household represented the

family politically. He was the citizen who participated in American democracy. His

wife’s duty was to provide moral guidance and a warm home, adding feminine virtue to

the perceived natural male traits of reason and judgment. Meanwhile, the family was

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both a public and private institution. The local, state, and national government could

monitor and govern citizens through the institution of the family.42 However, the family

was also considered a parallel form of government. In American political thought,

consent was central to the formation of a valid marriage. The wife consented to

marriage, and submitted to her husband’s rule, trading some of her freedoms for the

protection she received in matrimony. This was perceived as parallel to the consent of

the governed to the government.43 These ideas were still present during the Great

Depression. The economic support the New Deal provided was organized around the

structure of this ideal family. Benefits overwhelmingly went to white male citizens who

were heads of household, while married white women were encouraged not to work.44

The Grapes of Wrath depicts the threat to national identity caused by migrancy, as well as

the need for transformation of the government-citizen relationship, through the dual notions of family as origin of virtuous citizenship and as appropriate model of government.

The Grapes of Wrath highlights the era’s challenges to citizenship and

government by depicting the changing gender relations within migrant families and

changing notions of the family itself. As the Joads became more and more destitute, Ma

displaces Pa Joad’s leadership:

Pa sniffed. “Seems like times is changed,” he said sarcastically. Time was when a man said what we’d do. Seems like women is tellin’ now. Seems like it’s purty near time to get out a stick.”

42 Cott (9-23).

43 Thus the American revolution relied on familial metaphors to justify the rejection of British governance. Early American divorce proceedings were codified along similar lines — if a husband failed to provide economically, or a wife proved disobedient and sexually unfaithful — a breach of the marriage contract could be pursued. See Bredbenner; Cott (24-76); and Gardner.

44 Cott (156-179); and Mintz and Kellogg.

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Ma put the clean dripping tin dish out on a box. She smiled down at her work. “You get your stick, Pa,” she said. “Times when they’s food an’ a place to set, then maybe you can use your stick an’ keep your skin whole. But you ain’t a doin’ your job, either a-thinkin’ or a-workin’. If you was, why, you could use your stick, an’ woman folks’d sniffle their nose an’ creep-mouse aroun’. But you jus’ get you a stick now an’ you ain’t lickin’ no woman; you’re a-fightin’, ’cause I got a stick all laid out too” (366).

Ma Joad ceases to respect the family hierarchy.45 In creating this character, Steinbeck drew on the works of Robert Briffault, as his biographers have noted. Briffault argued

that the family was produced by the mother more than father, and that a maternal era of

government came before current patriarchal structures. Thus what Steinbeck depicts may be read as a regression. The mother’s protective force must reassert itself in the face of the father’s failure to provide for the family’s survival.46

Moreover, in depicting the families of the Depression-era migrants, the novel

implies that migratory lifestyles threaten not only family hierarchies but national order.

The family model parallels the model of government. The American government fails to

meet the Joads’ expectations of it, paralleling the grounds on which Ma justifies her own

revolt. Pa Joad is unable to live up to his expectations within the marriage contract. As

Ma says, “you ain’t a doin’ your job.” Just as Ma is justified in challenging Pa Joad,

perhaps the American people, represented through the migrants, would be justified in

challenging the system of oppression found in California, and the government which has

failed in its duties. Perhaps Ma Joad’s revolt against her place in the family under

economic duress is only a precursor to the Joads’ own revolt against their place in the

45 In examining Ma Joad’s independence one must also consider the increasing citizenship rights of women throughout the 1920s and 1930s and the separate citizenship they could claim within marriage by the time of The Grapes of Wrath’s publication. See Bredbenner; and Gardner.

46 See Astro (105-108, 225); Benson’s The True Adventures of John Steinbeck (239-250); and Motley.

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American system. The text implies that the conditions imposed on the migrants not only

threaten to turn the family upside down, but to overturn the national order. 47

Throughout the novel the fundamental vision of the family is transformed. At the novel’s beginning each character more or less looks after his or her individual best interests. Ma looks after the interests of the family, and the family always comes first.

But slowly the importance of the family breaks down. By the novel’s end, Ma states philosophically, “Use ta’ be the fambly was fust. It ain’t so now. It’s anybody. Worse off we get, the more we got to do” (463). Critics often describe this as a move from “I” to

“We” in the text. Indeed, this is the dangerous moment of revolution the text warns us about. The narrator explains, “you who hate change and fear revolution. . . . Here is the

anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. . .It was my mother’s blanket – take it for

the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning from ‘I’ to ‘we’” (155-156).

This new collectivity, “we,” is threatening to the order of society. Full-scale revolt will

result if systematic reforms are not undertaken. The novel depicts the transformation

from individual to collective as both threatening and beautiful. Through unity with the

collective, the individual becomes more than himself or herself.

This prompts the question, who is the “we” in the novel? What is the new

collective identity being formed? The migrants are displaced white American citizens

who are treated like foreign, non-white slaves rather than as consenting free labor. As

such, they are prevented from realizing the privileges of their citizenship. At the same

47 The character of Ma Joad can be read also as a reflection of Depression-era fears about men’s economic failures. Cultural historians contend that men were psychologically afflicted by their lost economic power, while observers at the time worried over changing authority in the family due to changing economic circumstances. See McElvaine; and Mintz and Kellogg.

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time, the owners who deny them those rights are marked as un-American figures, who

“stole” California and transformed it into an un-American landscape. The migrants thus

emerge as the true Americans, under a new definition of citizenship. As Ma Joad

prophetically proclaims, “we’re the people” (291). The migrants reinvent their national

identity and sense of national unity based not on the family, but on a larger sense of the

community. Both individuals and families move towards a broader definition of

themselves.48

The Dust Bowl migration depicts the changed relations among citizenship, government, and American nature. The changing model of family both demands and prefigures a new form of national governance. The old meanings of citizenship, nature, and government do not hold up in new circumstances. It is within this framework that we need to examine the culminating image of the text. After Rose of Sharon’s baby is stillborn, she offers her breast to a starving man, feeding a stranger rather than her own

progeny. In doing so, “her lips came together and smiled mysteriously,” (473) echoing the moment of Casy’s sacrificial arrest, “on his lips there was a faint smile and on his face a curious look of conquest” (277). As numerous scholars have argued, these are the moments of Christ-like spiritual transcendence in the text.49 It is also the moment where

the family breaks down entirely, and instead a sense of what Steinbeck calls “manself” arises. The family reconfigures around a collective American identity. 50 The narrator

states, “The people in flight from the terror behind – strange things happened to them,

48 For a discussion of the “we” in Depression-era Mexican American narratives see Rivera (162-164).

49 For a description of the numerous biblical readings of the text see Ditsky’s “The End of The Grapes of Wrath”; and Lisca’s “The Dynamics of Community in The Grapes of Wrath.”

50 See Ditsky’s “The End of The Grapes of Wrath”; French’s “The Education of the Heart in The Grapes of Wrath”; Lisca’s “The Dynamics of Community in The Grapes of Wrath”: and Britch and Lewis.

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some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever” (125). The

bitter cruelty over which the Joads triumph, seen through Rose of Sharon’s final act, offers a particular type of American redemption.

One might even read their deliverance to “manself” in light of the spiritual redemption captured in traditional frontier myth narratives described by Richard Slotkin:

The Joads’ descend into the violent conflicts of Californian agriculture and re-emerge in a purified state (collectivity). Rather than purification from the ills of European civilization, the Joads may be cleansed of the ills of industrial capitalism and the environmental sins that lead to the Dust Bowl, re-emerging as the quintessential

Americans.51 Just as Turner’s “new man” required a transformed government from

colonialism and Europe, Steinbeck’s new “manself” may require a transformation of

government from an orientation toward property owning individuals and family units to

new forms of citizen-subjectivity.

In New Deal Modernism, Michael Szalay argues that New Deal fiction, including

The Grapes of Wrath, depicts a transformation of the citizen’s relationship to government

whereby the individual male became the principal of public policy through bodily

absence from the family, while women’s bodies move from the private sphere to a public

role of nourishment. Tom exemplifies this absence. He departs even before the novel’s

final action. Moreover, he appears almost to dissipate into air or spirit. He tells his

mother, “I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ – I’ll be in the way kids laugh

when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready” (436). The political transformation

of the nation requires his absence, just as it requires Rose of Sharon’s body to step

51 See Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation; Slotkin’s The Fatal Environment; and Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence.

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forward for the public good. Thus the Joads as the new American family, and Tom and

Rose of Sharon, as the new American citizens, have completed their transformation.

In the novel’s final scene however Rose of Sharon suckles a dying old man rather

than her newborn baby. The baby, born of the conditions of Rose of Sharon’s

displacement, abandonment, and poverty, represents reproduction and new life in the

novel. It is stillborn. There is a subtle implication that revolution, itself a new thing born

of displacement, abandonment, and poverty, may prove stillborn as well. When Rose of

Sharon suckles the dying old man, she nourishes the old, regardless of its weakened state,

rather than sustain the new.52 Thus the final tableau can be read in multiple ways; it

contains political ambiguity. On one hand the image is reaffirming; the old will not be

abandoned in favor of the new. Perhaps processes of modernization and industrialization,

symbolized in the novel by the tractor, ought not to be nourished at the expense of older

ways of being and living. Likewise, the white American migrants should not rush into

the “new thing” of revolution. The old government, the older way, can be saved if it is

properly nourished. The image represents hope through the ability of individuals to grow

and change, and the possibility of the American government itself finding strength

through the acts of its new collectivity of citizens.

On the other hand, by suckling a dying man rather than her own baby, Rose of

Sharon represents a perversion of the family. Tom Joad is a convicted murderer who has

rejected Christianity, and has little ability to control his temper. He shows no inclination

to acquire a wife and reproduce the American nation, and will likely be killed as quickly

as Casey. Thus the transformed American citizenry, as represented by Rose of Sharon

52 For discussions of Steinbeck’s ending see Ditsky’s “The End of The Grapes of Wrath”; Kocela; and Matton.

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and Tom Joad, will not be reproductive. Moreover, the notion of family captured through

the collective community demonstrated in this final scene is incompatible with the idea of

family upon which the federal government is modeled. Rose of Sharon’s perversion of

the family threatens to become a perversion of the nation. Her action is both dangerous

and threatening. Simultaneously, the completed transformation of the citizen and the

family does not extend more than symbolically to the transformation of government and land-relations in California. It remains to be seen how exactly the land inequity in

California will be resolved. The future of the nation remains in doubtful hands.

In failing to provide a clear resolution to the political queries highlighted by the

Great Depression and the Dust Bowl migration, Steinbeck’s novel is not itself a failure. It captures the ideological tensions that made the subject of the Dust Bowl migration and its narration powerful and compelling for its audience. Must we abandon the mythic

American relationship to nature (farm, frontier, Eden) in order to industrialize and modernize? What defines citizenship when pioneer relationships to the land are removed? Will the government and other citizens respond adequately to these changing notions of American belonging, or is a new American revolution on its way? By refusing to provide unambiguous solutions, and instead reaffirming the power of the government to do good, and the common humanity in a collective migrant subjectivity, the novel provides hope without resolution. The novel reveals the ideological contradictions at the heart of the imagined relationship between American citizenship and the American landscape.53

53 It is tempting to equate the political ambiguity in Steinbeck’s text with the ambiguity found by Leo Marx in what he terms complicated pastorals, particularly as Marx finds such complicated pastorals predominately in literature. However, Conlogue asserts that Marx’s pastoral framework has been over- applied to farm literature. Because the opposition between rural and urban within a pastoral framework

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Ultimately, the novel reinforces the racialization of American citizenship as

specifically white. The text repeatedly refers to the white owners and other white

Californians as potentially part of the new citizenry the migrants create. We are told, “the

quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we.’

(156). That is, white owners could be part of this new American unity, but are cut off

from it through their un-American selfish individualism and fascist behavior. In contrast,

the non-white migrant workers are never included in the growing “we”.54 Thus

Steinbeck’s novel reifies the racial division of American inclusion. A comparison with

Sanora Babb’s novel Whose Names Are Unknown highlights The Grapes of Wrath’s

depiction of United States citizenship as white.

Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown

The relationship between landscape and political belonging is also near to the core of

Sanora Babb’s novel Whose Names Are Unknown. Written in 1939 but not published

until 2004, Babb’s work rivals Steinbeck’s in its artistry. Like The Grapes of Wrath,

Whose Names Are Unknown focuses on the displacement of an Oklahoma farm family,

the Dunnes, and the exploitation they and their fellow migrants encounter in the fields of

California. The title references the wording on Depression-era eviction notices, “To John

Doe and Mary Doe whose True Names are Unknown” (xiii). While a case cannot be

retains an urban center, Conlogue finds a Georgic mode of reading more appropriate to many farm narratives, including The Grapes of Wrath. I find Conlogue’s overall argument compelling, but am still considering whether I agree with the implications of its application to The Grapes of Wrath.

54 The possible exception here is Jule, the half Indian character. He plays a significant role in the collective “we” as he first spots the instigators at the Government Camp. Why did Steinbeck choose to include a Native American figure when there were more Mexican workers at the camps? As scholars such as Huhndorf and Deloria have demonstrated the image of the Indian was often used to claim a type American belonging to the nation. Thus Jule may function in the novel to demonstrate that the Joads and other migrants ‘naturally’ belonged to the American nation, and were somehow indigenous to it, without threatening Steinbeck’s racial construction of the migrants as white. See Deloria’s Playing Indian; and Huhndorf.

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made that Babb’s unpublished novel influenced the national consciousness in the same

way as Steinbeck’s best-seller, her text is as deserving of attention as the more popular

(and published) works of the time. 55 It is not only in the most prominent works of an era

that ideologies become apparent. The perspectives that Babb’s novel illuminates deepen

our understandings of the ideological relationship between nature and citizenship that

structured broader beliefs about the meaning of the Great Depression and the future of the

American nation.

Who Was Sanora Babb?

Like most authors, Sanora Babb’s life experiences and political beliefs significantly

influenced her literary output. In order to understand Babb’s ideological differences with

Steinbeck, it is necessary to know something about her background. Babb was born in

Oklahoma Territory in 1907, the year Oklahoma became a state. Her fictionalized

autobiography, An Owl on Every Post (1970) recounts this period of her life, which was

also influential in her depiction of the region in Whose Names Are Unknown. Yet she

also spent significant periods of her childhood in Kansas and Colorado. Her father

shifted careers throughout her early life, from baker to basketball player to gambler. Her

first published novel, The Lost Traveler (1958), focused on a father-daughter relationship

much like her own. After attending college, Babb worked at local newspapers and

magazines, until deciding to take off for California in 1929, at age twenty-two. Babb

55 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, historians reconsidered the history of Depression-era women. See Ruiz’s Cannery Women, Cannery Lives; Scharf; and Ware. As part of that trend, the visibility of radical and/or proletarian literature of the period by women increased. Although Babb, the author of Whose Names Are Unknown (1939) was a literary presence during the 1930s, she has not received the same critical attention as her comrades Meruel Le Suer and Tillie Olson. Rabinowitz contends that in radical women’s novels of the time class-consciousness was expressed through gendered metaphors and gender while was expressed in classed ways. Haskle explores the representation of women wage workers in Depression-era fiction focusing on the contradictions of the “double-day” and myth of the female wage worker as preventing male employment. Babb’s novel was published after both of these works. See also Hapke’s Daughters of the Great Depression.

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intended to become a newspaper reporter in the Golden State, but the Depression

interfered and she ended up unemployed and even homeless for a time, an experience that

radicalized her. She joined the local Communist-led John Reed Club in the early 1930s,

traveled to the American Writers Congress in New York in 1935, and to the USSR in

1936. She joined the Communist Party in 1938, as she was writing Whose Names Are

Unknown. She published short stories and poetry in a wide variety of venues such as

California Quarterly, and the Communist-sponsored New Masses and Daily Worker. Her

personal circle included Tiller Lerner (later Tillie Olson), Richard Wright, and Carlos

Bulosan. During this period she met and married world renowned Chinese-American

filmmaker James Wong Howe, who was not a communist. Their marriage became legal

only after California’s anti-miscegenation laws were lifted from the books in 1949.56

In the meantime, Babb’s political work included efforts on behalf of migrant farm

workers, the Spanish Republic and the Anti-Nazi League. Babb remained a left-leaning

Californian short-story writer up through the 1950s, when she spent a year during the

height of McCarthyism in self-imposed exile in Mexico.57 Although her politics became

more “liberal” than radical following this period, her sharp political critique remained

prominent in later works.58

Sanora Babb Meets John Steinbeck

It is well known that John Steinbeck relied on Farm Security Administration employee

and Weedpatch camp manager Tom Collins as an informant for his novel The Grapes of

56 In addition to the texts see Alan M. Wald’s “Introduction” to Cry of the Tinamou and Lawrence R. Roger’s “Foreword” to Whose Names Are Unknown.

57 See Wald’s “Introduction” to Cry of the Tinamou and Rodgers’s “Foreword” to Whose Names Are Unknown.

58 Wald recognized an incipient feminism in many of her writings; one might also identify an underlying eco-feminism, particularly in short stories such as “The Matriarch of the Court.”

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Wrath.59 It is less well known that Tom Collins also worked with another novelist,

Sanora Babb. In 1938, the year Babb joined the Communist Party, she volunteered for

the Farm Security Administration in the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys. Through this

job she became close to Collins, who asked her to keep notes. Collins, impressed with

her observations, asked to show them to another novelist, almost certainly Steinbeck.60

Babb shared her notes with Collins, and shortly thereafter completed her novel

Whose Names Are Unknown (1939), which was under contract with Random House.

Steinbeck’s novel came out just prior to the scheduled publication of Babb’s work. Her editor, Bennett Cerf, pulled her publication, writing, “What rotten luck . . . Obviously, another book at this time about exactly the same subject would be a sad anti-climax.”

Showing confidence in her future development, Cerf provided an advance on her next

project. Whose Names Are Unknown remained unpublished until 1990, when an excerpt appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review. The complete manuscript was finally published in 2004. Babb subsequently told The Chicago Tribune in an interview that she

was a better novelist than Steinbeck, who she had met just once, because her work was

more realistic. She passed away in December 2005.61

It can not be said with certainty that Steinbeck saw Babb’s notes, though literary

critic Lawrence R. Rodgers believes it likely given the types of materials Steinbeck

59 Steinbeck’s novel is dedicated to “Carol who willed it and Tom who lived it.” Carol was Steinbeck’s wife; Tom referred to Tom Collins. Steinbeck later recommended Collins as on-set consultant for the film version of The Grapes of Wrath, where he had significant influence. See Benson’s The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer; and Parini.

60 See Rodgers’s “Foreword” to Whose Names Are Unknown.

61 See Wald’s “Introduction” to Cry of the Tinamou and Rodgers’s “Foreword” to Whose Names Are Unknown. Also see Woo’s “Acclaimed Writer Sanora Babb Dead at 98.”

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routinely borrowed from Collins.62 The issue, however, is not whether Steinbeck lifted

ideas or details from Babb. Even if he borrowed heavily from her work, it would not be a

shocking revelation about a man often accused of stealing and artistically revising the

stories and experiences of others.63 Rather, what is significant about the two novels is

the remarkable political distance between their renderings despite the superficial

similarities of their form and content. The ideas contained within Steinbeck’s novel may

appear to some on passing glance to be those of a communist. Yet sustained

consideration of the bedrock ideas expressed through both texts, intentional or otherwise,

demonstrate the fundamental patriotism (with its racial implications) at work in

Steinbeck’s novel compared to the characters’ formation of anti-nationalist/anti-racist

revolutionary class consciousness celebrated in Babb’s work.

Whose Names Are Unknown

In Whose Names Are Unknown the failure of the traditional relationship between

citizenship and nature prefigures the failure of the American nation, and results in a

reconfiguration of identity around class lines rather than ethnicity, race, or nationality.

Although the novel lacks a clear protagonist, the focus is unmistakably on the Dunnes.

The first half of the novel is situated in a community of Oklahoma farmers, where Milt

Dunne, his wife Julia, his father, and his two daughters (Lonnie and Myra), farm. This section demonstrates the shift of the characters from a land-based near-subsistence existence towards an increasingly capitalist economy that ultimately dispossesses them of their land. The Dunnes, leaving their grandfather who claims he is too old to start again, caravan to California with the widowed Mrs. Starwood, her children, and Frieda, the

62 See Rodgers “Foreword” in Sanora Babb Whose Names Are Unknown.

63 Benson’s The True Adventures of John Steinbeck; and Parini.

127 discontented daughter of the richest farmer in town. The second half of the novel focuses on their experiences as migrant farm laborers in California. The characters undergo a political transformation culminating in a massive strike, which they lose, but, we are told, “in their falling, [they will] rise again” (222).

If Steinbeck’s novel narrates a transformation in the relationship between nature and citizen that requires a transformation in government, Babb describes an alienation from nature and labor that requires a rejection of citizenship and a destruction of government. Like Steinbeck, Babb opens her novel in Oklahoma and ends in California.

Both Babb and Steinbeck describe the ways in which the Dust Bowl refugees were removed from their land, using imagery similar to Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains, and they both describe the loss of a formerly present mythic American relationship with the land. Steinbeck describes the breakdown of the individual relationship with the land reborn as a collective relationship at his novel’s end. In contrast, Babb describes a process of alienation in Oklahoma comparable in certain aspects to the transition from feudalism to capitalism described by Marx. Transplanted to

California, the characters are forced to adapt to an industrial situation that transforms the class and gender stratification of their previous life. In her rejection of nationalism,

Babb’s configuration of race and citizenship is far from that offered by Steinbeck. Her characters are tutored by heroic figures, including the black union man Garrison and the

Filipino organizer Pedro. Babb’s white Dust Bowl migrants will succeed only when they learn from those whose resistance to oppression preceded them. Yet Babb’s text manages both to tokenize its two non-white leaders, Pedro and Garrison, and to obfuscate the intersections of race and class in emphasizing the similarity between the two modes

128 of oppression. Babb’s conscious anti-racism, that is, transforms into class-reductionism through the novel’s internationalist framework.

Unlike representations of Dust Bowl migrants found in Steinbeck’s writings and

Dorothea Lange’s photographs, Babb provides no narrative of her characters’ journey between Oklahoma and California. The two halves of the novel are presented almost as if they are separate tales, with a continuity of characters. In emphasizing the two locations rather than the journey between, Babb discourages a reading of her novel as a nationally representative journey of one family that stands in for the journey of the nation through

Depression. In contrast to works like Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and right-wing novelist Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s Of Human Kindness (1940), there is little mention of the characters’ ethnic or regional heritage (showing ethnic and regional diversity to demonstrate an American whole). By refusing to focus on a single journey, Babb rejects a narration of the Dust Bowl as nationally representative. Instead, one sees a simultaneous political awakening occurring both in the Oklahoma Panhandle, among those farmers who stay behind, and in California’s fields. The novel functions to emphasize local struggles as both individually unique, and as part of a larger whole.

Through her narrative choices, Babb creates a representation of the Dust Bowl migration that cannot stand in for the national journey, even as her text makes national predictions of a coming class-consciousness and militant union activity.

Oklahoma Alienation

Because of Sanora Babb’s Communist Party membership, her novel’s subject matter, and the general political landscape of California at the time of the novel’s production, Whose

Names Are Unknown lends itself to Marxist interpretation. Through such a reading,

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themes of alienation, human potential, capitalist greed, and the naturalization of

American revolutionary thought emerge.64 In their move to California, the novel’s focal

characters become alienated from nature and the products of their labor but find new

relationships with other human beings which ultimately allow them to achieve the

historic potential of humanity in other ways, namely revolutionary unionism.

The relationship of the small farmers to their land in the Oklahoma Panhandle is

reminiscent of a relationship to nature and labor not yet alienated. Of Milt, the family’s

father, we are told, “But whatever other pleasures he had in town, nothing was quite like

the satisfaction he felt after he planted or harvested a crop. This kind of feeling is one of

the things a man lives for, he told himself on one of the long walks to a neighbor’s farm,

the feeling that I made something” (58). The characters see a direct connection between

the work they do and the products produced. The direct relationship between labor and

production celebrated in the novel’s beginning cannot be separated from the direct

relationship to the land: “I made something with the soil, together we made a crop grow in order and loveliness” (emphasis mine) (58). The efforts of nature and humans combine to produce the crop. Ownership is a direct result of one’s labor, a strong sentiment in The Grapes of Wrath as well. As Milt Dunne and his father farm the earth,

“They looked at the land they had planted the day before, and the land they would plant this day, and they felt a sense of possession growing in them for the piece of land that was theirs” (6). Human labor and nature combine to create possession. Once possession of land is denied, the relationship between land and labor is severed. In other words, only

64 Marx describes alienation as including the state in which a person, group, or society is severed from the products of its labor. See Marx and Engels (69-85).

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with alienation from the environment, can an alienation of labor arise, and only with an alienation of labor, can workers be alienated from nature.

The novel defines human potential through the dual desire for freedom and

security.65 In a society without alienation, freedom and security are found through a

direct relationship to land and labor. Old Man Dunne thinks, “The earth was generous

and could give him his needs, and stir his heart and soul. Did he not many times stand

and look at the far horizon, feeling the tug deep in his thoughts as if his being were

stretching and drawing out beyond him? Did he not hunger for more than he knew and

felt when he stood like this?” (39). Thus he has security in the land which could meet his

physical needs, and provide freedom for his “heart and soul.” Through the relationship to

land and labor, Old Man Dunne realizes what Marx described as the historical

possibilities of humanity:

It seemed to him the whole of his experience and observation of others pointed straight and true to one thing: that man was capable of making a good life for himself, of guiding his existence, of finding a better answer to the longings of his spirit, once he learned a way to throw off the halter of power on earth that controlled the things men created in their work (39).

Babb’s characters are surprisingly philosophical, and the dignity of her characters

implicitly refutes the stereotypes found in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932) and

repeated in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The characters, like Gramsci’s organic

intellectuals, are thinking beings who understand their place in the social order and

believe in their own ability to make change.66

65 This sentiment encompasses the pastoral ideal as described by Leo Marx.

66 It is highly unlikely that Babb’s read Gramsci, as this work was published in Italian in 1937 and not translated to English until 1970.

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Human potential is most concretely captured in the novel through the agency of

individuals. Babb’s characters repeatedly demonstrate a particular faith in humanity’s

ability to make the world better. Old Man Dunne tells his granddaughter Myra, “Maybe

you can fix the world. Its out of joint somewheres” (25). Likewise, the child Tessie

“began to image ways of helping these poor people she knew. . . giving them back their

farms, giving them houses instead of tents, giving them herds of cows and gallons of

milk, giving them happiness” (151). Throughout the novel characters take action and

demonstrate their agency. Mrs. Starwood storms into the bank with a dead skunk as a

response to an eviction order explaining, “This is all we raised this year above the

interest” (111). When the banker shouts, “You’ve disturbed the peace!” Mrs. Starwood

responds, “You’ve disturbed my peace for years” (112). Similarly, when the bankers

come for Old Granny Cyclone’s land she whips out a shotgun and proclaims “Git, you

buzzards. . . This is what I use for hawks and buzzards” (66). Even the store keeper

Flannery’s suicide becomes heroic when the characters discover that he burned “all us

farmers bills” before dying (116). This sense of agency extends to the youngest children

who, by the novel’s end, organize a school strike in solidarity with their parents’ strike in the fields: “[Tessie’s] going to organize us to quit school and people will hear what they’re doing to us. She wants to be like Pedro, and Lacy, and that girl at the union

office” (210). The individual acts of resistance characters like Mrs. Starwood undertake early in the novel contrasts with the solidarity and community of their actions in the final strike.

The Double-Headed Monster

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According to Babb, a two-headed monster creates the financial struggle in Oklahoma,

and the consequent loss of human potential. The monster’s first head represents local

greed, and the second signifies the larger system of capitalism represented by the

presence of the banks.67 The Brennermann family embodies the relationship between

these two sides of destruction. The Brennermann family owns more land than anyone

around, and the father works for the local bank. His profession ties together the banking

industry with the growing land monopolies in Oklahoma. The Brennermanns do not work

their own land; unlike the other characters, they are divorced from the soil. The

schoolteacher Anna, the Brennermanns’ youngest daughter, is aware of this dynamic:

Finally, as she learned more of its various functions and more about the hardworking, sacrificing families involved in its existence, she began to see it as a mercenary business profiting most off the misfortunes and desperate circumstances of others. It seemed now to her, strangely intertwined as it was with her own personal life, a monster gorging itself on the farmlands and crops of the people she knew, who had lost their independence either through accidents of nature or through the fluctuating prices for crops and animals – and –in general- the depression (33).

The novel most clearly demonstrates the Brennermann family’s greed when Mrs.

Brennermann sends the pregnant Julia home in a storm to avoid feeding her dinner; Julia

miscarries from exposure, and her husband shouts, “Goddamn that old woman!” (41).

The death of Julie’s unborn baby demonstrates that future generations can not be

maintained on the farm because of the greed of the rich. The young are born dead. The

loss of the baby, the family’s only son, takes on particular personal significance to Milt,

even as it remains a larger symbol in the novel more generally. The baby’s miscarriage

represents the final break in the Dunne family’s patriarchal lineage; the grandfather’s

land passed to the father and then to the son. Milt is brought to his knees by the loss,

67 This is reminiscent of a longer tradition in U.S. novels of agrarian dissent where banks play the role of villain. See Pratt’s introduction to I Hear Men Talking.

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sobbing for the first time since he was a boy, until finally, “in anger he shook his fist,

shook it hard and fierce at something in the world” (45). During the Great Depression, reproduction remained linked to anxieties about the composition of the nation through the granting of citizenship to those born on American soil. 68 The work of eugenicists

concerned with “race suicide” directly contributed to the framework for the 1924

Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, while amendments to the Cable Act throughout the

1930s provided derivative citizenship for the first time to the children of white and black

citizen mothers.69 In both the legal and cultural terms of the time, the failure of the

Dunnes’ reproduction heralded anxieties about America’s pastoral potential.

If the Brennanmen family’s greed accounts most directly for the baby’s death, the

wider dynamics that allow their greed are explained in detail. Lorentz’s The Plow That

Broke the Plains indicts the combination of greed and governmental polices that led to

the over-cultivation of the plains, particularly the overuse of wheat. Such a lesson is

repeated in Babb’s work: “Earlier the government had opened the dryland grazing plains

of buffalo grass to farming; one could obtain 320 acres for ‘proving up’ the land by living

on it, building a home, and working it. It was a mistake to plow the plains in a land of

little rain and wind, wind, wind, and the mistake resulted in dust, which covered fields

and buildings, killed people and animals, and drove farmers out with nothing” (6). New

Deal policies are not exempt from blame. Historians commonly acknowledge that the

68 See Gardner.

69 See Higham; Gardner; and Ngai.

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Agricultural Adjustment Act and other farm polices increased the displacement of small farmers.70 As the narrator explains:

The Longs were the poorest of all the farmers in the neighborhood. They had never recovered the losses of livestock suffered under the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers to not produce. Due to the poor condition of their cattle, many were shot, and after paying the process taxed on the ones they shipped, they had no return at all. The drought forced him to buy feed for what remained of his herd, until the bank took the cattle on a loan. So he was totally dependent on his crops in the dust years. Folks all knew that one winter they had to rip the floor out of their small house for fuel, leaving them to walk on the dirt (53).

It is the intervention of capitalist logic into agriculture that prevents the characters from simultaneously achieving freedom and security. Faced with the realities of industrialization’s intrusion into agriculture Milt’s father thinks, “Strange how a man longed for both freedom and security, and the one could not be had together with the other” (60). The inequalities of capitalism force the separation of freedom and security for the poor. Milt wonders, “Why was one man with leisure to waste and another with no hour to spare? The papers were filled with pictures of people coming and going from coast to coast, to foreign lands, around the world” (60). Through capitalist corruption of the pastoral idyll, the novel illustrates that the machine in the garden is not technology itself or even industrialization, but the capitalist juggernaut.

Marxist Technology and Industrial Unionism

The simultaneous occurrence of freedom and security has two interdependent hopes: scientific efficiency and revolutionary unionism. Through the character of Max, the novel connects scientific efficiency to industrial unionization. Max embraces and preaches both beliefs. Significantly, Max is the only character to find a romantic relationship in

Oklahoma. When the other characters depart for California, he stays with the

70 See Foley; McElvaine; Mintz and Kellogg; and Worster’s Dustbowl.

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schoolteacher Anna. The dual theories of production encapsulated in Max’s thought

(scientific efficiency and industrial unionism) appear to offer the reproductive hope for

Oklahoma. Similarly, Anna’s sister Frieda, a spinster in Oklahoma, finally finds her

own potentially reproductive relationship after her conversion to revolutionary unionism

in California. Thus successful reproduction becomes a symbol for the possibilities of equitable production in the novel.

Examinations of the Dust Bowl today often link mechanization (technology) with

environmental destruction.71 As historian Douglas Sackman contends, artists and intellectuals of the Depression era also lost faith in technology in response to the ecological collapse of the Dust Bowl.72 Yet, their technological trepidations frequently

fell short of the anti-modernism and anti-industrialism found in environmental

primitivism and back-to-the-land movements. Anxieties encompassed by the machine in

the garden motif were more likely invocations against capitalist greed. Many

progressives, including Babb, remained committed to the possibilities of an industrial

modernity that encompassed the values of democracy and natural harmony that the

idealized pastoral landscape typically represented.73

71 See Sackman’s Orange Empire; and Worster’s Dustbowl.

72 See Sackman’s Orange Empire.

73 Both Lange and Taylor’s American Exodus and Carey McWilliams’s Ill Fares the Land demonstrate this dual commitment to industrial modernity and traditional rural American values. McWilliams explains, “There was a time in American history when people did have an organic relation to the land upon which they lived, and worked, and built their homes. They were as much a part of that land, of that landscape, as the trees and rocks, the streams and the grass “(IFL 386). Yet, this time and this relationship to the land is lost and “there is no point whatever in attempting to reverse a clearly defined historical trend. (IFL 387). Similarly, Lange and Taylor state that “The advance of the machine should not, and probably cannot be halted” (153) and that “In order to preserve what we can of a national ideal [captured in the Homesteading Act] “new patterns, we believe, must be developed” (135). These include “joint purchase of machinery, large-scale corporate farms under competent management with the working farmers for stockholders, and cooperative farms” (155). Collectivization represents the only way to combine “economies of machinery and organization” with “elements of our national ideal” (155).

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In Whose Names Are Unknown, Max explains, “We’re getting more and more

scientific. We want improved farming, and we want improved conditions to lessen the

gamble” (102). This sentiment correlates with 1930s representations of the environment

and technology that built off the Progressive movement (1890s-1920s). The New Deal

increased the human resources put towards conservation with thousands of volunteers

planting trees and stabilizing stream banks to benefit wildlife refuges, even as other

public works projects, such as the massive increase in roads, had adverse long term

environmental consequences. During the 1930s, the government response to ecological

disasters continued to promote scientific management of natural resources popular in the

Progressive Era, and supposedly improved through the rise of ecology.74 Babb’s

depiction of scientific efficiency leading to plenty rather than scarcity of natural resources also spoke to a traditional Marxist view on the relationship between nature and labor.75

In Babb’s novel, the characters’ relationship to nature transforms from a pioneer relationship of proximity to nature to a relationship of scientific management, where technology will provide the masses with both comfort and plenty.

The farmers’ embrace of technological progress directly links to their interest in industrial unionism. Like McWilliams, who alleges in Factories in the Field that

California’s migrant farmers labor in industrial conditions, Babb contends that the tenant farmers and small farm owners in Oklahoma are likewise analogous to an industrial workforce. They, too, can benefit from organization. As Max says, “farmers have got to realize that they belong with others who work. We’ve got to wake up and find out about things and stick together more, the way the workers do in the cities” (98). The characters

74 See Dorsey; Hays; Sutter; and Worster’s Dustbowl.

75 See John Bellamy Foster’s work.

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dream of utilizing the power they could obtain through collective action to demand

inclusive technologies rather than the exclusive technologies placed on their land by

private capital. Max explains, “We need dams . . . but we need big ones, not just private

ones with high-price water the way it is here now” (97). Thus the Oklahoma farmers

serve as the direct connection between a rejection of capitalism and a celebration of

technology. As cultivators of American soil, these farmers naturalize the link between

modernization and progress on one hand, and revolutionary anti-capitalism on the other.

In the works of both Steinbeck and Babb, American revolutionary rhetoric rises from the

salt of the earth, those who work the soil. It is almost as if it grows from the American

land vis a vis American experiences, as an American crop.

In recognition of the changing conditions in Oklahoma, Babb’s characters

respond directly to the mythic American relationship to nature. They recognize these

myths in their own origin stories, even as they reject the myths as representative of

present-day realities. Old Sandy, a friend of Old Man Dunne explains, “Me and him is

old nesters. We proved up goviment claims side by side in the early days” (52). In this

statement, Old Sandy includes himself and Old Man Dunne among the mythic American

pioneers who homesteaded government land in Oklahoma.76 The failure of the frontier

myth, the dream of their pioneering days, emerges in Old Man Dunne’s confession:

When I was a young feller, there was work to do for anybody with a mind to it . . . In those days we just went somewhere and started building a town. I proved up this land, I was going to settle down so I wouldn’t have to worry ‘bout getting old. Well, I got one foot in the grave and I got nothing to show for my work, and I ain’t the only one. . . I may lose my farm and then there’s no place to go. No more new land, no more free gold out west . . .(101).

76 This statement by Old Sandy can be read as Babb’s less offensive version of Steinbeck’s characters’ assertions that “Grandpa killed Indians; Pa killed snakes.”

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The myth of the frontier that gave hope to his younger self is dead. The farmers also remark on the failure of Jeffersonian democracy. As another older man stated, “‘Pears to me we ain’t taking enough part in the govamint. Ol’ Honest Abe said something about govamint for the people, by the people, of the people. I reckon we been taking it for granted that it was for the people without their recollecting that part about by the people”

(98). The myth of California as Eden is already gone. As Julia states early on, “I always heard only the people with money live there” (54). The collapse of these myths of the

American relationship with nature allows the characters to launch critiques against

American capitalism and the American nation, ultimately exchanging their remnants of national identity for class-consciousness.

As part of their “organic intellectual” dispositions, Babb’s characters denounce differences based on nationality or ethnicity. Instead the characters come to see class as the most defining feature of their identity. As Anna explains to her love interest Max,

“Interesting too . . . how we’re not really divided according to our nationalities, but by how much or how little money we have. Most of the differences are acquired, they depend on what money can buy you” (104). As part of the characters’ understanding of class differences, they consistently articulate a critique of World War I. One farmer’s wife, Mrs. Starwood, explains, “My brother is lying buried in foreign soil. God forbid my sons ever have to fight like wild beasts without good reason” (48). Many of the characters have children who died in the first World War. By implying they died without cause, fighting someone else’s battle, Babb’s novel aligns national interests with the interests of the upper class and depicts the lower classes as anti-war.77 Within the

77 The characters use their understandings of the injustice of World War I to critique the possibility of US entry into World War II. It would be inaccurate to simply attribute these anti-war rumblings to Babb’s

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characters’ thoughts we find not only a rejection of national interests but also an incipient

internationalism, seen for example in the discussion of wheat. According to the narrator,

“It gave the farmers a sudden feeling of being a vital part of the whole of America, even the world, when they remember the export of wheat, a warm good feeling of working together with people they would never see” (65). It is this same good feeling that they later rediscover through the solidarity of their union movement in California.

Given the novel’s rejection of national and ethnic belonging, how does Babb represent race? Like Steinbeck, Babb depicts the process through which the Dust Bowl migrants were racialized as no longer white. This process demonstrates a relationship between race and class. For example, Julia explains that some of the club women “want to have us all sterilized,” to which her husband responds, “Yow, they want to fix us like horses. Just good for work . . . I felt desperate when he said they don’t like their kids

mixing” (171). The novel describes the conventions of Jim Crow segregation as treating

people like animals, and as valuing them not as human beings but as de-humanized

workers. Moreover, racist accusations in the novel serve a direct purpose of political

repression. At one point, the bosses charge into a group of Dust Bowl migrants

screaming “white niggers” and attempt to remove one man in particular (154). The scene

is reminiscent of lynch mobs who murdered African Americans; the targeted man,

Martin, is falsely accused of sexually assaulting the boss’s wife.78 Milt explains to his

Communist Party membership. It is likely that Babb penned these lines prior to the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. Moreover, like many authors of the period, Babb’s Party membership did not dictate her artistic responses to the world. She did not see her art as her primary contribution to political change. See Wald’s “Introduction” to Cry of the Tinamou.

78 For example, the Scottsboro Trial would have kept such images in the public eye. As a Communist Party member Babb would not have been ignorant of the cause celebre. The trial began in 1931 and with appeals continued through 1937.

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children that Martin was actually attacked because “he’s trying to organize us” (156). In

Babb’s novel, bosses employ oppressive tactics against white migrants that are commonly directed at black communities. This suggests the economic motivations for

oppression and repression, echoing the economic understanding of race put forth in Carey

McWilliams’s Factories in the Field.

The prejudice deployed against the “Okies” affects the psychology of the children who begin to think, “‘Okie’ is a funny word, and an okie is me. Someone different.

Someone not as good” (164). However, unlike in Steinbeck’s novel, Babb’s characters do not try to reaffirm their whiteness or their citizenship through comparison to non- white workers. Rather, the characters’ growing understanding of their class position leads them to a sense of cross-racial solidarity: “You were just growling about the

Mexicans the other day working for nothing,” Julia said testily. “Oh well, I reckon they work for nothing for the same reason we do,” her husband responds (180). Babb’s depiction of the Dust Bowl migrants’ anti-racist education counters the knowledge we have both of the white migrants’ culture and of black Californians’ perceptions of the new workers. In Los Angeles the black community perceived white migrants as bringing the corrupting influence of Southern racism into the potentially free land of the far west. 79

Babb’s white characters, however, look to non-white characters for leadership.

Both Pedro and Garrison are unique in pre-World War II literary representations of

California’s migrant farm workers. Garrison is an African American man who has ties to

79 See Allmendinger; Flaming; and McBrooome. The perceptions of the Los Angeles black community may have been correct. James Gregory contended that Dust Bowl migrants were horrified by their perceptions of California as having looser attitudes towards racial mixing than their home states. See Gregory’s American Exodus and Weber (149).

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the union and experience in labor organizing.80 The novel does not avoid the nation’s

long history of racism in Garrison’s presentation. When Milt first meets him he:

waited automatically to hear the ‘suh’ and when it did not come, he was relieved. He had been wondering how he would say it, tell him not to. We’re both picking cotton for the same hand-to-mouth wages. I’m no better’n he is; he’s no worse. The memory of being called a white nigger in Imperial Valley lay in his mind unforgotten, sore, like an exposed nerve (185).

Milt looks up to Garrison. He instantly senses Garrison’s skills from dealing with a

lifetime of oppression. He thinks “Somehow he wanted this man’s respect, and suddenly

he was not ashamed to acknowledge it himself” (187). Milt’s instincts here are not

misplaced. When Garrison learns that a strike by inexperienced workers is underway, he

calls in the union for back-up. It is Garrison’s house at which the organizers gather. Babb

suggests that without the union (and Garrison’s leadership), the uprising would have been

crushed far more easily.

Babb’s inclusion of Garrison, along with his wife Phoebe, is significant in part

because of the absence of information and representations of black workers in

California’s fields.81 Little has been written or researched thus far on the experience of

black farm laborers in California during the Great Depression.82 Despite black workers’

hesitation to engage in agricultural labor (due to its associations with Southern

plantations), they toiled in California’s fields before, during, and after the Great

80 Garrison’s name recalls white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator, thus referencing an earlier cross-racial movement. The key literary representations of black agricultural workers by progressives in this period is Langston Hughes’s play Harvest collected in Duffy. Lange did take photographs of black farm workers in California, but they were not included in her major publications. One such image can be found in Street’s Photographing Farmworkers (114).

81 This includes a striking absence in literature of the period, in work by historians then and now, and in artistic representations of Californian farm workers in film, photography, and other artistic mediums.

82 For works on African Americans in the West in general and California specifically see Allmendinger; Broussard; De Graf, Mulroy, and Taylor’s edited volume; Flaming; Moore; Sides; Taylor; and Weber (6-7, 149, 182-183, 194, 290, 294).

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Depression.83 Each year from 1900 through the 1930s the number of black workers

forced into agriculture grew.84 While hundreds of thousands of white migrants moved to

California during the Depression years, available statistics show it is possible tens of

thousands of black farmers also migrated.85

Thus Garrison’s presence in the novel raises historical questions. Did Babb create

this figure out of her understanding of the significance of an African American presence

to anti-racist activism? Or, could Garrison be modeled on an actual black organizer in

California’s fields during the Great Depression? Black workers were certainly active in

some agricultural strikes, and one man in particular, Jesse McHenry, was a Communist

Party member who organized agricultural labor throughout the 1930s.86 Babb’s other non-white organizer, Pedro, is Filipino; Filipino workers actively and visibly organized in the fields.87 Yet if Babb envisioned her characters as representative of historical realities,

why the absence of Mexican workers in her novel? They were known to be one of the

most significant groups involved in the strikes of 1933-1934, the largest strikes in

California’s agricultural history.

83 Despite the popularity of some black Westerns, and the success of pioneer colonization ventures in the Midwest (the theme of Toni Morrison’s Paradise), the few agricultural colonization projects by African Americans in California failed. See Allmendinger; Johnson; and McBrooome.

84 See Allmendinger; and McBrooome.

85 Taylor and Lange’s American Exodus reports that 90% of 300,000 migrants were “native white Americans” (146). This would imply that 30,000 migrants (no small number) were likely African Americans and Mexican workers. See Arax; and Leseur.

86 Additionally, by 1939 around 5% of UCAPAWA (CIO affiliated union) members in Corcoran, California were African Americans, compared to 75% white, and 20% Mexican. See Weber (290, 294).

87 One might wonder if her close friendship with Carlos Bulosan (who was romantically involved with her sister Dorothy) affected her depiction of Pedro. Similarly, the young female union representative seems similar to Babb’s friend Dorothy Healy.

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Garrison’s textual presence, thus, raises the question of the symbolic value of

blackness and black workers in Babb’s text. Although in Factories in the Field, Carey

McWilliams mentions black workers, he largely ignores them. Ruth Comfort Mitchell in

Of Human Kindness represents black migrant workers in order to promote a disturbing

plantation model of employment. While black workers are absent from Steinbeck’s The

Grapes of Wrath, images of blackness and particularly of slavery haunt the novel

demonstrating the threat to white citizenship caused by the treatment of Dust Bowl

migrants. Whose Names Are Unknown depicts Garrison, Pedro, and Garrison’s wife

Phoebe in order to demonstrate a multi-racial workforce that defines themselves not by

race or by nation, but by class. The question of citizenship is never raised. In the terms

of the novel, the characters belong to the same categories of identity. They are the

oppressed working class. Thus in contrast to Steinbeck’s novel, Babb’s refusal to

describe non-white workers as “foreign” and white workers as “citizens” represents a

rejection of white citizenship and the privileged category of national identity.

However, race is not erased from the novel. Non-white characters in the text are

racially marked while the race of white characters is not mentioned. The text defines their whiteness as the universal norm, too obvious to be spoken. Moreover, the non-white characters provide a token multi-cultural leadership for the strike, with little sense of racial diversity among the strikers.88 The novel illustrates the acceptance of non-white

workers and non-white leadership by white workers, but gives little sense of how Phoebe,

Garrison or Pedro perceive the white characters. In the narrative strategy of the novel,

Pedro, Garrison, and Phoebe demonstrate that multi-racial solidarity is necessary to class

88 For a less-tokenizing depiction of a multi-racial strike see “Harvest,” co-authored by Langston Hughes and Ella Winter in Duffy, ed.

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struggle. Yet the novel fails to adequately portray the perspectives and concerns of these three characters. Through their presence, Babb claims that class-consciousness erases the racism of white workers, and that racial differences and racial discrimination are a function of class. While certainly Babb’s anti-racist position is commendable, her novel betrays a lack of intersectional analysis. While the white workers learn from Filipino and black workers’ strategic resistance, the novel neglects to demonstrate what Pedro and

Garrison gain for their sacrifices. Moreover, in equating the oppression Pedro and

Garrison face to that experienced by the white Dunne family, Babb’s novel fails to fully explore the ways in which race operates separately from class in U.S. society.

Yet, the solidarity enacted by the Dunnes with Garrison and Pedro further

illustrates the novel’s reconceptualization of political belonging. Both black workers and

the Filipino immigrants were included in the national territory without the granting of full

political belonging to the nation.89 Yet, in the politics practiced by Babb’s characters,

Pedro and Garrison became leaders of a rising laborers’ nation. Thus, through the reimagination of its citizenry, government is likewise reimagined.

Throughout the text we are told that the old system is dead or should be killed and

that a new system will have to arise. In the novel’s first half, Julia thinks, “Seems the

world’s like an old horse that’s had spells of colic ever so long and finally has such a bad

one he can’t get up and knows he’s about quit kicking. If it was a horse, his master

would shoot him and break in a new horse” (49). Thus Babb’s novel contends that

capitalism and the American nation should not be transformed or reformed. The world as

the Dunnes know it should be destroyed and built anew. This process is naturalized

through the use of farmers as characters and the employment of agricultural metaphors.

89 See Lopez (40); Lye; and Ngai.

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Max explains, “It’s like nature, maybe its human nature, that when something dies and rots something new and healthy grows up to take its place” (99). In the novel capitalism is rotten, and the old way of life is dying. The new way, industrial unionization linked to technological progress, is growing up “new and healthy” with a multi-racial class alliance that rejects the racism and nationalism linked with the older order of American life.

The contrast between the old and the new is heightened in the text by the transformation of the young; it is the children who are radicalized first. Tessie justifies stealing to prevent starvation; it is she who initially recognizes the ways in which her family’s labor is being stolen. At the end of the strike, when Julia complains she can barely keep from going back to work, her daughter Myra proclaims, “Not after they put

Daddy and Frieda in jail! . . . We can wait” (210). Children are the hope of the new world: “Julia looked at her children and she knew she did not understand them beyond her love. She would . . . look at their lives as they made them in hard and tortuous ways they seemed already to comprehend more clearly than she. And this gave her an ornament of comfort, a grave and tremulous spring of joy” (214). This hope of a new world reawakens human potential.

It is through their collective relationship in unionization that the characters revive their connections to each other and to the larger world. When Milt first meets with the union organizers, the narrator explains, “He was in the presence of something new, a part of something he could not name” (193-194). Through union activity, the workers begin to feel the freedom that Old Man Dunne felt from his land. They re-discover their philosophical souls. Babb writes, “It was better to starve than to become the shadow of a man on this earth that could give him a full, whole life. . . He wants more than bread and

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sleep; he wants himself – a man to wear the dignity of his reason” (203). In the text’s

final moments, humanity is reborn: “the word love lay in the warm air of the little tent for

each of them to feel in the unashamed and simple truth of his knowing” (221). In the

text’s final line we are told, “They would rise and fall and, in their falling, rise again”

(222). The bonds of nation reliant on human division and labor segmentation are broken

as the multi-racial community of workers became “as one man” (222). Thus, Babb’s

novel finds the possibility for human potential, the ability to simultaneously achieve

freedom and security, in multi-racial revolutionary unionism.

Conclusion

The Grapes of Wrath affirms the Dust Bowl migrants’ white citizenship by the contrast

created between the Joads’ relationship to the land and the relationship of non-white

workers to the land. The novel constructs the Joads’ whiteness against images of blackness, which are equated with slavery in the context of agricultural labor. Tropes of the frontier narrative allow the appropriation of Native American imagery and establish the Joads’ indigenous relationship to the American landscape. The text establishes the

Joads’ Jeffersonian relationship to the land in contrast to the feudal and imperial

relationship illustrated by un-American owners in California and their foreign

“unassimilable” Latino and Asian workers. Steinbeck inaccurately describes these

workers as transient and lacking citizenship and thus easily imported and deported. In

contrast he depicts the Joads as white American citizens with an indigenous relationship

to the American landscape, who consequently pose a revolutionary threat to the

American government if their privileges of white citizenship are not honored. Moreover,

the Joads’ citizenship is transformed through their dispossession. Tom and Rose of

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Sharon emerge as new citizen-subjects who, in moving away from the individuality of

Jeffersonian pastoral democracy towards the collectivity of “manself,” require a transformed version of the American government. The political ambiguity of Steinbeck’s text relies on the inability of the newly transformed citizens to form a reproductive family and the unknown possibility of the national response to the Joads’ condition.

