Dust Bowl Migrants

Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).

Peon.

The word is used today casually, as in, "You don't want to be a peon do you? Go to college!" Or, "You work for the State Department?" "Yes, but I'm just a lowly peon, filing reports."

But peonage--debt servitude--is a real labor arrangement, and southern white landowners have used it for most of the twentieth century. Peons were kept against their will at a job by (often inflated) debts to their employers. Sometimes the employer would pay a fine to get a black person out of jail, on the condition that the convict work for him to pay off the debt. Other times immigrants were lured to the South (or to California, it seems) by promises of steady, well-paying employment, only to find that they incurred debts in their passage, accommodations, and supplies that they could never pay off. Most Southern states had laws that made it lawful to imprison and fine someone who broke their labor contract by fleeing, and since local law-enforcement often did the planters' bidding, they would simply turn over the captured laborers to their employers to do with them as they wished.

Peonage was little more than slavery; indeed, Pete Daniel argues, slavery set the stage for peonage: "An economy based on labor-intensive agriculture and extractive industries, a large African-American population, and a heritage of slavery, violence, and discrimination furnished a context for the continuation of slavery in another guise" (ix). They were, Daniel says, the poorest of the poor, existing "at the core of concentric circles of oppression, their entire world circumscribed by exploiters" (19).

The Shadow of Slavery draws primarily on Justice Department records of peonage complaints and prosecutions to paint a detailed portrait of southern involuntary servitude. Again and again, the institution survives public exposure by northern periodicals and legal attacks by U.S. attorneys and civil rights workers. Even the great flood of 1927, though exposing the system of radical inequality and oppression that dominated the Mississippi Delta, failed to raise enough public outcry over peonage to stop it. As late as the 1960s, peonage continued. Why? Acquiescent communities. Obsequious law-enforcement officials. Powerful planters. Powerless workers. Peonage survived in part because, Daniel writes, "The idea was unbearable and consequently unthinkable. Its stench of medieval bondage or Latin American oppression created security for it" (171). But it also survived because local custom allowed gross inequalities of power to persist.

Inequality this great--once indebted, poor blacks and immigrants had virtually no recourse, legal or otherwise--corrupts both the victims and victimizers. I don't believe in absolute equality for all people. Some people will be richer, some will be poorer. But a system like peonage takes advantage of the sinfulness of human hearts. When given the opportunity, people will exploit one another. It seems like our job--government and citizen alike--should be to make that a lot harder.

I wonder where the Christians were in this story. At one point, Daniel mentions a 1939 condemnation of peonage by the Georgia Baptists--was there more activity like this (181)? I fear the answer must be, not much, or there would have been a much bigger stink over the institution. As it was, peonage remained mostly invisible.

I also wonder if something like peonage continues to exist? Daniel makes the interesting observation that "Migrant workers . . . have replaced sharecroppers on the bottom rung of the southern agricultural ladder," citing a 1983 hearing before the U.S. House committee on Labor Standards that "produced vivid accounts of migrant abuses, including peonage" (xi).

A church with its imagination alive to the Old Testament ethical injunctions with regard to land and debt should not have ignored peonage systems. We should be advocates for debt-relief and (more) even distribution of resources.

Finally, a parting shot. This kind of evidence is why I cannot agree when someone says, "Slavery ended almost 150 years ago; we don't owe them [African-Americans] anything." The simple fact is that slavery did not end 150 years ago.

How music can document a revolution, in a land where every even has a song.

Very moving.

Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970, Studies in Rural Culture, ed. Jack Temple Kirby (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

Matt Garcia engages a number of historiographies with this study: Chicano/a studies, labor history, (sub)urban history, agricultural/environmental history, and California history. And as he makes clear in his introduction, he means his work to be intensely theoretical. Following Robin D.G. Kelley's Race Rebels, Garcia wants to broaden the definition of politics to include domestic life and popular culture; although few of his characters engaged in labor strikes or overt political protests, he sees their actions--developing their separate colonias, going to dance halls, acting in plays, and writing newspapers--as inescapably political.

To make this argument, he draws on Antonio Gramsci's concept of "wars of position" to describe the resistance strategies of his Mexican and Mexican American workers. Rather than wage a "war of maneuver" on their employers/oppressors, workers in L.A.'s citrus belt attempted to build "counter-hegemonic alliances" with other oppressed groups. Chicana lemon packers, for example, could petition for better treatment or wages as women, workers, or Mexican-Americans (6).

