The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl

by Sarah D. Wald

Overview

The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America’s natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, many novels, plays, movies, and songs have dramatized the brutality and hardships of working in the California fields. Little scholarship has focused on what these cultural productions tell us about who belongs in America, and in what ways they are allowed to belong. In The Nature of California, Sarah Wald analyzes this legacy and its consequences by examining the paradoxical representations of California farmers and farmworkers from the Dust Bowl migration to present-day movements for food justice and immigrant rights.

Analyzing fiction, nonfiction, news coverage, activist literature, memoirs, and more, Wald gives us a new way of thinking through questions of national belonging by probing the relationships among race, labor, and landownership. Bringing together ecocriticism and critical race theory, she pays special attention to marginalized groups, examining how Japanese American journalists, Filipino workers, United Farm Workers members, and contemporary immigrants-rights activists, among others, pushed back against the standard narratives of landownership and citizenship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295995670
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	05/02/2016
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Sarah D. Wald is assistant professor of English and environmental studies at the University of Oregon.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction "To the Farmer in All of Us": Agricultural Citizenship as Racial Gatekeeping 3

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 27

Chapter 2 From Farmer to Farmworker: Representing the Dust Bowl Migration 53

Chapter 3 The "Clouded. Citizenship" of Rooted Families: Japanese American Agrarianism in Rafu Shimpo, Kashu Mainichi, and Treadmill 75

Chapter 4 "The Earth Trembled for Days": Denaturalizing Racial Citizenship in Hisaye Yamamoto's Fiction 102

Chapter 5 "The American Earth": Reclaiming Land and Nation in America Is in the Heart and Strangers in Our Fields 131

Chapter 6 "Elixirs of Death": The United Farm Workers and the Modern Environmental Movement 156

Chapter 7 Fit Citizens and Poisoned Farmworkers: Consumer Citizenship in the Alternative Food Movement 190

Epilogue "Tienes una Madre Aqui": Environmentalism and Migration in the Twenty-First Century 207

Notes 221

Bibliography 255

Index 275

What People are Saying About This

Douglas Cazaux Sackman

"Wald skillfully shows how social constructions of race and citizenship have been intertwined with constructions of nature in representations of agriculture in California."

Matthew Garcia

"By focusing on the work of Mexican, Japanese, and Filipino writers and artists, Wald attributes not only labor but environmental conscientiousness to those who have borne the burden of exploitation in California fields. Here we witness people of color fighting back in the most eloquent way possible—art and the written word."