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.
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