In contrast, Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown rejects the significance of white citizenship for the dispossessed migrants. Rather than embrace an identity formulated on lines of race and nationality, the Dunnes contribute to a multi-racial political body defined in terms of class. The explicit inclusion of the black laborer

Garrison and the Filipino organizer Pedro in leadership roles affirm the separation of this political body from the white citizenship that characterized the American nation. Yet the novel tokenizes their leadership, failing to show a fully integrated workforce or to represent the subjectivity of non-white characters. Moreover, the text’s class reductionism fails to demonstrate the complex relationship among race, class, and citizenship that would have been necessary for workers to find true liberation.

While both Babb and Steinbeck’s texts blame capitalism for the disruption of the pastoral ideal, both works also contain hope that the transformation undergone by the migrant subject will ultimately lead to national progress. While rural dispossession demonstrated a challenge to the American pastoral ideal and the future of white citizenship, some progressive observers perceived modernization and technology as inevitable and perhaps not undesirable. The challenge was the political incorporation of the migrant subject to a modern and industrialized world. The highway was alive with

148 travelers during the Great Depression. Yet the certainty of their destination was not ensured.

World War II dramatically shifted the material conditions of the United States and the demographics of agricultural labor in California. White and black Dust Bowl migrants increasingly moved out of the fields and into the defense industries. Moreover, the internment of Japanese Americans significantly removed a vital group of farmers and farm laborers; one-half to one-third of the interned Japanese Americans previously engaged in agricultural work. In the following two chapters, I examine Japanese

American representations of farm labor during the period before, during, and after internment. In doing so, I analyze representations of the “alien citizen” as American farmer. While this chapter examined ways white farmers’ citizenship was threatened through their loss of their farms, the following chapter examines the ways novelist

Hiroshi Nakamura and authors for the Japanese American newspapers Kashu Mainichi and Rafu Shimpo claim citizenship through representations of farm ownership. Whereas

Chapters 1 and 2 examine the simultaneous racialization of citizenship and farm labor where white citizen farmers own land and non-white aliens farm the land, the next two chapters explore ways in which Japanese Americans worked through the contradictions between the class positions many aspired to as farmer-citizens and their racialization in the popular press as unassimiable aliens incapable of asserting citizenship through land ownership.

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CHAPTER 3 The “Clouded Citizenship” of Rooted Families: Japanese American Agriculture in Rafu Shimpo, Kashu Mainichi, and Nakamura’s Treadmill

On May 9, 1942 the Saturday Evening Post quoted Austin Anson, the managing secretary

of the Growers-Shippers Vegetable Association of California: “We’re charged with

wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It’s

a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man.”1 As

Anston’s statement demonstrates, proponents of Japanese American removal from the

West coast invoked the racial formation of Japanese Americans as alien citizens to

portray the threat of Japanese invasion through their agricultural holdings. That is,

because anti-Asian agitators represented Japanese Americans as “unassimiable,”

Japanese American land ownership rendered rural U.S. landscapes as Japanese rather than marking Japanese immigrants as American. Consequently, political and business

organizations, as well as government and military officials, often invoked Japanese

American agricultural labor to question Japanese American claims to citizenship, and justify Japanese American internment during World War II.2 These racial formations

1 Cited in Grodzins (27) and Tenbroek, et al (80). The Growers Shipper’s Association effectively acted as a subsidiary of the dominant Western Growers Protective Association, whose membership controlled 85% of the market on California row-crop vegetables. See Grodzins (25-30, 61, 175, 219 and 276).

2 Lye goes so far to say “It is certainly possible to view the wholesale removal of the Japanese American population in 1942 as the latest episode in the history of California’s agricultural development” (103). The influence of Japanese Americans’ agricultural success as causality for internment has long generated academic debate. While both Grodzins and McWilliams (Prejudice) advanced the argument that Californian agricultural pressure groups and economic tensions led to internment, Tenbroek, et al

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emerged not only from the long history of West coast anti-Asian agitation, but also from

the specific threat to the imagined relationship between nature and citizenship that

Japanese Americans evoked as American farmers. Since pastoral cultivation affirmed

white citizenship in the dominant national discourses, Japanese Americans threatened the

political imagination of the nation as white when they represented themselves as

American farmers.

The narratives that Japanese Americans produced through out the Great

Depression and World War II countered these “official” representations of their

community as “unassimable aliens” 3 In many Japanese American texts from this period,

depictions of family farming and pastoral imagery affirmed Japanese American national

belonging. Authors employed farm families’ “roots” in the U.S. soil to confirm

American identity even when the families’ legal citizenship status was “clouded.” In this

chapter, I provide narrative analysis of two literary documents: ethnic newspapers in Los

Angeles, Kashu Mainichi (Japanese California Daily News) and Rafu Shimpo (LA

Japanese Daily News), and a largely unknown novel, Treadmill, by Hiroshi Nakamura. I treat Japanese American newspapers as a literary source in part because these newspapers provided the major vehicle for Japanese American literary expression during the 1930s.

Moreover, placing these cultural documents together demonstrates the continuity of

contended racial stereotyping across the population flamed by Pearl Harbor was more responsible than pressure groups or economic tensions, an argument later taken up by Daniels’s America’s Concentration Camps. Also see Drinnon; Hayashi, Smith, and Robinson’s By Order of the President. Hayashi provides an excellent summary of the debates (4-6), as well as in footnote 1, Chapter 3 (247).

3 Here as throughout my dissertation, I draw on Priscilla Wald’s description of “official stories.” For the racial formation of the unassimiable alien see Lee’s Orientals and Lowe’s Immigrant Acts.

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Japanese American agricultural discourse before, during, and after World War II.4 The narrative strategies that authors employed in Rafu Shimpo, Kashu Mainichi and Treadmill capture the ideological continuity of the U.S. pastoral discourses operating in textual representations of the Dust Bowl migration, Japanese American agricultural experience, and Japanese American internment.5 Moreover, both types of texts deploy the image of the Japanese American family farmer to convey Japanese American cultural citizenship and national loyalty.6

Throughout the 1930s, Kashu Mainichi and Rafu Shimpo portrayed agriculture as

Japanese Americans’ major economic contribution to the American nation. Such

representations intervened in dominant discourses that situated Japanese American farm

labor as a threat to the nation. In depicting the agricultural strike waves of the 1930s, the

newspapers replaced the category of class with the category of race to falsely represent

labor strife as ethnic antagonism between Mexican workers and Japanese growers.

Through depictions of Mexicans, Filipinos, and African Americans as participants in

crime waves, the newspapers reaffirmed racialized images of the strikers as violent and

4 Representations of the Japanese American agricultural experience during the 1930s remain neglected within histories of the Dust Bowl migration and California’s agriculture more generally. For example, neither Daniel’s Bitter Harvest or Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field significantly discuss Japanese American agriculturists after the passage of the Alien Land Laws. Yet many of the writers and advocates of the Dust Bowl migration, including Carey McWilliams and Dorothea Lange, later documented the internment. In demonstrating the discursive continuity and transformations between pre-war representations of Japanese Americans and interment depictions work contributes to the efforts of scholars like Creef.

5 Moreover, the representations I examine throughout this chapter function to dispute the narratives of internment told by the visual record taken by Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams in which, according to Elena Tajima Creef, the relationship among agriculture, class, and race remained obscured. See Creef (13- 58). Also see Kozol’s “Relocating Citizenship in Photographs of Japanese Americans”; Street’s Beasts of the Fields (148-151,164-165). Street compared the relationship between labor and landscape in the internment photographs of Adams and Lange.

6 In using the term cultural citizenship, I draw from the definition established by Flores and Benmayor. Cultural citizenship refers to a community establishing its rights through participating in society and through their participation reshaping society.

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threatening. The newspapers utilized the contrast between these “undesirable” minorities

and all-American Japanese-American farming communities to counter government and

organizational proclamations of Japanese-American disloyalty.

As a “documentary novel” (Nakamura’s term), Treadmill demonstrates Japanese

American subjectivity in the context of World War II internment. Treadmill follows the

protagonist Teru as she is uprooted from her family’s agricultural lifestyle, interned after

Pearl Harbor, and eventually sent to Tule Lake awaiting deportation, or “repatriation,” to

Japan, a nation she has never visited. Just as more well-known internment narratives like

Nisei Daughter, Citizen 13660, and Farewell to Manzanar establish the “normal”

American domestic life of the narrator prior to internment’s disruption, Treadmill

envisions a rural family farm setting to suggest the natural belonging of Japanese

Americans to the American nation-state. The farm setting allows the geographical and

ideological transformations the narrator experiences. The image of the treadmill

captures the inability of equality to develop in the United States. Nonwhite subjects are

unable to progress regardless of their efforts. In moving from the national setting of the

family farm to an international context, the novel implies that true democracy can only be

achieved through global efforts.

“The Specter of the Japanese Farmer”7

Understanding the ideological and material location of Japanese American agricultural labor provides the context for the discursive interventions played out in Japanese

American narratives from the 1930s and 1940s. From the early days of West coast

Japanese immigration, anti-Japanese agitators built on anti-Chinese sentiment to depict

7 Lye (102).

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Japanese immigrants as a threat to the economic and moral order of California.8

Following Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) exclusionists such as

California Senator James D. Phelan claimed Japanese immigrants as a military threat as well.9 Invoking Japan’s rising status as a modern power, they purported that Japanese

American agricultural success put American land in the hands of a foreign government, and created the possibility of fifth columnist activity.10 By the 1930s, many progressives envisioned Japanese American farm workers as the exploited rather than invaders.

Nevertheless, advocates like Carey McWilliams and John Steinbeck commonly used the image of the “foreign” Japanese farm worker in America to expose the exploitation of white migrant workers and indict white capitalist owners for their abuses. White intellectuals, artists, and advocates rarely, if ever, depicted Japanese Americans as truly

American agricultural workers capable of signifying the natural and desirable relationship between American nature (as pastoral middle landscape) and American citizenship as could John Steinbeck’s Joads or Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s Banner family. Ultimately,

Steinbeck’s contention that Japanese immigrants were “foreigners . . . ostracized and segregated and herded about” (Harvest Gypsies 20) was not so founder disconnected from the similar formulation that American Federation of Labor (AFL) Samuel Gompers

8 See Almaguer; Daniels’s The Politics of Prejudice; and Tenbroek et al. (23-25, 62). On differences between the Anti-Chinese movement and the Anti-Japanese movement see Daniels’s Asian America (118).

9 See Tenbroek et al (25-26); Daniels’s The Politics of Prejudice (70-72). For organizations engaged in anti-Japanese agitation see Almaguer; Daniels’s America’s Concentration Camps (10-11); Daniels’s Asian America (114-115); and Grodzin.

10 See Tenbroek et al (50-53;78)

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offered in his strong support for Chinese exclusion.11 Even as Steinbeck was far more

consciously anti-racist, both men utilized the image of Asian workers as foreigners to

promote the rights of the white working class. The racism embedded in the labor

movement remained present in the ideological constructions of many (though not all)

radical visions of agricultural labor during the Depression era.12

The ideological conflict invoked by the image of the Japanese American farmer,

for both the right and the left, rested in part on the racial formation of the Japanese

American as unassimiable.13 From J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s contention that

immigrants were like plants that adapted to their environment through Frederick Jackson

Turner’s claim that the process of transforming the “wilderness” into pastoral middle

landscape forged the American character, American agriculture has long been envisioned

as a vehicle of assimilation. Yet agriculture could not work its magic on the Japanese

immigrant, who was prohibited from naturalizing. The legal procedures forbidden to him

or her prevented (in ideological terms) the process whereby the all powerful American

landscape transforms the immigrant into the American. Instead the Asian immigrant

posed a threat to the American landscape, rendering it somehow Japanese.

Thus Japanese American agricultural success exposed the contradictions inherent

in Japanese Americans’ legal status and the racial formation of Asian Americans as

11 For a discussion of the construction of the “coolie” in relationship to the white working class see Lee’s Orientals. For the role of the labor movement in Anti-Asian agitation see Almaguer; and Saxton’s The Indispensable Enemy.

12 Lye argues that the racism of the labor movement was ultimately a response to the growth of transnational capitalism, whereby the Asian Alien stood in for the dehumanizing effects of capitalism against the anti-colonialist nationalism of the white labor movement.

13 Lye contends that “In class-conscious accounts of Californian agricultural history the Asiatic often appears as an antiradical figure” (116).

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aliens. These ideological and material forces culminated in California’s Alien Land

Laws, first passed in 1913 and strengthened in 1920.14 These laws ostensibly aimed to prevent Japanese immigrants from owning or leasing farm land, though many were able to get around its provisions.15 According to Senator Phelan, the Japanese “are not

content to work for wages, as do the Chinese, who are excluded, but are always seeking

control of the farm.”16 That is, while Chinese exclusion activities highlighted the threat that Chinese workers supposedly posed to white workers, anti-Japanese agitation focused on Japanese Americans’ growing land-ownership as jeopardizing white farm workers’

abilities to climb the agricultural ladder.17 Anti-Asian agitators specifically decried

Japanese American women’s participation in family farm labor as an unfair economic

advantage and a perversion of U.S. family values.18 By “crowding out our population,” the Senator contended, “Japanese produce disorder and Bolshevism among our own people.”19 The very traits that seemed most American in white workers (desire to own

land rather than work for wages) were perceived as particularly suspicious in Japanese

immigrants, and even as capable of producing Bolshevism. In Senator Phelan’s

14 Alien Land Laws were not limited to California. All western states on the continent except Colorado eventually passed some version of the Alien Land Law. See Daniels’s America’s Concentration Camps (15-17); and Walz (416).

15 For a discussion of the effects of the Alien Land Laws see Azuma (14); and Lye (111). Although Japanese Americans maneuvered around many of the provisions, the economic and psychological effects should not be underestimated. For a description of Japanese American response to the Alien Land Laws see Daniels’s Asian America (143-44); and Ichioka’s “Japanese Immigrant Response to the 1920 California Alien Land Law.” For the law’s impact on Indians see Leonard.

16 Grodzin (9).

17 For more on the racial ideology imbedded in the concept of the agricultural ladder see Foley and Jamieson (5).

18 See Matsumoto’s Farming the Home Place; Garcia’s A World of Its Own (58) and Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore.

19 “Why California Objects to the Japanese Invasion” January 1921, qtd in Grodzin (9).

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formulation, it was not the rich growers whose economic exploitation of white workers

resulted in Bolshevism, but the economic success of the Japanese. Both the white elite

and the white working classes targeted Japanese Americans as ideological scapegoats.

Yet, Japanese agricultural workers and farm owners rarely, if ever, posed a direct

economic threat to California’s agricultural elite. Japanese Americans expanded the

productivity of land through intensive labor practices, rather than though the extensive

land holdings of white growers.20 Japanese Americans only operated 2 percent of all farms, and .3 percent of total farm acreage.21 Even when Japanese Americans owned

farms, they competed mainly with small time growers, not the powerful Associated

Farmers. The average farm owned or leased by Issei in 1940 was only 40 acres,

compared to the state average of 200 acres.22 Those most likely to perceive Japanese

American farmers as an economic threat included “(1) the farmer who did all his own

work and whose produce came into competition with that of other farmers who could

undersell him if their labor was worth less, and (2) the working farmer who was a part-

time employer, and therefore interested in hiring cheap and efficient labor.”23

20 Moreover, Daniels contends that Californian agriculture was in a period of expansion and Japanese Americans contributed to the growth of the industry benefiting multiple sectors of the white population. See Daniels’s Asian America (144).

21 See Smith’s Democracy on Trial (65). According to Iwata, in 1920, the total acreage of Issei farms in California was 458,058. This declined substantially by 1930 then slowly increased to 220,094 in 1940. This was in part the result of the end of the war boom as well as the impact of the Alien Land Laws and an increasingly urban Japanese American population. While some assert that the desire of Nisei to escape the farming life also expedited this trend, as Itawa points out, most Nisei were teenagers or younger during this period (31-32).

22 Daniels’s Asian America (163); Iwata (32); Smith’s Democracy on Trial (65). Smith adds that 85% of Japanese farms were less than 50 acres.

23 McWilliams’s Prejudice (52-53). In The Politics of Prejudice Daniels explains: “By the 1920’s no significant number of California’s Japanese was competing with organized labor, and occasional comments to this effect were heard from labor’s ranks . . .organized labor’s anti-Orientalism was an inherited position and was no longer dictated by economic interest” (87).

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Additionally, the Japanese American farm owner who employed day labor was just as much an economic threat to Japanese, Mexican, white, and Filipino laborers as any white employer. Most Japanese owners were virulently anti-labor whether the workers

struggling to better their lot were Issei bachelors or Mexican families.24

Although Japanese American agriculturalists did not pose a major economic threat to the white population (especially the elites), they were essential to California’s booming agricultural industry.25 While white farmers focused on crops suited to large tracts of land and mechanized methods of harvest, such as wheat and potatoes, Japanese

American farmers produced labor-intensive crops such as strawberries and tomatoes.26

Indeed, Japanese Americans produced 30 to 35 percent of all truck crops.27 In certain areas they held a virtual monopoly, producing 90 percent of all strawberries, 73 percent of snap peas, 75 percent of celery and 50 percent of tomatoes.28 Through these niche crops, Japanese Americans contributed to the West coast’s agricultural identity without

24 See Almaguer; Daniels’s The Politics of Prejudice; and Modell. Additionally, this emerges from the articles in Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainchi discussed in the following section.

25 For a discussion of Japanese Americans in California Agriculture see Daniels’s Asian America (135, 163- 164). For a discussion of Japanese American agricultural influences in the interior west see Walz. Niewert offers an important case study on Japanese American agricultural influence in one community in Bellevue, Washington. Graff extends the impact of Japanese immigration on American agriculture to include the importation of Japanese plants, such as soy and apple.

26 See Neiwert (48).

27 The 30-35% number is widely invoked for the pre-war era. The earliest reference to it I found was Thomas and Nishimoto’s The Spoilage (4). Itawa states that by 1941, it was 42% of the state’s acreages in truck crops (32).

28 See Itawa (33); Grodzin, Moddell; Matsumoto’s Farming the Home Place; and Smith’s Democracy on Trial (66). Itawa also states Japanese Americans grew nearly 30,000 acres of grapes, and 19,000 acres of fruits and nuts including plums, peaches, peas, prunes, apricots, apples, almonds, walnuts, and cherries. They grew 3,000 acres of nursery crops, and provided for 65% of the flower industry. Azuma and Neiwert point out that these crops tended to be the most labor intensive, and so were less desirable for white farmers to plant.

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directly threatening white growers’ markets.29 In 1940, there were 6,170 Japanese

operated farms, of which 70 percent were tenant-operated. Many of the rest (1,600) were

owned (in name) by Nisei.30 The extent of their agricultural contribution, despite the

relatively limited amount of land they owned, resulted from their intensive methods of

cultivation and their choice of crop specialization. Thus, the removal of Japanese

Americans during World War II potentially imperiled California’s agricultural economy

and war time production.31

The ideological and economic beliefs of California’s agricultural elite culminated

in suggestions that Japanese Americans be rounded up and removed from the farm land

they owned, but utilized as a labor force under military guard on agricultural land owned by white Californians. The Pacific League’s proposal from February 2nd 1942 is

representative:

That all Japanese people of both foreign and American birth, be drafted into an agricultural division under supervision of the Department of Agriculture of the Federal Government in the same manner as draftees of the United States military forces are inducted into service . . . creating a great agricultural army providing both a humanitarian and practical solution of this immediate problem and eliminating a menace to our general welfare.32

Land ownership within the United States affirmed the national identity of white citizens,

while the agricultural ladder obfuscated class stratification through offering white

workers the possibility of landownership. Thus, farm land owned by Japanese Americans

29 See Neiwert. Part of their success here resulted from cities’ increasing demands for fresh produce. See Garcia’s A World of Its Own (56).

30 Daniels’s Asian America (164); Itawa (25); Grodzin; Moddell; Matsumoto’s Farming the Home Place; Thomas and Nishimoto’s The Spoilage (4, Footnote 9).

31 Indeed, according to Neiwert, “The major loss of production of fresh vegetables clearly harmed the war effort on the home front, and played a significant role in triggering the rationing that came during the war years” (248). Grodzins and McWilliams also make this point.

32 See Grodzin (36-37); and Weglyn (93-97).

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threatened the racial meanings endowed in the farmer’s relationship to the soil. Recasting

Japanese Americans as de-territorialized workers reinforced their status as aliens, and

reified the relationship between whiteness and national belonging. Exhortations to employ Japanese Americans as coerced field laborers highlighted the threat that Japanese

American economic mobility and landownership posed to racialized conceptions of the

American citizen’s relationship to nature as white landowners.

While these particular proposals did not come to fruition, interned Japanese

Americans were used as agricultural labor during the war. The very first Japanese

Americans to receive clearance from the internment centers were sent out on work crews to save Idaho’s sugar beet crops from a labor shortage.33 In Colorado, Arizona, Utah,

Montana, and Wyoming, interned Japanese Americans labored in the fields, sometimes alongside German POWs, while Mexican “guest workers” labored in California’s fields under the Bracero Program.34 This further emphasized the desired place of the alien

citizen (both Asian American and Latino) in American agriculture according to the

dominant hegemony or the “official stories.” Migrant workers were perceived as

temporary and not as truly part of the nation. Farm ownership by non-white and non-

American subjects exposed the whiteness of the abstract U.S. citizen-subject and the

contradictions inherent to the U.S.’s democratic promises. Yet, as laborers, they

33 See Daniel’s Asian America (244-246). For history of hand labor in the sugar beet industry see Taylor’s “Hand Laborers in the Western Sugar Beet Industry.” For Japanese Americans’ specific roles in sugar beet industry see Rogers’s Asian America (133).

34 See Smith’s Democracy on Trial (221); Weglyn (97-99); Thomas and Nishimoto’s The Spoilage (54). The frustration that many Japanese Americans felt at this arrangement emerges in a wide variety of sources. For example, Kikuchi rails against the decision in his published diaries, “This is nothing more than a work corps. What about resettlement? I doubt whether much action will be placed upon it now” (78-79).

160 economically and ideologically fit the bill. They could be used to support the nation’s goals as long as they remained workers rather than land-owning citizens.35

The Importance of Japanese American Agricultural Experience

Japanese American agricultural labor was significant not only to California’s agricultural economy but also to the formation of the Japanese American experience. Although estimates vary, between one-third and one-half of all Japanese immigrants and Japanese

Americans were engaged in agricultural labor when Roosevelt’s executive order 9066 was posted authorizing the military to establish the zones from which Japanese

Americans would be “excluded” through internment.36 From 1900 until 1913, the majority of agricultural laborers in California were Japanese.37 Yet the rural experience of Japanese Americans has been relatively neglected in the work of Asian Americanists;

Valerie Matsumoto and Eiichiro Azuma provide notable exceptions.38

Literary analyses of Japanese American agriculture representations lag even more behind historical studies. In America’s Asia, Colleen Lye examines mainstream literary representations of the “specter of the Japanese farmer.” Lye emphasizes agriculture’s

35 This recalls the distinction that Lee makes between “foreign” and “alien” in Orientals. Lee explains that “‘Foreign’ refers to that which is outside or distant, while alien describes things that are immediate and present yet have a foreign nature or allegiance” (4). Lee offers the comparison between tourists, who are foreigners, and aliens who “declare to intention to leave” or “if such a declared intention is suspect” (3). Thus Japanese American farmers are decried as suspect aliens, while Japanese Americans as migrant farm workers can be rendered “merely foreigners” (4).

36 As Lye explains, “The unreliability of the data is at least partly the result of conditions of economic informality characterizing Japanese farm operation that, with the passage of the 1920 Alien Land initiative, were only exacerbated” (112). Thompson and Nishimoto, in The Spoilage, site a forty-five/fifty-five split in the population between agricultural and non-agricultural production (4).

37 Lye (109).

38 Matsumoto’s Farming the Home Place was the first book-length study of a Japanese American farming community, followed only recently by journalist Neiwert’s Strawberry Days. Studies of Japanese workers’ involvement in farm strikes are included in Almaguer, Daniel’s Bitter Harvest; and McWilliams’s Factories in the Field. Azuma offers the most notable discussion of the agricultural experiences of Japanese Americans. See also Okihiro.

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material and economic significance to the exclusion of its ideological importance.

Moreover, the literature that Japanese Americans created falls outside the scope of her

study. Yet some of the most significant texts recognized among Japanese American

literature utilize rural or agricultural settings. For example, Toshio Mori is considered

the first Japanese American author to publish a book-length collection. His first short

story collection, Yokohama, California, focuses on a rural Californian community.

Dramatist Wakako Yamauchi and short story author Hisaye Yamamoto both situate their

renowned works in pre-war Japanese American agricultural landscapes; the landscapes

in which they grew up. Even the character of Emi in John Okada’s No No Boy evokes

the role of agriculture in Japanese American life. Her role as a farm wife asserts her

Americanness, defines her purity (despite her adultery), and allows her to help Ichiro heal

his psychological wounds. In this way, she becomes linked to the agricultural landscape

in which she lives. Both Emi and the American farm provide healing and offer

assimilation to the alienated and wounded Ichiro. More recently, Ruth Ozeki’s All Over

Creation, situated on a family farm in Idaho, along with the writings of David Mas

Masumoto demonstrate the continuing significance of agricultural representations to

Japanese American literature.

The lack of analysis of farm life within Japanese American literature stems in part

from the little attention given Asian American literature more generally by

environmentally-oriented literary critics.39 Accordingly, both this chapter and the next examine Japanese American literary representations of agriculture from the 1930s and

1940s. While the ethnic newspapers offer one of the best sources for Japanese American

39 There are some exceptions. See Lousely; and Sze’s “From Environmental Justice Literature to Literature of Environmental Justice.”

162 representations of agriculture during the 1930s, Treadmill provides a bridge from pre- internment depictions to post-internment representations. Moreover, in comparing primary source material (1930s newspapers) with a novel, this chapter suggests a cultural politics around citizenship and agricultural circulating beyond the literary realm that helped frame public understandings and popular ideologies.

Ethnic Newspapers

In 1935, Kashu Mainichi columnist Larry Tajiri wrote, “The backbone, the spinal

column, of Japanese life in the United States then, is the farmer.”40 Throughout the

1930s, such sentiments filled the pages of the two English language sections of the major

Los Angeles Japanese American daily newspapers, Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi.41

These newspapers represented agriculture as central to the Japanese American experience, and as a primary medium for Japanese Americans to demonstrate both their belonging to the American nation and their loyalty to a U.S. national project.42

40 See “Tomorrow’s Farms.” While Tajiri began as a columnist in Kashu Mainichi at age seventeen, he went on (with his wife) to publish the Japanese American Citizen League’s organ Pacific Citizen from 1942-1952.

41 I read the English section of each paper from 1930 through 1941, when publication ceased following Pearl Harbor. The examples below were selected as representative through the frequency in which certain language was used or certain logic employed. In making my assessments, I examined not only the text of the articles, but considered their headlines and their layout on the page. Although the papers shut down during internment, they began publishing again after the war. Rafu Shimpo continues publishing today. The footnotes for this section include some of the more notable examples of what I discuss. Not every example was cited, as listing dozens of examples for key trends that sometimes appeared daily over the period of a decade was impractical. For additional context I also read the Communist Party’s paper Western Worker and the left-wing Japanese American paper Doho for the same years.

42 Japanese Americans were of course not the only ethnic group to have their own newspaper. For an overview of ethnic newspapers and their functions see Park’s The Immigrant Press and Miller’s The Ethnic Press in the United States. For the Filipino American ethnic press in Los Angeles see Bonus (128- 163).

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Both Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi were published predominantly in

Japanese.43 Yet both contained at least one page a day (more on Sunday) in English that catered to a Nisei audience. The articles were not translations of the Japanese features; they were written by a separate staff, including their own English language editor.44 The

English language sections provided a forum for the rising intellectual, literary, and advocacy stars of the Nisei generation. While the papers provided a range of opinions, and a variety of genres of writing, they should not be used as an objective record of events, nor as a reflection of Japanese American opinion as a whole.45 Central to my reading is the notion that newspapers do not merely print the news because it happens.

The political consciousness and unconsciousness of writers and editors determines which stories are covered, and how they are covered.46 Consequently, I examine the English language sections as cultural objects. The newspapers intervene in U.S. agricultural discourse to produce the Japanese American subject as an ideal American citizen.47

43 The role of the Japanese American press is discussed in Daniels’s Asian America (167); Yoo’s Growing Up Nisei (68-92).

44 The left-wing Japanese American paper, Doho, even accused the editor of Kashu Mainichi, Sei Fuiji, of taking contradictory stands in his English language and Japanese language articles.

45 Historians have drawn substantially on the English language sections of these papers. See Yoo’s Growing Up Nisei, Mastumoto’s “Desperately Seeking ‘Deirdre’”; Kurashige’s scholarship; Yamamoto’s “Cheers for Japanese Athletes.” Azuma draws extensively on both the English and Japanese sections of the papers. The Japanese language sections remain a rich and underutilized source. Moreover, the literary sections of the papers, as Valerie Matsumoto contends, provide a window into the world of Nisei literary production. More work on this literary community, including close readings of their published works, is needed.

46 In mentioning political unconsciousness I draw on Fredric Jameson, as discussed in my introduction.

47 Although there were slight political differences between the papers, I largely consider them together here. They did not differ much in their depiction of agriculture. The left wing Doho felt that Kashu Mainichi was more militaristic and pro-Japan. However, Kashu Mainichi also appeared more sympathetic to the Democrats, liberals, and unions than Rafu Shimpo.

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An unsigned editorial, “Youth and the Farm,” on October 2, 1932 in Kashu

Mainichi asserted, “It is to the best interest of the Japanese people that the young people

follow the pioneer work of our fathers. But we need to follow it with the increased

knowledge and scientific training in all phases of agriculture: production, distribution and

consumption.”48 This formulation was common to both newspapers. If agricultural labor

represented the honor of the Issei’s “pioneer” past, modernized agriculture represented the future of the Nisei. Such discussions of the Issei’s past highlighted their economic contribution to California’s agricultural success. Larry Tajiri wrote in Rafu Shimpo,

“Though slighted by historians who dipped their pens in blood and thunder, the growth of a great state, California, has been coupled with the growing importance of the Japanese in agriculture in the state.”49 These descriptions rendered California as synonymous with an

agricultural Eden, and the Issei as pivotal to California’s wealth and glory.

As such, they largely correlate with the Issei pioneer narrative described by

Eiichiro Azuma. According to Azuma, this pioneer thesis, promoted by amateur Japanese

American historians, catered to colonialist desires of both U.S. manifest destiny and

burgeoning Japanese imperialism.50 The narratives “challenged the Anglo-American

monopoly of frontier expansionism, arguing for [Japanese American] relevance to the settling of the west” (91). In the newspapers’ descriptions, Asian pioneers, like white

48 “Youth and the Farm.”

49 Tarjiri’s “Tomorrow’s Farms.”

50 According to Azuma, “Shiro Fujioka, a community leader and journalist in Los Angeles, published a treatise whose title translated to ‘Pioneers of Japanese Development,’ which helped to set the basic tone and direction of the subsequent historical construction of the Japanese community from the exclusion movement to 1924. The author characterized the Issei as ‘the pioneers of racial development, [who] have endured poor living conditions, patiently fought exclusion and persecution day and night, and still established the basis for social progress.’ He also contemplated what measures Japanese residents should take for their future in the United States” (91).

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pioneers, struggled against economic uncertainty but prevailed due to their hard work and

perhaps the favor of God. 51 Both serve as manifest destiny’s laborers, providing the

work that transformed America’s resources into America’s wealth. Both are the forefathers of the present generation, and their sacrifice and success contributes to the potential and pride of the current generation. Yet it is important to recognize, and I add to

Azuma’s reading here, that farming in particular played a pivotal ideological role in Issei pioneer narratives. For example, consider this Kashu Mainichi editorial:

The soil has been kind to the Japanese pioneers in California. Back-breaking toil, the many years of sweaty, hard labor which the first generation Japanese have given the land have been returned in full measure in abundant crops, and in later years in the transition of virtual control of many of the Japanese agriculturists. This advantage has been utilized in giving the Japanese in this state large control over both wholesale and retain distribution of these productions of the soil.52

The rendering of Asian immigrants as pioneers places them in a mythic time prior to the industrialization of agriculture, and justifies their domination of truck farming. Some articles explicitly contend that the Japanese consciously became farmers rather than farm workers to avoid the wrath of white organized labor, only to face anti-Asian agitation in

51 Both papers frequently used the term “pioneer” to describe the Issei, such as in “Pioneer Japanese Taken by Death,” or “Death Claims Pioneers of Lil’ Tokio.” Articles detailing honors and respect were especially likely to utilize the phrase, such as in “Pioneer night.” Another examples includes: “Stay, pioneers Stay!” This term rendered the Japanese immigrant as similar to the Euro-American immigrant. Tustomu Tazawa, in Rafu Shimpo, states, “The Issei are those who drifted into this country with a roll of blankets on their shoulders and after several decades of hard labor had formed a community centering on the Pacific coast with a population numbering in the tens of thousands.” Such a trajectory mimics pioneer narratives, as this image of men with rolls of blankets on their backs echoes depictions of white loggers, gold miners, and fruit tramps. The “westering” project of the white pioneer became synonymous with the “easterning” project of the Japanese pioneer. A Thanksgiving editorial cartoon in Kashu Mainchi, prominently placed in the front center of the page, further demonstrates this point. The illustration shows the ghost of a pilgrim at a contemporary thanksgiving meal, and along with the caption, “Pioneers of All Races Give Thanks To God Tomorrow,” implies that the Japanese pioneers are similar not only to Euro-American pioneers of the U.S. West, but to those earlier “pioneers,” the pilgrims.

52 “Nisei Agriculture.”

166 the form of the Alien Land Laws.53 Given the white labor movement’s narrative of Asian immigrants as the slaves of capitalists who lower working standards for white

“American” agricultural workers, the descriptions in Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi

can be interpreted as asserting the Asian immigrant as pre-capitalist Jeffersonian farmer.

The descriptions of the hardships faced by the pioneer generation obscures the role

played by many as over-worked, under-employed, and under-paid migrant farm laborers,

and instead highlights the cultivation of California as a steppingstone for the building of

cultured community, advancing from its frontier roots.

Such a formulation dominated the depiction of the “Farm Crisis” that flourished

throughout the 1930s. The crisis claimed that the aging and declining Issei population

needed to be replaced by Nisei farmers.54 In 1933, the Central Farmers Association officially launched a “Back-to-the-Farm” campaign that was heavily supported by both papers.55 Articles with titles like “Agriculture Seen as Life Line of Our Future” urged

Nisei to pursue farming as a career.56 Without Nisei contributions, it was insisted, the

53 “History of Japanese Farmers.”

54 For example the author of “Nisei Urged to take up Agriculture at JACL banquet,” wrote: “Beyond that period when the first generation will have reached the end of their active days, the Nisei must take up the work.” In “Nisei Urged to take up Agriculture at JACL banquet.” A similar article explains “Did you know that the average age of our parents today is 54 years and that their average life span is in the vicinity of 60? This leaves but an incredibly short time of six years in which we must receive their invaluable farming knowledge” in “Time Too Short for Mooting on Farms.”

55 The Central Farmers Association described their program as “A back-to-farm campaign among the second generation is one of the programs of the proposed headquarters with various inducements to take up courses in agriculture in colleges in the form of scholarships and loan funds. A community center where wholesome recreation and indoor athletics may be available for Nisei employees at various wholesale terminal is being noted with interest.” See “Southland Farmers Await New Era In Agriculture.” Azuma discusses the back to the farm movement in more detail.

56 “Agriculture Seen as Life Line of Our Future.”

167 hard work of the Issei would be lost.57 According to the papers, returning to the farm respected not only the sacrifices of their Issei forefathers, but recognized their duty to their American homeland. George H. Nakamoto, editor of Rafu Shimpo English section, proclaimed, “As citizens of America, the Nisei can best serve the country to which they owe their education and citizenship by developing the industry that is purely American in product.”58 An anonymous article claimed “Nations’ Great Men are Found Among

Those Who Come From Farm Homes,” naming Abraham Lincoln and George

Washington as examples. As many Nisei were farm-raised, this emphasized their innate

American greatness, and encouraged them to raise their own children in the environment most likely to ensure the possibilities of national recognition. Other articles asserted that investing in land ownership demonstrated commitment and permanent belonging to the national territory. As M. M. Horii explained, “As American citizens, we must and should attach ourselves permanently to society and the State by acquiring land and other property.” Agriculture was articulated as a commitment to both place (the farm land owned) and time (hard work now ensuring local prosperity later).59

57 Some articles insisted that very economic structure of Japanese American life would collapse without farms. For example, George Inagaki wrote, “there exists a close connection between the rural and the urban Japanese, and that in reality the Japanese farms are the foundation upon which our structures is built. Wherever Japanese farms flourish there Japanese urban communities spring up, its economic life dependent upon the outlying farmers.” Similarly, Kenichi Uyeda explains “That occupation is the tilling of the soil: farming. It is the very heart of the economic structure on which the Japanese community today rests. On its growth depends the growth of the nisei future.”

58 The Americanness of farming along with the agricultural importance of Japanese American farming contributions were heralded in the lead-up to the U.S. involvement in WWII. According to the paper government officials and community leaders urged Japanese Americans to embrace farming before Pearl Harbor and to continue farming to display their loyalty after Pearl Harbor. For example see: “Issei and Nisei join ‘Food for Freedom’ Fight”; “Farmers urged to help in ’42 Defense Program”; “Cooperation of issei, nisei farmers lauded”; “Back-to-farm?”; and “Farmers Should Keep Planting to Show Loyalty, Army States.”

59 The farmers life was romanticized in many articles. For example see, “Nisei Life on a Farm.” The role of the Nisei farm girl was romanticized in articles like “How Dare You, Sir!” The “Farmerette” who authored the piece declares “Where would our future farmers be if all of us left the men folk to struggle alone?”

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Articles emphasized that the success of the Japanese in America was to be

measured by their participation in the farming industry.60 Writers proclaimed, “without

the farming industry the Japanese could not have reached the present status that they now

enjoy.”61 Or, “today [there is] no other industry that the Japanese has been able to attain

any degree of prestige among the Americans than agriculture.”62 In other words, as yet

another article explained, “Agriculture is seen as best vocation to attain recognition by

Americans.”63 The newspapers emphasized that Nisei could increase the recognition of

their parents’ contributions by continuing the Japanese American presence in California’s agricultural industry. 64 Farming provided an assured way for Nisei to establish the

legacy of Japanese Americans’ contributions to California’s prosperity. Moreover, Nisei

journalists perceived farm work to provide both economic security and social status,

markers of national belonging and acceptance.65

Nisei faced severe employment limitations, regardless of educational level, due to racial discrimination. The papers depicted agriculture as a welcoming field, and one in which success was possible.66 However, agriculture was also transformed through these

60 For example see the remarks by Counsel Sato in ”Farm Board Asked to Aid for Sake of Nisei Future”

61 See the Editorial, “A New Era in the Farm Industry.”

62 George H. Nakamoto’s “Must we all be Farmers/ What do the Elders Want of the Nisei? Are there any other Avenues of enterprise for them?”

63 “Agriculture is Seen as Best Vocation to Attain Recognition by American [sic].” Also see “Farm Board Asked to Aid for Sake of Nisei Future.”

64 This idea is captured in the article “Stay, pioneers, Stay.”

65 According to Azuma, “It is ironic that the overall exclusion of the Japanese from most other economic sectors, which caused their lopsided involvement in agriculture in the first place, gave them this hope, when in reality Issei farming underscored the severe limitations to Japanese livelihoods in the United States” (114).

66 See “Agriculture is Seen as Best Vocation to Attain Recognition by American.”

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representations. The call was constant for an increasingly modernized, scientific agriculture. One author suggested that the Nisei farmer need not even live in the country.

He could run the farm from a city office.67 Thus agriculture transformed from an industry

of hard work and long hours to a business requiring advanced education and allowing

endless possibilities. As “a Nisei Farmer” wrote: “The time when a farmer could make

profit in farming by just swinging a hoe, or driving an ill smelling horse from sunrise to

sunset is gone. At present, and even more so in the future, a farmer must be a

combination chemist, biologist, entomologist, meteorologist, and economist in order to

derive proper returns.”68 Agriculture could encompass all of the other fields from which

Nisei were unfairly locked out. As Kamato Ota, President of the Cooperative Farm

Industry of Southern California, explained, Nisei should not, “[limit] themselves in

production alone, but by advancing into the distribution, transportation, and marketing . .

. There should be a gradual diminishing of the so-called problem of the lack of vocations

for the second generation.”69 Such propaganda allowed farming to be reconciled with

modernization, and the changing status of agriculture, a common farm-literature trope

explored by William Conlogue.70

This depiction may initially appear surprising, given representations of

California’s agricultural industry during the 1930s in works like John Steinbeck’s The

67 See “Farm Crisis in Urgent Need of Rehabilitation by Capable Nisei Hands.”

68 “See Future of Nisei In Farming” by “A Nisei Farmer.” Similarly, “Nisei Farmers Take over Growers Confab” states: “nisei were overlooking a fertile field in agriculture, but their development in the field requires assiduous application of industry and latest scientific method of production and situation. This was the consensus of both nisei and issei delegates.”

69 See article by Kamato Ota, President of Cooperative Farm Industry of Southern California, “Warning Sounded on Farming Crisis.”

70 See Conlogue. Additionally, Lye makes a similar argument about the agricultural modernization narratives as a place where progressive movement narratives and anti-Asian narratives collide.

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Grapes of Wrath and Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field. While the Associated

Farmers combated Steinbeck’s image of them as “bankers with pitchforks,” Rafu Shimpo

and Kashu Mainichi appear to embrace that very image. This seeming contradiction is

explained by the mainstream construction of the Oriental subject. Mainstream (including

progressive) narratives claimed that the Oriental as farm laborer undercut the white

worker, facilitating a fascist-like take-over of agriculture, allowing land monopolies to

achieve vast wealth. The Oriental as land owner frequently appeared as a yellow peril

invader, putting American territory in foreign hands, as seen in propaganda promoting the

Alien Land Laws.71 Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi appear invested in the articulation

of a Japanese American subject that is part of the American nation, an explicit rejection

of the Oriental subject. Thus, the image of the small farmer promoted in these papers

aligns with an assimilated American. The production of the Issei as pioneers excuses

their original status as laborers and allows their movement up the agricultural ladder to

landowner. Consequently, the image of the Nisei in the papers is explicitly not the image of the farm laborer. The language choices promote the idea that while the Issei may be

farm laborers, even the Nisei today working as laborers are to be considered future

farmers. The trappings of education assure there is no mistake.72

Yet, the papers also adamantly express that Japanese Americans are distinct from

the Associated Farmers and the large growers. Articles repeatedly describe them as small

truck farmers who happen to employ labor at harvest time. In generating this image,

71 This is discussed in most books on the anti-Japanese movement including Almaguer ; Tenbroek et al; Daniels’s Asian America ; Daniels’s The Politics of Prejudice; Lye.

72 This is a moment in which Azuma and I offer different readings. Azuma claims the focus on Nisei farmers emerges from the tenuous position of Japanese American tenants post 1920 Alien Land law.

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authors attempted to evade the racial constructions of the Oriental available in popular

discourse. Japanese Americans were neither the menial temporary laborer nor the larger

growers threatening the independence of the quintessential U.S. family farmer. The

newspapers make this case in part by citing statements from prominent liberals. For

example, in October, 1939, Edward Mares, district secretary of the United Agricultural

Workers Association, spoke to the League of Nisei Writers about farm labor issues at a meeting that also included a review of The Grapes of Wrath. According to Kashu

Mainichi:

Mares pointed out that [Japanese American small farmers’] problems were more complicated than those of American farmers because most of the Japanese do not own their land and are therefore at the mercy of the big banking interest which usually control the property. He suggested that the Japanese farmers, in order to protect their own interests, organize and apply for a charter from the nation-wide farmers union, which is an association of small farmers formed for the purpose of fighting the control of the Associated Farmers and their cohorts.73

Similarly, when Carey McWilliams spoke at an event sponsored by the Japanese

American Citizen’s League (JACL), Kashu Mainichi explained:

In answer to the difficulty which Japanese growers face today in paying adequate wages to farm labor, McWilliams thought that the trouble can be traced to the fact that the growers have paid too much for their land, entirely out of proportion to the income from the land. The Japanese are farming in suburban land whose price was inflated by speculation. This, together with the difficulty in marketing their produce for fair profit, places small Japanese farmers at a disadvantage in meeting the labor question, he said.74

Frequent calls for a union of small farmers disputed the image of the Japanese as either

farm laborer or large grower. The newspapers depicted Japanese Americans both as

73 See “Japanese Farmers Urged to Organize into Union.”

74 “McWilliams Praises Issei for Developing California”

172 small-time farmers and as depression-era workers in need of union protection.75 Thus, in Kashu Mainichi and Rafu Shimpo, Japanese American farmers stand in for the family farmer hurt by the industrialization of agriculture. Yet, in refusing to see Japanese

Americans either larger owners or farm laborers, the newspapers accented racial unity over the community’s true class diversity.

Moreover, despite this rhetoric, Japanese American growers were far from immune to the waves of agricultural strikes that raged in the southland during the early

1930s.76 Both papers provided almost daily coverage and updates of the strikes.

Although Japanese Americans were involved in the strike as growers and as laborers, the narratives told by the Japanese American press related a “critical wage war between

Japanese farmer and Mexican ranch laborer.”77 Such narratives obscured the role of

Japanese laborers, and ignored the ethnic community’s economic diversity. Both papers were rabidly pro-grower, although Kashu Mainichi’s coverage at least superficially appeared more tempered.78 The construction of the strikes as racially rather than economically based obscured the material interests at the heart of the struggle, and

75 One of the most important articles on this position was “Strive to Elevate Standard of Farming.” This article explains “In spite of the balance of control Japanese growers can possess, the interest of the farmers has been so individualistic that they have no power. . . .To follow in the footsteps of the issei will mean a sure failure. We nisei must organize into a united figure. We must have the power of collective bargaining. Without this, at the end of the next thirty years, we will be in the same place as we are at present.”

76 For a discussion of this strike wave see Daniels’s Bitter Harvest; Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field and Jamieson’s Labor Unionism. Additionally, Daniels’s Asian America (17-158) discusses the relationship between the Japanese community and Mexican growers in the 1933 El Monte berry strike. The El Monte Berry Strike is also detailed in Jamieson, Labor Unionism (90-92). Newspaper articles in Kashu Mainichi and Rafu Shimpo appeared almost daily during the strike wave.

77 “Crisis Reached in Far Labor Problem; See End as Concessions Offered.” Other examples include: “To Stabilize Farm Labor in South Land”; “Ranchers, Laborers Deadlock”; “Ranchers Refuse to Demands”; and “Gardeners Pledge to Stand Pat.”

78 However, the editor of Kashu Manchu and the left-wing Doho frequently had verbal tousles in the pages of the papers. Those disagreements developed around Japan’s imperialism more than labor issues.

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promoted ethnic identity over class-consciousness.79 Indeed, Azuma asserts that unified

ethnic identity resulted from the collective threat Japanese farmers felt from new groups

of farm workers (Mexicans and Filipinos) who might usurp their tenuous position within

the agricultural industry in California’s racial hierarchy.

The papers articulated their investment in ethnic solidarity, that is, Japanese

workers’ support for Japanese growers, in part through denying worker involvement with

farm union activity. For example, Kashu Mainichi vehemently contested the existence of

Japanese strikers made by the Communist Press: “Contrary to the news item in Western

Worker, Communist weekly, the Japanese grape pickers have not sent in delegates from

the fields declaring that they are ready to strike with others.”80 Kashu Mainichi’s attack

on the Western Worker was part of a broader red-baiting strategy.81 Articles frequently

explained, “Although many Japanese have left the fields here at the insistence of

agitators, many returned immediately after the agitators have left.”82 This rhetorical

tactic not only rejected the possibility of class-conscious Japanese American workers, but

79 Azuma describes this tendency as “Ethnic nationalism as class unconsciousness” (205). One Kashu Mainchi editorial proclaimed “Like poor relations, troubles in Southern California between Japanese growers and Mexican labor seems to be ever with us.” Statements such as this not only explained the economic strife in racial terms but subsumed it in terms of familial discourse. See “Editorial.” Other examples of equating strikers with Mexicans and growers with Japanese include: “L.A. Strike Ends with Japanese Leaders and Mexican Union Workers” and “Japanese Growers Spurn Mexican Strikers’ Demand for Special Privileges.”

80 “Man Hunt Follows Gun Play.”

81 The Western Worker was the Community Party paper in California. The red-baiting of the Japanese Farm Laborers Association is further discussed in Daniels’s Asian America (159). The trend of red-baiting not specifically focused on the strike can be seen in articles like “Japanese Communists: Ignorant Reds are Source of Trouble.”

82 “Lodi Japanese Involved in Grape Pickers’ Strike; Frenzied Mobs in Lodi Streets.” Other examples include “Red Elements Within Our Japanese Community” and “Red Agitators Threaten Japanese Farms in Move to Force Wage Increase.”

174 articulated legitimate union activity as anti-American communism. The papers implied that Japanese Americans would only participate in such actions under duress. 83

In addition to obscuring and dismissing the actions of striking Japanese

Americans, the papers highlighted the strike-breaking actions of the Nisei and the

JACL’s support for such endeavors.84 The coverage of the Nisei strike-breakers highlighted their heroism, as Kashu Mainichi proclaimed: “Venice Japanese Rescued by

Nisei Volunteers: To Continue Celery Packing; Farmers Grateful.”85 Another article

celebrated, “Sixty nisei volunteer workers cleaned one field in spite of threatening

strikers.”86 In this formulation, brave Nisei risked violent retaliation by strikers to assist the victim-like growers. The papers not only celebrated the contributions of the Nisei as

83 The use of red-baiting to disrupt the representations of Japanese American class consciousness is further apparent in a series of articles in Rafu Shimpo involving the 1936 celery strike. The initial article, published March 27, 1936, claimed “Japanese Farm Workers Move to Join Mexicans To Boost Wage Claims.” Although beginning with the acknowledgement of striking Japanese workers, the bulk of the article serves as a rebuttal, defending the growers. For, “Further proof of the vegetable growers’ plight” we are told that the workers “do approximately 48 per cent of work required on all farms and receive 67 percent of the gross income, less the overhead. The grower gets 33 percent of this income and does 52 percent of the work.” See “Japanese Farm Workers Move to Join Mexicans To Boost Wage Claims.” Thus the sensationalized inclusion of Japanese workers in the title is counter-balanced by the lengthy refutation of their claims. This attack continues two days later in an article blasting the Japanese Farm Federation: “Growers Accuse Reds; Charge Workers Group With Fomenting Issue Not Existing on Farms.” This article claimed Japanese American workers were not responsible for the “agitation.” It was a communist mirage. An article titled “Japanese Farm Laborers Not Expected to Join in Farm Strike Despite Move; Agitation Blamed on Minor Group Affiliated with Communist Organizations of Other Nationalities; Spokesman for Growers Accuses Radicals” followed in two more days. This article consists largely of a lengthy statement by the Central Farm Association rebutting the initial story. The Association insisted that Japanese workers had never been involved in significant numbers and, moreover, that radicals of other nationalities were responsible for the false claims of Japanese involvement. The backlash against the March 27, 1936 article continued for several more days. Since the original article functioned to critique Japanese American participation in the strike, the degree of backlash within future issues of the paper suggests that even recognition of Japanese American class consciousness posed a significant threat to the Japanese American subject produced by both papers.

84 See “One Hundred Niseis At Work to Break Strike Near Venice”; “JACL Sponsors Nisei Aid”; “To Call Upon Nisei For Aid”; “Valley Nisei Preparing to Meeting Strikes”; and “Mobile Unites of Workers Organized to Pick Crops as L.A. Strike Prolonged.”

85 “Venice Japanese Rescued by Nisei Volunteers: To Continue Celery Packing; Farmers Grateful.”

86 See “Co-Operation Pledged Growers by JACL Heads As Strike Menace Rises”; “Nisei Aid Venice Celery Growers Harvest Crop as Strike Loses Ground.”

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strike-breakers, they actively recruited them. For example, one article breaks in the

middle to blare in bold letters, all caps, and in between double lines: “HELP THE

VENICE FARMERS TO TAKE IN THEIR CELERY CROPS. SAVE ONE DAY FOR

VOLUNTEER WORK IN VENICE.”87 An editorial titled, “The Moment Has Arrived”

characterized the JACL’s appeal for volunteer strike-breaks as “A definitive challenge . .