Less central to his argument, but to my mind more interesting, he employs Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies to argue that landscapes are anything but neutral. Rather, "their form and process of creation often possess keys to understanding the type of social relations that exist within a given society" (4).

Garcia aims to do all this by telling "how the formation of the citrus empire and its attendant worker settlements laid the foundation for the expanded and segmented landscape known as 'Greater Los Angeles'" (5). Like others, he describes the Jeffersonian ideals of the citrus growers, observing their delight in creating a society that was both rural without being backward and urban without being congested. In this sense, he follows journalist and activist Carey McWilliams' work very closely (McWilliams quotes are the epigraphs for each chapter).

Though the story is familiar, Garcia's treatment is refreshingly detailed, especially in his narration of George Chaffey's Ontario settlement, a magnificent attempt to unite ten-acre family farms with the latest technology to build communities. In contrast to other agricultural industries in the midwest and elsewhere, which were being consolidated into larger and larger farms-and perhaps, too, in contrast to the pellagra-ridden, share-cropping South--the "citriscape" promised a civilized future for America. This vision often aligned with eugenicist views of the era. As one commentator put it, the most pressing problem of the time was "how to rearrange our social and economic system so that more of the superior member of our race will stay on the land" and reproduce (34).

This hope for civilization was, of course, undercut by citriculture's reliance on foreign (dirty!), cheap labor, who contrary to American rags-to-riches mythology, would never enjoy the "ideal country life" themselves. As Garcia rightly notes, very few agrarians of the time recognized that Jefferson's vision "promoted material equality and discouraged social stratification" (21). What happens, then, when living the agrarian ideal demanded that others remain as a permanent, nomadic, laboring class?

Actually, the life cycle of most citrus ranches meant that year-round labor was the rule. And so permanent settlements of Mexican American farmworkers developed throughout Southern California, some founded by citrus growers in an attempt to control and Americanize their employees, others springing up through the immigrant community's own efforts. The latter became the basis for Los Angeles' famously "polynucleated" landscape, a city of suburbs if there ever was one.

Garcia celebrates these semi-autonomous colonias (which often boasted their own churches, locally-owned stores, and mutual aid societies) as he celebrates Chicano handiwork throughout the book. The efforts of whites to "uplift" the foreign newcomers, on the other hand, he typically condemns as misguided at best, oppressive at worst. Imperfect as these efforts at intercultural understanding were, however, in the end Garcia holds them up as models for our disintegrating, identity-politics world.

For me, the takeaways of the book are two: first, that immigrant farm labor stories must be set carefully in their geographical contexts. Where are the immigrant communities located? How are they arranged differently than owner-sponsored housing? How do immigrants and laborers view the landscape differently than owners? Presumably they see fruit trees somewhat less romantically. But you should find out if you can.

Second, the immigrant labor force can be very differentiated and complex. In the citrus groves, there were Mexican Americans, braceros (contract workers), and undocumented workers; in the packinghouses, women labored under male supervisors. They did not necessarily share much beyond the shop floor.

Dori Sanders, Clover (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1990).

The owner of the oldest black-owned peach orchard in the South (the nation) is also a writer. Her books, Clover and Her Own Place draw on her agricultural vocation. In Clover, the peach orchard weaves in and out of the story.

Clover is the daughter of the newly married widower Gaten Hill. Hill dies in the beginning of the novel, leaving Clover alone with her new (white) stepmother Sara Kate, and her uncle Jim Ed and aunt Everleen. It is a story of coming to terms with death and abandonment, as well with the racial and cultural differences between her and Sara Kate. But Round Hill, SC is peach country, and the orchard business remains a backdrop throughout.

At her father's funeral, for example, Clover describes the strangeness she feels for her new stepmother and goes off on a tangent about farmworkers:

She's been my stepmother for almost four days now and all I know for sure about her is, she's not a Mexican. I can spot a Mexican a mile away. Every summer if there's a big peach crop the migrant workers flood Round Hill. We have peaches, but not enough to need Mexicans.
Chase Porter brings them in all the time. He couldn't get al those peaches picked without them. He's one of the biggest peach growers in South Carolina.

