California’s Harvest Gypsies: Race and the Reproduction of Colonial Power in the New Deal Era

Abstract

This study challenges the prevailing narrative that agriculturally-bound southwestern migrants entering California’s rural valleys during the 1930s were marginalized socio-politically as a consequence of the Great Depression, antiunionism in Western agriculture, and popular counteraction amongst rural conservatives to the liberal tenets of the New Deal. Although resource scarcity, dominant class anxieties regarding the specter of communism, and the paranoia of government overreach, undoubtedly informed local perceptions of southwestern migrant otherness, they alone insufficiently account for the discourses of inferiority that accompanied this episode of domestic migration in United States history, let alone the juridico-political measures deployed by California’s sovereign authority to deprive domestic migrants of basic civic considerations as persons under the law. As this study suggests, such perspectives are historically inconsistent: discounting the proclivity of California’s sovereign authority to maximize industrial farm labor’s vulnerability as a caste through the withholding of certain juridico-political protections as full and equal citizens under the law from subject groups believed to be Other. Alternatively, this study employs a colonial modernity framework that suggests that the Great Depression and the New Deal did not cause the state’s rural establishment to treat southwestern migrants as Other in any unique sense, but merely provided the political terrain necessary to redirect well-established colonial forms of dominance traditionally reserved for California’s non-white exogenous subject groups towards Okies as the region’s most recent corps of imported labor.