. placed before the second generation Japanese of the city. How well they rise to meet

that challenge still remains to be seen.”88 In the papers’ framework, the challenge that

Nisei faced was the ability to define themselves as American Japanese, as opposed to un-

American Japanese. Strike-breaking was portrayed as a choice between American

heroism and un-American cowardly apathy. Support for the strikers was not offered as an

option. Moreover, the actions of the Nisei functioned as a model to encourage Japanese

workers to conform. For example, Rafu Shimpo explained “More than 500 Japanese field

workers voluntarily reduced their wages from 30 cents to 25 cents and are out on the field

in defiance to threats from the agitators of violence.” Workers refusing to strike were

imbued with the same heroic loyalty as the Nisei volunteers.89

The strikes provided an opportunity for some Japanese Americans to defend their

Americanness through red-baiting. The articulation of the un-Americanness of union

87 “Venice Japanese Rescued by Nisei Volunteers: To Continue Celery Packing.”

88 See also “Near Riot in Berry Strike Frustrated by Police. Nisei Students Quit School to Aid Pickers.”

89 Also see “Red Elements Within Our Japanese Community” in “Uncle Fuji Speaks” and “Red Agitators Threaten Japanese Farms in Move to Force Wage Increase.” Japan’s anti-communist tendencies may have contributed to the anti-communism displayed in the paper. Certainly, it led communism to be depicted not only as anti-American, but as anti-Japanese. See “Border Riot Keeps Up as Stores Shut”; “Nipponsese Reds Threaten Stores – Japanese Activity in North Curtailed by General Strike”; “Nippon Reds Take Place in Communist Hunger March.” Kashu Mainichi in its feud with Doho reported: “Japanese Communists. Ignorant Reds are source of Trouble . . . Communists know nothing of Japan or Japanese people . . . Most of these Japanese Communists are American born boys and have never been to Japan.” See “Japanese Communists. Ignorant Reds are Source of Trouble.”

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officials and strike participants affirmed the loyalty of Japanese growers, workers and

Nisei (who such articles depicted as neither growers nor laborers). For example, a Rafu

Shimpo editorial explained: “California agriculture is harassed by labor disturbances,

practically all of which are instigated or participated in by Communists and other un-

American elements.”90 Similarly, Kashu Mainichi explained, “Perhaps the most tragic

sidelight of the recent Southern California worker’s strike has been the fact that the

movement was instigated by paid agitators and for the most part was not the expression

of the workers as a whole.”91 Such consistent red-baiting served both as evidence for

Issei loyalty and as a rhetorical strategy discouraging Issei or Nisei support for striking

workers. For example, an editorial in Rafu Shimpo stated, “Though denied the rights and

privileges accorded the full fledged American citizens, though classed as ‘aliens’

ineligible to ever attain that status, the Issei Japanese have long proved themselves

worthy of American principles and have maintained their stand against radicals and

Communists consistent with the attitude of the nation as a whole.”92

The desire for the Japanese American subject, as represented in the papers, to be

consistent with “the attitude of the nation as a whole” is apparent in the depiction of

Mexicans, Filipinos, and African Americans as well. The papers’ consistent focus on the

racial division of labor in which Japanese growers (and Nisei strike breakers) opposed

90 “‘Red’ on the Farm Front.”

91 Editorial.” Kashu Mainichi (13 Aug. 1933). Other examples include: “Federal Board In Attempt to Settle Labor Trouble as Mexicans Threaten Strike”; “Venice District Celery Crops are All Sent Out; Palos Verdes Has Patrols; Communist Headquarter Moves Out”; “Professional Agitators Blamed for Labor Unrest”; “[Mexican Counsel] Deny House Investors Charge of Red Propaganda Within Mexican Labor Ranks”; and “Reds Take Up County Farm Strike Cause.”

92 “‘Red’ on the Farm Front.”Azuma asserts that by depicting themselves as loyal Americans, growers attempted to keep their role as unofficial tenant farmers or “foremen.” Other examples of this include “Farm Federation In Appeal to City Nisei Volunteers to Pick Bean Crop in Palos Verdes Labor Shortage/American Groups in Support of Japanese Growers Stand in Strike.”

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Mexican and Filipino laborers encouraged the readers as to the appropriate site of their

solidarity. The language of racial strife was seldom far from the articles, such as in the

headline, “Fear Racial War as Farm Labor Strike Spreads in Santa Maria Valley Area.” 93

The consistent depiction of racial strife obscured the economic and material interests at

the heart of the workers’ struggle. Moreover, the Japanese press employed derogatory

racial stereotypes of Filipinos and Mexicans to depict strikers as violent, irrational, and

controlled by communists. Kashu Mainichi explained, “Striking an effort to force

Japanese ranchers of Southern California to meet their demand for exorbitant salaries and

the hiring of 90 percent unionization, a belligerent group of Mexican and Filipino farm-

hands led by representatives of the United-Agricultural Workers’ Union of America

yesterday fought a stern battle with several policemen seeking to quiet the 300 rioters.”94

Rafu Shimpo explained, “Aroused over the unreasonable demands by the Mexican labor union, officials of the San Diego and Chula Vista Chambers of Commerce stepped into the controversy between the Japanese growers and the Mexicans and issued a warning that unless the Mexicans conform to the terms set down by the Japanese drastic action will be enforced.”95

93 See also “Labor Leader Presents His Case in Strike.” Rafu Shimpo quotes Mexican labor leader Velardes that “The prolonging of this strike is bringing about race hatred between Mexican and Japanese.”

94 “Three-hundred Rioters in Effort to Force Japanese Ranchers to Meet Demands; Rages On.”

95 “New Strike in San Diego is Squelched.” Other examples include “Man Hunt Follows Gun Play”; “Violence Flames in Oxnard Beet Strike at Laborers Riot”; and “Riots Rage in Compton District; Nipponese in Emergency Conference.” This is one of multiple articles to directly connect the strikers with acts of assault: “‘I saw three automobiles filling with men I presumed to be strikers open fire with rifles on workers crowded in a celery field,’ He said. Miraculously escaping being shot, the workers raced to safety.” Others include “Violence Breaks Loose in Lettuce Strike Area”; “Violence Looms as Laborers Routed from Harvest field”; “Two Growers Knifed by Farm Hand As Agitators Incite Sacramento Strike; “Police Probe Explosions in Lettuce Shed”; and “Nisei Driver Victim of Gas Attack.” Interestingly, Jamieson in Labor Unionism notes that the conflict between Japanese growers and a largely Mexican and Filipino labor force in the 1933 El Monte strike was characterized by substantially less violence than strikes aimed at white growers (91).

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This depiction of Mexican and Filipino workers as “unreasonable,” “belligerent,” and requiring discipline by the state was not a racial formation emerging solely out of

class interests in the contexts of the strikes. Similar depictions in Rafu Shimpo and Kashu

Mainichi appeared throughout the 1930s in reports on crime, automobile accidents, and

love affairs.96 The criminalization of Filipinos, Mexicans, and blacks can be seen in just a small sampling of the headlines: includes “Filipino Bandits Rob Nisei Couple, Threaten to Kill Baby Daughter”; “Mexican Gunman Wounds Nipponese Woman in Robbery”;

“Three Nisei Robbed in Supper Market Hold-Up By Negroes”; “Lil’ Tokio Raids

Confessed; Two Mexicans Jailed”; and “Filipino Trio Arrested in Police Drive to Protect

Lil’ Tokio.”97 Such headlines generated the distinct sense of a crime wave, and articulated the Japanese population’s fear of Filipinos, blacks, and Mexicans. The papers depicted Filipinos, blacks, and Mexicans as outside the mainstream, disorderly, and deadly.98

The effects of this criminalization campaign can be seen in the case of twenty- year-old Harou Tanaka, who, in 1937, murdered his ten-year-old niece, and blamed it on

96 For example, accounts of automobile accidents with a Japanese individual at fault are treated with understanding and sympathy, such as in the headline: “Sleeping Tiny Mexican Tot Crushed to Death by Truck; South El Monte Accident on Japanese’s Ranch Seen as Unavoidable.” Not only does this further the sense of racial solidarity depicted in the strikes, but implies that Japanese American lives are more valued that Filipino or Mexican American lives.

97 Other examples include: “Arrest Filipino for Murder of Japanese”; “Drunken Negro Caused Damage to Several Japanese”; “Japanese Accosted by Trio of Filipino Bandits in Lil’ Tokio, Beaten and Robbed”; “Lil’Tokio Residents Seek better Police Protection; Filipinos Rob Issei of $600”: “ S. Hattori Struck Around Head by Filipino in Robbery of Café Monday”; “Mexican Caught White Trying to Stela [sic] Mrs. Iumi’s Purse”; “Nab Bandits Who Robbed Shot Farmer/Filipinos Snatch Payroll from Grower in Attack”; and “Filipino Held in Knife Murder of Four Year Old.”

98 Some articles even explicitly referred to a crime wave such as: “Crime Wave Hits Lil’ Tokio Stores” and “Robbery Wave Hits Japanese Town.” This language of a crime wave repeated after Pearl Harbor, here emphasizing the criminality of Filipinos. Japan’s invasion of the Philippines provides an important context for the tensions between the two communities at this moment. For example see, “Wave of Attacks Hits Japanese Residents.”

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two Mexicans, spurring a manhunt before confessing. Despite the cloud of suspicion cast

over him by the police, the Japanese papers initially offered support. Rafu Shimpo

dedicated a full column to the “indignant” Tanaka’s story. In the Japanese American

community, his voice was heard:

My niece and I had spent the day visiting in San Diego and were returning home by automobile when we stopped at Manchester and Inglewood to watch the setting sun and to get a view of the city below. Shizuko had to get off the car a minute, and while I was waiting, two Mexicans approached and began acting queerly. I immediately took out the Colt gun which was in the pocket of the car, but before I knew what was happening, they were upon me. They succeeded in wresting the gun away and were beating me, when Shizuko, who was returning at the time, began to scream and then run way. One of the Mexicans shot her, and as I rushed on him, he shot me point blank. When I awoke, I was laying beside her. I got up to summon aid, and remember crawling through the weeds. Then I woke up here.99

The ease at which Tanaka lied and the willingness of the Japanese community to believe

him are chillingly similar to Susan Smith, who murdered her children and then cast the

blame on an anonymous black man. Tanaka, like Smith, responded to and affirmed

society’s criminalization of Mexican/black masculinity.100 Through stories like Tanaka’s,

Japanese American ethnic presses contributed to a larger project of the criminalization of

black, Mexican and Filipino youth.101

The newspapers’ depictions of Mexicans and Filipinos as threatening the Japanese community contributed to the papers’ articulation of Japanese American community

during the agricultural strikes. The papers’ characterization of strikers as irrational and

belligerent depends not only upon labeling the organized workers as un-American

99 “Police Seek Mexican Pair in Attack-Murder of Girl as Uncle Denies Charges.”

100 “Youth Near Death, Confesses Shooting Niece in ‘Accident’; Autopsy Shows No Attack Made on Girl.” See also “Nisei Girl Kidnapped Killed; Youth Wounded” ; “Youth Confesses to Kidnap, Murder.”

101 This should be seen in the context of that criminalization of youth that culminated in the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial just five years later in 1942. For information on Sleepy Lagoon see Escobar and Pagán.

180 communists but as describing them as un-American because of their Mexican and

Filipino heritage. By contrasting “Un-American” workers with American Japanese farmers, the papers emphasize Japanese American inclusion to the nation on the grounds of racial belonging. Japanese Americans were aligned with white Americans in that both communities were threatened by non-white workers resisting their economic exploitation.

The newspapers depicted strikes as a form of economic harm (loss of agricultural profits) similar to that caused by kidnappings and robberies.102 The newspapers linked rural economic losses to urban losses due to boycotts, strengthening material bonds within the

Japanese American community.103

The newspapers articulated the strikes’ potential to imperil Japanese American agricultural prosperity as a direct threat to Japanese Americans’ ability to claim the rights and privileges bestowed on white citizens. Throughout most of the 1930s, Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi argued that Japanese Americans’ socio-economic status protected them from the most virulent forms of racism. The papers recognized that Japanese

Americans were susceptible to the same low status of other racial minorities should their

102 Moreover, they portrayed the economic impact of the agricultural strikes as imperiling the entire Japanese American community by provoking wide-spread anti-Asian sentiment. For example, the newspapers highlighted boycotts called by the strikers of Japanese goods in the United States and Mexico. Consider a representative headline: “Mexico Declared Boycott on All Japanese Goods; Wires Sent to South American.” The newspapers portrayed the boycotts as an attack on the larger community by outsiders. The actions of striking Mexicans as characterized by the papers were remarkably similar to the more clearly anti-Asian actions and boycotts undertaken by white labor, such as the AFL. Both forms of anti-Japanese boycotts were depicted (and may have been formulated) in ways that obscured class conflict and emphasized racial solidarity.

103 In addition to the threats of boycotts, the newspapers discussed lawsuits filed against Japanese farmers and ranchers in a similar fashion. For example see: “One-Hundred Thousand Dollar Damage Suit Filed by Mexicans on Japanese” and “Suit Filed by Striking Laborers.” Articles dealing with boycotts include: “Filipinos Picket Japanese Store in Farm Dispute”; “Crisis reached in Farm Labor Problem; See End as Concessions Offered”; “Growers Refuse Terms of Labor Union; Start Boycotts on Japanese”; “File Charges on Japanese Farm Groups”; and “Boycott on Japanese is Threatened by Strikers.”

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economic importance falter.104 One article warned, “[Agriculture] is the only means for the prevention of the Japanese people from falling into the bewildered obscurity of the

Negro and the Mexican.”105 In other words, articles claimed that agricultural success

protected Japanese Americans from even worse incarnations of American racism.106

Rather than recognizing a shared struggle for multi-racial equality, the papers contrasted

Japanese American prosperity as farmers to the criminal behavior of blacks, Filipinos, and Mexicans as strikers and thieves. In doing so, the papers articulated a version of

Japanese American identity that may be interpreted as a precursor to the modern model minority myth.

Japanese American agriculture was central to the articulation of this proto-model minority subject. Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi emphasized the particular ability of agriculture to afford the economic and social success believed key to Japanese American belonging to the nation. In criminalizing blacks, Mexicans, and Filipinos, the papers utilized agriculture to contrast the (desired) status of Japanese Americans with the exclusion and racism facing other racial minorities. Moreover, by highlighting the racial tension between Japanese growers and Mexican and Filipino workers, the papers obscured the class diversity of the Japanese American community, envisioning Japanese

Americans as the quintessential family farmers. Ultimately, these strategies failed to

104 As war with Japan drew nearer papers were noticeably more apt to show solidarity with non-Japanese victims of racial oppression and celebrate black achievements. For examples see: Tajiri’s “Nisei Should Support Movement Which Fight All Forms of Racial Discrimination”; “Fight Against Prejudice”; and “Negroes Support C.L. Activities.”

105 See “Succumbing to Domination Seen as Fate of Farms.”

106 Azuma asserts that, “Indeed, the Japanese of the delta accepted the racially stratified class hierarchy as natural. They showed little desire to challenge or even question white hegemony and their own subordination - at least for the time being” (206). I don’t find the same tendency in the Los Angeles ethnic newspapers. The papers highlight the role of the Japanese farmers as growers, obscuring their location in the racial hierarchy.

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protect the Japanese American community from the dominant racial formations of yellow

peril and internment resulted in the significant loss of Japanese American agricultural

holdings. Asian Americanists typically portray internment as a historical breaking point,

during which Japanese American subjectivity irrevocably shifted. Yet my reading of

Hiroshi Nakamura’s novel Treadmill demonstrates that the pastoral discourses of national

belonging that emerged during the 1930s remained useful in examining internment and

post-war narratives.

Treadmill: Japanese American Ambassador

Like Kashu Mainichi and Rafu Shimpo, Treadmill imagines Japanese American

agricultural labor through the trope of the independent American farmer. The Noguchis’

agricultural labor communicates their citizenship through their economic contributions

and active cultural assimilation. This is similar to the case made by the newspapers

through the “Back to the Farm” campaign and the pioneer narratives. Yet, while the

newspapers envision a unified Japanese American community protected from the most

virulent forms of U.S. racism by their agricultural success, Treadmill suggests a common

ground among disenfranchised groups, who are trapped on the same treadmill, chasing an

American dream they can never achieve.

Treadmill is the only known novel written by an interned Japanese American

during internment. It was first discovered by historian Peter Suzuki in the National

Archives in 1952, and finally published in 1996. Little is known of Hiroshi Nakamura

(1915-1973), who passed away before Suzuki contacted him.107 According to his family,

he was born in Gilroy, California, attended San Jose State College and then transferred to

107 He died of stomach cancer at the age of 58. Suzuki’s “Introduction.”

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University of California, Berkeley. He took time off from school to bicycle around the

country, and graduated in 1937 with a degree in zoology. Prior to World War II he

penned several short stories under the pseudonym Allen Middletown. He believed using

an Anglo name would improve his publication chances, but unfortunately, he received

only rejections. Nakamura was interned in the Salinas Assembly Center followed by the

Poston camp in Arizona. He was eventually transferred to Tule Lake, California and

completed Treadmill while working for Tule Lake’s Community Analysis Section. At

Tule Lake he married Mary Sato Nakamura, who remembers “using our battered but

serviceable old portable nightly to type the manuscript in our camp room.” After the war

he returned to LA, and sent Treadmill to a number of publishers who liked the novel, but

according to his wife, “they feared publishing it could damage their reputation.”108

Despite its historical significance, Treadmill has received almost no critical attention. The novel follows the experience of college age Teru Noguchi whose family

— sister Sally, brother Tad, and parents — are small truck farmers in California. In the opening pages, Teru’s father is unexpectedly arrested by the FBI.109 The family had

planned to relocate with the Motoyama family outside of the exclusion area, but without

Mr. Noguchi the plans are scrapped and Teru is separated from her boyfriend George

Motoyama. The remaining Noguchis are interned, and Mrs. Noguchi suffers a heat

stroke due to the rough treatment they receive. This stroke, combined with negligent

medical responses, leaves Mrs. Noguchi mentally and emotionally impaired. Separated

from George, Teru falls for a new young man, Jiro. When George visits, however, Sally

108 For bibliographical information see Suzuki’s “Introduction.”

109 For discussion of these early arrests see Tenbroek, et al (101); Daniels’s Asian America (202); Smith’s Democratizing the Enemy (77); and Thomas and Nishimoto’s The Spoilage (5).

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has grown old enough to pursue her childhood crush on him, and they join Teru’s social

group, composed entirely of young heterosexual couples.

While the government eventually returns Mr. Noguchi to his family, the loyalty

oath further disrupts their lives. This loyalty oath was a questionnaire distributed to all

internees over the age of 18, conceived by the government as a pathway to drafting Nisei

and allowing them to leave the camps. The government failed to anticipate Japanese

Americans’ resistance to the questionnaire. Question 27 inquired: “Are you willing to

serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?”

Question 28 inquired, “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of

America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attack by foreign or

domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese Emperor or any

other foreign government, power, or organization?”110 Although Teru and her father

answer Yes-Yes, Sally and her mother answer No-No. Sally changes her answer at the

last minute to marry George, who is drafted after his Yes-Yes response. Jiro, disillusioned with his initial rejection from the army (he patriotically attempted to enroll the day after Pearl Harbor) also answers No-No. Sally and Teru are separated, as the

Noguchis are moved to Tule Lake, where the government segregated “disloyals.” When

Teru is given the opportunity to relocate for a well-paid secretarial position, her father announces that he has decided to apply for repatriation because the Noguchis will never be accepted in America.111 Rather than let her elderly father, young brother, and ill

110 Almost all historical works on internment discuss the loyalty oath and its effect on internees. For examples, see Thomas and Nishimoto’s The Spoilage (85-91) and Weglyn’s The Years of Infamy (136- 140).

111 For more information of the leave programs for Nisei’s see Chapters 14 and 15 in Smith’s Democracy on Trial.

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mother face hardships in Japan alone, Teru decides to stay with her family.112 The

novel’s final pages consist of a series of pained letters from Teru to her sister Sally on the

eve of her deportation to Japan.

The novel blends documentary realism, modernist techniques, and sensationalist plot elements, providing multiple points of entrance for its audiences. The omniscient third person narrator provides extensive historical background that can be interpreted as allowing access for the white community and generating a historical record for the

Japanese American community. The text incorporates some modernist narrative techniques (such as stream of consciousness) which demonstrate the subjectivity (and interiority) of the main characters, particularly Teru. The omniscient narrator increasingly blends with Teru’s consciousness as the novel progresses. Elements of

melodrama and sensationalism are added through the romantic subplots and through

minor characters, such as Teru’s friend Alice, who is raped by a fellow internee and dies in the desert outside the camp. Thus the text borrows its narrative style from a variety of genres in seeking a language capable of capturing the transformations in political

consciousness the characters undergo.

Through the Noguchi family, the novel demonstrates the national belonging of the

Japanese American community to the United States. Rather than focus on legal

citizenship, the novel opens with an alternative definition of belonging through the

Noguchis’ economic, social, and political participation in the nation. The novel’s depiction of internment’s injustice pivots on the successful depiction of Japanese

112 As Hayashi points out, many of the “repatriates” in Tule Lake were economic refugees more than political refugees. Many were from Terminal Island, and termed the “Japanese okies” due to their poverty (155). Hayashi also points out that among those awaiting repatriation at Tule Lake, for everyone individual who answered “No” on the Loyalty Oath, four were simply accompanying their parents.

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Americans as naturally belonging to the nation. The novel depicts racist intervention, largely by the government, to each of the spheres of Japanese American involvement in the national life. Internment generates disillusionment, disease, and death for many

Japanese Americans in Treadmill. Ultimately, Teru, the most loyal character, appears likely to be physically removed from the United States (“repatriated” to a country she has never even visited). Yet, in this removal, Teru transitions from the private realm of the family to the public realm as both an ambassador for the Japanese American community and an ideal American citizen. She remains a decidedly American political subject, called to fight and struggle in an international context for American values.

The narrative defines Japanese American belonging to the United States through the Noguchi family’s relationship to U.S. soil, rather than legal citizenship. When internment is announced, Issei community members contend, “We told you [Nisei] your citizenship was only good for fair weather” (8). By utilizing the language of weather,

Treadmill depicts legal citizenship as a changing status upon which Japanese Americans can not rely. For farmers, the weather signifies economic instability. Floods or drought could cause ruin.113 Consequently, in referring to “clouded citizenship,” (8) Nakamura implies that the changing legal and cultural meanings of Japanese American citizenship threatened the Noguchi family’s socio-economic status. The narrative suggests that like weather, the characters’ citizenship status is outside of their control. However, since it is always changing, like the weather, citizenship serves less as a determinant of identity than as a practical concern shaping material conditions. By deploying weather metaphors in agricultural contexts, the text highlights the drastic influence such practical

113 Japanese American newspapers frequently contained articles about the economic uncertainty caused by uncontrollable and unpredictable weather patterns.

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concerns can have on characters’ every day lives.114 In depicting legal citizenship status

this way, the text emphasizes ethnic solidarity rather than glorifies citizenship status. It

refutes a definition of legal status as synonymous with belonging to the nation-state.

If the novel describes legal citizenship through the agricultural metaphor of weather,

it defines national belonging through the metaphor of rootedness.115 Teru, in proclaiming her parents’ Americanness, offers a string of questions as evidence: “Why their purchase of the land they farmed and the house they lived in? Why should they be sending their roots down so deep?” (24). This sentiment of “sending their roots down” establishes

Japanese American national belonging as a choice, made by active cultivation. The focus

on agency disrupts a conception of national belonging as “inevitable” or even

“biological” and outside of one’s control, ideas commonly associated with nature. In

redefining national belonging, the narrative challenges conventional conceptions of

“natural” belonging. Through metaphors such as digging and rooting, the narrative

succeeds in claiming Japanese immigrants’ agency in their Americanization process.

Regardless of legal citizenship status, Mr. and Mrs. Noguchi nurture and tend their

relationships to local communities, American values, and U.S. soil. Thus, the narrative

allows first generation Japanese Americans to “naturalize” even though, as Asian

immigrants, they are denied the legal process of “naturalization.”

114 My reading here is influenced by Montejo’s Anglos and Mexicans. Montejo examines the way practical concerns rather than deeply seated loyalty determined whether individuals or families claimed U.S. or Mexican citizenship at moments in which the border was influx.

115 In Reading Asian American Literature, Wong compares the mobility glorified in the frontier which ends with a rootedness that comes to stand for the very freedom of the original westward movement, to the geographic mobility in Asian American texts that demonstrate the inability to achieve social and economic mobility (122). Here it appears Nakamura employs the metaphor of rootedness as westward settlement, only to be uprooted, to loose their freedom, through government action (internment).

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The novel additionally invokes the metaphor of the family for the nation to

demonstrate national belonging. We are told, “Teru remembered a story in which a

mother told her adopted child, ‘You weren’t forced upon us by circumstance like babies.

We chose you because you were the nicest child we could find.’ Her father and mother

too had come of their own free choice to make America their home” (24). Teru equates

the nation with a child and citizen-subjects as adoptive parents. Their love for the nation

might be as fierce as that of a parent for a child and certainly no less strong because they

selected the nation. In asserting the stronger loyalty of the immigrant (over the native) to

the national family, the text refuses to conform to assimilationist narratives that perceive

the second generation as more loyal or more inculcated to America than the first.116 By explicitly embracing adoption as a form of family, Treadmill includes immigration as a natural form of belonging to the nation-state. That is, by expanding the nuclear family, a symbol through which the nation is naturalized, Treadmill imagines a more inclusive national family. If the Noguchis’ actions can be described as an active rooting of the family in the U.S., both physically and metaphorically, the government’s intrusions can be described as an uprooting. Treadmill portrays the government’s actions as unnatural and immoral, as they disrupt a naturally “rooted” family and destroy the national family through the internment of loyal national subjects. Since the novel emphasizes the psychological and sociological costs of internment through the disillusionment of loyal

116 Robert Park’s Chicago School is the key influence here. For a more extensive discussion see Hayashi’s Democratizing the Enemy (20-21). For a discussion on the gendering of Asian American narratives of assimilation, see Chu’s Assimilating Asians.

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Americans, such as Teru, the narrative positions the fall of her parents’ faith in America as equally tragic since they are equally loyal. 117

The narrative characterizes agriculture and the family farm as central to the political, social, and economic contributions of the Noguchi family. The novel represents internment as a threat to the nation’s security and war-time productivity as government policy and local prejudice prevent loyal Japanese Americans from performing their duties to farm, family, and community. The Noguchis are small-time truck farmers working for the local market. Treadmill demonstrates the family’s loyalty as they insist on meeting their market commitments up until the last possible minute, despite personal hardships, out of “duty” (1). They are prevented from meeting this duty by the FBI’s removal of

Teru’s father and later by the violent racism Teru encounters on her vegetable route. The first page of the novel makes apparent that the government men’s presence in her house forces her parents to abandon their work in the yard hoeing parsnips and bunching carrots: “Must be important, [Teru] thought, for both of them to leave the last-minute work which had to be done” (1). Similarly, Teru completes her father’s work only to encounter youth who attack her truck, screaming racist epithets, and break gasoline filled glass jars over her vegetables, rendering them unsaleable.118 Thus, according to the novel, the racism of white American youth enacts economic sabotage on the American nation disrupting the war contributions of loyal Japanese Americans.

Treadmill directly credits the Noguchi parents for the assimilation of their children, including the children’s participation in the social life of the nation. Tad’s success at the

117 This analysis recalls the argument put forward by Thomas and Nishimoto in The Spoilage.

118 Teru’s fears that she will be seen attempting to poison Anglos reference the paranoia actually present in California during that time. In America’s Concentration Camps, for example, Daniels cites the headline “Vegetables Found Free of Poison” (33).

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track meet, Teru’s academic success (valedictorian, denied her scholarship because of her

race), and Sally’s popularity demonstrate the Noguchi family’s social involvement.

These achievements result from more than the happenstance of location; they are one

consequence of Mr. and Mrs. Noguchi’s active loyalty. We are told, “Why had they made Sally quit her Japanese language school when she’d gotten poor grades her first year in high school? They’d been so proud, too, when Teru had given the valedictory address. And why their purchase of education endowments to ensure sending Tad through college?”(24). This social investment directly links to the Noguchis’ agricultural activities. The above passage connects their investment in the children’s

Americanization to their purchase of farm land, demonstrating that the Noguchis had sent

“their roots down so deep” (24). The novel implicitly compares the Noguchi parents to immigrant plants, recalling Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer. Thus the novel affirms their Americanization, justifies their agricultural activities, and attributes their children’s community involvement to their relationship to the land, specifically their successful cultural cultivation of their offspring. Conversely, the internment order actively uproots the children’s American belonging along with the parents’ agricultural endeavors. We are told that, “Teru, Sally, and Tad had made arrangements to quit junior college and high school that very day while Tad was even now at the track meet” (5).

Tad is in first place in the track meet when Teru rushes him home – mid-meet - to say good-bye to his father as the government men take him away. His father’s unjustified arrest prevents him from achieving his athletic potential. Likewise, Sally must be pulled away from joy-riding with friends as a result of the FBI’s presence in their home.

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Through the image of uprooting, the novel figures this disruption as a destruction of the

idealized farm family.

Removing the Noguchi children from their social, athletic, and academic contexts

interrupts their search for belonging to the nation. One character articulates this role for

state institutions when she explains, “Look, we talk American. We act American. We are

Americans. It’d be strange if we weren’t after being exposed to it all these years in school

and at work. They’d call it indoctrination or the making of an American, you are just as surely molded into a good German, a good American, or what have you.” Thus, by interning the family, the United States government actually intercedes to disrupt processes that produce “good Americans.” Even characters like Teru who maintain their loyalty find themselves pulled further and further away from the rest of America. Teru’s friendship with best friend Janet, who is French-American, is symptomatic. After Janet’s first visit to the internment camp, Teru “felt unwillingly that their friendship would never be the same again. They were being exposed to such totally different environments and interpretations and as time passed they would inevitably grow away from each other”

(55). Internment not only removes Teru from the environment that Anglo-Americans experience, but creates a set of new experiences to which only Japanese Americans are exposed. This fosters a growing gulf between Japanese Americans and Anglos. Here, and throughout the novel, experience and environment “naturally” result in particular actions and ideas.

This is evident in the novel’s portrayal of disillusionment and downfall. In depicting the material and ideological changes undergone by Mr. and Mrs. Noguchi, Jiro, and even Teru, Treadmill blames the government for the direct and indirect consequences

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of internment. Mrs. Noguchi’s mental illness results from the heat stroke and stomach

ulcers that go untreated in the camp. The heat stroke that Ayame Noguchi suffered

resulted from government negligence, as the internees languished in overheated buses in

weather upwards of 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Teru explains “No one can say that the heat

is killing these people, but our hygiene teacher at J.C. told us that the death rate definitely

rises during a heat wave, and so, I myself believe that those people would be living today

if they hadn’t been forced to come to this awful place” (79). Teru establishes that

Ayame’s condition results from the heat wave, and thus, from their concentration camp

experience. Sally explicitly condemns the government, stating: “Look what they did to

Mother” (153). Ayame’s mental illness leads her to turn against the United States,

captured in her No-No response on the loyalty questionnaire. Since her answers result

from her ill health, her disloyalty can be traced back to the negligence that led to her

altered state of mind. Moreover, Ayame’s No-No answers result in the Noguchi family’s

segregation at Tule Lake and allow Mr. Noguchi to apply for repatriation. Thus, through

Ayame’s deterioration, Nakamura blames the government for the Noguchi family’s

“repatriation,” including the deportation of the loyal Teru.119

In discussions involving the decision to answer No-No, both Nisei and Issei

characters articulate their frustration and disillusionment with the U.S. government. The

characters most commonly reference the prevalent racism of the United States.120 One character explains: “There’s no use trying to delude ourselves that we’re American. If

119 For information on the repatriation of Japanese Americans, see Daniels’s America’s Concentration Camps (116-117).

120 The explanations the novel advances are remarkably similar to those made by social scientists such as Thomas and Nishimoto in The Spoilage and Leighton’s The Governing of Men. It also echoes the argument of Weglyn’s Years of Infamy.

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our skins were white, it would be another matter. Look at the Indians around here. They say they’re discriminated against even yet. Then look at the white-skinned immigrants.

They don’t even have to be born here to be considered full-fledged Americans” (135).

This passage establishes that the issue of loyalty and recognized national belonging has little to do with indigenity or the place of one’s birth, highlighted by the example of

Indians. Discrimination is race-based and the characters’ American ideals can never be obtained under the national system of white supremacy. As Mr. Yamamda explains, “I don’t want this to happen again to anyone I love” (134). Characters like Mr. Yamamda express their feelings of hopelessness to justify their desired removal to Japan. They perceive U.S. racism to be an unconquerable foe, or an inextricably American enemy.

The characters’ growing awareness of the racism affecting other non-white national denizens shapes their despondency about the potential for anti-racist progress.

Whereas newspapers such as Kashu Mainichi and Rafu Shimpo distinguished the

Japanese American community from Mexican American and black populations,

Treadmill depicts the experience of Native Americans and blacks as similar to Japanese

Americans. Indeed, after the announcement of Executive Order 9066, Teru notices “an increasing friendliness on the part of Germans, Negroes, Italians, and Mexicans” (24-25).

German disloyalty and Italian materialism,121 as represented by the novel, contrasts with the analysis of racism offered by blacks and Mexicans, who “don’t like Americans. They treat us like dirt” (25). Responding to the small pittance the internees received for harvesting the cotton crop, Teru realizes, “no wonder the negroes can’t get ahead” (94).

121 “An Itilian [sic] neighbor said in a confidential tone, ‘The only reason I live in this country is because I can have a car, a radio, a refrigerator, and a good house. In Italy, I couldn’t have those things.’ A German- American told George, ‘This time we’ll do it. They’ve been hanging on to the best things in the world long enough’” (25).

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Similarly, the “dilapidated shacks” of the Indian reservations shock her as “she’d always

pictured Indian Reservations as well kept because they were under government

protection” (193). The novel’s characters perceive the government’s treatment of other

racial minority groups with the resultant economic immobility as indicative for their own

future. For example, Teru uses information shared by local Indians – “over half the total

number of Indians who were earmarked for this reservation died either on the march here or within the first months after arriving” (79) - to understand the wave of sickness and

death passing over the camp. The experience of internment leads Teru to a new

understanding of the consequences of racism and slowly forces her to perceive the United

States as dominated by Anglos who prevent non-whites from truly participating in a democracy.

When Mr. Noguchi, Teru’s father, states his desire to return to Japan, it is

prefaced by several pages listing the discrimination faced by himself, his family, and his

friends. He explains that prior to internment, he ignored it all, convinced that America

“was a land of opportunity with a limitless future for anyone with ability” (168). This list

suggests that characters like Mr. Noguchi previously persevered over many forms of

racism. Their loyalty is not only “fair weather,” like Nisei citizenship (8). Yet internment

differs drastically from earlier incidents; it is the final proof that Issei ignored in their

initial drive for success in the United States. Moreover, as Teru’s boyfriend Jiro states,

“Any debt of gratitude [to the United States] I may have acknowledged was wiped out at

evacuation” (139). With internment, characters like Mr. Noguchi and Jiro come to

believe that the white supremacy of American society will not be transformed in their

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lifetime or the lifetimes of their children. Jiro explains, “I’m afraid I’m not idealistic enough to want to die for my great, great, grandchildren” (131).

Instead, Jiro celebrates Japan, believing that its pan-Asian imperatives offer the only true hope for challenging the United States’ white supremacy. He not only

expresses the belief that Japan’s triumph will demonstrate the possibility of Asian equality, but also that Japan’s actions support an anti-colonial mission. He claims “Japan has already done a great deal. Look at the record. America has given up all claims to extraterritoriality in China. England promises independence to India after the war.

Holland promises a greater measure of self government for the East Indies.” (130). In rearticulating the stakes in World War II, Jiro attributes to Japan the struggle for the Four

Freedoms that Roosevelt ascribes to America. Perhaps it is these shared values that ultimately allow Jiro and Teru to remain together, despite their strikingly different loyalties.122 Moreover, Treadmill represents Jiro as man of virtue and character. The text

implies that his loss of loyalty to the United States is a tragedy for the nation. Jiro makes

clear that his citizenship renunciation is only “a natural outcome which was inevitable, at

least for him, after evacuation and segregation . . . he had no choice” (217). While his

actions are “natural” and “inevitable,” they are not the result of his racial character, but

rather due to the internment environment. Thus the government remains culpable for

Jiro’s renunciation of his U.S. citizenship. In offering blatant evidence of the United

States’ hypocrisy in a war fought for “Oppressed minorities. . . [and] democracy,”

122 In reading Treadmill as an implicit response to and critique of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, I place the novel alongside the more explicit critiques made by Carlos Bulosan, Americo Paredes, and CLR James. See Salvidar’s The Borderlands of Culture (217-218). Certainly celebrating Japan in contrast to the United States’ imperialism is heavily problematic given Japan’s war crimes and imperial ambitions, as Jose Limon points out in “Border Literary Histories, Globalization, and Critical Regionalism.”

196 internment represents a loss in the war’s ideological battlefront for the United States. The direct causalities of this loss are loyal Americans, that is, the Japanese American internees.123

Despite Teru’s awareness of the United States’ hypocrisy and racism, she remains the most loyal character in Treadmill, with the least hesitant embrace of the United

States. Repeatedly, in her interior monologue, she views herself as American, not

Japanese: “Japan was still a foreign country” (51). In the early parts of the novel, her beliefs seem even to trump her physical needs. After receiving far too little to eat at the

Assembly Center she wonders, “Are they going to keep us so undernourished there will be no energy for rest within the camps? Her dissatisfied stomach said, yes, but her mind said no, this is America” (39). The placement of the mind’s no after the stomach’s yes suggests that her mind responds to the disloyalty expressed by her physical body, as much as to the initial question. It also indicates that Teru’s loyalty can only be maintained by ignoring her material circumstances. The definitive “this is America” that ends the sentence implies that this ends the conversation for Teru. “No” is the answer with which she ultimately rests.124 Even in the final pages of the novel, when she reluctantly accepts that she will be going to Japan, she remains an American subject. Indeed, though she has harsh critiques of internment she explains to Jiro, “Maybe we girls really don’t feel disloyal to this country” (153). Yet, throughout the novel she also hears a “double whisper” (52), as seen in the dialogue with her stomach. This double whisper articulates

123 This sentiment is also captured in Teru’s interrogation by the FBI when her father is interned: “finally Teru forgot to be scared and turned resentful” (9).

124 The irony here is that Teru, a former food producer, lacks adequate nutrition. Moreover, as Ho describes in Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming of Age Novels, food often serves as literary vehicle for representations of assimilation in Asian American fiction. The absence of all food renders such questions obsolete under conditions where bodily needs fail to be met.

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Teru’s double subjectivity, as she struggles to embrace both the identity of the ideal

abstract American citizen and her more familial identity as a Japanese American

subject.125

Although Treadmill was not authored by a woman, the text constructs a

specifically female Japanese American subjectivity through Teru. The editors of The Big

Aiiieeeee! famously denounced key texts featuring female protagonists, including Fifth

Chinese Daughter, Nisei Daughter, and Woman Warrior as pandering to white audiences.

They asserted such texts emasculate Asian American men and depict them as patriarchal tyrants from whom the narrators must flee by embracing Western attitudes of white superiority. Their move parallels much early literary criticism of nineteenth-century

African American fiction, which dismissed prominent works of domestic fiction written by both men and women, like Clotel (1853) and Iola Leroy (1892), on the grounds that

the texts catered to white fantasies through their mulatta protagonists. Literary critics

Claudia Tate, Ann duCille, and M. Giulia Fabi counter that the mulatta as a figure in

nineteenth-century African American fiction serves a range of both narrative and political

purposes dependent on the cultural context of the text’s production. Similarly, Teru’s

gendered relationship to family, citizenship and landscape proves central to the

geographic and ideological transitions the narrative depicts.

In constructing Teru’s subjectivity, the narrative employs strategies also utilized in

“autobiographical” Nisei works such as those by Yoshiko Uchida, Monica Sone, and

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. In Masking Selves, Making Others, Traise Yamamoto

contends that Japanese American women writers “employ the trope of masking” to

125 The “double whisper” employed in the text echoes the “double consciousness” described by Dubois in The Souls of Black Folk.

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disrupt patriarchal and orientalist readings of their protagonists, allowing the voice and

subjectivity of each to emerge. Yamamoto contends that Japanese American racial

visibility (an Oriental mask) marks them invisible as a subject, and many writers allow

for a double subjectivity to create space for the protagonist’s voice. Treadmill employs

this strategy in its opening description of Teru:

Her wide-spaced eyes were momentarily narrowed in puzzlement but even then it was easy to notice the generous separation of eyebrow from eye which imparted that incredibly soft Oriental look to her inevitably brown eyes. Harder to see was the slight cleft in her chin which was inherited from her father. The photogenic hollows and the olive-smooth freshness of her complexion were from her mother (1-2).

The description moves from the physical markings of Oriental identity (notice the words

“Oriental” linked to “inevitably”), to the less noticed, “Harder to see,” markings of

individuality. This is the only point in the book where the word “Oriental” is used. In

this passage it does not describe Teru, but instead describes her “look.” Her eyes are

“inevitably” brown, because of the Orientalist trope that dictates it to be. Her “Oriental”

look is “easy to see” because it is what the eye has been trained to notice, and when

noticing it, the mind calls forth a variety of narratives and readings of the “Oriental” face.

By asking the reader to look at what is “harder to see” the novel instructs the reader to

shed their misperceptions about Japanese Americans, so that they are able to more

appropriately interpret the narrative that follows, a narrative that might otherwise be

obscured by the visible presence of the Oriental mask.126

Moreover, this displacement of the physical attributes of “Oriental” identity works side by side with an embrace of the character’s racial visibility as all-American

beauty. As critics like Barbara Christian assert, naming women of color as the heroines

126 My thinking here draws from Creef’s analysis of Mine Okubo’s Citizen 13660.

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of fiction criticizes the restriction of dominant standards of beauty to white women. Thus

in placing Teru as the novel’s protagonist and by repeatedly insisting on her physical

beauty, Nakamura critiques white supremacist standards of attractiveness and of

womanhood while also claiming Teru’s Americanness by allowing her to stand for the

beauty of the nation.

Beyond the physical description of Teru, Treadmill offers additional clues as to

the centrality of her subjectivity to the novel. Though the reader occasionally encounters

the thoughts or perceptions of other characters, by and large, the novel moves in and out

of Teru’s own consciousness. Her point of view is often synonymous with the narrative

point of view. The line between Teru’s thoughts and the narrator’s words frequently

blurs, especially through the absence of quotation marks when discussing Teru’s internal

narrative. For example, we are introduced to Teru’s first morning in the camp with, “A baby was crying. A baby? Teru sleepily tried to orient herself”(46). The novel does not distinguish between Teru’s thoughts and the narrator’s observations. Teru’s surprised reaction to the sudden presence of a baby mirrors the reader’s own surprise. The lack of quotation marks encourage the phrase “A baby?” to function simultaneously as the reader’s thought, the narrator’s voice, and Teru’s voice, encouraging a merging of the three. The novel moves in and out of first person, encouraging the reader to identify with

Teru. Teru becomes the focal point through which the reader enters the narrative. As we find out, Teru is awakened by a neighbor’s baby heard through the thin walls of the camp barracks. Lacking narrative information unavailable to Teru, readers must orient themselves along with her. Such strategies encourage readers to filter their perspectives through hers and to relate to her as a “readable” character, not dissimilar to themselves.

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This allows Teru to achieve a quasi “universal” status of the U.S. citizen.

Dominant ideologies figure the “universal” or “abstract” citizen of the United States as disembodied. This process of disembodiment or abstraction renders the ideal-subject

citizen’s white race and male gender invisible. The narrative insists that Teru, an

embodied subject whose race and gender remains highly visible, remains capable of

functioning as a national citizen. Her subjectivity is commensurate with the individual

(universal) subject. In allowing Teru to serve in the capacities of both embodied subject

and disembodied citizen, the text identifies Teru as both a Japanese American subject and

as a national citizen-subject.

Teru’s prospects as an “ambassador” demonstrate her ability to function as both

Japanese American and abstract American. Her white boss in the internment camp, Mr.

McBain, provides her an unparalleled opportunity to leave the camp for a secretarial job

far better paying than those other Nisei in the novel are able to secure. The use of the

word ambassador here renders the Japanese American community as outside of the

United States, for an ambassador builds relationships between two sovereign nations. As

Mr. McBain explains, this job was an opportunity to prove “that they [Japanese

Americans] are no different from your sons or my daughters” (161). He communicates

that Teru’s job as ambassador would be to demonstrate the loyal citizenship of the Nisei

population to white America. Here the issue of double-subjectivity is raised. Mr.

McBain simultaneously characterizes Teru as an outsider and a foreigner capable of

being an ambassador to the United States, and proclaims her fully American, no different

“on the inside” from any other loyal American subject (161). This textual moment

communicates that Teru is the most American of the Nisei in the novel, as Mr. McBain

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acknowledges that there are others who he ought to ask first (such as his office staff), but

that he is convinced that Teru should be sent. Mr. McBain explains “you’ll make the best ambassador I know” (161). Out of all the novel’s characters, Nakamura suggests Teru best exemplifies the similarity between Nisei and white Americans. Teru is labeled as deserving of the nation’s promise of equality.

Teru’s relationship to her father, mother, and Jiro demonstrates how she personifies ideal American citizenship, yet manages to maintain her specific and individual identity as a Japanese American subject in the process. In the traditional model of American citizenship, the family’s father is the ideal citizen. His status as head of family and breadwinner affirms his readiness for the responsibilities of citizenship. In

Teru’s family, her father, as a legal alien, is ineligible for citizenship due to the racist restrictions against Asian naturalization. With the removal of her father by the government, Teru receives the mantle of his contested citizenship. She becomes head of the family. Her father explains to her that with his departure he “will leave you in charge of the family” (7). Her gender does not disqualify her. As her father tells her, “I know you have a level head on your shoulders and I have always trusted your judgment” (7).

This statement imbues Teru with the rationality of the ideal citizen, countering images of women as too emotional for political responsibility. Teru’s mother is not a rival for

Teru’s growing power, for as Mr. Noguchi explains, she “is not very strong” (7). With her father’s departure, Teru immediately steps into his shoes:

The shiny black car disappeared and suddenly Mrs. Noguchi was sobbing softly in her daughter’s arms. They [the arms] tightened protectively. She barely came to Teru’s nose. . . She kept seeing the look in her father’s eyes when he had turned for a last farewell. The pleading look in them. Take care of mother they seemed to say. Be good to her. She needs protection. Tears welled in Teru’s eyes but she blinked them angrily away and led her mother into the house (10).

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As the obedient daughter, Teru becomes the guardian of the family. Her diminutive

mother leans against her, and Teru wraps her arms protectively around her mother.

Fulfilling masculine gender expectations, Teru blinks her tears away as she transitions to

her new role. As a legal American, and as head of the family, Teru is now aptly

positioned to demonstrate her ability to perform the tasks of ideal American citizenship.

Mrs. Noguchi’s frailty, made apparent in Teru’s ascendancy to household head,

can also be read as a demonstration of the dominance of American values in their family.

Mothers are traditionally perceived in the United States as the bearers of culture. In

American immigration myths, the child’s American identity must break free from the

influence of the Mother-culture, and hence the mother. This is apparent in No-No Boy, where Ichiro’s mother is vilified, and must bear the weight of the protagonist’s indictment of Japan. He is only able to free himself from the psychological wound of his

Japanese identity through the death of his mother. Instead of maligning Mrs. Noguchi,

Treadmill renders her as an impotent victim of the state. We are reminded several times of her small stature, while the narrative characterizes her dementia as harmless and passive. She shows little initiative, and often sits by, holding Teru’s hand, when important decisions are to be made. The more mentally ill she grows, the more she allows

her children to take over and control the affairs of the house, as demonstrated by her diminishing interest in doing the laundry (109). Moreover, we are frequently told that her

dementia is really a form of memory loss. As Teru explains to her father, “She just can’t

remember anything” (99). If the mother has lost her memory, then she cannot pass on

Japanese culture, further affirming the Americanness of her off-spring, who do not even

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speak Japanese. Through the mother’s illness, Treadmill depicts the influence of Japanese

culture on the Nisei as harmless and weak.

Literary critics, such as Marianne Hirsh, have argued that dead, dying, or absent

mothers enable the production of the daughter’s subjectivity. The absence of the mother

allows the daughter to become central to the narrative.127 Teru’s increased power,

strength, and independence correlates with her mother’s downfall. If Teru requires subjectivity for citizenship, her mother “shrivels” to allow Teru to expand and claim this

American subjectivity. In contrast, Traise Yamamoto contends that in the works of many

Japanese American female authors, including Hisaye Yamamoto, the daughter negotiates between her status as female and her status as Japanese American in relationship to her mother. The mother’s subjectivity remains central to the daughter’s selfhood, even in the mother’s absence. In this reading Mrs. Noguchi’s subjectivity is rendered vital to her daughter’s identity. Teru negotiates her sense of self and her ethnic identity in relationship to her mother.

While both analyses seem applicable to Treadmill, in my reading, the father- daughter relationship replaces the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship enabling the development of Teru’s subjectivity.128 Through her mental deterioration, Mrs.

Noguchi appears unreadable and unknowable both to her daughter and to the text’s readers. Mrs. Noguchi becomes accessible only through Mr. Noguchi’s memory, as he alone remains capable of communicating her past and her perspective to her children. He explains, “your mother pretended she wasn’t hungry so you would have enough energy

127 Yamamoto’s Masking Selves, Making Subjects cites Hirsch’s The Mother/Daughter Plot. Yet this discussion also comes up in Bow and Chu’s works.

128 One might note the male author as father and the female protagonist as daughter here.

204 for your play at school” (169). In informing Teru of her parents’ past, Mr. Noguchi must explain what Mrs. Noguchi intended to tell herself, “when we have lots of money and have no worries and we can look back and laugh about it” (170). Teru’s mother loses her voice and her intentions through the crisis of internment and Teru’s consideration of relocation. Interestingly, Ayame Noguchi sits through this conversation “as though all this were about some other person only remotely connected with herself” (169). The combination of her physical presence and mental absence highlights that Mrs. Noguchi’s subjectivity either no longer exists, or is actually unreadable. No one truly knows what

Mrs. Noguchi thinks. The narrative depicts Ayame’s subjectivity as less and less visible, with Mrs. Noguchi ultimately becoming the “Oriental mask” who expresses disloyalty through answering “No-No” during her loyalty interview. Simultaneously, Treadmill confirms Teru’s American subjectivity, as her father, whose role as American citizen is both structurally implied and legally impossible, transfers the status of household head to her.

Legal citizenship status is not Teru’s only qualification for Ambassadorship. As a female she poses less of a threat to the American nation than a Japanese American male might, given the context of war and the fear of the Japanese military. Teru easily answers the loyalty oath with “Yes-Yes,” stating her willingness to be drafted. Yet, earlier in the novel she explains: “If I were a man and free, I’d willingly take my place in defense of my country, but I’m not a man and I’m not free and I’m not willingly submitting to this evacuation because I know that it’s not right and is falsely described when it’s called patriotic duty” (53). She disputes comparisons between herself and soldiers not only because she lacks the freedom to choose to defend her country, but equally because of her

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womanhood. This suggests, within the novel’s logic, that women may critique the nation without posing a military threat as they are not expected to serve in the armed forces of either the United States or Japan.129 As Teru’s friend Bill glibly states, “Women don’t

count so they may as well answer yes-yes” (153). Teru’s gender assignment allows a

safe space for her to both proclaim her loyalty to the United States and from which to

launch her critique of the nation.

Moreover, as a young, strikingly pretty, and single daughter, Teru provides the

prospect of intermarriage.130 She poses a Pocahontas possibility to the United States.

Mr. Noguchi makes this connection when he states, “Teru is also a girl and I regard

relocation and marriage in the same light” (165). She will leave her family to belong to

the American state as a spouse and as a woman traded (in a deal brokered between white

men) to affirm friendship between the Japanese American community and the American

community at large.131 The novel is clear that for Teru, the choice to relocate would

require abandoning her romance with Jiro: “She wondered what there would be for her in

the future. There would be no Jiro” (173). Teru believes that to relocate to Cleveland

would likely require her to marry a white man, “with delivery waiting to complete the

129 This provides an interesting parallel to Fabi’s reading of Clotel in Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel. According to Fabi, Clotel poses gendered models of resistance whereby the attention given to the female protagonist’s escape through passing contrasts with the heroic depiction of the male figures’ active armed rebellion. The use of the female protagonist in Clotel allows white readers to identify with her through conventions of melodrama and overlook the radical subplot that would be more threatening to a white audience.