This Chase Porter and his relationship with Clover's family creates an intriguing window into the world of peach growers, large and small. He turns up later in the book as a suitor for Clover's white stepmother Sara Kate, and he has a reputation for great benevolence as the leading peach man in the area (even though Clover's uncle Jim Ed interprets his advances as pure greed. "A white man," he says, "never gets enough land or money" (137).

The Hills appear to get most of their money through their peach stand, and Clover spends most of her summer days there with her aunt and uncle, where all kinds of people stop for peaches.

Jim Ed is so worried about this peach crop I don't want to put another frown on his face. It wouldn't have any place to go, anyhow. His face is all filled up. A late spring freeze caused the peaches to have split-seeds. That means that once the seed of a peach freezes, the peach will split wide open as soon as it starts to get ripe. When customers complain about the way peaches look, Aunt Everleen will tell them right quick, "That's the Lord's work." It's a real slow day at the stand. Everleen jumps to her feet when a brand new pickup pulls up. "I see you have Elberta peaches on your sign," he says. "Yes, we do," Everleen brags. "It's the finest canning peach there is. Del Monte cans Elbertas. Says so right on the can." "Oh, I was wanting some to eat," the customer says. "It's the finest eating peach there is," Everleen put in quickly She rubs one on her big fluffy shirt, and takes a big bite. "This is truly the best peach I ever tasted." She stuffs the money he gives her into her pocket. He is a physicist down at the nuclear plant. I put his peck of peaches in his truck.

Clover is a very funny book, not least because of the culinary differences between Sara Kate and the Round Hill black community. Sara Kate cooks vegetables in water, without a speck of grease, and makes watery grits. She even puts jello on the turnip greens. After lunch one day, Clover narrates,

Sara Kate finally offers iced tea and cookies. I don't have to see them to know she will get those fancy paper doilies and those fancy, high-priced cookies that don't taste worth a dime. That woman can spend more in a grocery store than anybody I've ever seen in my life. And we still never have anything good to eat.

Leon Fink, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

"To understand the motives and behavior of Third World Workers--either on their home turf or as immigrant recruits to more developed metropoles--we need to fit them into a global political economy of competitive markets, changing technology, and a managerial logic of labor control. Yet we must also recognize them as agents who continue to draw on local wisdom in advancing the interests of family, friendships, and community even in a faraway land." (5)

So in the case of the Morganton Maya, Aguacatecos and Chalchitecos found a new unity; immigrants thought of themselves nationally, linguistically, or by municipality, but also found themselves categorized as Hispanics, and so learned that identity. Meanwhile, Morganton changed in its religious institutions, educational and other social services, and in the kind of activism expected of workers. And the immigrants' home communities in Guatemala changed, too, becoming more Americanized, sometimes more prosperous, sometimes more corrupt socially.

This is an exhaustive (the number of interviews Fink conducted is dizzying) look at the growing phenomenon of the "nuevo new south" as it appeared in Morganton, North Carolina. And though Fink is primarily concerned with the ramifications for the labor movement, he is not blind to the importance of religion in the lives of his subjects, or to the culture of the South.

A result perhaps of my southern upbringing, the role of labor unions has been somewhat lost on me until recently (despite the fact that I somewhat reluctantly joined the Kroger union for part of a summer). So for me, the most interesting chapter was Chapter Six ("Changing Places") which describes the cultural adjustments of the immigrants and their senders. Some were "birds of passage" who identified almost entirely with their home country and planned to return there once they had enough money. Others (especially children) assimilated into the host culture. Others developed a kind of transnational identity, using the tools of the global economy to cultivate a pan-Mayan movement.
The intertwining themes of globalization and community receive their fullest treatment here.

In general I wanted to know more about the attitudes of local citizens, especially about the racial and cultural dynamics. What about the rednecks and African-Americans? What did they think about this union idea? Did they think the Guatemalans were especially equipped for unionization?

I also wanted to know more about immigrants attitudes to their physical environment: the land, the climate, the mountains, the agriculture. Did many of them try to plant gardens? Would they if given the opportunity?

The idea that the Guatemalan Maya reacted differently to poor working conditions of the global economy because of their communal, traditional wisdom, which had in turn been shaped by the global economy -- this is fascinating, and important. Understanding the home places of the new immigrant labor pool could help us engage it more thoughtfully.

So, I don't entirely understand what he's saying, but I think it's important.

The Hand That Signed the Paper Felled a City

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.