Migrant Citizenship: Race, Rights, and Reform in the U.S. Farm Labor Camp Program

"Martinez Matsuda takes us to the late 1930s, early 1940s, when the US Farm Security Administration comes in to manage labor camps. There’s a moment when the lives of migrant workers become better because of government regulation and intervention. Martinez Matsuda takes us to labor camps across the US. These labor camps look very different from what they looked like in the late 1940s and 1950s. Through the Farm Security Administration, workers had access to sanitary housing, medical service, recreational spaces, educational opportunities and even lessons in citizenship. Martinez Matsuda argues that these FSA labor camps’ efforts to get people to exercise their rights as citizens sparked a civil rights movement. So Migrant Citizenship shows us that the miserable conditions imposed on migrant workers in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were not necessary—that there is an example of just treatment of temporary labor in our own national past. This book shows us how New Deal liberalism shaped labor camps as multiracial spaces that strengthened the link between democracy and labor. It reminds us that the relationship between business and labor wasn’t always configured so that workers were always on the losing end. It teaches us that government can oversee these programs in ways that engender greater fairness rather than more inequality."