130 While Leslie Fielder establishes the importance of the romance/marriage plot to American fiction, duCille’s Coupling Convention explores the marriage plot’s political import to African American fiction. In many nineteenth-century works of African American fiction, for example, the choice of an African American groom for mulatta capable of passing for white demonstrated a conscious embrace of the black community. For a discussion of miscegenation in Asian American literature see Koshy.

131 My thinking here is influenced by Kurishage’s discussion of the function of the Nisei Week Queen in “The Problem of Biculturalism: Japanese American Identity and Festival before World War II.”

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cycle of assimilation” (174). When Teru rejects the concept of marrying white, she

repudiates that model of assimilation as well as the oriental exoticification it would require of her. While Teru remains unable to “put her finger on the cause,” she remembers her distaste at a white schoolmate’s attraction to her, expressed through comments about “the half-caste heroine” and “hybrid virility” (175). Teru does not want a man who will love her because of his conception of her Oriental identity, built from

Hollywood movies, nor does she wish to be an ambassador to the United States by modeling a Japanese American identity in which she would be required to “lose her identity as Japanese” through intermarriage and assimilation (174).132

In rejecting the offer of relocation, Teru opposes intermarriage for purposes of assimilation. Yet she maintains her interest in being an ambassador, and asserts an identity that allows her to remain an abstract American subject without sacrificing her

Japanese American subjectivity. What ultimately tips Teru’s decision is her relationship to her family. She explains, “Friendships were so fine and heartwarming, but they didn’t always last. You had to be there to tend them like a fire. They were broken, they languished, they cooled, they met with intolerance, they met with forced evacuations”

(173). In this passage, Teru equates her relationship to the U.S. as friendship, not as

family. Teru’s acknowledgement of this relationship marks her greatest departure from

American loyalty, and her deepest statement of disillusionment. Although she has

treated the United States as family, she believes she will always be treated as a friend.

The novel foreshadows this when Teru earlier explains that Japanese Americans “had

been merely tolerated because of their economic usefulness…they hadn’t been really

132 My thinking here is influenced by Chu’s contention that the absence or transformation of the marriage plot in Asian American fiction reflects the inability of the author to demonstrate “the individual’s reconciliation with the social order” (18).

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accepted for better or for worse” (52). Thus the United States had never truly married her

family into the nation, and, even if she were to “intermarry” now, choosing the United

States as her spouse, she will remain unlikely to be accepted as part of the national

family. Such a marriage would only mask her subordination to the nation under the

guise of romantic love.133 Teru rejects the ambassadorship offered her both because it

requires her to model only the identity of abstract American subject/citizen (losing her

specifically Japanese American identity), and because she recognizes that the racial logic

of the United States will always cause her to be seen as an outsider, a friend, and an

ambassador. While she performs as an abstract American subject, she believes she will

never be recognized as a truly American subject. Thus, in Teru’s decision, the novel

cloaks its bitterness.

A similar dilemma informs Teru’s relationship with Jiro. Romances often figure

as political tropes in modern literature.134 The depictions of “East-West” romances in the

Japanese American ethnic newspapers illustrate this well, as Anglo marriages to

Japanese-Americans functioned in the papers to demonstrate the belonging of Japanese

Americans to the United States.135 Teru specifically rejects the possibilities of marrying

white, and she even rejects the loyal Japanese-American soldier George for the cynical

Jiro, who has chosen to support Japan in order to fight against white supremacy. This

implies that Teru, for all her loyalty to the nation-state, ultimately refuses the United

States’ seduction of her, rejecting national hypocrisy. Yet, in choosing Jiro, who has

133 Here I draw on the work of Yamamoto’s Masking Selves, Making Other, which asserts that interracial romance in U.S. popular culture often masks subordination through romantic love (38).

134 For example, as Sommer describes, Latin American romances of the nineteenth century frequently articulate national identities through “natural” romantic love of opposing factions within new nations.

135 For example, see Iwao Kawakami’s short story series “New Americans.” The sub-header for part one proclaims “The Story of an American boy falling in love with a Japanese girl. Can East and West Meet?”

208 renounced his United States’ citizenship, Teru does not reject her American identity.

Instead, Jiro’s disloyalty serves to highlight her loyalty. That is, in depicting Jiro as

“foreign,” the narrative marks Teru as even more clearly a part of the American nation.

Teru describes her lover as “remote and a stranger” (131), as distant from her as Japan, a nation she has never visited. Moreover, in Teru’s choice of Jiro, the novel suggests compatibility between her loyal American subjectivity and his disloyal American subjectivity through their shared desire to fight for the Four Freedoms. Teru’s romance can also be read as “strategic restraint,” a narrative strategy described by Traise

Yamamoto. As “strategic restraint,” Teru’s die-hard loyalty provides cover for the angry and bitter critiques launched by Jiro and Teru’s father. Readers’ identification with Teru allows them to remain loyal to her even if offended by the beliefs of those that Teru loves. Indeed, the novel may even suggest through this identification with Teru that the reader respond to them as Teru does, with understanding and love.

This is not the only function, however, for Teru and Jiro’s romance. Their relationship also sets up the alternative form of ambassadorship that Teru embraces in the novel’s end. For in choosing her family, Teru chooses to relocate to Japan. Japan replaces the United States as her potential spouse. Yet, in making this choice, Teru’s

Americanness is reaffirmed. Teru comes to represent the West in a new form of East-

West romance. Indeed, in the novel’s last pages, the romantic relationship between Teru and Jiro seems replaced by the familial bond between Teru and her sister Sally. The final chapter takes place after Teru has been sent to Tule Lake with her parents and brother. Her letters to Sally imply her distance from the rest of America, as if she has

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already departed.136 Yet her letters to her sister remind the reader of her bond to the

United States. They are letters written by one who is away from home, and as such remind the reader of Teru’s true home. Moreover, in centering on the sibling relationship between Teru and Sally, Treadmill establishes a familial bond between Teru and the

United States that the nation can not deny.

These letters to Sally capture Teru’s voice, her individuality and subjectivity.

They represent her communication and her consciousness as increasingly set-aside and separate from the rest of the work. Moreover, the text’s generic conventions blur as the work transforms into an epistolary novel. Scholars from Lynn Hunt to Nancy Armstrong perceive an eighteenth century cultural transition visible in the popularity of epistolary novels and domestic fiction (such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela) that allowed the production of modern individual subjectivity.137 The interiority central to these novels

articulated the consciousness that allows the articulation of universal subjectivity. The

citizen-subject of the modern nation state relies on this conscious universal subject. Teru

strives to be the abstract and ideal American citizen who has access to the nation’s

promise of equality, and who has achieved subjecthood, the modern marker of

personhood. Treadmill documents Teru’s moves toward universal western subjecthood

by blurring the boundaries between narrator and protagonist, and eventually utilizing

epistolary conventions to erase this distinction all together. In doing so the novel

documents Teru’s ascent to abstract United States citizen at the very moment of her

136 Indeed, in the novel’s cartography, Tule Lake is placed outside of the United States: “A faint glow on the horizon marked the city of Tule Lake. Over there and beyond was the life she’d known. Inside the fence waited the unknown. The barbed wire separating her from the lights made wishful thinking impossible. The reality lay cold within her breast. Goodbye, America, she thought” (205).

137 See Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction and Hunt. This is also echoed in Rodriguez’s Autobiographical Inscriptions.

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exclusion from the nation. Indeed, such a transformation can only be complete once Teru

has left the United States. It is only when Teru escapes from the nation that marks her

visibly as Oriental (unassimiable alien), that her position as abstract United States citizen

can be truly textually recognized.

In certain respects, Teru’s expulsion from the nation echoes the captivity

narratives popular in colonial America. As Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse contend, in texts like The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary

Rowlandson, the narrator gains an American identity only once she has been removed from her family. Her individual identity and the interiority that mark her as a modern political subject emerge in contrast to her captors and are solidified upon her return to her

community. While Teru’s American identity consolidates through the disembodied interiority her letters signify, Noguchi denies Teru the triumphant return to her family.

The text fails to imagine her restoration to the United States. In its move to the global, the narrative specifically avoids a return to the soil. At the end of Treadmill, Teru is located nowhere and everywhere. The novel denies her the local even as she achieves access to the global.

If prior to internment, Teru’s father struggled to naturalize his family through their agricultural roots, after internment the Noguchi family no longer has faith that the

American soil or the American system will accept them. Teru does not see herself capable of transforming U.S. agricultural discourse. Her only hope of ensuring her

American identity is to escape the tropes of nation and nature that shaped her pre- internment experiences. The pre-internment hopes of naturalizing through American nature no longer exist. Thus Treadmill refutes the ability of agricultural labor and

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landownership to provide access to citizenship for Japanese Americans even as the text

initially establishes the political and cultural belonging of its family through agricultural

motifs and metaphors.

Significantly, the relationship between individuals in the Noguchi family and the

U.S. state depicted through Teru’s experience of exile conforms to the New Deal tropes

Michael Szalay argues typified much modernist literature of the period.138 Szalay asserts that in New Deal literary works, the male citizen often vanishes while the female citizen moves from the private sphere to the public sphere. In such texts, women transition from selfish maternal acts of nurturing to public forms of aid provided by their bodies, such as when Steinbeck’s Rose of Sharon breastfeeds a stranger in The Grapes of Wrath. Men too must vacate their familial roles. Yet they become abstract citizens of the new

American collective through bodily absence, such as when Tom Joad metamorphoses into a “spirit.” Likewise Teru’s father and Jiro are textually absent from Treadmill’s final pages. Moreover, both are vanquished from the nation as Teru’s father applies for repatriation and Jiro renounces his U.S. citizenship. Denied entrance to the collective abstract male citizenship of the New Deal, they are relegated outside of the nation-state.

In the context of the relationship between the U.S. state and the U.S. citizen, both male subjects are removed.

138 Szalay defines modernist literature very broadly. While he is particularly concerned with the way modernist literature examines “what it meant for art to be considered either process or product, either an activity of creation or the artifact thus created” (5), he defines modernist works as any literature of “the first half this century” (5). Certainly Treadmill fits into this rubric. Moreover, Treadmill conforms with some (thought not all) commonly recognized markers of modernism such as multi-perspectives, engagement with current theories of social studies, experimental form, etc.

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Simultaneously, as an ambassador, Teru becomes the public citizen described by

Szalay as typical of female subjectivity within New Deal Modernist literature.139 She

achieves female citizenship through public sacrifice rather than private intimacy. Teru

becomes both abstract citizen and public citizen in her very removal from the nation- state. Like Jiro and her father who are exiled from the nation rather than admitted to the collective national body, Teru can only assume the mantle of abstract citizenship by departing from the nation. In Assimilating Asians, Patricia P. Chu argues that Asian

American literature transforms the bildungsroman. Typically bildungsroman narratives create national subjects through an erasure of differences. Asian American texts instead tend to demonstrate a form of “authorship [that] signifies not only the capacity to speak but the belief that speech – or literary representation – is also a claiming of political and social agency” (3).140 Treadmill’s bildungsroman narrative combines with its

incorporation of epistolary conventions to characterize Teru’s exile from the United

States as a move that allows her differences to speak for the nation. Her emigration marks her maturity into political speech. With her transformation in political consciousness, the cartography of the novel shifts. Teru transforms from an unrecognized U.S. citizen rooted in a Californian agricultural landscape to a recognizably U.S. subject, an ambassador, traveling and transforming international space. This geographical transition recasts the international implications of her public American persona.

139 The presence of New Deal literary tropes in Treadmill should not be surprising, as many historians now interpret internment as a New Deal project. New Deal officials staffed and administered the camps, actively working towards New Deal aims of racial assimilation through cultural erasure. Smith’s Democracy on Trial examines the internment camps’ similarity to the CCC in Chapter 13. Drinnon bluntly explains “The men who ran America’s concentration camps were liberals of the genus New Deal” (4). Lye in America’s Asia examines the ideological overlap (141-203). Also see Hayashi.

140 For an alternative discussion of Asian American bildungsroman interpretations see Ho.

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The internationalism of the novel’s anti-racist activism for recognition of the Four

Freedoms appears in Teru’s final personal plea. Because Treadmill is such a little known

novel, the passage is worth quoting at length:

Beyond this treadmill that saps our will to do good, there must be some common meeting ground where all peoples can mingle with liking and with trust. There must be within our lifetimes, a day when all people will be humble enough to know that whether we are born in a palace or a hovel, from a black, white or yellow womb, we share the common bond of being human, with sensibilities that can be hurt, pride that can be injured, honor that can be admired.

We’ve got to come to realize that the atom bomb in Hiroshima didn’t just wipe out a city, remote and far removed from our own existence. We’ve got to feel the horror of knowing as we would know if it happened to love ones of our own, the grief of a mother looking at her new born babe smashed to a bloody pulp in her arms, the dying gasp of a child with his eyes searching in vain for someone to comfort him. . . We who have passed through evacuation have learned a lot. We mustn’t forget. (219-220).

Here the novel figures the United States as a treadmill. Good citizens strive for

democracy but the energy they exert fails to move the nation forward. It is only in

escaping the United States that Teru can maintain her American values embodied in the

Four Freedoms. She writes to Sally, “I wish sometimes that I were staying to help fight

that battle with you but it’s a comforting thought to know we’ll both be working for the

same thing though we’ll be separated by the ocean” (219). Teru may relocate to Japan,

but her loyalty to America, and her commitment to democracy and freedom continues to

inform her life goals.141 These American values become transposed as an international anti-racism in an incipient human rights framework in Teru’s final speech. Indeed, Teru’s

relocation/repatriation implies that it is only in this post-war international context that

such values may thrive both in the domestic nation and on the global scale. In her letter,

she moves from the experience of evacuation to the injustices of war. Her speech moves

141 As Azuma points out, Japanese American intellectuals in the 1930s often used the metaphor of a bridge to discuss the role of the Nisei in relations between Japan and the United States.

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from the local contained spaces of treadmills and wombs positioned in the United States

to Japan and specifically Hiroshima. This transition marks not the move from one nation

to another nation, but from national to global concerns. Although Teru must escape the

tropes of nation and nature to establish her Americanness, Nakamura provides hope for

Teru by reconceptualizing ambassadorship in new international contexts.

Conclusion

The material relationship of the Japanese American community to agriculture shifted

significantly during World War II. Yet, understanding the cultural contestations of the

Japanese American relationship to farming and farm labor remains useful for

understanding narratives produced before, during, and after World War II. While many

conservatives and liberals depicted an Oriental farmer who threatened American national

identity, Japanese Americans textual sources from throughout this period often asserted a

natural form of national belonging through their community’s agricultural contributions.

Articles in both Kashu Mainichi and Rafu Shimpo expressed Japanese American subjectivity through depictions of farming. Similarly, Treadmill rejects legal citizenship as the standard for national belonging, redefining inclusion as economic, social and political participation through natural metaphors. Treadmill, like the ethnic newspapers, rearticulated Japanese American subjectivity that bridged the perceived distinction between Asian heritage and American citizenship. Yet Treadmill suggests that Japanese

American subjectivity transformed through the internment process from the national landscape to an international post-war context. Internment texts like Treadmill suggest the failure of earlier narratives of naturalization to intervene in the post-war moment and

Cold War discourses. As I explore in the next chapter, authors employed a diversity of

215 ideologies in negotiating Japanese American agricultural narratives. Hisaye Yamamoto’s

Cold War fiction disrupted, rather than an embraced, the relationship between nature and nation.

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CHAPTER 4 “The Earth Trembled for Days ”: Domestic Disorder and Nature’s Violence in Yamamoto’s Short Stories

While the 1950s were a period of political retreat for many leftists under attack by

McCarthyism, Japanese American author Hisaye Yamamoto increasingly identified with radical causes and organizations throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. Through this framework she rethought the agricultural experience of Japanese Americans during the

Great Depression. The political perspectives she developed through internment, her work for the Los Angeles Tribune, and her affinity for the Catholic Worker resulted in short stories in dialogue with the discourses of race, citizenship, and agriculture prevalent in the 1930s while remaining firmly rooted in Cold War discourses of domesticity and

Yamamoto’s post-war political engagements.

Hisaye Yamamoto may be one of the best known authors to examine Japanese

American agricultural experiences in California. She was among the first Japanese

American authors celebrated widely for her literary prowess.1 Three of her short-stories appeared in Martha Foley’s lists of “Distinctive Short Stories,” and “Yoneko’s

Earthquake” was included in Best American Short Stories: 1952.2 Asian Americanists

1 Toshio Mori’s collection of short stories was published before Yamamoto’s. Yamamoto’s first book- length collection appeared in 1988 under the auspices of Kitchen Table Press. Yet Mori and Yamamoto were contemporaries. They were friends and Yamamoto later penned the introduction to a re-issue Mori’s Yokamura, California. Yamamoto mentions Babb’s association with Toshio Mori (The Chauvinist, 8).

2 The stories included in Foley’s list include: “The High-Heeled Shoes” (1948), “The Brown House” (1951), and “Epithalamium” (1960). See Cheung,’s “Introduction” in Seventeen Syllables, Women’s Writers Series.

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celebrate her contributions as well. According to the editors of The Big Aiiieeeee!,

“Technically and stylistically, [Yamamoto’s work] is among the most highly developed of early Asian American writing.”3 As an adolescent in the 1930s Yamamoto penned a

regular column in the Japanese American newspaper Kashu Mainichi (Japanese

California Daily News), and her first short story was accepted for publication in 1948

(“High Heeled Shoes” in Partisan Review).4 With financial help from her brothers as

well as the John Hay Whitney Foundation Opportunity Fellowship, Yamamoto left her

post-war job at the African American paper, the Los Angeles Tribune, in 1949, to

concentrate on her writing. During this period (1949-1953), Yamamoto produced the

central works examined in this chapter, “Seventeen Syllables,” and “Yoneko’s

Earthquake.” In 1953, Yamamoto declined the Stanford Fellowship in Writing to move

to the Catholic Worker movement’s Peter Maurin Farm in New York, where she lived

alongside Dorothy Day. There she met and married Anthony DeSoto, and returned to

California, raising five children and listing housewife as her occupation. She continues

to reside in Los Angeles. In 1986 she received the Before Columbus Foundation's

American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.5

While the cultural politics present in a text seldom connect directly to an author’s

political engagements, Yamamoto’s political profile demands her fiction be seen as part

of her intellectual biography as much as a sign of her literary achievements. Specifically,

3 The editors tended to embrace specific works as “authentic” and chastise other works as catering to white audiences because they felt these works failed to promote a specifically masculine enough vision of Asian American males. Thus, their endorsement of Yamamoto’s writings, despite many critics’ contentions that she depicted male characters in a hostile manner is even more striking. See Chin, et al. The Big Aiiieeeee!.

4 For more on the thriving literary contributions of Nisei to Japanese American ethnic newspapers see Matsumoto’s “‘Desperately Seeking ‘Deirdre’” and Yoo’s Growing Up Nisei.

5 See Rolf.

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Yamamoto’s political commitments inform the ideological interventions performed by

the narratives of domesticity present in her short stories. Cold War themes of gender

anxiety, Civil Rights, and the nuclear threat remain central to both the narrative strategies of her short stories and the political tenets she embraced during the period of these short

stories’ production. The short stories she wrote in the 1940s and 1950s engage the

connections between domestic violence, natural violence (such as earthquakes), and the violence the nation-state visits upon marginalized members of society. The lack of critical interrogation of Yamamoto’s deployment of violence – a word used repeatedly in both “Yoneko’s Earthquake” and “Seventeen Syllables” – is striking given the pacifism central to her political identity as early as adolescence. Similarly, this chapter asserts the narrative presence of civil rights rhetoric in Yamamoto’s fiction. As Matthew Briones argues, Yamamoto’s post-war work at the African American paper, The Los Angeles

Tribune, shaped her engagement with the Civil Rights movement. She increasingly published frank articles about racial inequality and the Civil Rights movement in her column.6 As this chapter demonstrates, such concerns subtly underscore her narrative

presentation of Japanese American domesticity. This chapter examines Yamamoto’s

critique of the nation-state in light of the Christian anarchism she slowly came to embrace

through her engagement with the Catholic Worker movement during the period of these

short stories’ production. Indeed, “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake”

6 See Briones’s work for an excellent discussion of her time at the Los Angeles Tribune. For other insightful discussions of Yamamoto’s encounters with race and incorporation of African American experiences see Lee’s Urban Triage and Won Hong’s “Interethnic and Interracial Relations is the Short Stories of Hisaye Yamamoto.” In “Fire in Fontana,” a memoir and response to the Watts Riots, Yamamoto declared, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I, a Japanese American, became Black, because that’s a pretty melodramatic statement. But some kind of transformation did take place . . .”(150).

219 depict the family and the nation as sites of hierarchy and inequity, questioning the very possibility of equality and democracy within such models of kinship and community.

The short stories “Seventeen Syllables” (1949) and “Yoneko’s Earthquake”

(1951),7 re-write the narratives of naturalization at play in traditional agricultural narratives as well as in other key Asian American texts of the period. Rather than naturalizing her characters’ relationship to the nation, Yamamoto’s depictions of vicious natural forces denaturalize the American nation and the nuclear family. She exposes the economic dehumanization of Asian American families built into the foundation of national belonging. That is, “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” employ

Cold War domestic ideologies alongside discourses of U.S. agricultural citizenship to critique the contradictions of capitalist democracy inherent in the treatment of the

Japanese American subject/citizen. The first section of this chapter examines how the family farm’s combination of economic and domestic spheres allows Yamamoto to impart Japanese American specificity into her analysis of Cold War domestic ideologies.

The second section contends that depictions of violence within the family farm setting denaturalize both the nation state and the nuclear family in the texts. The family and the nation become sites of inherent unnatural hierarchy enforced by violence. The third section looks at Yamamoto’s creation of a political alternative in the short stories through her depiction of female Japanese American subjects as potentially rebellious. It explores the global implications of such ideological resistance in her post-war fiction. I further examine this subversive subjectivity through the themes of censorship and creativity that allow Yamamoto’s narratives to mask their politics through domestic imagery. The

7 The parenthetical citations refer to Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. New Brunswick, NY: Rutgers UP, 2001.

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chapter ends by briefly placing Yamamoto’s Cold War political awakening in

conversation with the cultural politics buried in her short stories.

I discuss “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” side by side throughout this chapter due to the similarity in their form and content. Both are domestic narratives, each focused on the interpersonal dynamics of one family. Both stories

expose the frustrated dreams and unfulfilled ambitions of an Issei (first generation)

mother (Tome and Mrs. Hosoume) whose subsequent actions demoralize the Issei father

(Mr. Hayashi and Mr. Hosoume). The works demonstrate the ramifications of the violent

tragedy enacted between the parents on the narrator, a young girl coming-of-age (Rosie

and Yoneko). The daughters’ limited perspectives result in what Stan Yogi calls “buried

plots,” or stories revealed by reading between the lines of the daughter’s observations.8

This narrative strategy forces the reader to engage what King-Kok Cheung names the

“articulate silences” of the daughter’s worldview to encounter and interpret the

subjectivity of the mother.9 Moreover both narratives deploy the politics of domesticity

to critique the dehumanizing effects of U.S. capitalism. They utilize agricultural settings

to question the stability of categories of race, gender, and nation often assumed to be

“natural.”

“Seventeen Syllables” recounts Tome Hayashi’s brief tenure as a Haiku poet

known as Ume Hanazono through the eyes of her fourteen-year-old daughter Rosie.

Tome’s husband, Mr. Hayashi, displays growing frustration at his own displacement from

Tome’s life, and from the couple’s public presence (Tome speaks to other men about

Haiku, leaving her husband on the side lines). When Tome wins first prize in a San

8 See Yogi’s “Legacies Revealed.”

9 See Cheung’s Articulate Silences and “Double-Telling:”

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Francisco newspaper’s haiku contest, her husband kicks out the visiting editor and burns her gift. The wife’s passion for poetry parallels Rosie’s own sexual awakening, depicted through her flirtation and first kiss with Jesus Carrascos, the son of the Mexican family hired by Rosie’s parents to help with the tomato harvest. At the story’s end, Rosie’s world is shattered as Tome recounts her own origin story - her failed love affair seventeen years ago with a man of a higher social status resulting in familial shame and a stillborn child. This instigated her flight to the United States to marry a man unaware of his wife’s past. Tome describes Rosie’s father as “of simple mind . . . but of kindly heart” and begs Rosie not to marry (19). Yet Rosie is too distracted by her own thoughts of Jesus to hear her mother’s warning.

Like Rosie’s budding romance with Jesus, “Yoneko’s Earthquake” ostensibly follows ten year-old Yoneko’s crush on her family’s Filipino field hand, Marpo. This crush leads to her brief conversion to Christianity, yet her faith is lost in the violence of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake.10 Hidden within Yoneko’s perspective, we learn that

during the earthquake, Yoneko’s father, Mr. Hosoume, is electrocuted, and some critics

argue rendered impotent.11 Mrs. Hosoume consequently consummates an affair with

Marpo, culminating in a forced abortion and Marpo’s replacement by an older Issei

worker. Subsequently, Yoneko’s little brother Sergio suddenly dies, possibly from appendicitis. Mrs. Hosoume converts to Christianity and informs the seemingly oblivious

Yoneko, “Never kill a person, Yoneko, because if you do, God will take from you

10 This was a real earthquake, 6.4 on the Richter scale. It occurred at 5:55 p.m., 10 Mar. 1933. It was centered just south of Huntington Beach. It is discussed at length in area papers including Japanese American papers Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi. Mike Davis also discusses the significance of this earthquake in The Ecology of Fear (See 37, 38, 42, 115).

11 For example,Yogi asserts the orgasmic imagery associated with the electrocution underscores his sense of impotence (152). More explicitly, Cheung refers to Mr. Hosoume’s “sexual impotency” repeatedly in Articulate Silences (43, 51, 52).

222 someone you love” (56).12 Yoneko fails to understand her mother’s message and proceeds to glibly enumerate the reasons she does not believe in God. As in “Seventeen

Syllables,” “Yoneko’s Earthquake” ends with the failure of communication between mother and daughter.

Cold War Domesticity

When literary critics engage the politics of Yamamoto’s short stories they mainly focus on their feminist interventions, demonstrating how the narratives assert female creativity and critique male dominance within the intimate spaces of home in Asian immigrant family life.13 Yet, scholars including Amy Kaplan, Claudia Tate, and Lora Romero expand our understanding of domestic representations in fiction. 14 Romero, for example, demonstrates that gendered concerns over domesticity remained central to the political claims made by a variety of nineteenth-century authors, including in literature not traditionally considered domestic, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the

12 Yamamoto claims “Seventeen Syllables” is her mother’s story and that “Yoneko’s Earthquake” is fellow author and friend Wakako Yamauchi’s mother’s story. Yamauchi’s short story “Songs My Mother Told Me” contains similarities to “Yoneko’s Earthquake,” unsurprisingly, as it is drawn from the same incident. See Songs my Mother Told Me for Yamauchi’s literary work. For the origins of the short stories see: “Hisaye Yamamoto and Wakako Yamauchi” in Cheung’s Words Matter (348, 367). Despite drawing from real events, Yamamoto’s stories are fictionalized; her characters are all composites. She once stated that Marpo is based more on a Kibei she transformed into a Filipino (Cheung Words Matter 370), while in another interview she claimed he was simply a character to whom she gave all the good traits of which she could conceive. See Osmond and Watanabe. For a comparison of Yamamoto and Yamuchi see McDonald and Newman; Yogi’s “Rebels and Heroines”; and Cheung’s Words Matter.

13 For example, see Koppelman and nearly all of the essays in the Women’s Writers Series edition of Seventeen Syllables. Elaine Kim’s comment in “Hisaye Yamamoto: A Woman’s View” is representative of these essays: “In ‘Yoneko’s Earthquake’ and ‘Seventeen Syllables,’ the husbands are hard-working and serious but unable to tolerate their wives’ efforts to create beauty and poetry. They ultimately crush their wives and shackle them to a life of endless toil beside them, not necessarily because they are evil, but because they cannot tolerate independence of any kind if their wives” (115). In the same vein, Mistri describes the “primary” theme of the tale as “a cultural straitjacket in which a male dominates and destroys a gentle woman who is consumed by an urgent need to create and express herself” (200). In “The Unrepentant Fire,” Cheng summarizes many similar responses (91).

14 Chu contends that Asian American authors often utilize domestic narratives to explore questions of national identity and citizenship precisely because it allows such critiques to reach a broader audience that might be otherwise inhibited by their lack of knowledge of Asian American experiences. See Assimilating Asians (16).

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Mohicans. Similarly, Claudia Tate examines the political significance of domestic representations in post-Reconstruction era Black women’s fiction. Their work inspires me to probe the ideological significance of the domestic setting in Yamamoto’s fiction as relevant to the post-war cultural politics present during the text’s production. What was at stake politically in cultural representations of the domestic during the late 1940s and early 1950s? What was at stake specifically in the representation of Japanese American domesticity? Amy Kaplan demonstrates a dual ideological function for the domestic. In the nineteenth-century fiction she examines, the domestic connotes not only the female gendered sphere of the home, but the home as a nation state. The domestic also operates in opposition to the foreign and the international, as she demonstrates through her discussion of “Manifest Domesticity.” Thus the politics of domesticity as represented in

“Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” may have ramifications not only for the nation as a whole, but for the United States’ place in the world.

As discussed in previous chapters, fictional families have the literary capacity to model the relationship between citizen and state. Multiple texts can be interpreted with the white male adult as the good citizen-subject of the nation, consenting to the rule of the state and paralleling that government in his relationship to his wife and children. The father’s relationship to his wife mirrors the state’s relationship to its citizen-subject. In novels with agricultural themes such representations take on heightened importance, as agriculture has long been represented as an ideal form of American citizenship. For example, as I argue in Chapter 2, the Joads’ dispossession from their agricultural property threatens their citizenship and consequently their whiteness. Yet, as Chapter 3 contends,

Japanese Americans have not easily assumed the mantle of American farmer-citizen.

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The racial formation of Japanese Americans as “unassimilable aliens” prevents the easy

assumption of citizenship status, rendering them “alien citizens.” California’s Alien

Land Laws reasserted Japanese Americans’ lack of citizenship due to their supposedly

“unassimilable” qualities of race and nation. Through the parallel between idealized

family and idealized nation state, “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” can

be interpreted as post-internment critiques of the impossibility of Asian American

cultural and legal citizenship. The short stories highlight the contradictions apparent in

the denial of citizenship to Japanese immigrants, and simultaneously represent violence

as a consequence of the state’s economic, cultural, and political exploitation of Asian immigrants.

The familial dynamics present in the short stories intertwine with ideologies of domesticity present in the Cold War moment of the texts’ production. Yamamoto wrote

“Seventeen Syllables” in 1949 and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” in 1951, the early years of the

Cold War. Scholars such as Elaine Tyler May contend that during this period domesticity operated as process of containment, inseparable from Cold War foreign policy goals. Business and political leaders presented heterosexual family life as a

“sphere of influence” that protected the nation from the interconnected threats of communism, nuclear annihilation, and non-normative sexualities.15 They encouraged

men and women to root their identities in their home life, rather than in their sites of

employment. They discouraged dissent in asserting that racial and economic home-front

tensions threatened the cultural battle of the Cold War.16 Consequently, I examine the

15 See May; Corber; Kozol’s Life’s America; Friedman; D’Emilio; and Johnson’s The Lavender Scare.

16 See Dudziak.

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domestic strife in “Seventeen Syllables” as commentary on the tensions at play within the

nation.17 Specifically, I ask what happens when we read the familial discord depicted in

“Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” as a political force capable of

disrupting U.S. Cold War ideologies. The threats to the domestic order within the

Hayashi family and the Hosoume family may be read as threats to national well-being.

Yet in allowing Japanese American domestic life to represent the domestic life of the

nation as a whole, the stories highlight the legal and cultural exclusion of Japanese

Americans from the United States.

Yamamoto depicts Tome Hayashi and Mrs. Hosoume, the mothers from

“Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake,” as similar to the imagined seductive

sirens that threatened the nation’s Cold War cultural strategies whereby the nuclear

family provided the bulwark for capitalism’s success.18 Popular representations and

political rhetoric during the Cold War era characterized non-normative power dynamics

within families as a perversion. “Unnatural” family life appeared to jeopardize more than

the individual family. It imperiled the nation as a whole. In “Seventeen Syllables,”

Ume’s poetic creativity threatens the Hayashi nuclear family by challenging Mr.

Hayashi’s patriarchal authority. Her threat to his dominance aligns with Cold War fears

of disobedient wives. Her ambition imperils her husband’s masculinity echoing fears

prevalent in the period’s mass-media of over-ambitious moms who refused to put

17 Kozol notes that Life magazine utilized only white families as nationally representative, while non-white families appear only as representative of social or political problems (Life’s America 13).

18 Asian American women, in particular, were seen as capable of seductive betrayal in the early Cold War due to a combination of orientalism, imperialism, and guilt over internment. The construction of Tokyo Rose expressed these tensions through the formulation of feminine oriental disloyalty enacted through sexual duplicity. See Bow. On a side note, Yamamoto reported on the Tokyo Rose trial for the Catholic Worker.

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parenthood before their career.19 Mrs. Hosoume, through her affair with Marpo, demonstrates a sexual freedom that emasculates her husband. Her character justifies Cold

War beliefs in containment, depicting an explosive female sexuality capable of disrupting

the nuclear family at the heart of the nation. Both Mrs. Hosoume’s and Tome’s

behaviors, which literary scholars typically read as acts of feminist agency,20 may also be

interpreted as embodying Cold War gender anxieties.

Moreover, the depictions of interracial romance in the text between Mrs.

Hosoume and Marpo as well as between Rosie and Jesus portray the possibility of

interracial solidarity. As Mary L. Dudziak argues in Cold War, Civil Rights, politicians perceived the depiction of racial injustice during the Cold War as threatening to the

United States’ foreign policy initiatives. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the government sought to contain and silence the voices of people of color critiquing prevalent systems of white supremacy in the United States. Thus the threat posed to the nuclear family by interracial romance in Yamamoto’s fiction echoes the threat interracial solidarity posed to the U.S. nation. Yet these recognizable tropes of domestic anxiety

(both gender and civil rights) highlight the denial of full citizenship to Issei men as well as the possibilities of resistance posed by female sexuality, creativity, and interracial

alliance.

Significantly, Yamamoto’s fiction reverberates with the Civil Rights movement’s strategies of the Cold War era by rendering the family divided, and most importantly,

19 For momism, see May; Friedman; and Terry.

20 For example, see Kim’s “Hisaye Yamamoto: A Women’s View” and Yogi’s “Legacies Revealed.” Mistri’s “‘Seventeen Syllables’: A Symbolic Haiku” also makes this assertion. In “Rebels and Heroines,” Yogi writes, “Yamauchi and Yamamoto portray the resistance of Issei women and the consequences of their rebellions in narratives that subvert the strict cultural codes of the Issei family” (131).

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divided in front of strangers, ambassadors (Mr. Kurado), and visitors. The appearance of

national unity and national equality registered high on foreign policy goals during the

Cold War. American diplomats surmised that overseas recognition of the United States

as a model of democracy depended on the perception of African American inclusion.21

As Dudziak demonstrates, media in newly independent countries in Africa and Asia paid significant attention to debates over racism and civil rights in the United States. The

Civil Rights movement capitalized on their ability to gain international media attention to push the United States government to increase federal civil rights protections.

Yamamoto’s short stories demonstrate this dynamic as the tensions within the Hayashi family reverberate through their neighborhood. That is, the domestic disturbances within the Hayashi family become community affairs. Ume disrupts not only her domestic life but the appearance of that domestic life to others. Her presence causes the household to

“split in two” when guests arrive (9). Moreover, when visiting the Hayano family,

Ume’s behaviors frustrate Mr. Hayashi and publicly humiliate him. His response

(storming out of the house) leaves Mrs. Hayashi to “[look] with embarrassment at Mr.

Hayano” (11). She is left “apologizing to the perturbed Mr. and Mrs. Hayano for her

[husband’s] abruptness” (11). Yamamoto’s use of the word “perturbed” demonstrates that Mr. Hayashi’s actions shame his family and disturb their relationship with other families. In Yamamoto’s fiction, domestic disturbances are seldom isolated affairs. In

“Yoneko’s Earthquake,” Mr. Hosoume’s injury immediately involves the community. He returns home “in a stranger’s car” with a “stranger driving the family Reo” (50). As I argue later, automobiles in Yamamoto’s text often become the vehicles of familial and

21 For example, the United States Information Agency created propaganda for international distribution that presented U.S. racism “as a story of redemption” (Dudziak 49). Such pamphlets presented the successes of Civil Rights activists as an example of American democracy at work, countering Soviet propaganda.

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national containment. The accident immediately displays Mr. Hosoume from a major

material object through which he organizes his role in the family. He becomes subject to

another patriarch as a result of losing control over the vehicle symbolic of his own domestic domain. Domestic disputes inevitably absorb the outside world, as was the case for national disturbances during the Cold War. Thus, when Yamamoto’s short stories demonstrate that family crises inevitably engage the wider community, the stories suggest the Civil Rights movement’s Cold War rhetoric. Through this strategy,

Yamamoto’s texts subtly promote Japanese American national inclusion as an important

Civil Rights issue with international ramifications.

Furthermore, the family farm setting of “Yoneko’s Earthquake” and “Seventeen

Syllables” highlights the inability of Yamamoto’s characters to achieve the full subjectivity and citizenship demanded by the Civil Rights movement. Specifically,

Yamamoto’s depictions of Japanese American agriculture highlight Japanese American economic contributions alongside the denial of their full-citizen/subjectivity. In this way, the short stories fall into the framework described by Lisa Lowe in which representations of Asian American subjects expose this core contradiction of capitalist democracy.

Specifically, the short stories’ family farm setting, which renders the domestic and the economic inseparable, engages the question of familial belonging, partial inclusion, and exclusion specifically in relationship to individual characters’ economic contributions.

The rebellion of characters such as Tome, Mrs. Hosoume, and Marpo implies that marginalized peoples’ inclusion in the nation depends upon their subordination. The transgressions of female family members and male employees threaten the authority of male figures excluded from full participation in the public sphere as citizens. The stories

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explain the violent reactions of Mr. Hosoume and Mr. Hayashi as a defense of their

masculine identities. In this way, Yamamoto’s texts impart Asian American specificity

to the Cold War crisis of masculinity. With the loss of autonomy in the workplace, media representations instructed white middle class men to find their source of authority in the home.22 Yamamoto’s Asian American men, denied authority and authenticity as abstract citizens of the nation-state, attempt to affirm their masculinity through their authoritative

roles in the domestic economy.

The short stories suggest the limits of national belonging through their exploration

of familial belonging. According to Robert G. Lee, national belonging often figures as a

kind of kinship, seen in phrases like mother-tongue, fatherland, and brotherhood (7).

According to “Seventeen Syllables”, this familial belonging is determined both by an

individual’s identity (race, gender, sexuality) and by whether an individual’s behavior is

identity-appropriate. For example, Tome’s behavior marks her as part of the Hayashi

family. But when her behavior alters and she no longer behaves according to her place,

she becomes Ume. Tome remains mother and wife when she “kept house, cooked,

washed, and . . . did her ample share of picking tomatoes out in the sweltering fields and

boxing them in tidy strata in the cool packing shed” (9). In contrast, Ume “neglected

speaking when spoken to and stayed busy at the parlor table as late as midnight” (9). The

text characterizes Ume as an “earnest muttering stranger” (9). The narrative renders her

an outsider who does not belong to the family. “Seventeen Syllables” narrates the

distinction between Ume and Tome through these behavioral differences. Their

behaviors determine who they are and the behavioral distance between Tome and Ume

22 For the crisis of masculinity see May; Corber; Ehrenreich; Spiegel; Cuordileone; Kimmel; and Johnson’s The Lavender Scare.

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represents the limits of familial belonging. Consequently, it suggests the limits of

national belonging.

As Marpo’s exclusion in “Yoneko’s Earthquake” suggests, these acceptable roles for national inclusion reduce marginalized individuals to their contribution to the family’s domestic economy. At the beginning of the story, Marpo belongs to the family’s economy. Specifically, he was “indispensable and both Mr. and Mrs. Hosoume often told each other how grateful they were for Marpo” (51). Indeed, “Mr. Hosoume said Marpo was the best hired man he had ever had” (47). It is only when Marpo “forget[s] his place” that he must be exiled from the family (54). He becomes dispensable when he performs outside the economic sphere, intruding upon Mr. Hosoume’s sexual monopoly over Mrs. Hosoume. The domestic economy reduces Marpo and Tome to particular useful roles in the family. Their ties to the family farm economy can be severed (as when

Tome becomes a “stranger”) when they transgress these proper boundaries. If Marpo and

Tome represent peripheral figures in the national family, they demonstrate that such subjects are not equal members of the family. Their relationships to the Hayashi and

Hosoume families are tenuous. The functioning family economy reduces them to the economic and reproductive services they provide. Thus, through Marpo and Tome,

Yamamoto’s short stories characterize marginality as a reduction of subjectivity to a single economic purpose: the maintenance of the family economy. The tenuous national or familial kinship of marginalized individuals depends on their performance of particular roles and behaviors. Yamamoto’s narrative conflicts arise when Tome prioritizes her own emotional sustenance over the family’s emotional economy, and Marpo’s extends his kinship beyond his labors of agricultural production, redefining his familial

231 belonging. These characters resist defining their relationship to their families solely through their productive capacities. They insist upon recognition of creative desires that gender, racial, and class-based inequalities within the family dictate as inappropriate.

“Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” consequently expose the dehumanization resulting from the economic exploitation Asian American subjects

(Asian American members of the U.S. national family) experience. Specifically,

Yamamoto’s depictions of farm labor imply that individuals become machines when reduced to their economic capacities. For example, Yoneko and her brother Sergio

“followed the potato-digging machine and the Mexican workers –both hired for the day – around the field” (55). The statement equates the Mexican laborers with machines because of their capacity to be hired. There is no difference between the renting of a machine and the renting of labor. The human qualities of the labors cease to matter under such capitalist circumstances. Through such descriptions, Yamamoto’s texts employ a

Marxist critique of wage labor’s effect on the experiences of Asian and Latino workers.

The dehumanization resulting from wage labor becomes inseparable from the dehumanization of the denial of full citizenship status. Similarly, Rosie was capable of working in the fields “as efficiently as a flawless machine” (16). She too becomes more like a machine (or wage laborer) than a daughter when she engages in farm labor.

Moreover, Marpo’s dismissal results in many ways from his failure to be simply a machine. The “old Japanese man” who replaces him has “no particular interests, outside working, eating, sleeping, and playing an occasional game of goh with Mr. Hosoume”

(54). In contrast, Marpo displayed dynamic and varied interests: “Marpo the Christian and Marpo the best hired man, but Marpo the athlete, Marpo the musician (both

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instrumental and vocal), Marpo the artist, and Marpo the radio technician” (48). This

new employee, with “no particular interests” can be more easily reduced to his economic

facility.

As Marpo’s transformation indicates, expanding one’s interests beyond one’s role

in the domestic economy generates the possibility of dissent and disobedience. In

“Yoneko’s Earthquake” and “Seventeen Syllables,” Mrs. Hayashi and Mrs. Hosoume’s

insubordination jeopardizes their husbands’ subjectivity by threatening the men in a

multiplicity of spheres (domestic, economic, community). At the same time, the ability of wives and workers to resist depends on their ability to articulate their subjectivity outside of the economic sphere. In Yamamoto’s fiction, when the subject begins to exist in multiple spheres and achieves a form of “personhood” rather than machine-like economic existence he or she becomes capable of claiming the equality promised in citizenship. 23 Yet this promise of equality fails to come to fruition, exposing the moral

bankruptcy of the nation-state. The state reasserts its authority through exclusion. The characters lose the bonds of kinship which tie them to the family (as symbolic of the nation). The violent reaction wives’ and workers’ insurgence provokes results in their exclusion, injury, or death, as we see with Marpo, Ume, and Mrs. Hosoume.

This reductive depiction of subjectivity appears not only with figures subservient to the domestic economy like Marpo and Tome. Yamamoto also documents the effects of denying naturalization to Asian Americans through the impotence and frustration of the stories’ patriarchs. The state reduces the roles of men like Mr. Hosoume and Mr.

23 Higashida hints at the connection between human subjectivity and existence in multiple spheres when she notes that “Mr. Hosume, however, perceives Marpo’s concern for the family as an infringement on paternal territory, and the fieldhand must be dehumanized in order to prevent his usurping the roles of father, breadwinner, and as it turns out, husband” (39).

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Hayashi to their economic functions. The powerlessness of Issei fathers in Yamamoto’s

fiction demonstrates the impossibility of their proper citizenship. Literary critics often

read Yamamoto’s harsh depiction of male desire for authority over their wives and

daughters as a feminist challenge to patriarchal Issei culture.24 Yet in “Seventeen

Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake,” the father’s frustrations emerge from his powerlessness in the face of the family’s economic and political oppression. The family’s place in the economy is tenuous, and the father’s inability to own land limits his economic niche as farmer. As Grace Kyungwon Hong contends, the stories hint at these

limitations through such details as the Hosoumes’ harvest of crops known for their short

term turn-over.25 Legal regulations and cultural manifestations prevent Mr. Hosoume and Mr. Hayashi from embodying the ideal subject of the nation-state. Mr. Hosoume and

Mr. Hayashi’s loss of masculinity jeopardizes their sense of self and their sense of self- ownership in a nation-state and economic niche where they can legally possess little and which ignores and denies their political and cultural contributions.

In “Seventeen Syllables” Ume’s insurrection reminds the reader of Mr. Hayashi’s tenuous role in the domestic life of the nation. Ume Hazano interrupts Mr. Hayashi’s familial relations, the one area in which his identity is grounded and his belonging affirmed. She manages to disrupt both the economic and cultural life of the family. In her appearance, the regular patterns of the family’s life are lost. The narrative renders the negative impact through Mr. Hayashi’s social deprivation. He plays solitaire in the

24 For example, Crow contends that “these five stories [of Yamamoto’s] can be seen as an extended quarrel with or perhaps rite of exorcism against this generalized Issei male” (The Issei Father” 119). Other critics make similar assertations in the critical anthology edited by Cheung, Seventeen Syllables, Women Writers Series.

25 See Hong (291) and Yamamoto (46).

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evenings, a time he formerly spent socializing with Tome (9). Moreover, with Ume’s

arrival the family separates even when company comes over, as Ume takes center stage

with her poetry. As an Asian immigrant, barred from naturalization, Mr. Hayashi lives an

existence peripheral to the mainstream. With the incursion of Ume, he becomes

marginalized even within the realm of his own family. He can no longer ignore the

contrast between his political exclusion and his domestic inclusion, for he maintains no

place of belonging.

This pattern of increased marginalization also manifests itself in community relations, as when the Hayashi family visits the Hayano family. Ume displaces Tome to discuss haiku with Mr. Hayano. Mr. Hayashi sits next to the disabled and disturbing

Mrs. Hayano.26 The actively engaged role of the evening goes to Mr. Hayashi’s wife,

while he is rendered parallel to a woman disfigured by childbirth. We are told,

“something had been wrong with Mrs. Hayano ever since the birth of her first child” (9-

10). Mr. Hayashi finds himself positioned not only as partner to the most powerless

person in the room, but alongside a person whose disfigurement resulted from her female

anatomy. Ume’s appearance emasculates Mr. Hayashi. In contrast, Ume becomes the

equal of the powerful other male in the room, Mr. Hayano. Pairing Ume with Mr.

Hayano highlights the extent of Mr. Hayashi’s fall in social status. It links Mr. Hayashi’s

degradation to his national exclusion by recalling stereotypes of Asian men as effeminate.

Ume questions the legitimacy of Mr. Hayashi’s familial authority just as images of Asian

men as sexual others attacked the ability of Asian immigrants to become U.S citizens.

The class dynamics of this emasculation further intensifies the contradictions of

Mr. Hayashi’s American existence. The family farm setting renders the narrative as

26 Rosie uses the word “painful” to describe being in Mrs. Hayano’s presence (9).

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much about economic life as about family life. Although Mr. Hayashi is excluded from

civil society, his economic contributions are accepted.27 Yet Ume serves not only as a

cultural and social threat to Mr. Hayashi, but also as an economic threat. Mr. Hayashi’s

final violence in the short story, where he ultimately reasserts his authority, comes at the

moment at which Ume displaces him economically. Tome abandons the tomato harvest

when time is of the essence and all help is necessary to salvage the family’s investment.

Mr. Hayashi states “the lugs were piling up . . . and the ripe tomatoes in them would probably have to be taken to the cannery tomorrow if they were not ready for the produce haulers tonight” (15). Mr. Hayashi explains to Rosie “we’ve got no time for a break today” (15). Shortly thereafter, Ume rushes off to have tea with Mr. Kuroda, the San

Francisco editor bearing her award. Significantly, when Mr. Hayashi sends a message to

Ume it is a reminder “of the tomatoes” (16). Until the arrival of Ume, Tome’s romantic visions of her past and future remained subsumed to the immediate needs of the family economy. Ume’s creative success directly interferes with the family’s economic survival.

Moreover, Mr. Hayashi’s undesirable social and economic status imperils his masculine ability to contain his wife’s sexuality within the nuclear family (19). The text establishes that Mr. Hayashi’s “simple mind” and marginal social status fail to compete with her “well-to do” original amour (19). Similarly, the newspaper editor Mr. Kuroda symbolizes Mr. Hayashi’s failed cultural mobility as much as his failed class mobility.

As Donald C. Goellnicht contends, Mr. Kuroda substitutes for the high-class lover who abandoned Tome earlier in life. With him, she engages the upper-class persona of her

27 Indeed, Japanese Americans contributed significantly to California’s agriculture development and during the 1930s maintained monopolies over labor-intensive truck crops like strawberries from which white farmers stayed away. See Chapter 3.

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youthful ambitions. She demonstrates her upwardly mobile pretensions by falling “easily

into his style” (16). Her preference for the company of Mr. Kuroda indicates her

dissatisfaction with Mr. Hayashi’s economic status, a status she explicitly rejects by ignoring the tomato harvest. Ming L. Cheng interprets this conflict through Sau-ling

Cynthia Wong’s framework of “necessity” and “extravagance.” Mr. Hayashi lives in a world of necessity while Ume’s love of poetry —she is an “extravagant contributor” (9)

— requires an economic status the family is unlikely to reach. Yamamoto further marks

Ume’s luxuriousness in the choice of a flower for a pen name. The blossoming flower communicates Ume’s sexual availability. Yet the poetic process displaces Mr. Hayashi as her lover as she seduces cultured consumers of art like Mr. Kuroda and Mr. Hayano.

Thus Ume’s poetic experiment suggests that Mr. Hayashi’s shortcomings, dictated partly by the nation’s denial of his full inclusion, jeopardize the nuclear family and masculine authority.

Yamamoto’s domestic fiction examines the incomplete nature of Japanese

American families’ inclusion in the American nation. The domestic strife between the couples, Mr. and Mrs. Hosoume and Mr. and Mrs. Hayashi, echoes Cold War gender anxieties and results from the marginal status of the patriarchs. The texts conform to the civil rights rhetoric of the Cold War in linking this failure of the Japanese American nuclear family to the national hierarchies which refuse to recognize the full subjectivity/citizenship of Asian Americans. Yamamoto’s use of the agricultural setting interrogates the contradictions of U.S. capitalism through a critique of the nation’s Cold

War economic incorporation of non-white subjects alongside their exclusion from the rights and privileges of full citizenship. Her depictions of agriculture critique the

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inequalities embedded in capitalist democracy. As the next section contends, these

depictions of nature question the naturalness of the categories of both nation state and

nuclear family by linking the violence of the nation state to the violence of the family.

Natural Violence

In the U.S., the government produces citizens from immigrants through a process of legal

and ideological “naturalization” that establishes national belonging. In contrast, the

narrative strategy of “naturalization” operates in Yamamoto’s texts to demonstrate the

failure of the United States to incorporate Japanese Americans into the national family.

The family and the nation instead become sites of inherent unnatural hierarchy enforced

by violence. Yamamoto’s short stories employ pastoral imagery to naturalize interracial

romance. Her choice of Filipino and Mexican-American lovers for her female Japanese

American characters characterize female sexuality as recognizably transgressive. The

female characters choose paramours who are identifiably inappropriate according to

Japanese American community norms.28 Rosie’s interest in the Mexican-American

farmhand Jesus and Mrs. Hosoume’s romance with the Filipino farmhand Marpo cross

class, race, and religious lines. While Mrs. Hosoume’s romance is also inappropriate as

adultery, Rosie’s could be interpreted as act of seduction synonymous with the prevalent

Japanese American stereotypes of threatening Mexican and Filipino male sexuality.29

Thus Yamamoto’s depictions of non-normative romance fueled by uncontained female sexuality and creativity threaten the traditional hierarchies of nuclear and national kinship

28 The inappropriateness of these choices are clear from the depictions of interracial romance in Japanese American ethnic newspapers as discussed in Chapter 3 of this dissertation, and in Yoo’s Growing Up Nisei.

29 Although Yamamoto counteracts this reading, as Rosie feels “the older of the two” with her recognition of “a brand-new power” (13) over Jesus due to his desire for her.

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As scholars such as Doris Sommer assert, depictions of heterosexual romance often function in narratives to naturalize the imagined community of the nation. The romance between Rosie and Jesus, as well as Marpo and Mrs. Hosoume, could be

interpreted as “unnatural” in that it violates the expectations of class, race, and family.

Yet the text naturalizes the relationships through their association with farming. Both

romances bloom among the rows of plants in the field. For example, Rosie and Jesus fall

for each other while racing to see who can pick the most tomatoes. Later, Rosie “ran

between two patches of tomatoes” to join Jesus in the barn for their first kiss. (12).

Yamamoto renders the sexuality captured in their agricultural pursuits by the “truly monstrous, pale green worm” that Jesus surprises Rosie with; it looked “like an infant snake” (12). This imagery captures Jesus’ lust for Rosie as seductively sinful (the snake in the garden), as well as innocent in its immaturity (“infant”). Likewise, the text associates Rosie with the ripe tomatoes of the harvest season. When she screeches at

sight of the worm, Jesus points out the “immature” tomatoes she holds. Her sexuality

matures with the tomatoes, as she later consumes a ripe tomato in the instant before he

kisses her. The kiss combines with the tomato as apple to evoke the forbidden fruit, and

wave the wand of Eden over the Hayashi farm. The Edenic imagery clearly contrasts with

the hard labor that Rosie and Jesus participate in, just as the text further justifies Rosie’s

taboo encounter through her inability to fully separate Jesus the farmhand from Jesus the

savior. At one point, she was “not certain whether she was invoking the help of the son

of the Carrascos or of God” (19). Similarly, the romance between Marpo and Mrs.

Hosoume grows after the days she spends with him in the fields. When Mrs. Hosoume

returns “breathless” one day with “a gold colored ring with a tiny glasslike stone in it,”

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the text implies that their sexual engagement began amongst rows of plants (52). Both

romances ripen with the crops and are consummated during the harvest. By using natural imagery to depict these “unnatural” relationships, the narratives question the

“naturalness” of the nuclear family, and thus the nation itself.

Yet the agricultural metaphors for sexuality, depicting the cyclical nature of fertility, growth, harvest, and fallow fields, are far from peaceable in the texts. The violence of these “natural” occurrences, including representations of birth and death, further denaturalizes the nuclear family. In “Seventeen Syllables” Mrs. Hayano’s seasonal reproductive capacity (“there were four Hayano girls, all lovely and each one named after a season of the year”) results in her decay (9). In birthing her children, she ceases to bloom. Indeed, “something had been wrong with Mrs. Hayano ever since the birth of her first child” (9-10). Natural reproduction, linked to the seasons, ravishes the mother. Is her decline natural? Rosie responds “wonderingly . . . But it was not a matter she could come to any decision about” (11). The short story does not offer a clear didactic answer to Rosie’s inquiry. The case of Ume is similar. Yamamoto names Ume for a flower that only lives three months, the length of a season.30 Thus, is it only natural

that she dies at the moment in which her namesake passes? In many farm narratives,

seasons represent processes by which humans must align their lives. Life and death, like

the harvest of crops, become part of life one must simply accept, although they are at

times unpleasant. Yet Rosie’s discomfort with both Ume’s death and Mrs. Hayashi’s

disfigurement counters such agrarian literary traditions, interrogating whether these

events are as natural and inevitable as they seem.

30 For a longer discussion of the importance of the three month span of the season in “Seventeen Syllables,” see Mistri.

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Yamamoto’s agrarian narratives question not only the naturalness of the nuclear family as well as the legitimacy of the nation-state. The violence of seasonal change in

“Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” contrasts with romantic images in more popular pastoral narratives where seasonal change represents harmony between the state of the nature and the American farm family. The Asian American relationship to agrarian nature in Yamamoto’s texts signifies the violence of economic exploitation rather than a peaceful pre-capitalist agrarian existence. Yamamoto narrates this seasonal violence onto Asian American bodies, such as Mrs. Hayashi whose duty to her family comes at the cost of her physical and emotional well-being. Her reproductive labor, resulting in her four beautiful daughters, mirrors Japanese American productive labor of cultivation resulting in the abundant crops that provide California’s wealth at the expense of Japanese American material, emotional, and physical health.

The earthquake in “Yoneko’s Earthquake” demonstrates the violence and instability of the kinship relations that bind Japanese Americans to the American nation- state. Yamamoto describes the earthquake as “though some giant had seized [the house] and was giving it a good shaking” (50). Aside from evoking the fairy-tale worldview of the children, Yoneko and Sergio, the image of the giant characterizes the family as under attack. The text depicts the earthquake, and the hand of nature it represents, as active.

The ground the Hosoume family stands upon lacks stability. Their roots are viciously yanked up amid the “tremendous roar” with all they had come to see as stable

“shuddering violently” (50). The metaphorical giant forcibly pulls the Hosoume family off of their land. Moreover, as the narrator explains, “the earth trembled for days

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afterwards” (50). The earthquake destabilizes both the land they stand on, and the house

they live in.

The earthquake denaturalizes the relationship between the Hosoume family and

their house, thus hinting at the tenuous nature of the relationship between the Asian

American family and the American nation. As Wendy Kozol argues, the post-war

(suburban) house increased its ideological significance in the Cold War, offering

protection and security against atomic weapons and communists.31 Yet for Yoneko the

home not only fails to offer protection during the earthquake, afterwards it becomes a

dangerous place that must be avoided, first because of aftershocks, and later because of

her housebound father’s quixotic actions which “cramped her style.”32 Indeed, every

time Marpo ventures into the house in search of supplies after the earthquake Yoneko

screams “No, Marpo, No!” (50). Moreover, the earthquake establishes that the family, in

contrast to the house, is composed only of human relationships, rather than rooted in the ground. When Mrs. Hosoume drags the children out of the crumbling house, Marpo

“gathered them all in his arms, as much to protect them as to support himself” (50).

Marpo’s arms provide the alternative and more protective shelter. Marpo’s response to the earthquake evokes his new role in the family. He becomes the provider of shelter and protection in the absence of the children’s true father and in the breakdown of their house. This hints at the ability of interracial solidarity in the text to offer shelter and protection to those most vulnerable to exploitation. The earthquake exposes the family’s fragile relationship to the home (family/nation) that shelters them.

31 Life’s America (107).

32 Yamamoto (51). Specifically her father refuses to let her make fudge because of the waste of sugar and also because he “stuck his finger up his nose and pretended he was going to rub some snot off onto the dolls. Things like that” (52).

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As entering the house becomes dangerous, the text depicts young Yoneko awakening to the instability of her familial, national, and natural belonging. The earthquake, in its natural violence, exposes the underlying power inequities within the

family and denaturalizes the nuclear family relationships that stand in for national

belonging. The narrative refuses to disentangle the earthquake, the father’s injury, and

the mother’s affair. They are swept up under the description of a “monstrous upheaval”

that shakes Yoneko’s faith in God, Marpo, and her place in the world. As such, the earthquake signifies the instability of categories previously conceptualized as natural, and

therefore timeless, stagnant, secure, and inevitable. The earthquake destroys the house as

a symbol of the protection offered to her by her father, and by association, the nation that

shelters her. The earthquake also destroys Yoneko’s newly acquired faith in God:

“Yoneko began to suspect that God was either powerless, callous, downright cruel, or

nonexistent. In the murky night, under a strange moon wearing a pale ring of light, she

decided upon the last as the most plausible theory” (51). In losing her faith in God,

Yoneko loses her faith in her family and nation to protect her.

Christianity represents a form of belonging for Yoneko, similar to her longing for

familial and national kinship. She “yearned at times after Christianity, but she realized

the absurdity of her whim” (46). The “absurdity of her whim” represents recognition of

her outsider status. She cannot attend the white Baptist church due to her Japanese

ethnicity, yet there are not enough Japanese in her rural community for a Japanese

church. The text captures her racial exclusion not only in the implicit implausibility of

her attendance at the white church but by equating her Japaneseness with the type of

crops her family grows. The short story explains, “They were the only ones, too, whose

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agriculture was so diverse as to include blackberries, cabbages, rhubarb, potatoes,

cucumbers, onions, and cantaloupes. The rest of the countryside there was like one vast

orange grove” (47). As Grace Kyungwon Hong argues the diversity of crops grown by

the Hosoume family results from the Alien Land Laws.33 Oranges require a long-term

investment in one plot of land, unrealistic for Issei families in California. Thus the

instability of the family’s relationship to the land represented textually by the earthquake

evokes the racist exclusionary laws of the nation-state. Yoneko’s desire to belong (have

the same crops as others, attend the same church as others) links to her desire for a stable

relationship to nature, and thus the nation.34

Through Christianity Marpo offers Yoneko the ability to belong, to fit in, and to be like others.35 The Christianity that he dangles in front of her performs similar

functions as the narrative of national community. It offers her belonging to an “imagined

community” and a timeless creation story.36 She can begin to understand her place

temporally and geographically through the mythic stories of Christ offered to her by

Marpo. This is similar to ways in which Homi K. Bhabha contends the nation state

comes into existence through narrative processes.37 Thus, when the earthquake causes

Yoneko to lose her faith in God, the text represents this as a moment of Yoneko’s lost

33 See Hong’s “Something Forgotten” (292).

34 The story also depicts her inability to fit during her one visit to her urban cousin’s Japanese church, where Sergio embarrasses her as he does not understand the act of praying.

35 Yogi very briefly touches about the link between Marpo and Christianity in “Legacies Revealed” (150- 151).

36 McClintock contends national myths manage an incongruous relationship to time by balancing between a feminine timelessness and a masculine progressive march towards excellence. McClintock contends that in gendering this contradictory relationships to time, the national myth naturalizes its contradictions. See Chu’s Assimilating Asians (52).

37 Bhabha suggests that examining the textual strategies through which literature produces the nation exposes the unnatural creation of the nation itself (Nation and Narration 2).

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faith in the nation-state. She recognizes the falsity of the promise of belonging to the land and to a people who do not accept her, a promise embodied by her legal citizenship.

Yoneko’s lost faith in God links to her later lost faith in Marpo. From Yoneko’s perspective, Marpo abandons her just as God did during the earthquake. Indeed,

Yoneko’s adoption of Marpo’s God initially results from her seeing Marpo as a God.

With her acceptance of Christianity, Yoneko became “an ideal apostle, adoring Jesus”

(49), just as she adored Marpo, who the narrator with her childhood crush depicts as practically perfect. Yoneko and her brother Sergio “visited with Marpo at least once a day and both of them regularly came away amazed with their findings” (49). Early on

(prior to the affair), Mr. Hosoume detects a threat in his children’s adoration of Marpo, as

“Mr. Hosoume began remarking the fact that they dwelt more with Marpo than with their own parents” (49). For example, when Marpo builds a radio that the children clustered into his room to listen to, Mr. Hosoume buys the radio, and Marpo “put away his radio manuals and his soldering iron in the bottom of his steamer trunk” (49). Thus Mr.

Hosoume recognizes Yoneko’s adoption of Marpo’s God as a threat to her vision of her own father as God-like. With the earthquake, she loses faith in the ability of both

Marpo’s God and her father as God to protect her and her family.

The natural violence depicted in the text becomes inextricably intertwined with the story’s domestic violence, a pattern viewed in “Seventeen Syllables” as well. Literary critic Charles L. Crow recognizes this in his assertion that the earthquake, in shattering

Yoneko’s house, shatters her family.38 The earthquake signifies the beginning of

Marpo’s affair with Mrs. Hosoume. Moreover, the earthquake is also the most direct

source of the father’s injury. These events produce a “catastrophe” in the lives of the

38 See Crow’s “Home and Transcendence in Los Angeles Fiction.”

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characters (51). They lead to Mr. Hosoume’s feelings of cuckoldry. He accuses his wife,

Marpo, and his children of impudence: “Just because I’m ill just now is no reason for

them to start being disrespectful” (53). When he and his wife then argue, “Mr. Hosoume

went up to where his wife was ironing and slapped her smartly on the face. It was the first

time he had ever laid hands on her” (53). In describing the children as “thunderstruck”

Yamamoto employs images of natural violence (53). This sudden storm-like interruption

to the family can not be separated from the “monstrous upheaval” caused by the

earthquake (51). The wrathful hand of the father mirrors the wrathful hand of the giant

that shook the house during the earthquake. This associates the state and the family with

violence. The hierarchies of inequality within the Hosoume household mirror the

violence of Japanese American exclusion from the nation.

Yamamoto’s tendency to employ natural metaphors (like earthquakes) as representative of violent threats to Japanese American families is at odds with many textual representations of the period that attempt to establish Japanese American national belonging through textual naturalization. For example, comparison to Monica Sone’s

Nisei Daughter highlights the distinct relationship among nature, nation, and violence in

“Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake.” Sone first published Nisei Daughter

in 1953, just shortly after Yamamoto’s short stories. The book proved palatable to a

broad American audience seeking to interpret the experience of Japanese American

internment as ultimately in line with American values. Sone reproduces the nation’s

narrative that young Nisei were better off (meaning more assimilated) because of

internment. Critics retrospectively note the lack of anger and blame present in the text.39

39 For example, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong explains “A writer like Monica Sone, intent on rehabilitating her group in accordance with white standards, may try to identify the forced marches of internment with

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Prior to internment, the young protagonist cannot reconcile her Japanese identity and her

American identity. She states “I didn’t see how I could be a Yankee and Japanese at the

same time. It was like being born with two heads. It sounded freakish” (19). This image

of double-headedness emerges in other Asian American texts of this period, such as No

No Boy and Fifth Chinese Daughter.40 Yet, the relationship between nationality and

nature articulated in this description largely remains unrecognized by critics. To have two

nationalities is to be born with two heads, a freak of nature. It is impossible within the

framework of the nation’s “official story” to have two heads or two nationalities. In other

words, the racial identity of the protagonist (with its assumed foreign nationality)

contradicts the racial identity of the “unmarked” national subject. Since the racial identity

of the “unmarked” national subject is presumed natural, the protagonist feels unnaturally

burdened with two contradictory subject positions, echoing Du Bois’s description of the

“double consciousness.”

The text affirms the Americanness of Nisei Daughter narrator’s one “true”

national identity when her family visits Japan. During this episode both her brothers

become sick, and one of them, Kenji “my little brother who had not wanted to come to

mainstream mobility myths” (138). Hoffman even feels the need to situate his article “Home, Memory, and Narrative in Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter” in opposition to the “many” critics that “have quickly discounted the text as overly simplistic, as autobiography that quite consciously panders to a white audience” (230).

40 In No No Boy, the narrator explains: “as things turned out, it wasn’t all right to be Japanese and American. You had to be one or the other” (91). The novel demonstrates this through the physical and psychological wounds that prevent Japanese American characters from being whole. In Fifth Chinese Daughter the narrator perceives that she can not be both American and Chinese. She believes early in the text that she must make a choice: “she was now conscious that ‘foreign’ American ways were not only generally and vaguely different form their Chinese ways, but that they were specifically different, and the specific` differences would involve a choice of action” (21). In the final pages of the story, she gains success with her pottery (exploiting the white community’s exotified fascination with her), and evinces an identity capable of encompassing both traditions. Interestingly, the state department sent Jade Snow Wong on a speaking tour to China in 1953. Her narrative of a poor girl who gains success in America fit with the depiction of American democracy the U.S. government promoted.

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Japan,” dies (100). The illness of the children from a disease endemic to Japan

demonstrates their inability to survive Japanese nature in the Japanese nation. This

contrasts with the two daughters’ triumph over tuberculosis in the United States. The parallel between the girls’ struggle with tuberculosis and Kenji’s failure to survive ikiri communicates the Americanness of the family, as much as the title of the chapter — “We meet Real Japanese.”41 As Monica comes of age, she realizes that she is not a freak of

nature, because even if her cultural identity is plural, her national identity is singular. She

explains, “I used to feel like a two-headed monstrosity, but now I find that two heads are

better than one” (236). This is because two heads ultimately give her “a clearer

understanding of America and its way of life, and we have learned to value her [America]

more” (237). Her cultural duality results in her national loyalty. The naturalness of

Japanese American belonging to the American nation is re-established as Nisei Daughter demonstrates that “an elemental instinct bound” Japanese American families “to this soil”

(124).

This comparison to Nisei Daughter helps us recognize the different relationship that the families in Yamamoto’s fiction hold with the national soil. The violent characterization of nature in “Yoneko’s Earthquakes” rejects the Hosoume’s peaceful agricultural existence. It questions the ease with which their belonging to the nation may occur. Moreover, if nature is a violent force in the story (responsible for Mr. Hosoume’s injuries), Yamamoto hints at the violence of the nation-state. Given Yamamoto’s unwavering pacificism, the theme of violence described repeatedly in both “Yoneko’s

Earthquake” and “Seventeen Syllables” is striking. This aggression and cruelty emerges

41 The title asserts the separation of the Japanese American family from the Japanese nation by establishing that the Itoi family is not really Japanese.

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predominantly from two sources in the short stories, from nature (earthquakes, harvests,

and seasons) and from the patriarchs (Mr. Hosoume and Mr. Hayashi). Both nature and

the family’s father symbolically stand in for the nation-state in their brutality.

If the relationship between the father and the wife in agricultural narratives

commonly mirrors the relationship between state and citizen-subject, then infidelity or

disloyalty in Yamamoto’s fiction results in state violence. This includes the abortion Mr.

Hosoume forces upon Mrs. Hosoume after discovering her affair with Marpo.

Yamamoto renders the violence of the forced abortion textually present through the death

of the “beautiful collie” (54). Mr. Hosoume strikes the dog with his car which “jerked

with the impact, but Mr. Hosoume drove right on, and Yoneko, wanting suddenly to

vomit, looked back and saw the collie lying very still at the side of the road” (54). Later,

after the treatment, Yoneko notes “the dog was nowhere to be seen” (55). The death of

the collie is a mysterious absence, like the death of the baby-to-be. Yet the expiration of

the collie and fetus result from patriarchal vengeance. Additionally, the disappearance of

Ume can rightly be called a murder perpetrated by Mr. Hayashi as Ume is more than

Tome’s alter ego. She is her own person “who came to life after the dinner dishes were

done” (9). The violence perpetrated upon Ume comes at the moment she most clearly

and unapologetically ignores Mr. Hosoume’s demands. Thus in both stories, the father

responds to domestic discord with violence.

Throughout Yamamoto’s fiction cars serve as particular vehicles of this violence.

Moreover they additionally function as an image of the nation. In her memoir, “Life

Among the Oil Fields,” Yamamoto explicitly establishes this relationship between the

automobiles and the United States. In this essay, a reckless automobile runs down the

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narrator’s brother, Jemo. Initially he appears dead; “he does not move” (94). While the

narrator insists he is only stunned, the injuries appear graver than the narrator lets on. He

returns from the hospital “clothed in bandages, including one like a turban around his

head and face” (94). The white couple in the car, who are neighbors, lack “even the

decency to come and inquire after Jemo’s condition” (95). This leads the narrator to

explain that “I sometimes see the arrogant couple from down the road as young and

beautiful, their speeding open roadster as definitely and stunningly red. They roar by;

their tinkling laughter, like a long silken scarf, is borne back by the wind. I gaze after

them from the side of the road, where I have darted to dodge the swirling dust and

spitting gravel. And I know that their names are Scott and Zelda” (95). As critics have

explained, this image ties the car to the uncompassionate nation-state Japanese

Americans encountered in the 1920s (when the memoir takes place). The scene echoes

the cruel carelessness of Myrtle’s death in The Great Gatsby, and recalls the moral

emptiness automobiles symbolized in Fitzgerald’s novel, such as with Daisy’s refusal to take responsibility for her actions.42 For Yamamoto, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald represent

privileged white Americans’ selfish lack of consideration for those with whom they must

share the national road. Yet Yamamoto’s characters escape the deadly consequences of

speeding automobiles that Fitzgerald’s characters face. Instead, Yamamoto’s narrator

survives by dodging and darting out of the way so as not to be killed like “an animal”

42 Indeed, the memoir opens with a quote from The Great Gatsby: “They missed collisions by inches, wavered on the edge of precipices, and skidded across tracks to the sound of the warning bell” (86).

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(95). That is, she must use her wits and brawn to resist the de-humanization enacted by

their negligence.43

The necessity of survival against national violence that threatens the humanity of

Japanese Americans emerges in the car accident of “Yoneko’s Earthquake” as well.

When a wire knocked down by the earthquake hits his car, Mr. Hosoume began to

“writhe and kick and this had been his salvation” (50). Like in “Life Among the Oil

Fields,” Mr. Hosoume lives only because of his darting and dodging. He survives by

unconsciously writhing, causing his car to spin out of control and out from under the

wire. While the earthquake is most directly responsible for Mr. Hosoume’s injury, the car becomes the vehicle that allows it. His survival testifies only to his instincts and his

actions, not to any protection offered by the car. Thus nature and nation conspire in his emasculation. The car accident physically violates Yoneko’s father. The electrocution injures him; he returns an invalid. The experience grants him feminine traits that popular media representations attributed to male Asian immigrants as racial and sexual foreigners. He is rendered impotent, perhaps literally. He is confined to the house and to his wife’s previous tasks of cooking and childcare. The gender ambiguity of his character mirrors the ambiguity pictured in the construction of the Asian immigrant, specifically the Chinese coolie, as Robert G. Lee demonstrates in Orientals: Asian Americans in

Popular Culture. Yet Yamamoto does not portray such gender ambiguity as a threat to the nation. Rather it results from the violence of the circumstances to which the nation subjects Mr. Hosoume.

43 One could also read the use of the getaway car in “The Brown House” as a symbol of the potential for interracial solidarity in the face of national oppression.

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In Race and Resistance, Viet Thanh Nguyen contends that in much Asian

American literature, the Asian American body stands in for the Asian American body

politic. This produces a tension in the text between hegemonic contentions that one body

is representative of all Asian Americans, and the Asian American response that there are

multiple Asian and Asian American bodies. In Yamamoto’s writings, the electrocution

of Mr. Hosoume and the injury of Jemo offer the material evidence of the nation’s attack

on the Asian immigrant. Their injured bodies stand in for the harm done by the

privileged white American public and the callous American nation state concerned more

with its speed, modernity, and sleek image than the actual inclusion of racially-excluded

subjects. Moreover, twentieth-century representations of automobiles often signify

narratives of freedom and socio-economic mobility. In contrast, as Sau-ling Cynthia

Wong asserts, images of geographic mobility in Asian American texts are “usually

associated with subjugation, coercion, impossibility of fulfillment for self or community”

(121). While mobility and travel in dominant hegemonic narratives usually lead the

narrator to an “immobility of a desirable kind: that of having created a permanent home

and cast down roots,” Asian American texts frequently fail to achieve this immobility as

a form of freedom (122).44 As Yamamoto’s image of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald running

down Jemo demonstrates, Japanese Americans were not included in the national socio- economic mobility of the “roaring twenties.” Instead they faced “roaring” economic and ideological violence as represented by “Yoneko’s Earthquake.” They were not only excluded from national socio-economic mobility. They also were harmed by it. The achievement of freedom, independence, and wealth by white national subjects came at the expense of this uprooting of Asian American families.

44 See also Huang.

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Yamamoto’s images of national violence directed at Asian American families

emerge in her depictions of nature and family. She turns around the “naturalization”

narratives of traditional U.S. pastorals as well as other Asian American texts of the

period. Instead “Yoneko’s Earthquake” and “Seventeen Syllables” emphasize the

instability (“unnaturalness”) of the categories of race, family, and nation that dictate the

oppression and economic exploitation facing Asian American families.

Resistance is Fertile?

Traise Yamamoto contends that interracial romance functions in U.S. popular culture,

such as the film Sayonora (1957), to mask subordination with romantic love. In contrast,

romantic love in Hisaye Yamamoto’s fiction highlights the racial, gender, and economic

hierarchies through which individuals negotiate their desires. The romantic triangle that

appears among Mr. Hosoume, Mrs. Hosoume, and Marpo draws attention to the power

inequities that exist within nuclear families. The text’s metaphoric naturalization of

Marpo and Mrs. Hosoume’s affair denaturalizes the national romance between Mr.

Hosoume and Mrs. Hosoume. On one hand, this failure marks the couple’s inability to stand in for the nation’s citizen-state relation due to their economic and racial

marginalization. On the other hand, it allows Marpo and Mrs. Hosoume to project an

alternative national imaginary that challenges the power inequities that exist between Mr.

and Mrs. Hosoume. Just as Mr. Hosoume finds the romance between Marpo and Mrs.

Hosoume threatening and insulting to his place in the family hierarchy, the text implies

that an alternative romance founded on interracial solidarity could successfully challenge

the racial, economic, and gendered hierarchies central to the nation’s self-definition.

Perhaps Mrs. Hosoume’s fertility with Marpo represents the fertile possibilities of their

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resistance. Mr. Hosoume’s desire to retain his masculinity, which his changed status

within the home threatens, results in the forced abortion of the Japanese-Filipino fetus

growing in Mrs. Hosoume’s womb. Through the metaphor of the collie, we know this

child would have been “beautiful” (54). This description of the collie/fetus run down by

an automobile hints at the nation’s violent suppression of interracial movements. Yet, the

texts ultimately transfer the possibility of resistant subjectivity as well as the potential of

Asian American full citizenship to its youthful female protagonists Rosie and Yoneko.

In both “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” the mother’s attempt

to reshape significantly her subordinate position within the family fails. If Mrs. Hosoume

demonstrates a new independence in the heat of her affair with Marpo, her dependency

upon Mr. Hosoume increases after her abortion. The abortion wounds her emotionally

and physically in a way that mirrors the injury Mr. Hosoume sustains in his earthquake

accident. After the abortion, her “insolence” (53) disintegrates, as she returns from the

hospital “walking with very small, slow steps,” with Mr. Hosoume “assisting” her (54).

In a face of a threat to the nation, the disruptive male (Marpo) must be removed and the

woman’s insubordination crushed. This also occurs in “Seventeen Syllables” with the

expulsion of Mr. Kuroda, the newspaper editor, and the incineration of the haiku prize,

actions which combine to destroy Tome’s poetic spirit as embodied by Ume.

These gendered patterns of power relations repeat with the children’s generation,

rearticulating earlier models of gendered citizen-subjectivity circulating in farm labor

representations. Michael Szalay discovers a trope of vanishing fathers and public mothers in New Deal era literature, including The Grapes of Wrath. In Chapter 3, I analyze the functioning of this trope in Hiroshi Nakamura’s Treadmill, contending that the vanishing

254 father/husband figures represent the impossibility of citizen-subjectivity for Issei and adult male Nisei. I assert that the mantle of U.S. citizenship passes from Mr. Noguchi to his legal-citizen daughter, Teru. Her subjectivity expands to encapsulate both her

Japanese American identity and the possibility of ideal U.S. citizenship. Yet, in rejecting an assimilation model of intermarriage that would compromise her Japanese American identity, she becomes an ambassador, or a bridge figure between the United States and

Japan. Her ideal abstract citizenship can only co-exist with her Japanese American identity in her exile from the United States. A gendered model of citizenship also structures the subjectivity represented in “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s

Earthquake.” Like Treadmill, Yamamoto’s fiction uses the development of characters’ subjectivity (shown through novelistic tropes of interiority) to demonstrate the contradictions of the United States’ denial of characters’ legal and cultural citizenship.

Yet, whereas Treadmill constructs Teru’s subjectivity in relation to her father’s,

Yamamoto’s fiction foreground the relationships between mothers and daughters.

Both “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” depict the failure of communication between mother and daughter. “Seventeen Syllables” opens with both characters cognizant of their inability to communicate. Tome reads her daughter her latest haiku. When she tries to explain the meaning of her art, her daughter replies, “Yes, Yes, I understand,” even though she does not. Yamamoto writes, “the truth was that Rosie was lazy . . . It was so much easier to say yes, yes, even when one meant no, no” (8). Tome recognizes Rosie’s lack of interest in her artistic production; she “see[s] through [Rosie’s] deception and [is] resigned” (8). Their ability to communicate remains stymied throughout the course of the tale. Tome repeatedly attempts to reach out to her daughter,

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but Rosie refuses the offerings. The final scene of the short story echoes the story’s

opening. After confessing her hidden past (a secret even from Rosie’s father), Tome

warns that marriage crushes the creative soul, and begs Rosie never to wed. Rosie, lost in

lustful thoughts of Jesus, responds, “yes, yes, I promise” (19). Her mother recognizes the

“familiar glib agreement,” and withdraws the intimacy she has just offered (19).

Similarly, “Yoneko’s Earthquake” ends with the mother’s warning, “Never kill a person,

Yoneko if you do, God will take from you someone you love” (56). Yoneko “eagerly”

responds, “Oh, that. . . I don’t believe in that, I don’t believe in God” (56). She misses

the references to Marpo, Sergio, and the abortion, and thus does not hear her mother’s

confession and directive.

In Yamamoto’s fiction, the daughter’s failure to comprehend her mother’s

messages demonstrates her immaturity as much as the immigrant generation gap.45 As

Stan Yogi contends, Yamamoto’s fiction employs “buried plots” in which the child narrator lacks the knowledge and experience to fully interpret the events around her. The narrator tells a story about her own life through which, in bits and pieces, the reader becomes aware of a parallel narrative focused on the mother. Thus, while some literary critics evaluate mother-daughter relationships that privilege the daughter’s subject formation at the expense of the mother, Yamamoto’s texts, as noted by Traise

Yamamoto, employ the daughter’s nascent subjectivity to communicate the mother’s frustrations, aims, and ambitions.46 As Elaine Kim contends, the daughter’s survival may

45 For a reading predominantly focused on issues of “generation gap” see Kim’s “Hisaye Yamamoto: A Woman’s View.” This theme is also key to Crow’s critique of her representations of Issei men in “The Issei father in the Fiction of Hisaye Yamamoto.”

46 See Yamamoto’s Masking Selves, Making Subjects. Chu also makes this point in Assimilating Asians (91).

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depend on her ability to later interpret the lessons her mother intends to convey.47

Yamamoto’s narratives shift from the failure of mother’s rebellion to the daughter’s potential disobedience to her father, and thus to the state, as the future’s hope.

If the communication difficulties delay the mothers’ attempt to cultivate the daughters’ resistance, within the text, to authority figures, Yamamoto’s fathers fail to communicate to their sons due to the child’s absence or death. That is, Yamamoto’s stories are eerily haunted by dead and dying male children. In “Seventeen Syllables”

Rosie learns that she had a little brother that was stillborn to her mother seventeen years prior. In “Yoneko’s Earthquake” the death of the fetus (characterized in the text as a murder) is followed by the death of Sergio from a mysterious medical malady. Because the text implies Mr. Hosoume’s impotency, the father’s ability to produce a male heir, a legal citizen who could enact the citizen-subjectivity denied him, fails.48 Through the

death or absence of the male child and the emphasis on the female subject, Yamamoto’s

short stories imply that Japanese American inclusion in the nation-state depends on the

successful rebellion of her female characters.

The works suggest that Yamamoto’s female subject, the daughter, aligns herself

with her Japanese mother as a rebellious threat to the domestic order and the nation-state.

The alliance between mother and daughter disrupts the patriarchal order. For example,

when Yoneko takes the ring offered her by Mrs. Hosoume (the symbol of the

consummation of her affair with Marpo) she was “delighted” by the “chance to have

some secret revenge on her father” (52). Indeed, Traise Yamamoto contends that

“Yamamoto’s use of the metaphor of marriage between Mrs. Hosoume and Yoneko

47 See “Hisaye Yamamoto: A Woman’s View.”

48 The inability of Mr. Hosoume to have another heir is discussed by Cheung in Articulate Silences (48).

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[through the gift of the ring] not only implies their bonding against the father’s authority but also signifies Yoneko’s initiation into an adult world ordered by marital, religious, and social institutions” (167). Moreover, in Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion,

Leslie Bow asserts that accusations of women’s betrayal serve not only to police women’s sexuality but to guard the boundaries of kinship. Allegations of sexual treason by women demonstrate the constructed nature of identities and group allegiances. Thus the female bonding displayed by Yoneko and Mrs. Hosoume alongside their transgressive activities implicitly jeopardize national belonging, by demonstrating the falsity of group- identity construction. Their activities contain the potential to expose the unnaturalness of family and nation, as well as provide the opportunity to imagine new forms of social relationships and community identities.

Yamamoto’s mothers and daughters connect not only through their common rebellion, but also in the violent consequences they mutually face. When Mr. Hayashi storms into the house where Ume converses with Mr. Kuroda, the haiku editor, Rosie

“stood, frightened and vacillating” (36). Her trepidation for her mother interchanges with her fears for herself. She later describes Mr. Hayashi’s actions as “the other violence of the hot afternoon” that along with other events “level[ed] her life, her world to the very ground” (37). This description implies a form of destruction, as if Mr. Hayashi’s act annihilated Rosie along with Ume’s prize. Similarly, Mr. Hosoume utilizes Yoneko as a substitute for Marpo when he criticizes her nail polish. Yamamoto communicates Mr.

Hosoume’s misplacement of blame through Yoneko’s initial suspicion that Mr.

Hosoume’s anger arises from the ring she wears. However, he does not even see the ring, instead offering a tirade about the polish. He misidentifies which marking on her hand

258 represents her insubordination, just as he reprimands her emerging sexuality rather than his wife’s infidelity. In focusing on Yoneko’s behavior, Mr. Hosoume avoids directly addressing the more immediate threat of his wife’s sexual conduct. Nevertheless, through this confrontation, Yoneko becomes synonymous with her mother’s rebellion. Mr.

Hosoume reprimands her in front of Marpo: “‘You look like a Filipino’ . . . for it was another irrefutable fact among Japanese in general that Filipinos in general were a gaudy lot” (52). Mrs. Hosoume immediately defends Yoneko, claiming she too wore nail polish at that age. Her defense disputes Mr. Hosoume’s characterization of Filipinos as particularly gaudy, thus defending Marpo even as she supports her daughter. The hostile exchange ends with Mr. Hosoume slapping his wife for insolence. Mr. and Mrs.

Hosoume’s disagreement employs the daughter’s nail polish as a proxy for their own growing distance. The focus on the nail polish, which marks Yoneko as “Filipino,” hints at Mrs. Hosoume’s affair. For, if Yoneko begins to look Filipino, the fetus in Mrs.

Hosoume’s womb appears even more so. Yoneko, as a substitute Filipino and as a woman flaunting her sexuality, becomes a proxy for both Marpo and Mrs. Hosoume’s defiance.

This marks Yoneko as a character capable of embodying multiple forms of resistance to the systems of familial and national belonging which constrict her mother’s agency. With the death of her brother Sergio she represents the potential of Japanese

American full citizenship, that is, the ability to bridge the gap between economic producer and national subject. She also suggests the potential for a radical re-visioning of society. Yet, her ability and willingness to take on such roles remains ambiguous in the text. Will Yoneko escape the family hierarchies that bind her to the home? Will she

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participate in interracial resistance to the hierarchies of class, gender, and citizenship

status that structure the national family? Rosie too embodies a rebellious potential. Will

her romance with Jesus threaten the race-based hierarchies of familial economic

production? Will her emerging sexuality lead to her betrayal, the way her mother was

left with a stillborn son? Will she refuse to marry, and refuse to join the national family, or will she too have her creative side (her full subjectivity) denied for the role she must

play in the domestic economy? Yamamoto leaves such questions unanswered. The

disruption caused by Ume’s emergence and Mrs. Hosoume’s affair doubles for the Cold

War domestic troubles of the nation. Yet, Yamamoto stops short of didactically enumerating the solutions that Rosie and Yoneko may offer. Her texts hint at the potential for revolutionary change, but do not guarantee its emergence. If the mothers fail in their bids for independence (and the implied threat to the domestic order), the possibilities remain for the daughter’s to recoup and act upon the lost messages of their youth. For her characters, resistance is delayed, not denied.

In the post-war nuclear imagery of the stories, the scope of this resistance takes on global proportions. For example, the culminating “murder” in “Seventeen Syllables” invokes the human rights crisis of the post-war era by recalling imagery of World War II genocides. Ume’s murder occurs through the destruction of her haiku prize, described as an “explosion” that leaves only “wreckage” (18). Described also as an “act of cremation,” the prize’s fate recalls the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

(18).49 Moreover, the images of cremation call to mind the burning of concentration

49 Many Issei originated from areas around Hiroshima with relatives remaining there, and many American Nisei trapped or remaining in Japan during the War resided there. The bombings were particularly personal to many Japanese Americans who had relatives killed in the blasts.

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camp victims in Nazi ovens. 50 While this violent act is localized to one family and

destroys only one inanimate object, the subtle references to World War II imply global

consequences for Mr. Hayashi’s actions. Similarly, Rosie explains the events of the

afternoon, “level[ed] her life, her world to the very ground” (18). This “leveling” of a

“world” echoes the prominent images of nuclear destruction that abounded in the early

Cold War era, as described by Paul S. Boyer. The cruelty of mass destruction and human

annihilation implied through such imagery hints at the global reach of state violence,

especially in the nuclear context of the late 1940s.

Moreover, such descriptions extend past acts of physical violence to performances

of ideological violation. While Mr. Hayashi uses fire to enact material destruction, Tome

challenges the stories through which Rosie understands her place in the family and by

extension her role in an international community. The text parallels the impact of

Tome’s confession on Rosie to the effect of Mr. Hayashi’s destruction of the haiku prize on Ume. “Seventeen Syllables” explicitly names Tome’s act as violent like Mr.

Hayashi’s, which is “the other violence of the hot afternoon” (18). When Tome asks

Rosie, “Do you know why I married your father?” Rosie finds it to be “the most

frightening question she had ever been called upon to answer” (18). Rosie resists the

information about her mother’s past as an act of self-preservation. Tome’s reconfiguration of her origin story threatens Rosie’s sense of self. Tome explains she fled

Japan following a failed affair with an upper class man and a miscarried child. She

married Rosie’s father as an alternative to suicide. When Rosie grapples with this

information from her mother, the self-identity she developed within her family

50 In “Hisaye Yamamoto: A Woman’s View,” Kim compares the burning of the Hiroshige to “other literary descriptions about issei burning art objects and heirlooms in the wake of Pearl Harbor” (80).

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reconfigures. Tome’s story forces Rosie to understand her subjectivity within a multi-

family narrative of international migration. Rosie’s first response to Tome’s tale captures

this revision of familial boundaries: “‘I had a brother then?’”(19). Tome’s words tie

Rosie to the fate of her stillborn half-brother in Japan. Thus, the violence of Tome’s

story unites Rosie with individuals outside of her family, and resituates her in

international systems of racial, gender, and class-based hierarchies. Tome’s story

provides Rosie with the capacity to re-imagine her sense of family as non-nuclear and

international.

The ability of Yamamoto’s short stories to transcend the bounds of the nation

state towards global kinship echo the characterization of Teru as a global ambassador for

Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms in the final pages of Treadmill. Teru’s closing monologue

links the places and bodies of North America to those in Japan shattered by the bombing

of Hiroshima. The threat of global annihilation by nuclear warfare summons an

alternative incompatible with the racial logic of U.S. national identity. In Sexual

Naturalization, Susan Koshy contends that relations of sexual inequality and moral hypocrisy that U.S. subjects engage in outside of United States “could be condoned and forgotten because it lay outside the moral and legal order that operated within the U.S. nation” (33). Like Treadmill, “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” offer an expanded definition of the domestic romance that prevents the legal and moral order of the nation from disentangling itself from its international consequences. The transnational implications of local resistance remain central to Yamamoto’s formulations. Cold War domesticity infiltrates the texts through both the nuclear family and the nuclear threat.

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The Japanese American families featured in Yamamoto’s fiction represent the

United States in the context of the double entendre of the word domestic: “domestic

[national public] policy”, and “domestic [family private] sphere.” Yet the national

domestic can not be separated from its global influence in the post-World War II era.

The violence at the heart of Yamamoto’s nuclear families implies the violence at the core

of the nation. This violence threatens to be unleashed upon the world. Rosie and Yoneko

share the possibility of resistance. They, more effectively than their mothers, may counter

the material and ideological forces that seek to dehumanize and marginalize them. They

may lay claim to the full subjectivity and citizenship promised by capitalist democracy.

Yet Yamamoto’s texts imply that achieving such equality depends on the destruction or

significant alternation of the nuclear family, and by extension, the Cold War nation-state.

Censorship and Creativity

Yamamoto’s short stories mask their criticism of the United States and evade Cold War

censorship by employing what Traise Yamamoto names “strategic resistance” in their depiction of domesticity. Yamamoto’s works conform to hegemonic narratives of race and gender by encompassing both Cold War criticism of over-sexualized and over-

ambitious mothers, and Cold War narratives where Asian daughters achieve liberty in

their escape from traditional Asian fathers (see Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese

Daughter). Yet, in their “articulate silences” Yamamoto’s narratives also critique the

capitalist-nation-state where economic survival mandates dehumanization, requires

authoritarian rule, and demarcates the boundaries of racially-appropriate bonding.51

When read through the lens of Cold War cultural politics, Yamamoto’s depictions of

51 “Articulate silences” references Cheung’s identification of this narrative strategy in Articulate Silences.

263 family dynamics question the nation’s ability to overcome these inequalities inherent to its system of rule.

In discussing the function of familial metaphors as national symbols through the structure of gendered inequality, Anne McClintock asks “whether the iconography of the family [can] be retained as a figure for national unity, or must an alternative, radical iconography be developed?”52 This question seems to underscore Yamamoto’s fictional examination of family dynamics. Yamamoto’s short stories portray families as sites of inequality and hierarchy. The patriarch violently reprimands those who assert their individuality, their creativity, or their sexuality. His identity depends on their subordination. The nuclear family fails as a model of democracy, equality, and freedom.

What does this mean for the international ramifications of domestic family representations during the Cold War? The texts question the ability of the United States to provide a familial model any more stable than the Hayashis or the Hosoumes. On the other hand, the depiction of the Issei patriarchs’ national exclusion suggests that the stories’ malfunctioning families may result from the nation’s failure to fully include racial minorities, rather than the failure of the nuclear family as national model, per se.

The violence of political and economic oppression in the story allows the domestic violence depicted in the text. The father’s oppressive actions can not be understood outside of his limited economic options. Thus, Yamamoto’s narratives open themselves to a range of political interpretations from anarchistic anti-government to the most moderate of Cold War civil rights critiques.

Perhaps because of the Cold War context, contradictory political readings are available for many of the national and international discursive interventions that

52 McClintock (110).

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Yamamoto’s short stories produce. Yamamoto penned “Seventeen Syllables” and

“Yoneko’s Earthquake” in the midst of the McCarthy period, when many radical writers

of the 1930s were blacklisted, went underground, or cleverly disguised their political

writings. The prevalence of Cold War censorship highlights the alignment of artistic

creativity with patriarchal disobedience in Yamamoto’s fiction. In “Seventeen Syllables”

Ume’s haiku dexterity threatens the domestic order, similarly to the way McCarthyism

claimed writer’s artistic license lent itself to political duplicity. Moreover, as Ming L.

Cheng contends, artistic creativity aligns in “Yoneko’s Earthquake” and “Seventeen

Syllables” with the transgressive female sexuality that the postwar nuclear family sought

to contain.53 Thus “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” mimic Cold War techniques of silencing and censorship through the destruction of Ume’s artistic achievements, and the separation of Mrs. Hosoume and Marpo, whose aborted fetus remains a narrative analog to Ume’s incinerated haiku prize.

“Seventeen Syllables” exposes the subversive possibilities of censorship through

Rosie’s popular culture mimicry. Her conformity serves as self-censorship. If the domestic world is turned upside down by Ume’s poetic freedom, and tested by Rosie’s awakening sexuality, Rosie’s embrace of popular forms of expression superficially masks the problem.54 Rosie responds to the stress in her life “at recess by performing wild

mimicry” (15). She imitates Fred Allen, Rudy Vallee, and Shirley Temple. Thus

“Seventeen Syllables” proposes modeling oneself after the images found in popular

movies as one possible response to transgressive behaviors. The use of the word

53 See Cheng’s “The Unrepentant Fire” (96-97).

54 Both Charles Crow and Elaine Kim read this seen as demonstrative of Rosie’s artistic creativity and expression. Allen was a popular radio personality. Vallee was a singer, actor, and bandleader. Shirley Temple was a popular child actress.

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“mimicry” here recalls the theories of colonialism produced by Franz Fanon and Homi K.

Bhabha.55 While Fanon sees mimicry’s function largely as a boon to the colonizer,

Bhabha views it as a strategy of resistance. The mimic reminds the colonizer of the similarity between himself and the colonized. Both readings are available here. On one hand, Rosie performs as expected. She escapes the revolution underfoot in the domestic relations of her family through theatrics. She evokes popular culture narratives of identity and nation as a response to stress in her home life. Rosie reacts to her adult behavior (kissing Jesus) through child-like play. This reinforces a reading of this scene as rehabilitative through regression. Yet, what are we to make of Rosie’s mimicry of these media stars when dominant national hegemonies deny Rosie’s Americanness? Asian

Americans were popularly believed to be “unassimilable,” yet Rosie’s mimicry offers proof of assimilation. Rosie plays like other children do, and she can even impersonate movie stars. Her use of mimicry in the schoolyard establishes a textual connection between her home life and the dominant public narratives of the nation. Moreover, her impersonations demonstrate the folly of the racial constructions that places her culturally outside of the nation. Thus, her mimicry threatens the structures of racial meaning at the heart of national discourses during the 1930s’ setting of the text, and the 1940s’ context of its production. The very acts of creative conformity Rosie employs serve textually to subvert society’s dominant narratives. Just as Rosie’s acts of resistance can be masked by their Cold War context, Yamamoto’s own rebellion through creative expression often remains under explored.

Political Conscious and Unconscious

55 See Bhabha’s “Of Mimicry and Man.”

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Although scholars widely acknowledge Yamamoto’s radicalism, few engage the political contributions of her texts outside the framework of contemporary feminism. As

Yamamoto herself acknowledges, an author’s politics may shape a text in ways that the author herself may be unaware. She explains: “A fiction writer who has a political agenda will probably consciously or unconsciously incorporate it into his work” (Cheung

Seventeen Syllables Women’s Writers 85). She further explains, “I call myself a

Christian anarchist, but I’m not sure my beliefs come through in the stories. If they’re part of me, however, some sense of it must be evident, but I leave that for you to judge”

(Cheung Seventeen Syllables Women’s Writers 85). In my judgment, Yamamoto’s politics, including her perspectives on racial inequality, pacificism, and anarchism emerge throughout her oeuvre. Whether Yamamoto intended it or not, Catholic Worker value systems circulate within the Cold War politics at play in her fiction.56

56 Yamamoto remained on the farm for two years, yet little has been published on this significant period of her life. I supplemented the existing literature by reading the Catholic Worker, 1933-1961. The 22-acre farm was purchased in the late summer/early fall of 1950 by Dorothy Day, and named after the late Peter Maurin, co-founder of The Catholic Worker. The farm was only in its third season of Catholic Worker cultivation when Yamamoto arrived, around Labor Day, 1953 (Stafford). Yone U. Stafford reported to the Catholic Worker that her influence led to Yamamoto’s presence. Stafford wrote, “Now, I can remember as long as memory is granted me, her quiet, ‘You are really the reason I am here Yone’” According to Stafford, Yamamoto credited her time at the farm to a letter Stafford sent in response to an early Yamamoto article in the Los Angeles Tribune. Yamamoto described the farm, “with its daily Mass, cockroaches, weaving, bedbugs, homemade whole wheat bread, [and] poison ivy . . .” (Cheung Seventeen Syllables Women’s Writers 67). The live-in community at the Peter Maurin farm was small. Dorothy Day often resided there, and her young grandchildren became Paul’s playmates; Day referred to “little Paul” quite frequently and fondly in the paper. Yamamoto explained, “I fed the chickens and rabbits usually, sometimes cooked if there was no one else around to do it, cleaned cupboards, sorted clothing that came in, and wrote for the paper” (Cheung Seventeen Syllables Women’s Writers 81). In another interview she explained, “I got to do things like going around killing tomato worms and feeding the chickens and rabbits. Eventually, they asked me to review books and do the farm column and. ..cook” (Cheung, Words Matter 365). These recollections are reinforced by the reports both she and Day printed in the Catholic Worker. Day described her as the farm’s “best example of manual labor” (“Peter Maurin”). In another instance, Day reported that Yamamoto was wearing out the brooms (“On Pilgrimage,” 1953). Yamamoto also wrote occasionally for the paper, contributing at least one book review (children’s books read to a chicken pox infected Paul), an article on the Seabrook farm’s history of labor strife and use of Japanese American labor during the war, and several of the columns published each month full of day-to-day updates on the farm life. She continued to contribute to the paper after leaving the farm. Although never a Catholic, Yamamoto continues to politically identify with the Catholic Worker and considers herself part of the Catholic Worker community. After marrying Anthony De Soto, whom she met at the farm, she returned to

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Founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin on May Day, 1933, the Catholic

Worker movement combined anti-capitalist radicalism with Catholic pacifism. The

Catholic Worker’s masthead features a white worker holding a shovel alongside a black worker carrying a pick. The workers reach towards each other to shake hands in front of a

white Jesus, capturing the movement’s ideal of interracial labor solidarity united with

Christianity. Catholic Workers frequently claimed conscientious objector status, and many did not pay federal income taxes as a protest against both war and government.

Both then and now, volunteers at Catholic Worker centers around the nation provide food, shelter, and clothes to needy patrons. As part of their promotion of manual labor, voluntary poverty, and an agrarian lifestyle, the Catholic Worker self-identified from its earliest days with the “green revolution” (their term).57 Indeed, critics have yet to

connect the agrarianism embraced in Yamamoto’s fiction to the culture of cultivation

celebrated by the Catholic Worker movement.

Most central to my analysis, however, is the “Christian Anarchist” identity that

Yamamoto developed within the Catholic Worker framework. The Catholic Worker first

California and continued her career as an author and self-identified housewife. Little is known of De Soto. Yamamoto skirts mention of him in her interviews. She and DeSoto raised a total of 5 children, including Paul. She still resides in the Los Angeles area and has at least two grandchildren. See Osmond and Watanabe.

57 During the period in which Yamamoto began reading the Catholic Worker, articles argued for integration, and reported on the arrests of Catholic Workers picketing alongside the NAACP. The paper put reports of lynching and labor struggles side by side on its front page. It followed the rise of McCarthyism, and frequently argued against the draft. George Carlin reported from the occupation of Japan and the paper bemoaned the hunger and poverty of children across both Europe and Asia in the aftermath of the war. By the early 1950s it engaged with environmental discourses by promoting organic farming and arguing against birth control. Russia’s reliance on technology to increase agricultural production was also flawed, the paper argued. According to Catholic Worker articles, the scarcity of resources was to be solved by a return to the natural agrarian way of life, voluntary poverty, and the teachings of Christ. By the late 1940s, the paper had more than 66,000 subscribers, and was recovering from its wartime loss of subscribers and key leaders over Day’s adamant Catholic pacificism during World War II. Day challenged the Catholic principle of a just war. While some Catholics opposed World War II on the idea that all modern warfare was injust, Day rejected the just war criteria. In particular this brought her to blows with the Chicago Catholic Worker. See Klejment and Roberts. Also see Catholic Worker, 1933-1961.

268 applied the term “Christian Anarchism” to the movement’s political platform in

September 1949 in an article by Robert Ludlow as well as a similar article by Amman

Hennacy, who went on to publish The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist (1954). In

his article, Ludlow explained, “the fact that the position is described as Christian

anarchist means that it has a moral basis. For the Christian is opposed to all evil and in

the field of government he must be opposed to all evil government and it is his contention

that the state as we know it, the state as a historical entity, is an evil form of government”

(Sept 1949, pg 4).58 Articles by Ludlow and Hennacy contend that as the Catholicism of a community increased, the need for a government and law decreased. As Hennacy famously articulated, “Oh, judge, your damn laws: the good people don't need them and the bad people don't follow them, so what good are they?” Yamamoto defines her own anarchism through reference to these beliefs by Ludlow and Hennacy as well as the writings of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. In an interview with King-Kok Cheung, she explained: “I’m a Christian because I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. And an anarchist because I agree that ‘the government is best which governs least,’ the

58 Notably, the phrase was only used after Peter Maurin’s death, and Ludlow’s frequent columns on anarchism over the next several months make clear that some objected to its use. However, by all accounts Dorothy Day concurred by Ludlow’s assessment in “Christian Anarchism” that anarchism was “what I believe the Catholic Worker to stand for” (2). In a later issue, and in direct reference to another controversial statement by Ludlow, she wrote, “I personally stand in back of everything Bob Ludlow writes, though his way of expressing himself is at times peculiar, to say the least” (“On Pilgrimage” 1950). It is worth noting though that Day called herself a personalist not an anarchist, and by the early 1950s Ludlow himself was also using personalist, bickering over anarchism in the paper’s pages with Hennacy. Like many Catholic Workers, including Day, Hennacy was a radical and a pacifist prior to his Catholic conversion. He termed himself a Christian anarchist shortly after World War One believing pacificism was required of Chistianity and that states promoted the resolution of conflict through war, thus pacificsm required anarchism. He was baptized Roman Catholic in 1952, an event Day celebrated in the Catholic Worker (“The Conversion of Ammon Hennacy”). Unlike Hennacy, Yamamoto never converted to Catholism. She roots her anarchism back to Maurin, referring to his “easy essays” when explaining her politics. Interestingly, Ruth Ann Hearney in a letter entitled “Dear Tom” insisted that Maurin identified himself to her in private conversation as an anarchist but chose not to use the label publicly because, “people weren’t ready” for it.

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government by mutual consent in small groups – communities – is the ideal form of

democracy. This includes pacifism.”(85).59 In another interview with Cheung,

Yamamoto explains, “My politics are radical . . . I don’t even vote because I consider

myself an anarchist” (Words Matter 352). In refusing to vote, Yamamoto references the

Catholic Worker idea that change will come neither through the ballot nor the bullet but through direct action and personal transformation.60

This recalls the politically ambiguous endings of “Yoneko’s Earthquake” and

“Seventeen Syllables.” If change is to happen in the stories, it is through the actions and

transformations of the young female protagonists rather than more typical images of

revolution or reform. The stories’ hope exists in the agency and imaginations of Rosie

and Yoneko. Moreover, the lack of faith Yamamoto felt for the nation-state, expressed by

her interest in Christian anarchism, echoes in the lack of faith in the nation’s

incorporation of Asian American families expressed in “Yoneko’s Earthquake” and

“Seventeen Syllables.” As Wendy Kozol writes, “The image of the family has significant power when it functions as a metaphor for the nation, but that power is tenuous because instabilities in families can appear to threaten the nation”61

Yamamoto saturates her fictional families with the Cold War discourse of

containment. Yet her Asian American nuclear families fail to contain the threats of

kinship inequalities. Mr. Hosoume and Mr. Hayashi participate in the Cold War crisis of

masculinity. The threat posed by their economic alienation emerges from their racialized

59 Many Catholic Workers believed small communities could empower the individual disempowered through social injustice. See Klejment and Roberts (5).

60 Here I refer to Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet.”

61 Life’s America (126).

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exclusion from full participation in the nation-state rather than from the changing

economic organization of the post-war era.62 Yamamoto’s fiction, set in the 1930s, uses

Depression-era agricultural imagery to challenge the naturalness of the nation-state and

the nuclear family central to the defense of Cold War capitalism. Her short stories

reverberate with Civil Rights rhetoric. This use of such narrative strategies is

unsurprising given that Yamamoto penned the stories shortly after her formative experience working for The Los Angeles Tribune. The texts imply that the partial nature

of Japanese American national belonging jeopardizes masculine authority and nuclear family containment. The marginalization and dehumanization of Asian American

subjects weaken the Cold War United States. Moreover, representations of violent

patriarchs mirror representations of violent nature to depict the nation as employing

brutal means to maintain its power. The subjectivity of the daughters Rosie and Yoneko offers the best hope for increased democracy in the future. Yet the texts question the ability of the nuclear family and the nation state to provide that democracy. Yamamoto’s narratives mirror Cold War strategies of censorship and conformity whereby they hide such harsh critiques of national inequalities under naturalized images of farms, families, and romance. This is to say, Yamamoto’s Cold War era commitment to civil rights, pacifism, and anarchism offer expanded access to her texts as surely as my interrogation of the multiple meanings of domestic at play in the narrative strategies of her work.

Conclusion

Hisaye Yamamoto’s short stories critique the naturalness of the nation state. The violence characterized by the earthquake in “Yoneko’s Earthquake” provides a political

62 Without referencing the Cold War context, Cheung notes, “Yamamoto punctuates both narratives with sufficient hints to indicate that mounting masculine anxiety, not habitual insensitivity, sparks violence” (Articulate Silences 49).

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awakening for the young narrator who loses her faith in family and nature to protect her.

Both “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake” expose the violence upon which

familial (and thus national) unity hinges. Rather than insist on Japanese American national inclusion, the short stories demonstrate the fertile possibilities of more “natural” forms of resistance, as captured textually in the potential of interracial romance. Both

Yoneko and Rosie appear capable of one day digesting the nourishing lessons of their mothers to engage a strategy of resistance more successful than that of Mrs. Hosoume and Mrs. Hayashi. Cold War discourses of domesticity circulate through the texts to provide the national and international context for the familial tribulations of Yamamoto’s fictional Japanese American families. Yamamoto’s texts parallel the Civil Rights rhetoric of the Cold War suggesting that the disruptions caused by women’s and workers’ self-expression reveals the hierarchy at the heart of the family, threatening the outward appearance of unity. The dehumanization required for economic success alongside the violent response garnered by any disruption, seems to suggest a resolution only outside of the bounds of the nuclear family, and outside of the territories of the traditional nation state.

In the following chapter, “Remapping Imperial Geographies and Reclaiming

National Identities,” I further examine the formations of such resistant subjectivities and anti-nationalist geographies at play in Cold War agricultural representations. Specifically,

I analyze the writings of Carlos Bulosan and Ernesto Galarza to interrogate the contested citizenship status of Filipino laborers alongside the decidedly non-citizen status of

Mexican guest workers during the Bracero Program (1942-1964). While Yamamoto denaturalized the nation, Bulosan challenged imperial geographies by claiming the nation

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for colonial subjects and laborers, writing in one poem, “I want the wide American earth,

Its beautiful rivers and long valleys and fertile plains, . . . For all the free.”63 Similarly,

Galarza disrupted the economic geographies of the Cold War United States through his

exposés on the Bracero Program, Strangers in Our Fields and Merchants of Labor. He

viewed the economic imperialism of the Bracero Program as disrupting a rights discourse

founded on the primacy of the nation state and the national subject. For Galarza, the

bracero subject threatened the rights of all laborers, becoming “the prototype of the production man of the future” who was “an ‘input factor’ stripped of the political and social attributes that liberal democracy likes to ascribe to all human beings ideally.”64 I contend that Galarza and Bulosan revise the United States’ agricultural geographies to expose the threats that imperialist economic forces pose to human subjects.

63 “I want the Wide American Earth” in Evangelista (88).

64 Galarza’s Merchants of Labor (16).

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CHAPTER 5 Imperial Geographies and National Identities in Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Galarza’s Strangers in Our Fields

“Is this indentured alien – an almost perfect model of an economic man, an ‘input factor’ stripped of the political and social attributes that liberal democracy likes to ascribe to all human beings ideally – is this bracero the prototype of the production man of the future?” – Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor (16).

“Before the brave, before the proud builders and workers, I say I want the wide American earth, Its beautiful rivers and long valleys and fertile plains, Its numberless hamlets and expanding towns and towering cities, Its limitless frontiers, its probing intelligence, For all the free” - Carlos Bulosan.1

“Under imperialism,” Anne McClintock asserts, “certain groups are expelled and obliged

to inhabit the impossible edges of modernity: the slum, the ghetto . . . and so on. Abject

peoples are those whom industrial imperialism rejects but cannot do without: slaves,

prostitutes, the colonized, domestic workers. . . .”2 Under McClintock’s formulation, both

braceros and Filipino migrant workers can be understood as “abject peoples.”3 From

1901-1934 Filipino workers retained the status of “noncitizen nationals,” encouraged to temporarily relocate to the United States as migrant workers, but denied the rights of

1 “I want the Wide American Earth” in Evangelista (88). According to Evangelista, Bulosan wrote this poem to generate funds to defend the two Filipino union officers of UCAPAWA threatened with deportation by the US government. One of these two men was Bulosan’s close friend Chris Mensalvas.

2 Quoted in Chu (50).

3 For the original use of the term see the first chapter of Kristeva. Although abjection is frequently employed in studies of Asian American literature, the reference is typically to Butler’s use of Kristeva. See Butler’s Bodies That Matter (3).

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citizenship. Similarly, from 1942-1964, Mexican nationals were admitted to the United

States on a temporary basis as contract labor and denied any opportunity for citizenship.4

These workers provided “guest labor” to the United States’ agricultural industry through

the Bracero Program.

The colonial histories of both Spain and the United States shaped the lived

realities and representations of braceros and Filipino migrants. In both the Mexican-

American War (1846-1848) and the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), the United

States claimed the land but was hesitant to claim the peoples.5 Although treaties

guaranteed citizenship to Mexican nationals living in the newly claimed United States, many Mexican Americans were treated as “alien citizens,” — legal citizens perceived as aliens.6 Filipinos were denied even citizenship, with the Philippines deemed an

“unincorporated territory.” Thus, for both braceros and Filipino nationals, the United

States claimed labor and land, but treated the subjects who performed the labor as abjects.

Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946) and Ernesto Galarza’s Strangers in Our

Fields (1954) refute the abjection of the Filipino migrant and the bracero, respectively.

Both texts reincorporate the subjectivity of these colonial subjects and counter the United

States’ claims on the subjects’ land and labor.

Moreover, both works examine the conditions in which subjects stripped of

“inalienable” rights reclaim their humanity through resistance to the systems of profit-

4 Ngai sees Filipino migrants and bracero workers as examples of “imported colonialism” characterized by “new social relations based on the subordination of racialized foreign bodies who worked in the United States but who remain excluded from the polity by both law and by social custom” (129).

5 In Merchants of Labor, Galarza writes “The treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which in 1848 ended the war between the United States and Mexico, left the toilers on one side of the border, the capital and the best land on the other” (14).

6 See Ngai.

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driven production. America Is in the Heart and Strangers in Our Fields were composed

during the ascendancy of international human rights discourse.7 In its 1948 “Universal

Declaration of Human Rights,” the United Nations defined human rights primarily

through national rights and national identities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, both Bulosan and

Galarza’s texts suggest that colonial subjects must reclaim a relationship to land, family, and nation in order to successfully reclaim their humanity.

Galarza and Bulosan engage U.S. agricultural discourses in order to remap the spatial relations of power that existed among nations in the post-World War II era. Both men produce texts that refuse to participate in traditional agricultural discourses, challenging the naturalization of U.S. territory and U.S. citizenship. Galarza uses the

American agricultural myth as an absent presence that haunts his de-nationalized, de-

naturalized depiction of the Bracero Program.8 Bulosan subverts any existing ideological

relationship between U.S. citizenship and U.S. agricultural land ownership by refusing to

incorporate his Filipino protagonist into the U.S. nation. Rather, he incorporates laborers

and allies into a Filipino family who lays claim to the U.S. both ideologically (the

promise of American democracy) and materially (those who labor on the land own the

land). Thus, the anti-colonial imaginary embraced by both texts revises the spatial

relations between nations as both works emphasize reterritorialization, a revised

relationship between landscape and political identity, as necessary to achieve a more just

future.

America Is in the Heart

7 See Ishay; and Hunt.

8 For “absent present,” see Simpson (3).

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Carlos Bulosan arrived in the United States on July 22, 1930 at the age of nineteen. He

was born in the town of Binalonan, Pangasinian in the Philippines in 1911.9 His parents

were peasants, though not as impoverished as Bulosan often claimed.10 Once in the

United States, he increasingly involved himself in political and intellectual circles,

publishing The New Tide, a radical literary magazine, in 1934. Through this paper he

came in contact with many left-oriented writers such as William Saroyan and Richard

Wright. He wrote in English for a primarily U.S. audience and contributed to union

papers as often as he did for literary ones. Throughout this period, Bulosan worked with

Filipino labor organizer Chris Mensalvas, who appears as José in America Is in the Heart.

From 1936-1938, Bulosan was hospitalized with tuberculosis yet continued to write

furiously, often with the company of the novelist Sanora Babb and her sister Dorothy

(Alice and Eileen Odell in America Is in the Heart). Bulosan published poetry, short stories, essays, and novels, gaining national acclaim during the 1940s. Mensalvas served as president of UCAPWA (the agricultural union of the CIO) from 1949 to 1959. In

1952, he hired Bulosan to edit the UCAPAWA Yearbook. It was during this time that the government attempted to deport Mensalvas due to his labor activism, utilizing a clause in the McCarran-Walter Act. Bulosan never returned to the Philippines, and he never

became a U.S. citizen. He died on September 13, 1956.11

9 There is controversy around Bulosan’s birth year. McWilliams uses 1913 (America Is in the Heart xv). E. San Juan Jr. uses 1911 (On Becoming Filipino 3). According Evangelista, Bulosan often stated his birth year to be 1913 or 1914; however 1911 is in accordance with his baptismal record and recollections of Escolastica, his younger sister (2).

10 Similarly, Bulosan seems to have promoted the idea that he only had a third grade education, when really he had completed his third year in high school.

11 For biographical information see Bulosan’s Sound of Falling Light: Letters in Exile; Evangelista; Madsen; and McWilliams’s “Introduction,” American Is in the Heart. To place Bulosan in the context of

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America Is in the Heart, a fictional autobiography, describes the narrator’s childhood in the Philippines, his passage to the United States, his never-ending flight in the United States as he rides the rails from migrant job to migrant job, his two years of convalescence with tuberculosis during which he grows as a writer, and his progressive political awakening as he struggles to unionize Filipino laborers. The book ends shortly after Pearl Harbor with his brothers and friends rushing to join the army to defend the

Philippines and to fight fascism worldwide, defending the ideals of American democracy.

Although Bulosan was active in Filipino radical politics, he was not present at

many of the events he describes, nor was he well enough for much of the manual labor

the book details. As Bulosan’s friend Carey McWilliams writes in the introduction to

America Is in the Heart, “One may doubt that Bulosan personally experienced each and

every one of the manifold brutalities and indecencies so vividly described in this book,

but it can fairly be said – making allowances for occasional minor histrionics – that some

Filipino was indeed the victim of each of these or similar incidents” (vii). Bulosan

intended the book to provide a composite view of the Filipino laborer’s experience in this

period. Thus it is important to distinguish between Carlos Bulosan, the author, and

Carlos, the narrator of America Is in the Heart. Following scholarly convention, I refer to

the author as Bulosan and to the narrator as Carlos.12

other Filipino intellectuals see Espiritu’s Five Faces of Exile and writings of his peers such as Buaken’s I Have Lived with the American People.

12 Alquizola’s “Subversion or Affirmation: The Text and Subtext of America Is in the Heart” played a critical role in this understanding of the distance between Carlos the narrator (who she reads as naïve) and the author Bulosan.

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As literary critic E. San Juan articulates, Bulosan’s writings must be understood

within the larger framework of the history of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines.13

Following its victory in the Spanish-American War, the U.S. waged brutal battle against

Filipino independence fighters from 1899-1902. U.S. public memory often ignores the scale of this clearly imperial “intervention”: two-thirds of the U.S. Army was deployed and between 250,000 and 1,000,000 Filipino civilians were killed.14 The United States

agonized over its relationship with the Philippines as politicians and businessmen wanted

to incorporate its territories but not its denizens.15 The U.S. eventually claimed the

Philippines, along with Puerto Rico and Guam, as “unincorporated territories,” separated

from the incorporated territories in which eventual statehood was assured.16 The U.S.

government classified Filipinos as “noncitizen nationals” or “wards” of the United States.

They were able to travel freely to the United States but were denied the rights of citizenship. Between 1907 and 1936, 150,000 Filipinos migrated to the United States working in the sugar plantations in Hawaii, the canneries of Alaska, and the agricultural fields of the U.S. West.17 According to historian Mae Ngai, “Nearly 85 percent of the

13 See E. San Juan, Jr.’s After Postcolonialism.

14 For the Philippine-American War and the U.S. imperial occupation see Anderson’s Colonial Pathologies; Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood; Miller’s “Benevolent Assimilation”; and Ngai (99).

15 For the popular image of Filipinos and Filipino migrants see Balce and Tapia. Tapia argues, “The manongs that came as wards of the United States – ‘nationals’ under the U.S. flag –had arrived already racially sculpted into an economic asset, but during the 1920s they had slowly ‘degenerated’ along with the national economy into an economic menace because of the threat they posed to white labor. The Depression thus provided a context in which the perception of the Filipino as a subhuman stoop laborer could purposefully transgress its own boundaries to assume the form of a threat to the ‘purity’ of the United States” (63). See also Isaac and Hawley’s “You're a Better Filipino than I Am.”

16 For the relationship between the Philippines and the U.S. as unincorporated territories see Ancheta; Crouchett (18-30); Issac; Kaplan’s “Where is Guantanamo?”; and Miller’s “Benevolent Assimilation.”

17 For a discussion of this immigration see Fujita-Rony and Espana-Maram.

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Filipinos arriving in California during the 1920s were under thirty years of age, 93

percent were male, and 77 percent were single” (103). These young men faced intense

vigilante violence, most notably in Watsonville, CA in 1930. Anti-Filipino mobs

justified their brutality as protecting white womanhood, and anti-Filipino organizations

called for exclusion of Filipino workers, using a similar logic as they earlier applied to

Chinese and Japanese workers. 18

They partially achieved their goals with the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 and

the Welch Act of 1935, which encouraged the deportation of Filipinos. With the

Tydings-McDuffie Act, the Philippines gained a modicum of self-government, yet the act

reclassified Filipino “noncitizen nationals” as deportable “aliens.”19 Throughout this

period, however, Filipinos resisted this treatment through labor organizations like

UCAPAWA and through advocacy projects like the Committee for the Protection of

Filipino Rights.20 The Philippines was officially granted independence from the U.S. in

1946, but the U.S. remains economically, politically, and militarily integrated with the

Philippines. Consequently, the Philippines relies today on exporting large numbers of

transnational workers, the majority of whom support their families through work

18 For Anti-Filipino Violence in California see Crouchett (37-40); De Witt; and Ngai (105, 113-115).

19 For Tydings-McDuffie Act and Welch Act see Crouchett (37-40); and Ngai (119-126). For a copy of the bills see Kim’s The Filipinos in America.

20 For an examination of Filipino unionization efforts see Crouchett (40-44); Friday; and Fujita-Roni (169- 199). Espana-Maram offers one of the few historical studies of Filipino experiences in the U.S. to assert the agency of Filipino workers through their day to day practices rather than highlighting their union organizing activities.

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contracts in the United States.21 The status of the Filipino laborer, then and now, is

marked by empire.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Filipino laborer was incontestably a colonial

subject located in the social periphery even while laboring in the metropolis of the

mainland United States. Critics consistently identify Bulosan’s text as anti-colonial; yet

they frequently analyze Bulosan’s critique through the textual absence of the imperial

relationship. For example, Marilyn Alquizola interprets Carlos as a naïve narrator whose

idealism of America remains irreconcilable with its stark material reality; she understands

the text’s assimilationist claims (“We are all America”) as slapped on for marketability.

More recently, Meg Wesling claims the textual absence of imperialism echoes the

“national forgetting” that invests in Filipinos as U.S. wards or as assimilating immigrants.

In contrast, I argue for the textual presence of Bulosan’s anti-imperialist politics. In

addition to demonstrating the conscious forgetting of the “special relationship” between

the U.S. and the Philippines, Bulosan forcefully reasserts the Philippines into the heart of

America.

In asserting the colonial status of the Filipino subject, the text rejects traditional

narratives of immigration and assimilation. Instead America Is in the Heart re-articulates

the geography of the Americas. Through Carlos, the Filipino subject, Bulosan asserts the

presence of empire in the heart of American agricultural discourse, and consequently at

the heart of American identity. Bulosan roots his text in the Philippines, not in the United

States. Rather than seeking Carlos’s more complete integration into U.S. society, the

21 For works on the contemporary experience of Filipino migration to the U.S. see Choy; George’s When Women Come First; Manalansan; Parreñas’s Children of Global Migration; and Parreñas’s Servants of Globalization. For contemporary Filipino communities in the U.S. see Bonus; Espirtu’s Filipino American Lives; Espirtu’s Home Bound; and Okamura.

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narrator desires to return home —to the Philippines — to fight for justice on the soil over

which he claims ownership.

America Is in the Philippines

The first one hundred pages of the book take place in the Philippines. From the

narrative’s inception, Bulosan establishes the American presence in Carlos’s birth place.

The story opens with the return of his brother Leon from fighting for the U.S. army in

Europe. With Leon’s entrance, the rural farming life of Carlos’s father intimately

connects with a military relationship with the United States and Europe. The first line of

the text reads, “I was the first to see him coming slowly through the tall grass in the dry

bottom of the river” (3). Leon arrives in a “khaki army uniform” representing the

incursion of the U.S. military into the fields of the Philippines as well as the private space

of Filipino families. When Carlos’s father introduces Leon he states: “It is your brother, son.” He names the relationship between Leon and Carlos as familial, yet Carlos responds “Welcome home, soldier” refiguring his relationship to Leon. The text exposes the naturalization of U.S. involvement in the Philippines through the process where a child meets brother as soldier as well as greets soldier as brother. This appears as the rhetorical converse to U.S. ideologies that patronizingly name Filipinos as U.S. citizens’

“little brown brothers.”22 Yet, in Bulosan’s text, U.S. army recruitment strategies and

economic underdevelopment of the Philippines alongside absentee landlordism force

Filipinos to play the roles of both U.S. solider and “little brown brother.” Thus the text

exposes the complexity of colonial subject formation, as well as the unequal burden of

the relationship placed on Filipino subjects. Bulosan’s text exposes the “white man’s

22 This refers to the racist and paternalistic term used by William Howard Taft in references to the Philippines. See Miller.

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burden” in the Philippines as primarily ideological, while Filipinos themselves are forced

to bear the material consequences of the U.S.’s imagined “burden.”23

The imperial relationship between the United States and the Philippines not only structures the opening of the book, but it also constructs the work’s narrative pre-history.

It is the world into which Carlos is already born. He does not know and can not imagine the Philippines outside of its colonial history. He has two older brothers who hold stations in the U.S. army and knows Leon only from “his picture on the large table in our house in town” (4). U.S. imperialism determines his very family relationships. The

effects of the Spanish-American War structure the economic and political life of the

nation. The out-migration of young men to the United States, a path which Carlos

follows, is a direct consequence of the Philippines’s status as a possession of the United

States (5). The United States shapes Carlos’s life, from his brothers’ absence to his

desperate escape from the Philippines’s poverty to the United States. Carlos would have

been unable to legally travel to the United States if not for the archipelago’s status as a

U.S. possession. Moreover, U.S. policies in the Philippines mold the circumstances

which prescribe the need for escape.24 Carlos explains “Popular education was spreading

throughout the archipelago and this opened up new opportunities. It was a new and

democratic system brought by the American government into the Philippines, a nation

hitherto illiterate and backward beginning to awaken” (15). Yet as Meg Wesling

contends, the narrative details the many ways in which the education offered was neither

23 The term “white man’s burden” originated from Kipling’s poem. It may be read alongside Mark Twain’s essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” which references the “Philippine temptation.” Both Twain and Kipling criticize U.S. involvement in the Philippines from a racist and paternalist perspective. Indeed they were both published the in the same month. Of particular interest in linking these texts to Bulosan’s writings is San Juan’s The Philippine Temptation.

24 See Fujita-Rony (25-50).

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free nor democratic. Carlos explains, “it was for Macario that we were all working so

hard” (10). As the family’s land is sold to pay for Macario’s education, the dispossession

and ruin of the family originates in a promise made by the United States that the peasants

of the Philippines are unable to achieve. The chase after the elusive and impossible

American Dream is as devastating for the well-being of families in the Philippines as it is

for families in the United States.25

Bulosan’s text does not merely expose the imperial relationship between the

United States and the Philippines. Rather, America Is in the Heart radically reconfigures

this relationship. The first part of Bulosan’s text can be read as an interrogation of John

Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath through a Filipino context. The rest of his narrative

may be interpreted as signifying on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.26 In responding to

such canonical texts, Bulosan mocks the process of colonial education even as he uses it

to expose the economic, political, and cultural conditions of the Philippines.

Oklahoma Is in the Philippines

Carlos’s family is as rooted in the ground as Steinbeck’s Joads. Their devotion to each

other and to the land prefigures a Filipino nationalism in the text. Family and landscape

function as the foundations for self-determination in America Is in the Heart. Carlos

states, “I knew that if there was one redeeming quality in our poverty, it was this

boundless affinity for each other, this humanity that grew in each of us, as boundless as

this green earth” (10). The love that holds the family together shapes the family’s

relationship with the earth as well. This claim to indigenity through peasantry performs

25 For an examination of the role of US educational polices in the Filipino migration see Fujita-Rony (51- 75).

26 See Gates.

284 the novel’s nationalist sentimentalism. Carlos explains that “circumstances stronger than my hands and faster than my feet were inevitably dividing us, and no matter what I did our family was on its way to final dissolution and tragedy” (33). The material conditions of the Philippines, shaped by centuries of colonialism, shape the disaster that faces the family through the loss of their land and threatens the dissolution of Philippines’s sovereignty.

Bulosan disrupts the text’s potential pastoralism through the incursion of dispossession and poverty. In narrating the family’s privation, the text echoes the narrative strategies of The Grapes of Wrath. As The Grapes of Wrath begins, Tom Joad arrives home from prison to find his family dislodged from their land. As America Is in the Heart opens, Bulosan’s brother Leon returns from the U.S. army to find his father struggling to maintain his hold on the family land. Both America Is in the Heart and The

Grapes of Wrath use the individual family’s welfare as a barometer of larger social changes. Bulosan writes:

These conditions could not continue forever. In every house and hut in the far- flung barrios where the common man [. . .] was dehumanized by absentee landlordism, where a peasant had a son who went to school through the sacrifice of his family and who came back with invigorating ideas of social equality and of equal justice before the law, there grew a great conflict that threatened to plunge the Philippines into one of its bloodiest revolutions (24).

Similar to the Joads’ pioneer forefathers, “[Carlos’s father’s] parents and their parents before him had lacerated their lives digging away the stones and trees to make the forest land of our village a fragrant and livable place” (76). Carlos’s father responds to his dispossession nearly identically to the Joads: “There is something wrong in our country when a man can take away something that belongs to you and your family” (55).

Generations of sacrifice define the land as the family’s property. Contributing labor

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constitutes ownership, as his father asks his son, “It is my own rice and land. Is it

possible, son? . . . Can a stranger take away what we have molded with our hands?” (55).

Here, as throughout the text, hands symbolize a lifetime of hardwork as well as a labor of love. Bulosan figures the land as a product produced by the Filipino peasantry and stolen away from them by the colonial government of absentee landlords and bourgeois families.

Just as the Joads’ loss of their land threatened the unity of their family and ultimately their relationship to the nation state, with the loss of Carlos’s family’s land

“My father knew then that it was the end of our family” (48). Like Grandpa and

Grandma Joad who are unable to survive the trip to California, Carlos’s father can not live without his land. Carlos describes “my father’s struggle to hold onto the land he knew so well, fighting to the end and dying on it like a peasant” (27). When his father loses his land, Carlos’s family becomes migrant farm workers. Carlos works with his mother and sisters in the fields of the town of Tayug. One family owns all the land in

Tayug, as well as all of the land in two adjoining towns (38). Absentee landlordism is as rife in the Philippines as in California. He and his mother work the rows of plants and

Carlos’s mother “stopped now and then to feed [the baby] Marcela” (59). Although

Carlos is too young to comprehend it, peasant resistance surrounds him. He explains, “In the middle of the season strange men began coming to the rice fields. They distributed leaflets and talked to us” (59). Although Carlos remains unaware of the social conditions that circumscribe his life, his experiences in the Philippines roughly invoke the agricultural discourse that dominated U.S. farm narratives in this period.

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Michael Denning contends that migrant narratives gained popularity during the

Great Depression because they represented the journey of the nation as it triumphed over

the material deprivation the economic crisis created. Bulosan’s journey by ship mirrors

the journey by jalopy undertaken by the Joads. As the Joads drive across route 66, Carlos

boards a boat to the United States. Just as the Joads are called “gorillas” and “Okies” as

they enter California, Carlos is called a “monkey” as the ship nears the shore (99). In the

Philippines, Carlos perceives himself as possessing more social status, economic wealth,

and cultural capital than the Irogot, who he depicts as the bottom-rung of the

Philippines’s social hierarchy.27 The journey to the United States shifts his lot, and he finds himself below deck, moving lower in status, not higher as he dreamed. Indeed,

Carey McWilliams claims that in California from 1930-1941, “the Filipino was the bottom dog; he occupied the lowest rung on the ladder.”28 Bulosan represents Carlos’s

descent in social status through his descent into the bowels of the ship during passage.

Similarly, the Joads find their citizenship and racial status transformed as they move

across the nation. The transition from Oklahoma to California shifts not only their

material reality but their perceived identities.

By figuring Carlos’s migration from the Philippines as similar to that of the Joads,

Bulosan suggests the ways in which the Philippines have already been incorporated into

the U.S. empire due to its colonial status. By presenting California as a central location

with migrants pouring in equally from the Dust Bowl and Asian countries like the

Philippines, Bulosan reconfigures American geography. He exposes the true reach of the

U.S. empire and debunks the isolationist image of the U.S. nation-state. Furthermore, by

27 See Slotkin’s “Igorots and Indians.”

28 McWilliams’s “Introduction,” American Is in the Heart (xxi).

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incorporating the narrative traditions established by texts like The Grapes of Wrath,

Bulosan connects the causes of dispossession in the dustbowl to the Philippines’s context.

By echoing the Joads’ experiences in this way, Bulosan prepares the internationalist

framework that comes to dominate the text by its end. He depicts the alienation of the

peasantry as a worldwide phenomenon fueled by capitalist expansion and consolidation.

He transforms the national narrative identified by Denning to an internationalist one

embraced by the Popular Front.

America Is an Island

The text also challenges imperialist geography by redefining the United States as an

island. Prior to his journey to the United States, Carlos’s brother “started reading the

story of a man named Robinson Crusoe who had been shipwrecked in some unknown sea

and drifted to a little island far way. My brother patiently explained the struggle of this

ingenious man who had lived alone for years in inclement weathers and had survived

loneliness and returned safely to his native land” (32). Bulosan continues the parallel,

positioning America Is in the Heart likewise as a fictional autobiography of a castaway to

a barbaric island. For example, as Carlos feels increasingly drawn to America, “a strong

desire grew in me to see [Crusoe’s] island” (32). Bulosan’s use of Crusoe places him

among writers like Caribbean American novelist Elizabeth Nunez, who, in Prospero’s

Daughter, rewrites Shakespeare’s The Tempest to critique colonial politics of race, class,

and gender.29 More specifically, Carlos’s identification with Crusoe parallels the works

of Caribbean poet and dramatist Derek Walcott, who claims common ground with Crusoe

29 It might also be fruitful to read Bulosan’s use of Crusoe alongside Uruguayan essayist Jose Enrique Rodo’s Ariel (1900).

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by recognizing Crusoe as an Adam, naming a world he can not master in its entirety. 30

Consequently, addressing Bulosan’s use of Crusoe requires us to read America Is in the

Heart alongside literary critiques of colonialism, whereas it is more often read as part of an Asian American literary tradition engaging themes of immigration and assimilation.

Critics often interpret Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as an embodiment of the colonial pioneer ideology, and as a representation of bourgeois rationality.31 Within this

framework, it is possible to interpret Carlos’s reading of Crusoe as a colonial education

that encourages him to identify with his oppressor. Carlos as Crusoe is named a colonial subject. While Homi Bhaba identifies this form of mimicry as a threat to the colonial empire, revealing the depth of similarity between colonized and colonizer, Vicente Rafael contends that the U.S. deployed Filipino mimicry as evidence of a deficiency in Filipino culture and intellect. Scholars interpret Robinson Crusoe’s Friday as representative of this form of deficient mimicry. Friday repeats the words he hears from Crusoe and performs the actions Crusoe orders. His usefulness to Crusoe depends on his inability to independently think and act. Carlos’s ability to write, to create stories out of the lives of his family and friends, assures his distance from Friday.32

Moreover, Carlos’s island is not the Philippines. Whereas Friday is the native who

becomes loyal to Crusoe, Carlos as Crusoe is castaway on the shores of the primitive

30 Walcott appropriated Crusoe frequently in his works from the 1960s. Walcott asserts that he prefers the story of Crusoe to that of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. See Hammer (5) and “The Figure of Crusoe,” an essay by Walcott written in 1966 (Hammer 33-40).

31 See Brantlinger (1-3, 42-43); and Mcinelly. Brantlinger employs discussion around Crusoe to comment on contemporary cultural studies whereas Mcinelly focuses on a closer reading of Defoe’s text, pointing out that cultural studies and post-colonial theorists often use the text as metaphor rather than providing an in-depth reading of the text itself.

32 Indeed, Ngai believes that the prejudice and violence facing Filipino migrants was different from that facing other Asian immigrants because Filipinos were “too Americanized”; this was the source of antagonism rather than the “foreignness” of the Chinese and Japanese.

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island of the United States. Once in the United States, he repeatedly refers to it as an

island. There he experiences the challenges of survival faced by Crusoe and is only able

to survive based on his wits and the allies he nurtures. He explains, “I died many deaths in these surroundings, where man was indistinguishable from beast” (135). Although he tries to escape from segregated impoverished urban landscapes, “we were always driven back to this narrow island of despair” (134). Each challenge of his life in the United

States becomes an island of its own: “Even when representative Vito Marcantonio introduced a bill in Congress proposing Filipino citizenship, even then I looked out the window of my room like a prisoner on some isolated island” (285). By replacing the island off of Venezuela in Robinson Crusoe with the United States, Bulosan challenges the exoticization of colonized landscapes. U.S. officials imagined the Philippines as illiterate and anti-modern.33 Thus Bulosan turns the tropicalizing discourse of the

Americas around, aiming it at the United States.34 Bulosan highlights the expansive love,

morality, and familiarity of the Philippines’s landscape, while the United States comes to represent the primitive, barbaric, and cannibalistic. Through naming the U.S. as the island, Bulosan reveals the U.S. as the primary location of the material deprivation and desperation normally associated with shipwrecks and castaways. Crusoe’s eventual

escape from the island suggests Bulosan’s own freedom will come only in his own escape from this “little island” called the United States and his return home to the Philippines.

America’s Anti-Family Agenda

33 See Slotkin “Igorots and Indians” (4).

34 For an examination of tropicalizing discourses as both oppressive and oppositional strategy see Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman.

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The United States threatens the humanity of the Filipino characters. Carlos explains that

“the lives of Filipinos were cheaper than those of dogs” (143). His friend José is treated

“as though he were a domestic animal” (142). When they are not in the fields, “it was a

beastly struggle for existence in a cold city” (139) where a hungry man, who “had not

eaten for weeks” fell upon food “like a dog” (140). Significantly, in the United States

Filipinos are treated as domestic animals, not simply as beasts. This domestication

parallels the violent efforts of Carlos’s class enemies to castrate him and other Filipinos

who resist. For example, anti-union thugs crush Carlos’s testicles, and “burned the

delicate hair between [José’s] legs” (208). These efforts to discipline Carlos and his

comrades serve as an effort to strip the men of their masculinity, and consequently

deprive them of their agency and dignity.35 Thus, Bulosan documents the violence

through which the American elite encourages the patronizing and paternalistic

relationship between Filipino nationals and the American family.36

Carlos’s humanity is challenged not only by the exploitative work conditions he faces and by the efforts of vigilantes to castrate him, but also by the commercialized and sexualized relationships he associates with the United States. The text contrasts his filial love for his brothers and sisters with the grotesque dehumanizing sexualization Carlos encounters from Americans. This begins in the Philippines where he noticed the tourists

“seemed to take a particular delight in photographing young Igorot girls with large

35 Bulosan here engages the relationship between popular discourses of Filipino savagery and narratives of southern lynching as examined by Balce.

36 As Song; Parikh; and Eng contend Asian American men in literary narratives often face castration through a threat to masculinity posed by white women. Bulosan represents the threat of physical castration as a response to labor activism as a parallel threat to that posed by white women. Carlos escapes both forms of castration through his assertion and naming of a familiar Filipino context – whether that is claiming a Filipino landscape that shelters him from his male persecutors or an incorporation of white women into his Filipino family.

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breasts and robust mountain men whose genitals were nearly exposed, their G-strings

bulging large and alive” (67). With such a description Bulosan attributes a pornographic

gaze to the Western camera. The sexual titillation the tourists derive from such images

recreates itself with Bulosan’s encounter with a white woman who employs him. The night before, one of the woman’s dinner guests exclaims “Is it true that they [Filipinos] are sex-crazy? . . . I understand that they go crazy when they see a white woman” (141).

The next morning, when Carlos delivers his employer her breakfast, she stands “nakedly admiring herself” in the mirror, seemingly enjoying his gaze upon her body (141). The text implies that she finds not only her own nakedness titillating, but specifically desires the gaze of her employee on her body.37 The woman wields sexuality as a representation

of power, shaming her servant while deriving sexual edification from his discomfort.

Carlos’s disdain for the relationship among sexual desire, wealth, and power

further emerges in the relationship between his brother Amado and a “big-time racketeer

lawyer from Los Angeles” (201). The lawyer’s wealth is obvious as Amado and the

lawyer stay “in a luxurious room” (201). The text hints at the sexual nature of Amado’s

employment when he explains “they always lived together when they were traveling.”

Amado tries to recast their intimacy as homosocial rather than homosexual when he

proclaims “we sometimes sleep with the same woman” (201). Sharing a woman suggests

heterosexual desire as well as a homosocial bond cemented through woman as commodity. Yet Carlos “did not believe him” (201). He suggests the illicit homosexual nature of Amado’s employment when he asks, “How was it that a successful lawyer would share a room with his servant?” (201). Carlos contends, “Amado disappointed me”

37 The scene echoes the “Battle Royale” in Ellison’s Invisible Man, where as the local white elite force the narrator to watch a white woman strip. Their entertainment is not only an objectification of the nude white woman but titillation derived from watching the black students watch the white woman.

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(201). Amado’s willingness to trade sexual favors for comfort and wealth implies his

seduction by the capitalist system and his betrayal of his brothers Macario and Carlos as

he refuses to help Macario go to school, beginning “a long estrangement between Amado

and me” (201).

Both Amado’s relationship with the lawyer and Carlos’s relationship to the “Lady

of the House” presents the sexual commodification of servant relationships as a perverse

replacement for family unity. Moreover, Carlos’s vilification of homosexual relations

claims homosocial relations as normative and non-queer. The homophobia that equates prostitution and homosexuality through capitalism’s perversion uplifts homosocial

relations (represented by brotherhood and unionism) as a legitimate site of masculinity.

In Bulosan’s text, the brotherhood of the union and the brotherhood of the family become

interchangeable. The homosocial bonds of the family depend on the appearance of female

family members (mothers and sisters) who comfort and connect the members of

masculine networks.

Carlos’s ability to reconstitute his family in the United States assures his

survival.38 His initial days are spent searching out his brothers Amado and Macario.

Although they are seldom in the same place, the three siblings retain a bond of loyalty

throughout the text, especially as Macario and Carlos solidify their political camaraderie.

Through these family bonds, Carlos survives the U.S. state and society’s numerous

attempts to strip him of his humanity. Macario and Carlos’s relationship expresses the

centrality of their Filipino family through their common love for their mother. To

38 Fujita-Rony argues that conceptions of Filipino American “bachelor society” prevent historians from examining “the families and fictive kinships” of “brothers” and “uncles” that emerged in Filipino society (13). Her observation encourages me to highlight the role of various forms of kinship in America Is in the Heart.

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demonstrate his identity to Macario, Carlos must provide his mother’s name: “to him, and

to me afterwards, to known my mother’s name was to know the password into the secret

of the past, into childhood and pleasant memories; but it was also a guiding star, a talisman, a charm that lights us to manhood and decency” (123). The mother serves as the female subject shared by brothers to affirm their ‘manhood’. Familial bonds contrast with capitalism’s homosexuality to demonstrate “decent” manhood, defining humanity and dignity through sexuality and masculinity. As the imagery of “talisman” and

“guiding star” implies, Carlos’s family serves not only as an anchor that holds his past

but it provides the inspiration for the future.39 Family exists not only in the past, but in

the future.

This is the case not only for his family but for his cultural roots in the Philippines.

Carlos explains, “Thus it was that I began to rediscover my native land and the cultural

roots there that had nourished me and I felt a great urge to identify myself with the social

awakening of my people” (139). Carlos often calls on his attachment to his motherland to

sustain his humanity in the United States. Moreover, his love for the Philippines provides

the roots for his political rebellion. It is through his pride in his family and homeland that

he nurtures the nationalism that shapes his political identity. Thus when Carlos claims

his “mother’s name” was “a charm that lights us to manhood and decency” he equates his

love for his mother with his love for his homeland. It is to both mother and motherland

he seeks to return and for which he dreams of battling injustice.

39 Chu asserts that that “By examining Bulosan’s portrayal of his mother in the context of his carefully wrought representation of his homeland, we can see how the Asian mother represents an ethnic ideal that exists outside of history and narrative time; her static remoteness serves as a foil, a ground by which to measure the change and progress of the uprooted Asian American male protagonist” (43). Rachel C. Lee contends that the mother serves as a symbol of the fraternity between brothers, both literal brothers and union brothers.

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If Carlos confuses his Filipino motherland and his Filipino mother, he imagines

the United States as a white woman. Susan Koshy contends that Carlos yearns to possess white women romantically because he cannot possess land within the United States. He cannot claim citizenship through the conquest of the frontier so he seeks to express it through the conquest of the white woman’s heart. Moreover, because the United States denies his masculinity, he seeks integration into the American nation through miscegenation.40 While Koshy’s interpretation is certainly available in Bulosan’s text, I

am not convinced the work is so clearly assimilationist. As Tim Libretti contends,

critical interpretations of Bulosan’s oeuvre often ignore the centrality of national-

liberation to Bulosan’s political analysis.41 Similarly, examinations of the anti-colonial imaginary in America Is in the Heart often focus on the absence of empire in the text.

Yet Filipino families remain constantly present in Bulosan’s text and Bulosan roots his text squarely in the Philippines. Significantly, Carlos incorporates the white women to whom he is drawn into his Filipino family. Rather than seek integration into the

American nation through union with white women, Carlos claims America for the

Philippines in depicting white women as analogous to his mother and sister, who remain in the Philippines.

When Carlos feels pity, love, or empathy for an individual he encounters, he incorporates that person into his family. Carlos witnesses the brutal gang rape of a young white girl on a box car and the perpetrators knock him unconscious as he tries to protect her. Afterwards, “I struck a match and watched her face affectionately. She looked a

40 Bulosan’s text here repeats the tropes identified by Eng.

41 Similarly, Campomanes insists that that America Is in the Heart be read as a narrative of exile rather than immigration.

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little like my older sister, Francisca. There was a sudden rush of warm feeling in me,

yearning to comfort her with the words I knew” (114). He identifies with her. Her plight,

“this ravished girl and this lonely night, in a freight train bound for an unknown city”

inspires him to name her as a sibling (114). He explains, “I felt that there was a bond between us, a bond of fear and a common loneliness” (115). Here in the United States, he brings an “American girl” into his Filipino family, rather than incorporating himself into her American family. In other words, she reminds Carlos of his Filipino sisters;

Carlos does not remind the girl of her American brothers. The family Carlos builds in the

United States challenges agricultural discourse in which U.S. citizenship is claimed through belonging to an American farm family. Rather Carlos’s declares kinship with those excluded from that narrative, and transports them, in his interior imaginative geography, to the Philippines where his mother and sisters remain.

Carlos likewise incorporates Marian into his family by naming her as both substitute sister and mother. She embodies for Carlos both a motherly affection and a sisterly love. Carlos explains, “My heart ached, for this woman was like my little sisters in Binalonan” (211). In establishing Marian’s similarity to his sisters, he also proclaims her resemblance to the American sibling he has already adopted: “This Marian: she was small, quiet, and lovely with long brown hair. Her hair – where had I seen it before? The girl on the freight train! Could it be the same person? I glanced at Marian’s face. I was not sure – it was so long ago” (213). Given the biographical information he provides about both Marian and the girl on the train, it does not seem particularly likely they are the same person. Yet Carlos connects them because of the similar brotherly affection he feels for them.

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Marian is both a vulnerable character ravished by the world (like Carlos’s sisters

and the girl on the train) and a maternal figure who protects Carlos and provides for him.

In this way, she reminds Carlos of his mother, “I turned away from her, remembering how I had walked familiar roads with my mother” (211). Marian and his mother share similar hands, resulting from their work lives. He describes Marian’s hands as “rough; the fingers were stubby and flattened at the top” (211). Correspondingly his mothers’ hands are “big-veined, hard, and bleeding in spots” (22). Like his mother, “it was obvious that [Marian] had done manual work” (211). Aside from Marian, the only hands described in the book belong to his immediate family members.42 If the hands of his

father and brothers mold the land he works on, his person is molded by the loving

protection of women like his mother and Marian. Marian works as a prostitute at night,

while he sleeps, to provide him food and shelter. She sacrifices her physical health for

Carlos, contracting syphilis; analogously his mother starved herself to ensure her children

had enough to eat (218). Marian explains, “What I would like is to have someone to care

for, and it should be you who are young. I would be happier if I had something to care for

– even if it were only a dog or a cat.” (212). Marian’s desire to care for something or

someone is not sexual; it is parental (a cat or dog would be a substitute, and she

specifically wants someone young). This care is not only physical. She provides the

nurturing love that steers him morally on the right path. Like his Filipino family, and his

cultural roots back home, she serves to protect his humanity in the United States. As she is dying she cries, “Promise me not to hate. But love – love everything good and clean.

There is something in you that radiates like an inner light, and it affects others. Promise

42 “They were hard and calloused, like my mother’s. They were ugly and twisted. I wanted to shout with anger at the world world. Macario’s cracked and bleeding hands. I wanted to grab and kiss them” (241).

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me to let it grow. .” (217). Again, Carlos does not figure himself as Marian’s son; he

figures Marian as his mother. He incorporates her into his expanding Filipino family

rather than forging an American family of his own.

Eileen Odell provides the character with whom Carlos has the most decidedly

romantic relationship. Carlos explains, “I yearned for her and the world she represented.

The grass in the hospital yard spoke of her, and when it rained, the water rushed down the

eaves calling her name. I told her these things in poems, and my mind became afire:

could I get well for Eileen?” (234). Yet here too, Bulosan transforms their relationship

into “maternal solicitude” (234). Carlos appreciates the motherly care that both Alice and

Eileen Odell offer him. Yet, he also perceives their lives as synonymous to his own.

When speaking with Alice (a character modeled on Bulosan’s friend Sanora Babb),

Carlos exclaims, “Then it came to me that her life and mine were the same, terrified by the same forces they had only happened in two different countries and to two people”

(230). The tragedy that marks the lives of the Odell sisters, like the harsh reality faced by

Marian and the girl on the train, allows Carlos to interpret their lives through the lens of

his own. Common humanity and common tragedy bonds them all as sharing in his

experiences.

Carlos faces sexual threats in the United States that resemble those that his sisters,

mother, and female allies encounter. The dark seduction of the American streets appears

in the form of “a young Mexican whose voice sounded like a girl’s . . . He put his hand on my knee and started telling me about a place where we could get something to eat. I was hungry and cold but I was afraid of him” (128). Carlos has a similar experience in a men’s shelter. He explains, “I heard an old man creeping slowly toward me. I thought he

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was looking for his place on the floor, but when he reached me and started caressing my

legs, I sprang to my feet and flung him away. I ran desperately into the dark, stumbling

over the sleeping men, and down the stairway and into the street, where the sudden rush of fresh air brought tears to my eyes” (155). These men approach him at moments in the text when he is most alone and vulnerable, without a place to go or without friends or family to protect him. The encounters always occur in the dark. In this way, Bulosan suggests a parallel between the rape of the young girl on the train and the men who would likewise “ravish” Carlos should he fail to escape.43

Moreover, Bulosan figures homosexuality as akin to prostitution. Before leaving

the archipelago, a wealthier young Filipino brings Carlos to a “dark house” where a

mother sells her young daughter into prostitution. Juan, the wealthy boy, asks “Do you

want to try it?” (92). Carlos reacts without words as “I began to run furiously away from

him. . . I wanted to cry” (93). The language used to describe his flight from the house of prostitution parallels the language later employed to describe his escape from the homosexual encounters. Additionally, his second encounter with prostitution reads as a rape scene. The men in the bunkhouse force Carlos to copulate with a visiting prostitute:

“I was backing to the door when Benigno and two other men grabbed me. I struggled desperately. I knew what they would do to me” (159). The struggle parallels the girl’s failed struggle to keep the men on the freight train from pulling off her clothes: “The men pinned me [Carlos] down to the cot, face upward, while Beningo hurriedly fumbled for my belt” (159). Although it is the “naked Mexican woman” with whom he has intercourse, it is “they” — the men in the bunk house — who “do” something to him

43 This suggests the homophobia Daniel Y. Kim identifies underlying texts like Frank Chin’s where white racism equates with homosexual longing for the non-white subject. Bulosan constructs Carlos’s masculinity as heterosexual and links homosexual desires to capitalism, racism and exploitation.

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(159). The group dynamic of his loss of virginity further echoes the gang rape of the young girl. After losing his virginity to the prostitute, Carlos “started running between the cots to the door . . . trembling with a nameless shame” (160). Through these images of rape or the threat of rape, homosexual or heterosexual, the text figures sexual encounters as tainted, forced, commercial, or immoral.

The threat of castration as punishment for union activism and the sexualization of servant relations in the text suggest the ties between labor exploitation and rape. Koshy asserts that Carlos’s conjoined sexual and economic vulnerability exposes the bonds between the public and private spheres of Filipino exploitation. She explains, “Filipino laborers were profitable to capitalists because the cost of their social reproduction was passed on to families overseas and the sexual needs of the workers generated profits for emerging forms of sexual commerce” (94). According to Koshy, Bulosan’s text is exemplary of Foucault’s notion of “biopower” — “the regulatory controls over the life-

processes of individual bodies and the social body” (94). Bulosan’s text protests this surveillance and discipline through refusing the myth that separates the public from the private. As prostitution and homosexuality acquire the valence of violent rape, all three represent capitalism as corrupting human interactions and preventing the consummation of traditional romantic relationships. Additionally, they emphasize the intertwined relationship between capitalism and imperialism.

Sexual encounters are no less problematic in the Philippines than in the United

States. Indeed Carlos’s first encounter with a prostitute occurs in a port city just prior to his departure from the Philippines. Carlos’s experience disrobing for tourists’ photographs in the Philippines exists alongside his experience with the disrobing lady of

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the house in the United States. Imperialism, the violent and commercial connections

between the Philippines and the United States, emerges through sexual relations. By

critiquing the sexual tropicalization of the Filipino subjects in both the Philippines and

the United States, Bulosan places both nations in a violent imperial present in which

sexualized commerce threatens families.

This depiction of sexuality as depraved and commercialized shapes the types of

families that Carlos forms. Sexual relationships between adults are always suspect; only

parental and sibling relationships contribute to the solidarity that Carlos seeks. Koshy

faults Bulosan for Carlos’s quest for family, which she reads as naturalizing heterosexual

inclusivity/exclusivity. While I agree the text’s homosexual panics expose the work’s heteronormativity, Bulosan represents families as more complex than a romance with white woman or a romance with America. Because Carlos views the white women to whom he is devoted as sisters and mothers, the family celebrated in the text is remarkably platonic as well as non-reproductive in a traditional sense. Bulosan removes reproduction from the context of heterosexual sexual relationships. He instead envisions his new (union) family as capable of “birthing” the new world of which he dreams.

Additionally, by removing the taint of sex from these romantic relationships, the text hints at the possibility of the non-imperial relations between nations.

Rachel C. Lee convincingly analyzes the ways in which women throughout the text prevent male bonding and break up Carlos’s family.44 Just as significant, however,

are the ways in which Carlos identifies with female characters in order to understand his

own oppression and act against it. Susan Koshy reads Bulosan’s homophobia as emphasizing a heteronormative narrative privileging the national romance where Carlos

44 Patricia Chu makes a similar observation (44-46).

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gains his citizenship through sharing white women with white men. Yet, the instances of

homosexuality in the text represent Carlos’s vulnerability as similar in ways to the sexual

violence that constantly threatens working-class women in the texts. He identifies the

loneliness and vulnerability that marks the women he sees as like his sisters. Moreover,

he identifies with the desire for love and creation that characterize the motherly figures he

describes. Both his mother and Marian seek “objects” on which to bestow their

affections. Similarly, as he describes his and his friends’ growing desire for socialism,

Carlos explains, “I knew that the most forlorn man, in those rootless years, was he who

knew that love was growing inside him but had no object on which to bestow it” (194,

emphasis mine). They ultimately bestow their love for humanity on the causes of Filipino

unity, anti-fascism, and socialism. While his mother gives birth to a son, Carlos realizes

that from the struggles of his compatriots “a new world is being born” (189). This is the

“object” upon which he would like to bequeath his love. He wants to contribute to “a

living and growing” political movement (188). Expanding his family, gaining brothers,

sisters, and mothers, Carlos helps breathe life into the movements to which he belongs.

Moreover, in claiming “motherhood” through birthing a new world, Carlos counters the

colonial family romance. He refutes the role of the Filipino as child and the United

States as civilizing parents. Instead, his family of siblings and parents, connected to his

Filipino family, transforms into the parents of the new socialist world that is rising.45

Bulosan’s representation of family depends on anti-colonial strategy which replaces corrupt commercialized relationships with the familial relationship he associates

45 Koshy believes Carlos serves as the father for this new world, and America, as a white woman, as the mother. While I agree this dynamic is operational, I also think the text, through its representation of prostitution and homosexuality as a form of rape threatening Carlos, place Carlos in a female subject position (defined by sexual vulnerability in the text). Thus Carlos is not simply the father, he becomes analogous to mother and sister as well.

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with his mother and sisters in the Philippines. Through Carlos’s sisters and mother, the

Philippines becomes central to the constitution of this new family. In building this network, Carlos constructs a mental map in which he categorizes the tragic and the beautiful in America as like the Philippines. The Philippines remains the location from which he understands and analyzes the United States, and the place in which he imagines his allies as he expands his network of political resistance. This narrative strategy

subverts the imperializing tendencies of U.S. agricultural discourse, rearticulating the

geographic and familial relationships between the U.S. and the Philippines.

This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land

While Carlos manifests bitterness for the political, economic, and social milieu in which

he struggles, he finds beauty in the ecological landscape that surrounds him. Several

times he discovers splendor looking out from the doors of a boxcar:

I crept to the door and opened it. I looked up and saw the sky burning with millions of stars. It was as bright as a clear summer day. The moon was large and brilliant, but its light was mild. I wanted to shout with joy, but could not open my mouth, so awestruck I was by the moonlight. I looked into the bright night sky. I looked without saying a word. I heard the metallic cry of the freight train, and I knew that heaven could not be far from the earth (155).

Although the American political and economic systems bring only ruin, the American

landscape continues to provide a redemptive value for Carlos.

While traditional agricultural narratives seek to assimilate the immigrant, Carlos

assimilates the landscape into his expanding Filipino family. He describes the beauty of

the U.S. landscape through its similarity to the Philippines: “The primitive beauty of

Santa Fe reminded me of the calm and isolation of Baguio, the mountain city in Luzon

where I had worked for Miss Mary Strandon” (168). Later, after escaping a violent attack

by vigilantes, Carlos and José “walked in the morning sun, smelling the orange blossoms

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and the clean air. I looked at the tall mountains on our right and stopped, remembering

the mountains in my village” (197). The Philippines continuously emerges in the

American landscape. The United States is never free from the Filipino presence; indeed

Bulosan writes the Philippines into the very mountains, flowers, and vistas of the United

States. In traditional narratives of U.S. western expansion, the natural and expansive

beauty of the landscape hints at the divine blessing of manifest destiny. Such descriptions

erase the indigenous presence from the landscape suggesting a world of only wilderness

opening itself for capture by the cowboy and frontiersman.46 In writing the Philippines’s

landscape onto such panoramic scenery, Bulosan reminds the reader of the consequences

of empire and the relationship between manifest destiny’s crawl towards California and

its sweep across the Pacific to the Philippines. 47

Carlos’s connection to the Philippines fuels his struggle for life in the United

States. His cultural connections to the Philippines anchor his lost soul. When he “lost

all hope” facing surefire death at the hands of yet another vigilante squad, it is the

presence of the Philippines in the U.S. landscape which inspires him again (207). He

states:

Looking swiftly to the east, I saw the big moon and below it, soon to move away, a mass of clouds that looked like a mountain of cotton balls. Suddenly I remembered that as a child I used to watch snow-white clouds sailing in the bright summer skies of Mangusmana. The memory of my village made my mind whirl, longing for flight and freedom again (207).

46 See Spence for a good history of this.

47 Fujita-Rony contends the Philippines remains central to the formation of the US West and demonstrates the relationship between “the role of U.S. militarism and the connection of events in the Philippines to what happened in other military campaigns” (17). Beederman connects the cultural anxiety over the close of the frontier to the imperial interventions in the pacific. The connections were both ideological and material. The significant distinction is the transformation of the United States’ strategies of empire. The U.S. did not seek to people the Philippines, like it did the continental U.S. West. It sought control over the land and exploitation of natural resources and labor power from its pacific possessions.

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The warmth of his childhood drives his yearning for survival. Moreover, Carlos’s ability

to rewrite the U.S. landscape as the Filipino landscape symbolizes his ability to claim

ownership over it. He not only molds the landscape through his agricultural labor. He

claims it through his imaginative naming of the U.S. landscapes as the Philippines. He

gains a foothold in America by remaking the “alien” landscape of the United States as the

familiar and familial landscape of home. This act of naming also recalls Carlos as

Crusoe, claiming the new world as his own.

Yet, the emergence of the Philippines in the United States landscape

simultaneously implies Carlos’s inability to escape the material deprivation he associates

with home. He explains:

I was determined to leave that environment [the Philippines] and all its crushing forces, and if I were successful in escaping unscathed, I would go back someday to understand what it meant to be born of the peasantry. I would go back because I was a part of it, because I could not really escape from it no matter where I went or what became of me. I would go back to give significance to all that was starved and thwarted in my life (62).

The natural landscapes of the Philippines are as essential to his identity as his cultural

roots and his family. They are always with him because he can not escape himself. For

Carlos, being of the peasantry requires being of the land, as he so lovingly describes with

his father. He can not remake himself in America’s image. Moreover, this attachment to

the Philippines’s physical places suggests that his journey’s end requires a homecoming.

His struggle is animated and inspired by the aspiration to return triumphantly to

the Philippines to bring justice to the peasantry. In his last visit home he promises his brother, “I will come back and buy that house [the family home] . . . Wait and see!” (88).

After surviving vigilante violence he proclaims, “Someday I will go back and climb these guavas [in my village] again. Someday I will make a crown of papaya blossoms” (198).

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Even after his brother and several friends leave to fight fascism in Spain, Carlos proclaims, “All right go fight a war on another continent, like my brother Leon. But if I live I will go back to our country, and fight the enemy there, because he is also among our people . . .” (240). In this way, Carlos privileges his relationship to the Philippines.

His Filipino identity and incipient nationalism shape the struggle he seeks to fight. The landscape and memory of the Philippines provide for his survival, and provide the inspiration for the new world he seeks.

Even as Carlos centers the narrative on the Philippines and repeatedly claims a desire to return to the archipelago, he refuses to see himself as an alien in the United

States. Instead, he renders the United States “a society alien to our character and inclination, alien to our heritage and history” (135). By terming the United States as the alien, rather than the Filipino, Carlos suggests the United States intrudes on the

Philippines, rather than Filipinos intruding on the United States. He refutes the image of

Filipino nationals as immigrants. Instead, he reveals them to be colonial subjects who do not arrive on the shores of California purely by chance and by choice. Moreover, by claiming the United States to be the alien, Carlos claims the territory of the nation for those he represents, the down-trodden. It is the decadence and violence and cynicism of

U.S. capitalism which invades the landscape, not “the last Filipino pea picker” who belongs to America as much as the original indigenous peoples, “the first Indian who offered peace in Manhattan” (189).

Thus even as the text exhibits a incipient nationalism focused on the Philippines,

Bulosan’s anti-capitalism renders the United States as illegitimate and imperial in its relations to both the Philippines and American landscapes. The tension between Carlos’s

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desired return to the Philippines and his claim to the American landscape suggests the

complexity of the relationship between colonial subject and colonized nation. America Is

in the Heart refuses to disentangle the future of the Philippines from the future of the

United States, and it refuses to draw a clear line of distinction between the Filipino subject and the American subject.48 Even as Carlos expands the Philippines to

encompass the United States and extends his Filipino family to include his U.S. allies, he

envisions the transnational colonial subject, arising from the imperial relations between

nations, as holding the most potential for international and local liberation.

The Promise of America

America Is in the Heart originally defines the promise of America through the myth of

Abraham Lincoln: “A poor boy became a president of the United States” [emphasis in original] (69). Through Lincoln, the text figures the U.S. not only as a land of opportunity, but a land of equality. Young Carlos learns that “Abraham Lincoln died for a black person” (70). This promise continually fails to appear in the United States, and

Carlos’s flight from poverty resembles too closely the environment he sought to escape in the Philippines. In response, the text redefines America as increasingly abstract and detached from the material realities and geographic circumstances of the nation-state.

Macario explains, “America is not bound by geographical latitudes. America is not merely a land or an institution” (189). He continues, “America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of men that are building a new world.

America is a prophecy of a new society of men; of a system that knows no sorrow or strife or suffering” (189). The possibility of resistance to the depraved material

48 This perhaps explains the ways in which Bulosan’s later novel, The Cry and the Dedication, set in the Philippines, remains over-determined by U.S. pastoral discourse.

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circumstances that the narrator experiences exist in his ability to reclaim America as an

inspiration, an ideology for which to fight.

At the novel’s end Amado states, “The world is an island . . . We are cast upon the

sea of life hoping to land somewhere in the world. But there is only one island, and it is in the heart” (323). As the fictional autobiography is titled America Is in the Heart,

Amado’s statement seems to affirm that the United States is Crusoe’s island. Yet, by

moving the island from the realm of harsh material existence to idealism, a utopia created

out of men’s dreams, Bulosan lays claim to the continent for working people. Moreover,

the struggle for global equity, captured in the struggle against fascism, becomes itself the

means of surviving in the island of the heart. Carlos explains, “I also felt attached to the

land, but it was now a different attachment. In the years long gone it was merely a desire to possess a plot of earth and to draw nourishment from it. But now this desire to possess, after long years of flight and disease and want, had become an encompassing desire to belong to the land – perhaps to the world (273).” He recreates America as an ideal rather than a nation-state.

Bulosan also establishes the Philippines as central to an American experience and

Filipinos as key figures to understand the changes needed in the world. For example,

Carlos explains to Macario, “Were we not exiles, were we not socially strangled in

America, we would never have understood the significance of the Civil War in Spain”

(241). He asserts that Filipino experiences of empire are central to the definition of

America. According to Barbara Foley, radicals in this period described African

Americans as “possess[ing] an experience that epitomized American social existence.”49

In positioning the Filipino experience as the epitome of the American experience,

49 Qtd in Chen (48). The quotation originated from Foley’s Radical Representations.

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Bulosan seeks not inclusion in an American nation but a redefinition of American colonialism. America must be de-colonized, reclaimed from U.S. capitalism, as much as the Philippines itself.

In this way, Bulosan’s text recasts the relationship between the United States and the Philippines, bringing Filipinos from peripheral and alienated subjects to the center of the internationalist struggle for a socialist utopia. Filipinos’ experience as colonial subjects proves pivotal to the future success of socialist revolution. Through their struggles, Bulosan asserts the centrality of the Philippines to any understanding of

America. If The Grapes of Wrath portrays capitalism’s threat to American democracy through the loss of citizens’ land, Bulosan’s text claims this experience of dispossession and alienation as quintessentially Filipino. In depicting Carlos as Crusoe, Bulosan contends that it is a Filipino who manages to survive the barbarity of the United States’ exploitation, and thus can teach others this strength and skill. If the American landscape defines the nation, the Philippines emerges constantly from its mountains and in its skies, recasting the land in the eyes of those who labor on it. Likewise, the white American women who befriend Carlos suggest their similarities to Filipino subjects through

Carlos’s analogies of kinship. Bulosan reimagines the women, and the physical landscape they signify, as reminiscent of the Philippines. By reconfiguring U.S. agricultural discourse to place the Philippines and Filipino subjects at its center, Bulosan suggests that the ideal America to which Carlos claims membership may be an America that, in its heart, is Filipino. He recasts the geography of U.S. agricultural discourses, exposing the imperialist processes that separate workers from their lands and colonial

309 subjects from their countries. Carlos as Crusoe reclaims the land for its workers and the agricultural empire for its colonial subjects.

Strangers in a Strange Land: Galarza’s Strangers in Our Fields

While Bulosan renders the agricultural landscapes of the United States as familiar and familial, Ernesto Galarza emphasizes the landscape of farm labor through its alienness and strangeness. In his muckraking pamphlet Strangers in Our Fields (1956), he portrays agricultural landscapes as a militarized space of industry outside of the regulatory agency of either the United States or Mexico. According to Galarza, industrial agriculture strips Mexican nationals of their masculinity, civil liberties, and national identities. The men leave Mexico to enter a world of mechanization from which U.S. civil society is barred. Galarza prefigures contemporary depictions of the post-NAFTA borderlands through representations of this earlier moment of contracted transnational labor migration.

Indeed, the Bracero Program contains certain similarities to contemporary guest worker programs. The Bracero Program was envisioned as Mexico’s contribution to

World War II.50 It initially recruited Mexican men to meet perceived labor shortages in the United States for both railroads and the agricultural industry. When the war ended, the railroad program was discontinued, but the agricultural program continued until

1964.51 Over two million braceros arrived in the United States during the two decades

50 See Takaki’s Double Victory for today’s dominant narrative of the Bracero Program (93).

51 For an overview of the program see Anderson’s Field of Bondage, Harvest of Loneliness and The Bracero Program in California; Calavita; Craig; Gamboa; Garcia’s Operation Wetback; Garcia’s A World of Its Own (172-188); Herrera-Sobek’s The Bracero Experience; Ngai (127-166); and Scruggs.

310 of the program (1942-1964).52 California consistently received the highest number of braceros among the twenty-six states in which the men labored.53 Many progressives originally supported the program because of the range of labor protections it offered; the majority of U.S. labor safeguards did not apply to farm workers. They believed the program might raise the standard for all workers.54 Yet the Bracero Program operated in tandem with an underground market in undocumented labor and the contracts’ regulations were seldom enforced.55 U.S. labor advocates came to believe the Bracero

Program lowered U.S. wages, prevented legal workers from employment, and prevented strikes through forced scab labor.56

52 In Merchants of Labor, Galarza places the number at 3,300,000 braceros, from 1951-1960 alone (15). Cohen contests this number in “From Peasant to Worker” and places it at closer to two million for the duration of the program. It is important to note that the Bracero Program was not the only contract labor system of its type. As Ngai explains, “During the same period contract workers came from the British West Indies to perform farm labor in the Southeast and along the Atlantic seaboard. Puerto Ricans, who were American citizens, also migrated under the island government’s auspices for migrant seasonal agricultural work in the northeastern United States. But the Bracero Program was by far the largest project, involving some 4.6 million workers” (138).

53 Ngai (139); Garcia’s A World of Its Own (175). According to Garcia, by 1946, braceros accounted for 80% of all pickers in citrus.

54 For example, in Merchants of Labor, Galarza explains “Standards set up for foreign workers in particular could easily become standards in general” (44).

55 See Ngai; also Garcia’s A World of Its Own (185).

56 It was not only labor organizers at the time that viewed the Bracero Program as the root of stalled labor rights and civil rights for Mexican Americans as well as farmworkers; many contemporary historians ascribe unfavorable social and political conditions to the Bracero Program. For example, Vargas asserts that the Bracero Program along with the increase in undocumented labor “essentially confounded in the minds of Anglos the differences of language and skin color and made the situation for economically and socially underprivileged Mexican Americans even more hopeless” (278). He continues “The endless flow of labor from across the border undermined the farm labor and civil rights movements, created enormous strains in the Mexican American community, and increased animosity toward Mexican Americans in general” (279). Similarly, Matthew Garcia contends that Mexican and Mexican American workers “failed to improve their material conditions due to the Bracero Program” (119). As Garcia demonstrates, these material conditions including such particulars as a reduction in overall employee housing resulting in part from temporary bracero camps but also a weakening in the power of labor as “temporary” vs. “permanent” became a defining category of employment (172). Tensions between Mexican Americans and braceros resulted from the threat they symbolized (and perhaps enacted) to existing communities (174-188).

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Ernesto Galarza wrote Strangers in the Our Fields in 1956. The moment of the text’s production is particularly important as the politics and policies of the Bracero

Program shifted considerably during its twenty-two year span.57 Historian Manuel

Garcia y Griego finds the period from 1947-1954, that is the period directly prior to

Galarza’s publication, the moment that “almost all the significant changes” in the program occurred (55). Galaraza wrote Strangers in Our Fields directly following a major shift in the balance of power away from Mexico, as well as in the period immediately following Operation Wetback, an INS project in 1954 involving the deportation of at least 130,000 Mexican immigrants.58 Consequently, the cultural politics

of Galarza’s text can not be understood outside this context.

It is also important to recognize the biography of Ernesto Galarza (1905-1984) in

examining the dynamics of his criticism of the Bracero Program. Galarza emigrated from

Mexico as a boy. Despite his poverty-ridden upbringing, he excelled in the U.S.

educational system, receiving a bachelor’s degree from Occidental College, a Master’s

degree in history and political science from Stanford, and a Ph.D. in economics from

Columbia in 1944. After working at the Pan American Union, Galarza was hired as the

Director of Research and Education for the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU). The

National Farm Labor Union grew out of the Southern Tenants Farm Union, and remained the predominant union for Californian agricultural laborers throughout the 1940s and

1950s. Galarza remained active with Californian farm workers throughout the duration of

57 Galarza’s Strangers in Our Field might be fruitfully compared to other contemporary exposés on the Bracero Program such as Otey M Scruggs’s 1957 dissertation, Braceros, "Wetbacks," and the Farm Labor Problem: Mexican Agricultural Labor in the United States, 1942-1954.

58 For an understanding of the changing policies and politics of the Bracero Program see Craig; and Garcia y Greigo. For Operation Wetback, see Garcia’s Operation Wetback. On the intersection of the changing Bracero policies in relationship to the INS see Calavita.

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the Bracero Program.59 His eighty-page report Strangers in Our Fields received national attention, and sold out in two editions. He followed it up with the book length exposé of the Bracero Program, Merchants of Labor (1964). He then wrote Spiders in the House,

Workers in the Field (1971) about the Digiorgio grape strike (1948-1950) as well as

Farm-workers and Agri-business in California, 1947-1960 (1978). He chronicled his immigration and childhood in the memoir Barrio Boy (1971).

My reading of Galarza’s text differs from traditional readings by both historians and literary critics. Despite the literary recognition Barrio Boy received, I am the first to produce a literary analysis of Strangers in Our Fields.60 Michael Denning compares

Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart with Galarza’s Barrio Boy, despite the nearly thirty

year difference in publication dates. Although Denning cites the compositional

similarities of the texts, I find the politics of the two works incommensurable due to

material and ideological changes between their production, such as the rise of the United

Farm Workers and the Chicano movement. Although separated by the early Cold War

and the growing strength of the Civil Rights movement (Brown v. Board in 1954, the

Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955) America Is in the Heart and Strangers in Our Fields

better capture the anti-colonial imaginary of two prominent agricultural labor spokesmen

in the post-World War II era.

Meanwhile, historians typically read Strangers in Our Fields for the information

it conveys about the historical realities of the program (the laws and their enforcement,

59 For Galarza’s life and work see London and Anderson; McWilliams’s “Introduction” in Spiders in the House; Pitti’s Devil in Silicon Valley (136-147); and Pitti’s “Ernesto Galarza.”

60 Although it does not directly deal with Strangers in Our Fields, Martinez’s “Telling the Difference between the Border and the Borderlands” is useful for its treatment of Galarza’s Merchants of Labor. Similarly, see Cohen’s “From Peasant to Worker: Migration, Masculinity, and the Making of Mexican Workers in the U.S.”

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the conditions of labor). In contrast, my analysis of Galarza’s pamphlet attends to the

narrative strategies, metaphors, and language through which Galarza expresses his

message. Galarza’s vision of the Bracero Program does not emerge directly from “the facts” that Galarza exposes but also from the intervention his text makes into U.S. pastoral discourses in the post-World War II era. Galarza articulates the distance between pastoral images of white citizen farmers and the mechanized, industrialized, anti-national Bracero Program he depicts. Galarza represents the Bracero Program as reterritorializing the farm land of the United States while stripping laborers of their national identities and human rights. He builds on the factory images Steinbeck and

McWilliams employed to claim the Bracero Program as a threat not only to farm workers, but also to the nation.

The majority of the text combines photographs, images of documents, and quotations from braceros that describe the inhumane, unjust, and illegal conditions under which they labor.61 This format positions Galarza’s pamphlet alongside John

Steinbeck’s Their Blood Is Strong (1938) and Paul Taylor’s An American Exodus: A

Record of Human Erosion (1939), both texts accompanied by Dorothea Lange’s photos.62

Like Strangers in Our Fields, these documentary works claim authenticity by combining photographic evidence with captions implying the words are direct quotations from the

61 Although it is possible the photographs in the pamphlet were taken by Leonard Nadel, I strongly suspect the ones included were taken by Galarza. Strangers in the Field inspired Leonard Nadel to later produce the “first comprehensive photo essay on braceros in California agriculture” (173). For a discussion of Nadel, see Street’s Photographing Farmworkers in California (173-174). According to Street, “no American photographer shot more images and covered the newcomers in greater depth than F. Hal Higgins” (170). Higgins work can be seen in the F. Hal Higgins Collection, Department of Archives and Special Collections, University of California, Davis.

62 In Merchants of Labor, Galarza paraphrases American Exodus: “Migration is the failure of roots. Displaced men are ecological victims. Between them and the sustaining earth a wedge has been driven. Eviction by droughts or dispossession by landlords, the impoverishment of the soil or conquest by arms- nature and man, separately or together, lay down the choice: move or die” (17).

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people depicted. The prose section of the text becomes secondary to the story told by the

photographs and the quotations, even if it is the larger text that offers the interpretive

frame. By reminding the reader of works by Lange and Steinbeck, Galarza suggests the

audience approach his work through the framework of social injustice. The reader knows

that he or she is viewing the hidden story of corruption and exploitation that will require

his or her action to resolve.

Mechanized, Feminized and Denaturalized: Producing the Bracero Subject

From his opening image, Galarza links the Bracero Program to the mechanization of the

agricultural industry. On the original pamphlet’s cover, men stand among rows of

machines. Both the men and the large metal machines are evenly spaced, as if they represented rows of crops. The image is captioned: “recent arrivals from Mexico feeding a battery of bean harvesters.” The men tend to the machines, providing the fuel. The machines appear like cattle, with the beans replacing hay. The men feed the machines in order to feed the nation. In this way the men become part of the machines. Yet, by evoking crops and cattle, the men-machine complex appears alive, animating the bracero landscape. The Bracero Program appears as a factory in which the men themselves are caught and consumed. Yet Galarza simultaneously figures the Bracero Program as a giant spider web in which the braceros are tangled (35).63 The metaphor of the giant

spider’s web subtly links the Bracero Program to the images of monsters and mutants

captured in films like Creature of the Black Lagoon (1954) and The Blob (1958). That is,

Galarza plays with post-war concerns about the monsters unleashed by modernity and

63 This is a metaphor Galarza employs again in his work Spiders in the House and Workers in the Fields (1970).

315 technology. The Bracero Program becomes a living-machine. It takes on a life of its own apart from the life of the nations in which it emerged.

The machine or spider-web operates simultaneously in both the United States and

Mexico, spanning the border region. This machine operates independently of the braceros. For example, Galarza writes, “The official machinery that has brought Perez up to this point has been moving long before his name was called” (3). The Mexican men become the raw material of these machines. As the machines spread across the official territories of both the United States and Mexico, it becomes clear the Bracero Program does not exist in one nation alone. For example, Galarza emphasizes that the Bracero

Program does not begin at the U.S. border. The movement of the machinery in the

United States can not be separated from its operation in Mexico. They operate simultaneously. While recruitment occurs in Mexico, “In the meantime, in the United

States, steps had already been taken to spark the system into action” (3). The word

“spark” evokes large industrial machinery moving its gears. The use of “in the meantime” expresses that the machinery is in motion in both the United States and Mexico before the men are pulled into it.

The language of the machinery emphasizes the braceros as a commodity. Galarza explains, “orders are placed by the United States representative at the recruiting center with the Mexican official of corresponding rank” (4). The use of words like “order” implies that the braceros’ recruitment is similar to a purchasing procedure. The Mexican nationals become a product bought from Mexico and sold to the United States. In depicting the purchasing of braceros through the recruiting centers, Galarza’s bracero story echoes narratives of slavery, a trope I return to later in this discussion. Moreover,

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the text emphasizes the recruitment and dispensation of braceros as a business. Galarza writes, “In recent years recruitment of workers below the border has been booming” (6).

Such descriptions are reminiscent of other boom and bust colonial economies, particularly of natural resources such as gold and coal. Thus the industry booms as it mines the bracero, Mexico’s latest natural resource, for use in the United States. The

Mexican national serves as a raw product for the machine. The bracero machine processes the Mexican national and in the process produces a new commodity, the bracero.

That is, Galarza describes an individual’s enrollment in the Bracero Program as a process of transformation.64 The Mexican national becomes the bracero. Galarza

suggests that braceros are “New men [that] had to be trained for unfamiliar tasks in a

delicate and sometimes tricky area of international relations” (10). In describing the men

as “new,” Galarza captures the transformation of the Mexican national into the new

subject of the “bracero.” Galarza articulates the relationship between “new” forms of

subjectivity and the new socio-economic spaces that structure and reflect that subjectivity.

Galarza depicts the process through which the Mexican national becomes a bracero as feminizing. This is captured succinctly in one of the photographs, in which a

lone Mexican man stands with his hat and blanket facing a row of women each placed in

front of their machines (5). The spatial relationship of the women to their machines, into

64 It is worth noting that Galarza depicts the men in Mexico who become braceros as having more choice in the matter than perhaps they did. That is, he does not emphasis the dire conditions which led many men to the program. Perhaps, by granting the Mexican men more agency prior to becoming braceros than is warranted, the text is able to better depict their new role as braceros as a decline from their status as Mexican nationals and thus advocate more effectively for their return to Mexico.

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which they feed information, mirrors the relationship depicted between the braceros and

their machines on the pamphlet’s front cover. This image captures the moment in which

the Mexican national is processed by the feminizing machinery of industry. In refusing

to look at him, the women refuse to recognize him. Both the women and the men in the

picture are denied their individuality. The women become extensions of their machines,

while each man’s individual identity is replicated on the sheet of paper upon which the

women type. The letters and number on the form replace his individuality and agency.

The photograph captures the gendered nature of this transformation, as a line of women

assimilate the lone man. The assembly line becomes women’s work. Subservient to the

movement of the women’s machines, the bracero becomes dominated by the feminine

industry.

Certainly the critique of industrialization as feminizing is not new. Yet the

process Galarza represents does not ultimately render the men as women, but rather strips

them of their masculinity. As Judith Butler suggests, notions of gender are central to the

articulation of contemporary subjectivity. 65 Without gender, one can not claim

personhood, and thus access to human rights (let alone the individual citizenship rights of

any given nation). Just as the women become coterminous with their typewriters, the

men become linked to their machines. Their individual identity expressed through their

masculine national subjectivity is lost as they enter the bracero bureaucracy.

This mechanized process strips the braceros of their citizenship and of their humanity. We are told, “If he has survived the system so far, Pito Perez is ready for work in the United States” (4). The word “survived” renders bracero production as deadening

65 See Gender Trouble but also Undoing Gender.

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for the men; it is hostile enough that mere survival is victory. Moreover, the language of

survival implies the men have been brought to their most base level. They exist on the primal level of survival. Such language is ironic as both the United States and Mexican

governments lauded the Bracero Program as a modernizing project which would teach

Mexican peasants the latest in U.S. agricultural techniques.66 Instead, the machinery of

industry deprives the men of their social and political identities. In removing them from

their families and divesting them of their “inalienable” Mexican rights, Galarza depicts

the program as distancing the men from modern national identity. Galarza penned

Strangers in Our Fields in the era of Bretton Woods, a period in which global relations

were defined through the building blocks of nation-states.67 Yet Galarza portrays the

Bracero Program as removing men from their national subjectivities as it transforms them

from Mexican nationals into braceros.

Galarza employs images of transportation to connect the dehumanized bracero to

the commodities the braceros produce. For example, braceros and the products they

harvest are transported the same way. One bracero explains “We go to the fields in a

truck that he uses for carrying tomato boxes” (51). The label for an accompanying photo

reads: “In one tomato field 18 Nationals were loaded on a truck carrying a heap of empty

lug boxes” (54). In three pages, Galarza reiterates the comparison between the men and

the tomatoes five separate times: “’They take us to the fields in the same trucks they use

to haul the tomato,’ a bracero told me.” (55). Such depictions suggest the men become

66 See Cohen, “From Peasant to Worker.”

67 Bretton Woods refers to an international monetary regulatory system developed after World War II, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The World Bank, the IMF, and the United Nations all emphasized the nation as the key institution for international interaction and the formation of international regulations and institutions. This context illuminates Galarza’s emphasis on the absence of nation as a way to understand the lack of regulatory enforcement in the Bracero Program.

319 products, commodities like the tomatoes. In one photograph a line of identical trucks stands ready to transport either braceros or tomatoes (55). The two products — men and produce — appear interchangeable. The picture depicts transportation through the aesthetics of mass production. The caption explains: “Sometimes we go in good buses, but other times we get into the same trucks they use for the tomatoes” (55). This comparison between men and tomatoes not only dehumanizes the men. It also links both men and tomatoes to mechanization. The crops become as alienated from the land as the men. The production of produce, like the production of the braceros, occurs outside of the national territory. Galarza captures the relationship between industrial production and the militarization of space when he describes these trucks as a “fleet” (55). The text explicitly fails to demonstrate a relationship between the crops and the farm, just as it debunks any perceived relationship between the men and the land. Both men and tomatoes are crops, ferried through the factory-fields by truck. Just as the men are separated from the area they lived in Mexico, the tomatoes become detached from the naturalness of their production.

In highlighting the use of machines and mechanization, Galarza alienates farm labor from U.S. agricultural discourse. While William Conlogue demonstrates that technology can be integrated into the U.S. agricultural idyll, Galarza’s pamphlet utilizes factory motifs to demonstrate the distance between the Bracero Program and U.S. national ideologies of farming. Traditional markers of pastoralism are absent from the text. The braceros’ daily work efforts are not determined by the patterns of weather. The rhythms of the seasons do not dictate the rhythms of the work. Moreover, U.S. farm narratives center on the farm family, linking the bounty of the harvest to the fertile

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possibilities of national reproduction. Yet, Galarza’s text emphasizes the separation of

the men from their families. Once the men become braceros, their families vanish

altogether as a textual presence. Even the iconic American farmer fails to appear; he is replaced by intermediaries such as subcontractors and foremen. In distancing the representations from agricultural discourse, Galarza suggests that this mode of farming is not natural.

As my larger project demonstrates, U.S. farm narratives are territorializing projects, linking the ideologies of the nation and the production of citizen-subjects to specific parcels of land. By distancing the Bracero Program from U.S. agricultural narratives, Galarza severs any preconceived link between the program and the place of the U.S. nation. That is, Galarza’s text signals that the space of the Bracero Program is distinct from the space of the United States. As such, Galarza’s pamphlet engages in a process of deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is a process in which the socio-spatial scale through which capital operates is reconfigured. Yet deterritorialization is always accompanied by reterritorialization. In this process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, the spatial structures through which capital operates are redesigned.68

Galarza’s description appropriately captures this process. The spatial relationships between levels of government, citizens, and industry within each nation are displaced by new relationships with occur in the de-nationalized space of the Bracero Program.

The production of the bracero subject and the Bracero Program’s landscape forces the extinction of the U.S. agricultural system. Mary Pat Brady’s examination of Chicana

68 Here I draw not only Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia but also, and more specifically, from Neil Brenner’s New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. Brady examines the intersection of the material and ideological in these processes.

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literature, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies, exposes the way changing socio-spatial relationships vanquish particular socio-economic landscapes. Her analysis, as applied to

Galarza’s text, suggests that the new socio-spatial relations of the Bracero Program

render traditional agricultural relations in the U.S. extinct. The myth of the American farmer, central to the liberal individualism that defines ideologies of American exceptionalism, is threatened by the Bracero Program’s colonization of space.

Brady contends that the naturalization of space hides power. In de-naturalizing the landscape of the Bracero Program – distancing it from natural motifs and pastoral discourses – Galarza makes visible the power relations that structure the Bracero

Program. Brady declares that the naturalization of power relations may be disrupted by demonstrating the “processural quality of space” (7) — the way that space shapes subjectivities and social relationships. By following the journey of the braceros into and out of the Bracero Program, Galarza documents the production of the bracero landscape and the simultaneous production of the bracero subject.

Galarza declares, “Through war and peace, scarcity and plenty, the Mexican labor program has become a fixed characteristic of the agricultural economies and the

international relations of Mexico and the United States. Crisis has become a permanent

condition” (11). He suggests most directly that the Bracero Program, developed in a

moment of crisis — World War II — is becoming institutionalized now that the crisis is

over. Thus, international relations and labor protocols that are specific to a moment of

war become a peacetime program. Yet, he also implies that the Bracero Program itself

represents a crisis. This crisis affects braceros, U.S. farm workers, and, Galarza contends,

entangles U.S. civil society. Thus, the timing of Galarza’s pamphlet is significant. He

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de-naturalizes the Bracero Program at exactly the moment it begins to become

naturalized. He reminds the reader of the origin of the Bracero Program and the ways in

which its socio-spatial power is produced at precisely the moment in which the “crisis”

he perceives attempts to become a permanent part of the agricultural landscape.

Democracy, Liberty and the Bracero as Family

Galarza emphasizes that the commoditization inherent in the Bracero Programs strips the bracero of his individuality. The opening line of Strangers in Our Fields emphasizes this anonymity: “‘In this camp,’ one Mexican National told me, ‘we have no names. We are called only by numbers’” (1). Galarza establishes that the braceros’ removal from their individual identity coexists with a removal from their location. Another bracero explains, “I don’t know what’s the advantage of these documents except in case we get lost. It seems we are lost even when we are right in camp” (11). The documents suggest the international agreements which render the bracero an anonymous number.

If the bracero becomes a cog in the machine, he also becomes lost in the landscape. When Galarza depicts braceros as lost, he does not suggest they lack, for example, knowledge of whether they are in California or Colorado. Galarza suggests, rather, that the Bracero Program alters the meaning of landscapes, and changes the assumed relationship between nation and land. This vision of the bracero, unsure of where he is, envisions the Bracero Program as productive of a denationalized, industrialized landscape. The bracero is not clearly in the United States or Mexico; he is in a no-man’s land. These statements link territory to identity as the bracero’s loss of identity correlates to the disorientation he experiences. As he is outside of all-nations, he is refused the individual personhood that nations provide their subjects.

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The anonymity of the bracero contrasts with the localized identity of the Mexican

nationals. Galarza uses the character of Pito Perez for an example of a man who enters

into the Bracero Program. The specificity of Perez’s identity matters. We are told,

“Perez lives with his wife and four children in Rancho de la Mojerna, Michoacan” (2).

Galarza defines Perez in relationship to his family and city of origin. When he decides to

become a bracero, it is not his decision alone: “Perez talks to his wife and it is agreed that

he should go” (3). This description emphasizes Perez’s status as head of family and his

autonomy despite his economic oppression. Although the lack of economic opportunities

open to Perez shapes his choice, ultimately he and his wife decide through conversation.

This image of agency contrasts with the powerlessness Perez will face once joining the

system.

According to Galarza, when the Mexican national enters the Bracero Program, he

leaves the official space of Mexico without entering the official space of United States.

Galarza articulates the Bracero Program’s denationalized landscape: “Up to this point the

bracero is still technically in Mexico” (4). Galarza describes the bracero as only

technically in Mexico to imply that the citizenship rights of the Mexican state have ceased to apply to the bracero. That is, Galarza envisions the bracero contract as temporarily replacing the contract between subject and government that constitutes citizenship. Similarly, Galarza claims that at his work site the bracero is only technically in the U.S. The privileges of citizenship and the protection of civil society are denied him.

Galarza establishes that the Bracero Program exists outside of the regulations of both the U.S. and the Mexican government. Galarza explains, “In the employment of

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Nationals, the restraints of Agreement and contract bend or break with the ease of spider webs. It is hardly surprising that the bracero cannot grasp what is happening to him and around him” (35). Here Galarza explains that the power of enforcement or regulation remains outside of either government. Instead the agreement is subject to the winds of capital production and its implementation is constantly renegotiated based on profit- driven motives entirely internal to the program. The program removes braceros from the national context of Mexico, trapping them in a web between Mexico and the United

States. They are lost because they are outside of either nation. They are in a new type of space, in which they have no rights, and in which they are trapped like flies in a spider web. This disorientation is captured when one worker comments, “It seems we are lost even when we are right in the camp” (47). They cannot gain the perspective to see what is happening to them. Thus the spatially-oriented metaphor of the spider’s web that

Galarza employs masterfully captures the power relations he exposes.

The chapter “Records and Deductions” highlights the absence of government regulation and accountability provided to the bracero. The spatial power relations of the system prevent the bracero from accessing decision makers or power holders. Galarza explains:

When the bracero asks questions about his insurance rights, he is likely to address himself to the nearest Spanish-speaking person of some rank or authority on the job or in camp. This person is usually a truck driver, a field foreman, a straw boss or a labor contractor. Here are some of the answers reported: ‘You’ll have to see the bookkeeper, I didn‘t make out the paper”; “The extra nine cents is for the county”; “I took off the round dollar because I haven’t time to make change for 200 men”; “I don’t keep the money, I just send it to the consul.” (57)

With such responses the truck driver, the foreman and the labor contractor divert authority onto some other invisible power holder. The bracero is unable to advocate for

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himself because it is unclear from whom he would seek protection or retribution. The system which highlights profits further reduces the liberty of braceros by obscuring the chain of demand. The bracero not only lacks the ability to contact an authority figure, he lacks the basic knowledge of his own rights. According to Galarza, “The bracero is even more handicapped with regard to his insurance privileges than he is with respect to his work contract . . . Out of 345 men interviewed, none was able to give even one provision

of the policy” (57). Thus the bracero’s lack of knowledge of his rights correlates directly

to lack of democracy and civil liberties present in the program. The absence of

knowledge of rights results directly from the absence of any rights granted in practice

(rather than on the paper of the International Agreement). Galarza is more explicit when he states:

Even if the bracero were well informed of his rights under the insurance contract, as he obviously is not, it would still be a serious question whether he could obtain immediate compliance with those rights. The U.S. Government disclaims any jurisdiction in the enforcement of the obligations created by the non-occupational insurance plan. The entire burden of enforcement and investigation of violations in the insurance program therefore falls, in theory, on the Mexican consuls (58).

In Galarza’s interpretation, the violations of citizenship rights, international agreements, and human rights which occur under the Bracero Program result from the lack of governmental jurisdiction.

Galarza figures the transnational borderlands as outside of national sway, and thus

left in the hands of irrational capitalist development, which privileges profit above

individual liberties. Galarza suggests that such an undemocratic system of rule will characterize any post-war economic model driven by this form of international cooperation. Specifically, Galarza explains, “the interests of farm workers are not best

served when they are under the supervision or control of private farm labor contractors . .

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. Since the contractor is the first person in authority for the most part the only person with whom the bracero is in an immediate relationship, he becomes interpreter, administrator and judge – law or no law” (59, 61). The Bracero Program as a whole can be interpreted as a system of international privatization. The lack of accountability under this system ensures the denial of the modern citizen’s individual liberties. Both the United States and

Mexico are displaced as the agricultural landscape is reterritorialized and agricultural labor recomposed through a set of spatially-constituted power relationships.

Specifically, the spatial relations within the reconstituted space of the Bracero

Program emphasize flexible arrangements of labor. Galarza explains, “some growers have devised a system of loaning braceros back and forth. The informal transfer of small groups of braceros between different users within an area of employment keeps the central labor pool flexible . . . That labor force is considered best which most easily,

quickly, and ungrudgingly responds to the caprices of weather and market” (65). The

instabilities of agricultural production are offset by the workers, reducing the risks and

increasing the profits of the producers. Thus the relationship between family and landscape that defined the agricultural discourse of the U.S. is replaced by a system

disconnected from the rhythms of nature and the regulations of the nation.

The bracero’s deportability contributes to this flexibility. One bracero explains to

Galarza, “I can read the contract, and I know that several of the clauses are not observed .

. . But nobody would make a complaint for fear of being sent back to Mexico” (67). The braceros’ inability to claim a right to the bracero landscape, thus risking deportation when

challenging the system, results in silence. Jeffersonian democracy asserts that political independence requires an economic independence that only can arise from farming’s

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rootedness to the land. Braceros’ disconnection from the land defines their ultimate

dependence on the whims of the growers. Because they lack a secure relationship to a

nation, and consequently a landscape on which their political and economic security may

be built, they are inherently unfree.

Bracero Program as Militarized Borderlands

This landscape of the Bracero Program is commodified, industrialized, and de-

naturalized. Yet it is also strikingly militarized. Galarza explains that “the first

contingents of men were assigned to agriculture” (6). More explicitly, in Merchants of

Labor, he quotes a government report describing the men as “shock troops” (55).69

Notably, such military descriptions further strip the men of their individuality. The scale of identity shifts. The individual man no longer sells his labor, but the labor is sold by the contingent. Moreover, in describing the men as army recruits, Galarza implies they are territorializing new frontiers of industry. The text hints that as the Bracero Program becomes permanent, it offers a model for a new mode of post-war economic relations between nations.

This militarization of space operates in opposition to domestic notions of the public and the private. The braceros do not move in either the public spaces of civil society nor do they move in the private spaces of the home. Rather, these images of militarized spaces depict the privatization of industry. The private spaces of production are outside of the nation state because they are outside of national regulation. Galarza captures this sentiment with a photograph in which a no-trespassing notice labeling a bracero camp as “military” is posted on a barbed wire fence (9). In this photograph, the

69 In Merchants of Labor, Galarza quotes a government report that referred to the braceros as “shock troops” as they were “a flexible group which can be readily moved from operation to operation and from place to place where local help falls short of the numbers needed to save the crops” (55).

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very landscapes that the braceros inhabit are specifically labeled as “military” (9). Both

the ordinance against trespassing and the wire fence suggest a border.70 In this way, the

Bracero Program becomes a nation of its own, a nation of private industry, with its own

borders to defend. In presenting the Bracero Program as a nation without national

identity functioning for economic profit and protected by industry, Galarza gestures

towards the post-war flexible accumulation capitalists more thoroughly embraced in the post-fordist period.71 That is, Galaraza envisions the Bracero Program as producing a

new form of space. This space is distinct from the national spaces of the United States

and Mexico. In highlighting the transnational nature of the Bracero Program, Galarza

offers a window into one particular type of space created in the post-World War II era.

The space of the Bracero Program that Galarza describes transcends the nation-state

(becoming transnational) and yet involves both the United States and Mexico (becoming

international).

The barbed wire serves to demonstrate that the Bracero Program stands outside of

government regulation and is placed outside of the prying eyes of both the U.S. and

Mexican civil society. Specifically, consider at whom the “trespassing” sign is aimed. It

faces the U.S. citizen who might enter the bracero reservation. By defining this space as

protected from the prying eyes of U.S. citizens, Galarza implies, the Bracero Program

asserts its separation from civil society. By situating the worker in a space that is neither

in the United States nor in Mexico, and further, is not subject to the protections of civil

70 For contemporary representations of fences as borders see Fox.

71 According to Harvey, the post-Fordist period is characterized by a shift to “what might be called a ‘flexible’ regime of accumulation.” He describes “new systems of production and marketing, characterized by more flexible labour processes and markets, of geographical mobility and raipd shifts in consumption practices” (124). For more detailed discussion see Harvey (141-188).

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society, Galarza exposes the socio-spatial relationships that prevent the braceros from

receiving the rights guaranteed them in the international agreement.

Galarza centers the discussion of the Bracero Program on the issue of U.S. and

Mexican national rights and civil rights. Galarza begins the pamphlet by setting up the

rights of the braceros. He explains, “When the recruitment program was originally begun,

Mexico insisted, and the United States was glad to concede, that the affair should be

conducted with close and scrupulous regard for the rights of the Mexicans to be

transported to labor in the north” (10). The international agreement envisioned the

bracero as obtaining the best protection of U.S. national laws and the protections of

Mexican constitutional legislation. Galarza explained, “The protection of the Mexican

bracero was to be guided by the principles of Mexican social legislation. He was to enjoy,

as far as possible, working conditions comparable, if not equal, to those guaranteed all

Mexican workers in their national constitution” (10). The rest of the pamphlet details the

ways in which these rights are ignored, and explains how the program’s implementation

excluded braceros from protections afforded by Mexican constitutional rights, U.S. civil

rights, and U.S. state regulations.

Thus the text details the establishment of rights, only to document the abuses of

those rights. Galarza aligns the bracero’s journey with the erosion of national and international law and the abdication of individual rights. In this manner the text

intervenes in the bracero discourse, yet also suggests a broader interpretation of the

individual rights discourse in the post-World-War-II moment. Galarza claims that the

Bracero Program represents “the fundamental concepts of individual rights and privileges

of citizens of the Americas” (11). The abuses of the Bracero Program suggest the erosion

330 of the individual rights and privileges of citizens of multiple nations under economic conditions that displace the nation-state in favor of privatized de-nationalized economic development.

Through this spatial relation, the bracero comes to represent an anachronism: the modern slave. The pamphlet prominently displays a newspaper image proclaiming

“Escalavos Modernos” on the page adjacent to the bold chapter title “Their Rights” (10-

11). In comparing the braceros to slaves, Galarza comments upon the lack of U.S. or

Mexican national rights provided the braceros. Moreover, he hints at their social death through their exclusion from civil society just as scholars conceptualize slavery in the

U.S. as an exclusion from political, cultural, and social citizenship.72 In Constituting

Americans, Priscilla Wald suggests the logic that bound citizenship to personhood. In discussing those excluded from the Constitution’s “We the People,” she explains,

“human beings, that is, excluded not only from citizenship, but also from certain basic natural rights and thereby from the personhood defined by those rights” (17). The denial of citizenship to slaves implied a denial of legal personhood; slavery operated as a system of legal and social dehumanization. Consequently, when Galarza compares the braceros to slaves he emphasizes that the system dehumanizes them. He suggests braceros are not treated as full modern subjects. At the same time, through the headline “modern slaves”

Galarza suggests that the slavery of the braceros is particularly modern. While slavery ought to be an anathema to modernity, it is actually central to the modern subject, as Paul

Gilroy suggests. The transnational trade and labor exploitation defining slavery provided the material contexts for the formation of the modern subject. In referencing slavery,

Galarza criticizes the forms of modernity emerging in the post-World-War-II context as

72 For social death and slavery, see Patterson.

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developing out of imperial relations between nations, and the dehumanizing labor

regimes that result from such transnational collaborations in the context of a growing

industrial empire.

In this way, the Bracero Program operates as a different kind of borderlands and

the bracero as a different kind of border crosser than conceived by many contemporary

borderlands scholars. In “Migration, Emergent Ethnicity, and the ‘Third Space’: The

Shifting Politics of Nationalism in Greater Mexico,” David G. Gutierrez theorizes the

borderlands as a zone of bi-national contact and conflict, in which local Mexican-

American communities generate social spaces to forge identities that mediate against

social, political, and economic displacements. In Borderlands/La Frontera Gloria

Anzaldúa conceptualized the borderlands as a space of hybridity, negotiation, and subject

formation. Galarza’s conceptualization of the borderlands significantly predates

Anzaldúa’s and Gutierrez’s works. Yet, rather than viewing the borderlands as a space

where conflicting national identities converge and in which subjects express their agency

by producing individual and community identities, Galarza envisions a denationalized

territory of capitalist expansion which strips subjects of their national identities. This

prefigures contemporary theories about globalization, deterritorialization, and the transnational identities of a global migrant workforce (such as partial citizenship described by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, flexible citizenship discussed by Aihwa Ong, and denizenship explored by Rachel Buff).

Galarza’s concept of international relations depends on an unequal relationship between nations. In describing the bracero contract negotiations, Galarza depicts the U.S. government as the employer while the Mexican government performs a role like that of a

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labor union. The Mexican nationals become pawns in this international game plan. Their

voices are not recognized and their interests are not represented. Galarza implies that the

failure to adequately protect braceros stems not from governmental intent but from the

economic imperatives of the corporate agricultural interests that implement the program.

Thus the de-regulated spaces of capital that the program creates corrupt the labor-

management contract.

Through this set up Galarza envisions the problems of international cooperation.

Because capital circulates through de-nationalized spaces, workers face conditions that

violate the ideals of both the sending and receiving nations. No nation truly invests in regulatory mechanisms designed to enforce labor codes. In this way, Galarza’s analysis of the Bracero Program prefigures the critiques advocates concerned with human rights, environmental sustainability, and labor rights launched at NAFTA during the 1990s.

Galarza’s example anticipates the concerns that developed with later forms of globalization implemented through the IMF and the World Bank and enforced through the WTO.

In Galarza’s interpretation, the bracero machinery does not turn men into permanent braceros. It is a revolving system. Men enter and leave. When they return to

Mexico, they stop being braceros. As such they undergo a second transformation. The description of their awakening from their bracero experience underscores the extent of the original transformation. Once in Mexico, they must “regain” their “self-confidence”

(80). The return of the dignity is demonstrated through their frequent protests in Mexican papers about the treatment they have received as well as their advocacy through governmental channels to receive missing payments for their labor. Galarza illustrates the

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braceros’ regained humanity through their regained political voice. That is, the text

connects the braceros’ humanity to their ability to articulate their individual and collective rights as guaranteed by the government. Their use of civil society to pressure

the government and affect public opinion shows that they have left the social death of

modern slavery. Yet the return of the braceros to Mexico does little to alter or end the

system through which such modern slaves are continually produced and the ongoing

process through which the bracero subject is produced out of the Mexican national.

Witness to the System: Galarza’s Solutions

Galarza’s depiction of the bracero as a “stranger” expresses the denationalization and de-

regulation characterizing the Bracero Program. The Mexican national’s relationship to

Mexico is figured in relationship to his home town and to his family. In contrast, Galarza

names the bracero as a stranger in “our fields.” The designation of stranger here defines

the bracero as outside of the United States’ national family. Moreover, the bracero, as a

stranger, is not a neighbor or a friend. He is not a visitor or a guest. He has no true

relationship to the nation. He is an outsider. The label “stranger” contrasts with the label

“our fields.” Galarza’s rhetorical strategy emphasizes his belonging to the U.S. nation

and produces a community of U.S. readers, “us.” The text here defines its readers and its

author as U.S. residents who feel ownership over the landscape. The fields that are in the

United States are “our” fields. The chapters further employ an us-them relationship

between reader/author and bracero. The chapter titles include “Who They Are”; “As

They See It” and “What They Earn.” This nomenclature captures the process of

deterritorialization and reterritorialization from a U.S. perspective. Strangers, or

braceros, occupy U.S. fields, rescaling the fields at the level of the Bracero Program’s

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implementation from their former location as the locus of U.S. national agricultural fantasies. Thus, Galarza’s call to bring the Bracero Program into U.S. civil society and under U.S. law re-colonizes “our fields” as U.S. fields. Galarza situates his project as a nationalizing project — whereby Mexican nationals reclaim their Mexican subjectivity and the U.S. citizens reclaim their U.S. territory.

If the Bracero Program articulates its power in its separation from both the United

States and Mexico, Galarza aims to reincorporate the Bracero Program into U.S. national consciousness and place the program under the regulation of U.S. civil society. The

Bracero Program separates itself from civil society and national regulation by using rural locations, trespassing ordinances, military protections, and fly-by-night transportation and housing to protect itself from the public eye. Thus, Galarza arranges his pamphlet

like evidence for a trial. It provides a tour, a direct witnessing of the program, for a perceived audience of U.S. civil society.

The pamphlet provides multiple forms of evidence. It relies heavily on photographs, scenes, and documents. Each photograph is arranged to emphasize the perspective of the viewer, as a witness. For example, Galarza includes the photograph of a truck that transports workers, but highlights the angle of the viewer looking into the truck, inspecting it (52). The angle of this picture implies the viewer is looking in from the outside, rather than anyone peering out from the inside the truck. It gives a sense of a cramped space into which the viewer peeks. This sense of evidence is produced also in the image of a bracero’s medical exam (54). An anonymous man pulls back a patient’s hairline to reveal a substantial head bump. The patient looks straight ahead, rather than at the examiner. He is on display for the viewer. Galarza includes ten such photographs of

335 the braceros’ living and working conditions along with eight photographs of documents such as pay stubs. None of the photographs represents the perspectives of the braceros themselves. Instead, the photographs appear as if to expose a broader public to the views of the Bracero Program.

In Strangers in Our Fields, Galarza repeatedly suggests the good that a union could do for the braceros. He explains, “Unless he is assigned to an employer who takes his responsibility for keeping accounts seriously, the worker is often unprotected.” (48).

Galarza not only suggests that the bracero workers would benefit from unions. He credits improvements to their treatment to union actions. He asserts, “It has been the American trade union that has obtained the most notable correction of abuses and violations of the

Agreement” (71). It is not only the growers who are antagonistic to the unions. Galarza situates the Mexican government in opposition to the unions. The Mexican government perceives itself as wholly responsible for the welfare of the braceros, holding with

“exclusive jurisdiction over the braceros” (71-72). According to Galarza, the Mexican government perceives the unions as a threat to its own authority. Through his discussion of unions, Galarza asserts that the Mexican government and the United States government maintain a self-interest in the Bracero Program and the denationalized space in which it operates. They oppose labor unions’ efforts to advocate for the braceros and bring them under the regulation of the International Agreement, Mexican law, or U.S. regulations. In this way, Galarza asserts that increased government enforcement will fail as the solution to the bracero dilemma. We can not turn solely to government officials, he suggests, but must engage a broader swath of civil society in dismantling this program which threatens the liberty of men within the program, as well as the liberties of U.S. and

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Mexican citizens outside of the program. Indeed, Galarza employs a bracero’s voice to

place the responsibility for such a program in the hands of a U.S. public: “These things

[contract violations] have to be tolerated in silence because there is no one to defend our

guarantees. In a strange country you feel timid – like a chicken in another rooster’s yard”

(75).73 Through such statements, Galarza calls on U.S. civil society to protect the bracero, to take the role of the union official and dismantle the program.

In describing the bracero as in need of protection from outside, Galarza references and reinforces the unequal relationships between nations. If his text begins by placing

Mexico in a subordinate position to the United States in negotiating the very contract under which the braceros labor, it ends the texts by placing the U.S. worker in a superior position to the bracero. Galarza describes the bracero as helpless.74 He explains, “They

are certainly not strong enough to nerve the men for joint action on the problems of

wages, hours, meals, housing, and decent treatment. Such action requires leadership, and

leadership needs a climate of freedom, knowledge, and opportunity that does not exist in

the camps” (75). Galarza tasks the U.S. citizen with protecting the bracero and with

safeguarding his or her own liberties by dismantling a program that is structured around

such injustices and abuses of rights. Galarza states, “The common respect for legal

obligations, as well as for civil and human rights, found in the general American

community serves as a firm foundation for the protection of the individual. The Mexican

73 “He is ‘living in somebody else’s house,’ as the National phrases it” (78).

74 Gambao’s Mexican Labor and World War II counters this image of the helpless bracero by emphasizing the strikes and cultural activities in which braceros participated. Similarly, Deborah Cohen’s “From Peasant to Worker” foregrounds the changing subjectivity of braceros. Cohen writes, “I expected former migrants’ accounts to be ones of racism and abuse. However, in living rooms, kitchens, barbershops, and on street corners, they talked to me with pride about their experiences in the U.S. In contrast to scholarly portrayals, men refused to see themselves as victims; rather, they were actors in making their own worlds and the resulting social configurations of Mexico and the United States” (81).

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national in the United States does not have the benefit of this powerful sanction” (76).

Galarza represents U.S. society as the pinnacle of societal responsibility and a role model for civil and human rights, an image the U.S. actively cultivated during the Cold War.

By placing the Bracero Program outside of the U.S. nation, even though it occurs on U.S. soil, Galarza contends that the U.S. public has a responsibility to the international community to end this program, even as he exonerates the U.S. public from responsibility for the uneven and imperial power relationships that allowed it to form.

Galarza’s ultimate goal is not simply an end to the Bracero Program. He desires better treatment for U.S. farm workers, and perceives the de-regulated landscape of the

Bracero Program as an obstacle to that goal. Galarza employs his discussion of the

Bracero Program to demonstrate the rights that non-bracero U.S. workers should have but do not. By leading his audience to recognize that it is unjust that braceros are denied certain rights, Galarza galvanizes that same audience to understand the broader injustices facing farm workers. Moreover, in rendering the braceros as “strangers,” he draws a line between Mexican and Mexican Americans, asserting the fields belong to U.S. citizens, regardless of race, and do not belong to non-citizens, regardless of their labor. In this

way, the educational work done by labor advocates aiming to terminate the Bracero

Program, including Galarza, prefigured the rhetorical strategies of the United Farm

Workers (UFW), and ultimately contributed to the popular support in U.S. civil society

for the UFW.75

Historian Matthew Garcia asserts that:

75 For the UFW’s stance on the Bracero Program, see the chapter entitled “Unions Si! Braceros No!” in Young.

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the ideology and practice of citizenship pursued by labor and civil rights groups inadvertently laid the foundations for the post-bracero labor system. . . . Although demands for citizenship rights helped end the Bracero Program, they also drew the line of membership around a national community that accentuated the differences between members and nonmembers. This line of inclusion/exclusion cut at right angles against potential class and ethnic solidarity, and ultimately helped increase the vulnerability of those at the bottom of the community: initially braceros, and eventually undocumented workers (186).

As my reading of Strangers in Our Fields demonstrates, Galarza was complicit in generating the “us-them” mentality shaping citizenship discourse and farm labor activism. Yet Galarza’s critique of the Bracero Program also manifests as an attack on

“imported colonialism,” to borrow Mae Ngai’s phrase. Galarza theorizes the unbalanced

relationship between the United States and Mexico as responsible for the bracero subject,

who is excluded from the protections of modern nation-states and captured in a de-

nationalized landscape of corporate industrialization. As such his analysis prefigures

contemporary leftist critiques of NAFTA, Free Trade, and the maquiladora system. As

Stephen J. Pitti contends, Galarza originally responded to the Bracero Program by

attempting to organize braceros as well as mobilize a relationship between U.S. and

Mexican labor unions.76 Failing to do so, Galarza placed his hope, rhetorically at least, in

the hands of U.S. civil society.77 With this discursive move, he rendered the bracero

helpless, reinforcing the very power relations his labor activism sought to upend.

Conclusion

76 Pitti states that Galarza “politicized Mexican cultural nationalism in ways that would not even be attempted by the UFW” (Countryside, 163).

77 Indeed, this may not be as large of a contradiction or shift in politics as it initially appears. Galarza wanted illegal border crossings and the Bracero Program to stop in part because he believed it would help the Mexican Left by shutting off a safety valve, forcing those unhappy with their situation to turn to the Mexican State with their grievances (Pitti Countryside 182).

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Ernesto Galarza and Carlos Bulosan undoubtedly knew of each other. They moved in similar social circles and struggled commonly for the unionization of California’s agricultural workers. Galarza’s works — Spiders in the House, Workers in the Fields, and Farmworkers and Agri-business in California — reference the organizing activities of Filipino laborers in the 1940s and 1950s. Likewise, America Is in the Heart denounces the Bracero Program, describing a scenario when “The Filipino workers struck, but the companies imported Mexican laborers” (206). Carlos’s sentiments reflect

Galarza’s when he proclaims, “There should be a law against the importation of labor . . .

It should be included in the interstate laws . . .Without it the workers will always be at the mercy of the employers” (206). Both Bulosan and Galarza positioned interracial alliances as essential for the success of farm labor unionization. For example, when

Carlos succeeds in uniting Mexican and Filipino workers he proclaims, “I was sure now that we were at last beginning to play our own role in the turbulent drama of history. I did not understand it then, did not realize that this was the one and only common thread that bound us together, white and black and brown, in America. I felt a great surge of happiness inside me!”(313).

Today, the U.S. pubic often understands farm union history as beginning with

Cesar Chavez and the Chicano movement. Yet, in 1967, it was Filipino workers, part of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), who first walked out of

Delano’s grape fields. Two weeks later, the National Farm Workers Union (NFWU), to which Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta belonged, voted to join the fight. The predominantly Filipino AWOC and the predominately Mexican NFWU joined together to form the United Farm Workers (UFW). While Cesar Chavez presided as the UFW’s

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president, Filipino leader Larry Itliong served as vice president.78 For too long, popular memory obscured the Filipino presence in the UFW. This erasure of Filipino labor ignores the history of U.S. imperialism that shapes both Mexican American and Filipino experiences in the United States. Indeed, many of the UFW’s problematic stances against undocumented laborers, as well supporting Marcos’s dictatorship in the

Philippines, can be interpreted as a forgetting (strategic or otherwise) of California’s

Mexican past, and ignoring the incursion of European and American colonialism on the indigenous peoples of Greater Mexico and the Philippines.

Today, the nostalgia fueling much of the food justice movement disregards the legacy of empire in the history of U.S. agriculture. Moreover, the movement often ignores the realities of migrant farm labor, as suggested by the film King Corn, which does not mention farm workers even once.79 When the food justice movement does

grapple with farm workers, it depicts such workers as the byproduct of an industrial

agricultural system.80 Local food movements figure the family farm as an innocent

return to core American values and Jeffersonian Democracy. That is, mainstream

celebrations of local and organic produce continue to privilege a relationship between

land ownership and white citizenship through the romanticization of the family farm

(ignoring the labor needs of such farms). As Julie Guthman makes clear, the organics

78 For a discussion of Filipinos’ roles in the formation of the UFW see Philip Vera Cruz’s autobiography. For works focused on the UFW’s history written during the movement’s peak, see Anderson and London; Kushner; Levy; Matthiessen; Ronald Taylor; and Young. For more contemporary assessments see Ferris and Sandoval; Griswold del Castillo and Garcia; Hammerback and Jensen; Meister and Loftis; and Shaw.

79 King Corn also fails to mention the flooding of U.S. corn into Mexican markets after NAFTA. Thus U.S. agriculture becomes a national story, protected from narratives of the global reach of U.S. capitalism. Farm Fresh Rhode Island provides another example of avoiding and ignoring issues of labor in agriculture. Nowhere on their website or in their marketing materials could I locate any information about farm labor. Labor becomes invisible in the nostalgia for American agriculture.

80 This is similar to the rhetorical move Carey McWilliams makes in Factories in the Field (See Chapter 1).

341 movement’s idealization of the family farm is particularly problematic in the ways it ignores the racist foundations of land ownership in the U.S. Guthman contends, quite rightly, that the environmental and social injustice that runs to the core of modern U.S. food production can not be solved by adjusting the scale of agriculture. Rather she asserts that it is the process of agriculture which must be transformed.

Guthman suggests a consumer-oriented solution along the lines of Community

Supported Agriculture, in which purchasers of a farm’s products share the risk of production. My study suggests that she is correct in identifying private property and individualized land-ownership as central contributing factors to the agricultural nightmare of modern America. Yet, that problem will not be solved by a consumer- oriented policy of shared risk alone. Even on small farms, immigrant workers often continue to supply the labor, without the legal protections guaranteed factory workers and without representation through unionization. A solution to the contemporary ills of modern agriculture must incorporate support for fair labor conditions in agriculture and eventually transform the racial and economic dimensions that historically shaped farm ownership in the United States. Collective ownership needs to come not only to the hands of the consumers, but to the hands of the workers as well. Such a process requires the re-examination of the relationship between political belonging and land-ownership that has been mutually constituted through race and class in California and other states.

The successful transformation of material conditions will not occur without the transformations of cultural understandings. Carlos Bulosan and Ernesto Galarza did not merely reflect contemporary agricultural discourses. They sought to incorporate Mexican

American and Filipino subjects as rightful owners of American land. Today their

342 writings serve as a necessary corrective to nostalgic visions of U.S. agriculture, relocating it in an imperial geography and asserting the centrality of labor to that geography.

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CONCLUSION Denizenship in the Cultural Politics of Environment and Immigration

Throughout The Nature of Citizenship, I have argued that cultural and legal understandings of citizenship in the United States are deeply entangled with conceptions of nature, the environment, and land ownership. Farmers and farm laborers stand at the center of this discourse through their divergent associations to the land. On one hand, farmers demonstrate their affiliation with the nation through their ownership of land. On the other hand, narratives about farm workers often assert that such workers belong to the nation by belonging to the landscapes in which they labor. In twentieth-century representations of Californian agricultural laborers, nature has the power to naturalize citizens, as Hiroshi Nakamura’s Treadmill depicts, or de-naturalize nations, as Hisaye

Yamamoto’s short stories envision. Moreover, such cultural understandings nationalize nature at the same time that they naturalize the nation-state. Such an analysis exposes that

“natural” Americans, citizens from birth, are just as unnatural as “naturalized” Americans who gained their citizenship through legal proceedings. Narratives of naturalization expose the “unnatural” process through which the legal territory of the United States becomes “American” nature. The land is no more inherently “American” than citizenship status is determined “naturally.”

The Nature of Citizenship has focused on texts written from the 1930s through the

1960s. Yet American agricultural discourse continues to affect contemporary understandings of both citizenship and the environment even as the material and

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ideological conditions influencing Californian agriculture changed rapidly in the decades

following the Bracero Program’s termination. In this afterword, I briefly trace the

contemporary relationship between nature and nation in three areas to suggest my

project’s relevance beyond the texts I have examined. First, I interrogate the

environmentalist fascination with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW) in the 1970s. Second, I read Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) in the context of the Proposition 187 debates surrounding its publication. Finally, I investigate the potential coalitions between immigrant rights and environmentalist organizations emerging today. All three examples demonstrate the continued tension between a politics of citizenship and a politics of denizenship. Representations of agricultural labor remain central to determining who belongs “naturally” to the nation as well as exposing that the nation is not a “natural” category at all.

Belonging to the nation is not synonymous with belonging to the land. Belonging often suggests private personal property, as in one’s “belongings.” Belonging also implies a “natural” or inherent association. The American Heritage Dictionary defines belong as: “1.To have a proper or suitable place. 2. To be a member of a group. 3. To be owned by someone. 4. To be a part of or in natural association with something” (79).

Through the notion of belonging, owning property or being owned as property may appear as a “natural association” between possessed and possessor. Considering these denotations, what does it mean to belong to the land? What is the relationship between belonging to the land and belonging to the nation? The Nature of Citizenship argues that owning land consolidates the citizen’s belonging to the nation. This has disturbing implications for texts within the dominant discourse of race and citizenship that envision

345 farm workers as “belonging to the land.” In such narratives, do workers belong to the land, just as the land belongs to the citizen? Do farm workers become represented as property, like land itself? As I have suggested throughout this project, associations between slavery and agriculture continue to haunt the discourses about migrant farm labor today. Representations of farm workers as “alien” echo the exclusion of the slave from full belonging in the nation. Through racialized discourses of citizenship, the

“alien” and the “slave” as non-citizen, and perhaps as property, consolidate the image of the citizen as white property-owner.

In this conclusion I explore the possibilities for a politics of denizenship to transform the politics of (white) citizenship that have long shaped U.S. agricultural relations and representations. These politics of denizenship stand in opposition to the understandings of property rights that underwrite the cultural logic of white citizenship and U.S. landownership. Denizenship suggests rights to political participation, land, and the fruits of labor founded on one’s relationship to place rather than property.

Natural Associations

Belonging to the land may be a problematic ideal under a capitalist system in which land is itself a belonging. Environmentalists’ fascination with the UFW exposes some of the racial politics of idealizing a “natural” relationship to the land. The UFW came into national recognition near the peak of the Civil Rights movement and the beginning of the modern Environmental movement.1 The UFW emerged in 1966 from the predominately

1 The United Farm Workers (UFW) was founded in 1966, the same year Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded The Black Panthers. It was founded just after The Civil Rights Act (1964) and The Voting Rights Act passed congress (1965), a culminating moment for the Civil Rights Movement which is often dated to the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955) or Brown v. Board (1954). In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The UFW was founded just four years after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring (1962) and four years before the first Earth Day (1970).

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Mexican American National Farm Laborers Union and the largely Filipino Agricultural

Workers Organizing Committee.2 Representations of the UFW and the farm workers movement as part of the Chicano movement reinforced a popular perception that a natural association existed between agricultural work and Mexican heritage and that the essential farm worker was the authentic Chicano. By the late 1960s, the association between Californian agricultural labor and Mexican heritage was so strong that Carey

McWilliams could explain that “No one knows this story [of Californian agricultural labor] better that Ernesto Galarza . . . [for] it is in his ‘blood,’ so to speak, for he is of

Spanish-speaking background and was born in Tepic, Mexico.”3 McWilliams credited

Galarza’s in-depth knowledge of Californian agricultural labor as much to his “blood” as to his lived experience as labor organizer and to his advanced degrees from Stanford,

Occidental College, and Columbia (xi).

This natural association between agricultural work and Mexican heritage contributed to environmentalists’ fascination with the UFW and the Chicano movement.

Journalists and social observers of the time frequently linked social and ecological histories when talking about the UFW. John Gregory Dunne, for example, in Delano:

The Story of the California Grape Strike (1967) begins his text with an overview of the connections between Delano’s social and ecological history. Harvey Wilson Richards, a prominent photographer and filmmaker of the farm workers movement, later focused on the clear-cutting of California and Oregon’s forests. Well-known naturalist Peter

That is, UFW gained its successes alongside the budding modern environmental movement after the peak years of the Civil Rights Movements.

2 The historic contracts were signed with Delano growers following the successes of the grape boycotts in 1969. The loss of influence of the organization is frequently traced to the grower’s embrace of the Teamsters in 1973.

3 Spiders in the House (xiii). McWilliams dated the statement March 27, 1969.

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Matthiessen wrote Sal Si Puedes, one of the most frequently cited books on Chavez, from

the position of an unabashed environmentalist. Matthiessen contended that the farm

workers existed in the nexus of all “America’s most serious afflictions: racism, poverty,

environmental pollution, and urban crowding and decay – all of these compounded by the

waste of war” (28).

What interested environmentalists in Mexican-American migrant farm labor?4 As

Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard A. Garcia point out, “Mexican Americans, specifically, the farm workers and Cesar Chavez, were existentially authentic, primarily because of their labor, their relationship to the land, their respect for their humanity, and their love of community. The Mexican farm worker was closer to the Jeffersonian ideal of the true ‘common man.’ As farm workers, they were God’s chosen children, threatened by industrial society” (102). Matthiessen’s Sal Si Puedes offers a more complex understanding of Mexican farm workers’ relation to the land; however, these ideas about Jeffersonian land use and Mexican-American “authenticity” clearly underwrote Matthiessen’s interest in Chavez and the UFW. As historian Jennifer Price contends, nature is, in part, a symbol of “the real” and “the authentic.” Its embrace during the 1960s and 1970s constituted a reaction against the perceived artificiality of

1950s society.5 Mexican-American culture, too, was perceived as more “authentic” than

mainstream white culture. For example, in 1979, literary critic Daniel P. Testa explained,

“modern Anglo culture suffers from an ersatz quality deriving from loss of the past,

4 It was not just environmentalists who were drawn to Chavez. In The Triumph of the Spirit (1995) Griswold del Castillo and Garcia provide an insightful examination of the ways American liberals claimed Chavez as their own.

5 See Price (175-178).

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urbanization, artificial and elitist sophistication, corruption by the manipulative mass media, and a voguish stress on the mental, the imaginary, and the irrational. The Chicano

may live outside the mainstream, this critic [Testa] would say, but his very exclusion has

permitted the retention of traditional culture” (99). Embracing both farm workers and

nature functioned as a declaration against the “mainstream” of society, and an embrace of

the values of the 1960s countercultural left. Indeed, Matthiessen associated Chavez not

simply with the Civil Rights movement but “the New American Revolution” (362).

Matthieseen’s interest in the UFW may ultimately belong alongside the tendency of contemporary radical environmentalists to romanticize peasant land struggles in the

Global South, such as that of the Zapatistas.6 Some environmentalists during the 1970s

envisioned Mexican and Mexican-American farm workers in the U.S. as authentic

stewards of the earth through which the conflict between human and ecological needs might be absolved. A similar vision exists today of peasants and indigenous peoples in

countries in the Global South. For example, environmental organizations such as

Rainforest Action Network too often depict indigenous rainforest communities as

uncontaminated by modern life. They envision indigenous populations and peasant

communities as inseparable from the land. They romanticize such communities as part of

the landscape rather than owners of it. “Traditional ways” of living are seen as

synonymous with a benevolent “natural state” that existed prior to capitalism.7 Thus

6 The Zapatistas do not share the romanticized visions of some environmentalists. As Adamson points out in“Encounter with a Mexican Jaguar,” the Zapatistas “were not fighting to preserve the pristine rainforest for elite ‘global citizens’ or longing for a mythical past where indigenous farmers engage in low-tech subsistence farming on communal lands. Rather, the Zaptistas demanded that the Mexican government provide them with the kinds of conditions that would allow them to become competitive in the global marketplace” (225).

7 Today, organizations such as Rainforest Action Network (RAN) utilize frameworks of indigenous sovereignty, human rights, and labor rights to speak about indigenous rainforest communities as displaced

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these environmentalists view the preservation of peasant and indigenous communities as similar to desired wilderness preservation. This is problematic in that such environmentalists fail in either case (indigenous people and wilderness) to adequately

analyze the concept of “natural state.” Thus the solidarity is based more on paternalism

than recognition of self-determination. Moreover, many such environmentalists fail to

assert similar solidarity in the displacement of urban populations as they do for the

displacement of peasant and indigenous populations perceived as “natural” in the Global

South. For example, dominant discourses of race, nation, and nature result in

environmentalists in the U.S. far more willing to act to prevent oil companies from

displacing the U’Wa from the cloudforests of Colombia than they are to assist black or

Latino communities in resisting displacement caused by freeway expansions.

Today the local foods movement displaces the labor movement in the environmentalist imagination of a just, healthy relationship between humans and non- human systems in the United States. The idealized family farmer replaces the romanticization of Mexican and Mexican-American farm workers as “natural” peasants with a “naturally” healthful relationship to the land. The remedy to industrial agriculture that many in the food justice movement envision today is the “return” of small farms.

This proposed solution ignores the racist and imperialist patterns of land ownership and

farmers, abused workers, and colonized populations. Yet the claim that rainforest communities provide a depository for traditional knowledge of sustainable relationships to the land alongside the images used harken back to problematic notions of the “primitive.” Consider, for example, their campaign film, “Rainforest Agribusiness.” In this video, an image of a lush forest transitions directly from a gorilla in the shadows to a human face emerging from the shadows. Far more problematic than the messaging strategies used by groups like RAN are the beliefs of green anarchists or primitivists. Green anarchists tend to romanticize indigenous communities that they perceive as “primitive” or “tribal’ as “uncivilized,” lacking the domination they associate with “domesticated” life. See The Green Anarchy’s Collective’s “An Introduction to Anti-Civilization Anarchist Thought and Practice” for an introduction to green anarchist or primitivist thought. For the tendency to read the Amazon as a new Eden see Slater. In particular see her discussion of representations of “Amazon Indians” in newspaper articles (118-125).

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farm labor history marking the U.S. agricultural present and past. In such images of the just food revolution non-white migrant farm workers simply disappear once the small farmer reappears, ignoring the presence of migrant work forces on family farms. Many food advocates, that is, envision migrant farm workers as a symptom of the problem rather than part of the solution. Food justice advocates consistently fail to imagine such workers as having a right to the lands on which they labor. Additionally, they rarely address the demands of organizations like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, who are

far more invested in labor rights than land ownership. This rhetorical move is strikingly

similar to the ways in which McWilliams figured migrant farm workers in Factories in

the Field. It raises real political questions about the consumer politics which endorse a

locally-grown, family-farm tomato over an industrially-grown and union-harvested one.

The two visions for American agriculture have yet to combine.

“You are not an Orphan”

In contrast to the cultural constructions of the food justice movement, Helena María

Viramontes’s novel Under the Feet of Jesus asserts the rights of workers to the land upon

which they labor within the United States. In doing so, it echoes Luisa Moreno’s 1940

speech, “The Caravan of Sorrow.” Viramontes’s novel was published in 1995, two years

after Cesar Chavez’s death, and one year after the anti-immigrant ballot initiative

proposition 187 passed by popular vote in California.8 The novel celebrates the political

struggles of farm workers and rejects racialized attacks on immigrants as threats to

8 The novel is dedicated to Cesar Chavez. Viramontes’s novel was not the only book to come out at the time about Mexican-American farm workers. Other works around farmworkers published that year include Lucha Corpi’s Cactus Blood, and Cherrie Moraga’s Heroes and Saints. T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain, published in 1994, begins with an epigraph from The Grapes of Wrath. For a reading of Corpi, see Rodriguez; for Moraga, see Brady.

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California. The novel details the coming of age of a young Chicana farm worker,

Estrella, who faces a changed relationship to her family, her community, and her

environment, following the pesticide poisoning of her love interest Alejo. Viramontes

makes clear that Estrella and Alejo are both legal U.S. citizens. Alejo was born in Texas, and Estrella’s U.S. birth certificate is under the feet of her mother’s statue of Jesus. Yet the novel establishes that Estrella’s voice, and her political actions, arise from an analysis of her place in a larger ecological and economic system, rather than from her legal political belonging.9

Viramontes’s novel revisits many of the themes explored in The Grapes of Wrath.

In the first paragraph, a family of seven piles out of an old Chevy Capri station wagon.

The mother carefully folds her route 66 map, reminiscent of the Joads’ travels West. As

the novel continues, aspects of Alejo’s relationship to Estrella suggest the preacher’s

relationship to Tom Joad. Both the preacher and Alejo have a wider view of the world

than other characters as they are able to comprehend the interconnection among human

labor, capitalist exploitation, and environmental degradation. Enraged at the murder of

the preacher, Tom Joad strikes out dangerously at the system. Impassioned by the threat

to Alejo’s life, Estrella strikes out at an apathetic nurse with a crowbar. Both Tom and

Estrella move closer to comprehending the lessons taught by their mentors and take

aggressive action in a heated moment of political passion. Because of the inequalities

structuring their worlds, Estrella and Tom face dangerous consequences for their actions.

9 My reading builds on an environmental framework but places the question of racialized notions of citizenship as inseparable from the novel’s critique of environmental toxins in the work place. For environmental justice readings of the text see Johanesen and Grew-Volpp. Other dominant frameworks for interpreting this novel include a focus on identity and subjectivity outside of a framework of place, such as Eysturoy’s and Zimmernan’s, and as a realist representation concerned with the materialism of the modern world (rather than a celebration of fragmented identity and hybridity).such as Moya’s.

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Both novels culminate with redemptive scenes of rebirth in decrepit barns. In The

Grapes of Wrath, Rose of Sharon nurses an old man dying of starvation after her own child is stillborn. In Under the Feet of Jesus, Estrella breaks through the roof of the barn,

after leaving Alejo at a hospital, most likely to die. She stands among the birds,

“immobile as an angel standing on the verge of faith. Like the chiming bells of the great

cathedrals, she believed her heart powerful enough to summon home all those who

strayed” (176). In these moments, Under the Feet of Jesus counters the politics of

racialized citizenship present in The Grapes of Wrath by rearticulating “home” in ways

that embrace a politics of denizenship.10

Viramontes specifically rejects the vision of racialized citizenship underpinning

Steinbeck’s novel. Instead of focusing on a racially-exclusive nation, Viramontes embraces a more inclusive redefinition of home as central to her character’s sense of identity. When a train’s whistle is heard across the fields, it “reminded the piscadores of destinations, or arrivals and departures, of home and not of home. For they did stop and

listen” (55). In the mainstream of American literature trains often signify the intrusion of

technology (the machine in the garden) or as a symbol of Western progress. Frank Chin

in Donald Duk and Maxine Hong Kingston in China Men reclaim the image of the train

as part of the exploitation and oppression facing Chinese immigrants. Yet, for

Viramontes’s farm workers, the train recalls neither manifest destiny nor labor

exploitation. It is likewise stripped of its nationalist sentiments and instead captures an

alternative sense of home. With the train whistle, Perfecto (a kind of step-father for

10 In contrast, Moya insists that Under the Feet of Jesus be read alongside The Grapes of Wrath because of its realist forms of descriptions. This argument is taken up as well in Greisbach’s dissertation. Both read The Grapes of Wrath and Under the Feet of Jesus as underscoring a similar political agenda through their realist narrative strategies.

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Estrella) longs for his past, and for his dead wife Mercedes. His is not a geographical home, but a temporal home, a place in his memory. Alejo thinks suddenly of his grandmother in Texas. She has planted in him the dream of upward mobility through education. The train reminds him of home by reminding him of her, and home seems like a hopeful place of the future, representing his youth in contrast to Perfecto’s age.

Estrella too longs for home. She follows the train tracks to a baseball game, where she sits watching home plate. The tracks of the train remind her of her mother’s caesarean scar (59). Her sense of home links deeply to her commitment to her family. The railroad tracks define her life’s path as “she stood, not knowing where they ended or began” (59). This sense of home resonates with the continuity of identity linked to the earth and geological time that Alejo expresses only pages before. Alejo “loved stones and the history of stones because he believed himself to be a solid mass of boulder thrust out of the earth and not some particle lost in infinite and cosmic space. With a simple touch of a hand and a hungry wonder of his connection to it all, he not only became a part of the earth’s history, but would exist as the boulders did, for eternity” (52). He finds his identity through his connection to other people, his connection to the earth, and his connection to history, a world that existed before him and will exist after him. It is this understanding that gives him his faith and his understanding of his place in the world.

When Estrella views the railroad tracks she embraces a similar worldview.

The baseball game with its “Destination: Home Plate” contrasts with the never- ending train tracks that comfort Estrella (60). Within the novel, the baseball game symbolizes a white America, a fenced in suburbia from which Estrella is excluded. The impossibility of access to this world for Estrella and her family is captured with a

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reference to her younger brothers: “Her brother Arnulfo had talked about playing

baseball. Ricky wanted to fly” (59). The novel depicts Arnulfo’s desire to play baseball

as similarly ludicrous to Ricky’s desire to fly. The text reinforces the impossibility of

Estrella’s inclusion in the suburban world suggested by the baseball game when she

recoils at the spotlights that brighten the field at dusk. In the “sharp white lights,” she

sees only the border patrol (59).11 She grips her knife, panics, and flees. The scene

renders her an alien in her own country: “She tried to remember which side she was on

and which side of the wire mesh she was safe in” (60). This wire mesh refers to “the

mesh of the fence” of the baseball diamond, but it also suggests the border fence (59).

Before the spotlights go on, Estrella appears entangled in a suburban or pastoral

American fantasy. The night is practically perfect, “the skies like whipped clouds with

linings of ripe nectarine red” (58). The interruption to her pastoral fantasy, the machine

in her garden, is the border patrol. As she worries whether the crowd can see her, the

presence of the white lights reminds Estrella that she can only be accepted into that white

world of the baseball diamond when she remains invisible.12

In this critical moment in the text, Petra articulates her daughter Estrella’s rights

as rooted in the ground, rather than rooted in legal citizenship status. When Estrella

returns home from the baseball diamond in a panic, Petra tells her:

Don’t run scared. You stay there and look them in the eye. Don’t let them make you feel you did a crime for picking the vegetables they’ll be eating for dinner. If they stop you, if they try to pull you into the green vans, you tell them the birth certificates are under the feet of Jesus, just tell them. The mother paused . . . Tell

11 This echoes the harsh “white light” of the “white sun” that punishes her in the fields (49).

12 Viramontes describes the hot sun not as yellow, but as white, like an onion. She describes the harsh white lights of the spot and the imitation white of the cotton. Whiteness in the text links to the privileged (and fake) world from which Estrella is excluded. It is both a harsh force, like the sun, for whom she sweats, and the force that renders her invisible.

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them que tienes una madre aquí. You are not an orphan, and she pointed a red finger to the earth, Aquí (63).

While she provides practical advice to Estrella, urging her to use her birth certificate to prove her belonging, she remains concerned with Estrella’s sense of self. Petra urges her daughter to reject the discourses of criminality to which she is subjected. She instructs

Estrella to refuse to participate in the part scripted for her. If the railroad tracks remind

Estrella of home by suggesting her mother’s scarred womb, Petra insists that Estrella’s true mother is the land upon which she works. Petra defends Estrella’s belonging through her relationship to the land. It is from this sense of place that Estrella’s political epiphany occurs and her sense of identity consolidates.

Throughout the text, Viramontes emphasizes the primacy of place in connecting the text’s disparate characters. The presence of animals, plants, and natural forces such as wind, water, and rock bring the characters and the land together to allow Estrella to redefine home. For example, birds often fly out of the view of one character into the perspective of the next:

Alejo lifted the sack and flipped it over his shoulder. His high-top tennis shoes disturbed the leafhoppers who jumped out of the way and his shoes snapped the twigs and molten leaves and a few birds flew out from under the fallen branches of the eucalyptus. Their wings spread then glided over Estrella as she gripped the handle of the blackened bucket she was removing from the fire (43).

In the text, animals, plants, and phenomena like wind and rain connect the characters to each other. Place, like the rocks Alejo loves, connects people to their communities. This sense of place motivates and justifies Estrella’s political action. While the connections among members of natural and social communities highlight an identity shaped by place, the characters are also brought together through the shared toxicity of their environment.

Repeated references are made to the polluted water found in the rivers and streams

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running through the novel’s pages. We are told “Estrella had heard through the grapevine about the water, and knew Big Mac the Foreman lied about the pesticides not spilling into the ditch; but the water seemed clear and cold and irresistible on such a hot day” (32). The insects falling from the sky after the pesticide spraying link the reader both to Alejo’s fall after being sprayed along with the insects and to Perfecto’s fear of his own death, as he watches the insects fall. The environment to which these characters are connected, and which connects the characters to each other is not the pure “wild” nature of much naturalist writing. It is a mixed environment — modified by humans, yet not fully within their control; beautiful, yet dangerous. What Viramontes depicts is not always the toxicity of polluted skies in an urban environment, but the unseen toxicity contained within a clear stream of water on a hot day.

It is only when Estrella realizes these connections, the way in which a shared environment binds all of the characters together, that she feels empowered to take action.

The moment of direct action celebrated in the text is Estrella’s challenge to a white nurse, who works in an office where everything is “too white” like an “imitation” (136).13 This nurse attempts to charge the family for suggesting Alejo be taken to a hospital for treatment. Estrella fights back with a crow bar. She harms only property and she succeeds in having her family’s money returned to her. She uses this money to pay for the gas to take Alejo to the hospital. When Estrella threatens the nurse, she remembers

Alejo’s words:

She remembered the tar pits. Energy money, the fossilized bones of energy matter. How bones made oil and oil made gasoline. The oil was made from their

13 The text does not mark the race of any non-white characters. Last names suggest both Asian American and Latino workers in the fields. White workers in the field and other white characters in the text are named as white. Thus Viramontes challenges conventions that leave whiteness unmarked.

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bones, and it was their bones that kept the nurse’s car from not halting on some highway, kept her on her way to Daisyfield to pick up her boys at six. It was their bones that kept the air conditioning in the cars humming, that kept them moving on the long dotted line on the map. Their bones. Why couldn’t the nurse see that? Estrella had figured it out: the nurse owed them as much as they owed her (148).

Through Alejo’s stories, Estrella comes to understand a larger economic system that places her labor in relation to people she will never meet, those who eat the produce she picks. She understands the common exploitation of fossilized fuel for energy and her energy exploited for labor. In a novel that repeatedly emphasizes the importance of place, that is, Estrella takes action after recognizing her own place in the system. Her right to political voice results from an environmental analysis that incorporates geology alongside economics. It is with this perspective that Estrella finds her voice, in a novel filled with the fear of losing one’s voice.14

In Viramontes’s novel, the characters may not own the land upon which they

labor, but they redefine the landscape around them as home. Their political belonging

exists through this redefinition of home rather than through processes of property and the

critique of consumption the novel offers. The characters become politically empowered.

As denizens, they demand not only equal treatment but equal voice. At the novel’s end,

Estrella speaks through her heart, rather than with her tongue. She provides hope in the

way she calls out to those who are lost. In “summon[ing] home all those who strayed,”

the text suggests Estrella will help others recognize their true place in the systems which

exploit them (176). In Viramontes’s vision, neither home nor family suggest nation.

Instead they serve as reminder that we are all rooted to longer and larger histories through

14 Alejo’s sickness is personified by his inability to talk. Both Estrella and Petra constantly worry about children born without mouths.

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our shared relationship to earth and land. Viramontes’s novel “point[s] a red finger to the

earth, Aquí” (63).

Earth Knows No Borders: Intersections of Environment and Immigration

While Viramontes’s environmental justice frame may suggest an easy alliance between

immigrant rights advocates and environmentalists, this has been far from the case.

Throughout 2008, anti-immigrant groups ran a series of print advertisements in The New

York Times and The Nation.15 These advertisements claim that undocumented

immigrants threatened the environment within the United States. They employ the

aesthetics conventionally associated with media campaigns launched by organizations

such as Forest Ethics and Rainforest Action Network.16 In one of these color

advertisements, bulldozers threaten ancient forests. Yet the text blames immigrants

rather than corporations. Such advertisements define the environment nationally rather

than globally. The American wilderness can be separated from the rest of the planet.

Indeed the advertisements warn that the American environment is in need of protection

from the rest of the planet, which is depicted as flooding into the U.S. to destroy the

American wilderness. This advertisement equates bulldozers with immigrants: “Schools

and emergency rooms bursting at the seams, and public infrastructure under stress.

Property taxes on the rise. Yet the bulldozers keep on coming.” The advertisement

claims that increased immigration threatens an American way of life. The connection

offered between bulldozers and bursting emergency rooms makes little sense without the

15 These groups called themselves the Leadership Team for Long Range Population-Immigration-Resource Planning (“Leadership Team”). The advertisements can be viewed on the website of Californians for Population Stabilization.

16 Recent advertisements can be accessed off of their websites. See Rainforest Action Network’s “Media Center” and Forest Ethic’s “Press Room.”

359

line that follows, “The Pew Hispanic Research Center projects 82% of the country’s

massive population increase, between 2005 and 2050, will result from immigration.” In

the logic such advertisements employ, immigration taxes public services and promotes

the use of bulldozers, destroying America’s natural and cultural beauty. The

advertisements are paid for by America’s Leadership Team for Long-Range Population-

Immigration-Resource Planning, a coalition including well-known anti-immigrant

organizations such as Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).17 In such a framework, population control becomes code for border patrol. Protecting nature becomes tantamount to protecting nation.18

Anti-immigrant advertisements exploit the racial ideologies that remain latent within the U.S. glorification of the wilderness. The wilderness often operates in the contemporary U.S. as an area of purity and innocence opposed to the corrupt and polluted

American city. This dichotomy racializes the American landscape. For instance, the city becomes associated with African Americans and the poor while the wilderness becomes

the proving ground for elite whites. These elite whites must protect the wilderness from

poor rural whites and poor black city-dwellers alike.19 Anti-immigrant advertisements depict the American nation as a godly wilderness threatened by the polluting bodies of non-white aliens. In the 1960s, fears of overpopulation commingled with racist fears

17 The Southern Poverty Law Center classified FAIR as a hate group. See “Intelligence Report: Hate Group Numbers Up by 48% Since 2000.”

18 Adamson discusses this in reference to the refuse left by border crossers in Arizona. She explains, “The Border Patrol’s strategy, then, risks harms to the environment by channeling migration through a targeted area while, at the same time, it wields the environment itself as a weapon in the battle to stop illegal migration in the United States” (234). Adamson argues that the Arizona desert becomes a “sacrifice zone,” falsely perceived as uninhabited. Locals are excluded from the decision to have their region become the barrier against immigration.

19 See Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness”; Evans; and Kosek (142-182).

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over the rise of anti-colonial struggles globally by peoples of color.20 Such ideologies

remain salient for contemporary anti-immigrant activists who link racial pollution of the

national body to the pollution of the national landscape. Moreover, as the battle in the

Sierra Club over the 1998 anti-immigration initiative, "Comprehensive Population

Policy," (which the membership defeated) demonstrates, the issue is not merely anti-

immigrant activists masquerading as environmentalists. Some environmentalists are

vehemently anti-immigrant and some anti-immigrant activists are motivated by their

environmentalist concerns.21

Yet the contemporary relationship between immigration and environmentalism

has not been negotiated solely by those with a xenophobic agenda. Radical environmentalists have increasingly sought common cause with immigrant rights organizations.22 For example, the Earth First! The Radical Environmental Journal ran a

photograph taken at one of the massive immigrant rights marches in May 2006 in which a

banner was held up proclaiming “Earth Knows No Borders / Earth First! for Immigrant

Rights.”23 The decision of Earth First! activists to participate in the immigrant march and to do so while using the name Earth First! suggests a conscious rejection of the perceived

20 For example, see Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb.

21 For example, see Kosek.

22 In 1990, Earth First! famously split into two camps aligned with Dave Foreman and Judi Bari. Foreman wanted a wilderness only focus for the organization, while Bari aligned with tendencies in the movement to see unity among environmentalism, feminism, anti-racism and a broader social justice agenda. Yet such tensions in the movement have never been entirely erased, as can be observed through attending the annual national organizing conferences or in the letters to the editor section of the Earth First! The Radical Environmental Journal. See a discussion of the split, see Lee’s Earth First!: Environmental Apocalypse; Scarce (88-95); and Zakin (358-361). The philosophical differences become clear comparing the published writings of Bari with those of Foreman.

23 See “Earth Knows No Borders.”

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antagonism between environmentalism and immigration.24 Such a framework presents

humans as natural migrants rejecting the state’s claim to decide who is naturally part of

the nation-state and who can be made natural, through naturalization. This is captured in

the points of unity that the radical climate justice organization Rising Tide North

America penned: “We reject the militarization of borders and the anti-immigrant policies

that criminalize communities here in the United States and elsewhere. We seek to create a

space that exposes the cycles of displacement, from colonial land theft to economically

forced migration, from gentrification to ICE raids.”25 In this statement, undocumented

immigrants have a similar right to land as indigenous peoples. Like residents of

gentrifying neighborhoods, immigrants have a natural right to their community.

Immigrants, documented and undocumented, belong where they live and work. A

segment of the radical environmental movement now imagines the state’s cycles of

displacement through genocide, displacement, and deportation as the unnatural action.

The No Borders Camp held November 7-11, 2007 exemplifies this emergent

borderlands eco-philosophy. The No Borders Camp blends a radical analysis of

immigration and citizenship with radical environmentalism and bioregionalism. The

camp was held on both sides of the border between the United States and Mexico, and the

camp proclaimed itself part of “Turtle Island,” a reference popularized as an indigenous

name for North America. The website for the No Border Camp explains it to be “a

24 In particular, see the following articles printed over the last five years in the Earth First! The Radical Environmental Journal: Panagioti’s “Down with Borders! Up With Spring.” The article attempts to answer the question, “Where does the radical ecology movement stand on immigration and border militarization issues today? What do the recent immigrant mobilizations mean for Earth First!?”; Panagioti Evangelos Nasios Tsolkas’s “¡La Tierra Sin Fronteras!” ; Non Servium’s “Resistance against the Wall: A Report from the No Borders Camp”; NB!EF! “No Borders! Earth First! Throws Down.”; and Ben Pachano’s “The World Looks Different Down Here: an EF!’ers view from the Border.”

25 Northeast Climate Confluence, Points of Unity. See website for Northeast Climate Convergence.

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temporary autonomous zone, networking forum and manifestation of resistance against

the border regime and its concurrent violence against people and the planet.” Thus anti-

racist and ecologically-oriented anarchists refuse to see the nation-state’s lines as

legitimate. Instead they focus on a cross-border unity where people, animals, and plants

refuse the state’s authority in their illegal acts of border-crossing.

Mainstream environmentalists are making such connections as well. The fight

against the border wall in Arizona offers one such example. The Arizona chapter of the

Sierra Club currently has a Border Policy Campaign and contends that U.S. border

polices devastate fragile ecosystems. 26 They use ecology and a bioregionalist philosophy

to argue against the constructed border wall between the United States and Mexico.

Specifically, the group opposes the wall’s effect on migrant species – animals and plants

that thrive based on their ability to cross borders. They depict the region as a natural

migrant route for non-human species, without addressing whether human migration in the same region can be called “natural” or appropriate. The Sierra Club’s documentary Wild

Versus Wall highlights footage of the Border Patrol ripping through desert on Off-Road

Vehicles (OHVs). These vehicles are currently high on the list of concerns of wilderness

focused traditional environmental organizations as they result in erosion and increase the

presence of invasive species, particularly when OHVs do not stick to established trails.27

The video portrays the Border Patrol as outlaws, part of a sagebrush rebellion, threatening the sanctity of federal environmental protections. The video is replete with

26 See Arizona Sierra Club Border Justice Campaign.

27 Moreover, as Sutter argues, the wilderness movement originated in opposition to automobiles. The Wilderness Act specifically defines wilderness as a place without automobiles. OHVs provide the machine in the garden effect but also specifically appear as the threatening automobile in the wilderness.

363

images of animals desperately trying to cross the border and stopped by the border wall.

The animals are depicted as caged in, emphasizing the wall as an unnatural construction.

Other environmentalist websites warn that the border wall threatens the population recovery of Sonoran pronghorns, ocelots, and jaguars. Fascinatingly, campaigns to protect such cross-border species have engaged environmental organizations from both

Mexico and the United States.28 Yet, these organizations ignore the implications of the

border wall for human immigrants in their propaganda. Websites, leaflets, and media

statements often state that the border wall will be ineffective as a way to control human

migration, while devastating animal migration. Wild Versus Wall calls for the repeal of the section of the Real ID Act of 2005 that allows environmental regulations to be swept

away in the building of the wall, rather than the repeal of the act as a whole.29 The

websites and documentaries make no call for comprehensive immigration reform. From

these materials it would appear as if the organizations placed human immigration as

secondary to bio-centric concerns. They depict the border policy as flawed only in so

much as it negatively impacts animals. In doing so, these organizations open themselves

up to the critique that they care more for the welfare of snakes, frogs, and antelopes than

for humans.

Border environmental justice organizations offer a framework that breaks the

limitations of the environmental movement’s wilderness perspective. Such campaigns

28 The campaign for the protection of the jaguar, which has only recently been rediscovered in the border region is a prime example of this collaboration. Interestingly, the “solution” pressed for by U.S. and Mexican environmental groups privileges the creation of a jaguar sanctuary within Mexico. See Northern Jaguar Project.

29 The Real ID Act of 2005 mandates federal standards for driver’s licenses and state identifications, making it impossible for undocumented immigrants to legally receive the government identifications necessary to open bank accounts. The act makes undocumented workers even more economically vulnerable.

364

frequently contest the threat of toxins to human communities in the borderlands.

Organizations in both the United States and Mexico highlight the toxins maquiladoras

produce as they take advantages of NAFTA de-regulation. Such campaigns examine the

exposure to toxins on the job as well as in living spaces. The Coalition for Justice in the

Maquiladora is a tri-national organization working in Mexico, the United States, and

Canada that recognizes the rights of communities to live and work in just and safe

environments. The SouthWest Organizing Project (SWOP) applies a similar mission to their grassroots work in New Mexico. SWOP calls for people of color in New Mexico to

“take back” the state from “mining, cattle ranching, timber, nuclear weapons development and now ‘high tech’ electronics” industries that threaten the health and livelihood of local communities. Similarly, David N. Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park in

The Silicon Valley of Dreams place immigrant workers at the center of environmental justice struggles against toxics in the high-tech workplaces. As the grassroots organizations they examine make manifest, environmental justice struggles over immigration and the human rights of immigrant workers often take place far from any physical borderlands.

Environmental justice organizers, along with certain radical environmentalists, would agree with Petra when she tells Estrella, “You are not an orphan.” They, like Petra, would see Estrella as a child of the earth, belonging to the land as a denizen, rather than a citizen. They would agree with Luisa Moreno that immigrant and migrant communities belong where they live and where they work. Indeed, the struggles of such organizations testify to the continuity between contemporary Immigration and Custom Enforcement

365

(ICE) raids, the “repatriations” of Mexican Americans in the 1930s, and the conquest and colonization of native lands that mark the present and past of the United States.

The Ghost of Tom Joad

In “The Deportation Terror,” Rachel Ida Buff discusses the 2007 ICE raid in New

Bedford, in which 361 workers, mostly Mayan, Honduran, and El Salvadorian women, were detained. She connects the raid and others like it, to the deportation of Luisa

Moreno and other foreign-born radicals in the early Cold War. She argues that the state operates in part by “instilling terror in people potentially subject to forcible removal by the state” (525). Deportations operate as a form of social control that affirms the nation through the threat of statelessness. In this context, Luisa Moreno’s deportation fits into a pattern of expelling foreign-born community leaders in order to discipline larger immigrant communities. Today’s deportations operate similarly. Buff reads the increase in ICE raids nationally as a response to the immigrant mobilizations of 2006 and 2007.

For Buff the raids operate as an attempt to silence the community through terror.

Indeed, struggles around deportations (including the new sanctuary movement) directly engage the question of who has a right to live in a nation-state and under what conditions individuals and communities will be allowed to remain in that nation-state.

They raise the issue of belonging – not just to a nation – but to a place. Borders identify the national identity of a natural landscape. The laws and ideologies that operate in each nation shape who is allowed to own the land and who is allowed to work the land. Land remains vital to the definition of the nation state, and nature remains central to national identity. Race, class, and gender mutually constitute the identities that grant one status as

“naturally” belonging to a nation or determine “unnatural” and alien status.

366

Contemporary immigration debates frequently employ pictures of migrant farm

workers. Indeed, the image of the migrant farm worker is now ubiquitous as a symbol of

the “illegal alien.” Agricultural labor remains central to the relationship between nature

and nation. The farmer remains the ideal American citizen, even as the number of

farmers steeply decline. The farm worker operates as much as an icon of the non-citizen

today as the slave did during the founding of the nation-state (although in astoundingly

different contextual ways). Those who work the land remain outside of the American nation in dominant ideological understandings. Writers, advocates, artists and

intellectuals continue to contest and transform the terms of the debate as much today as in the 1930s, as any sampling of border images in art reveals.30

In 1995, Bruce Springsteen released the album The Ghost of Tom Joad. The title

track directly connects the image of the destitute Joads to contemporary images of

undocumented immigrants. The Nature of Citizenship bears witness to the presence of a

different form of haunting. It testifies to the refusal of farm workers and their advocates to be silenced. Our conceptions of nation and nature in agriculture today are not just the result of dominant societal forces but reflect as well the voices and struggles of those who worked the land, the farmers and farm workers who contributed in material and cultural ways to the nation, whether or not the state legitimated their belonging. While agricultural land ownership still consolidates white citizenship in political and popular rhetoric, writers from Luisa Moreno to Helena María Viramontes have not been silent or silenced. Their texts offer an alternative to the politics of citizenship by embracing a more inclusive politics of denizenship.

30 Fox’s The Fence and the River offers just such a sampling.

367

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