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

"Sarah Wald uses ecocritism to examine depictions of farmers, farmworkers and the American landscape in literature and historical documents. She sheds light on what they tell us about the relationship between race and citizenship. In the US, we start with this Jeffersonian ideal of white male yeoman farmers. When Japanese immigrants, Filipino farmworkers and Mexican pickers enter the picture, they are racialized and marginalized. Wald has a keen eye for the complex relationships between the geographical landscape and the racial landscape. The history of migrant workers teaches who we are as a nation. It teaches us how we developed racialized ideas about who is worthy of citizenship and who is not worthy of citizenship. Ironically, our hardest workers, the people who feed us, are always on the losing end of this conversation about citizenship. We have yet to include the folks who feed us in our nation-state. We have continued to allow agribusiness to exploit farmworkers. Under Trump, their lives have become even more difficult because of the propagation of xenophobic rhetoric that casts them as lawbreakers, criminals and problems. The people who live on American soil, cultivate American soil and feed Americans are an important part of the American story. Migrant workers have been cast as alien for far too long. My book springs from years of working with the National Museum of American History on the Bracero archive and the exhibition that sprung from the archive, “ Bittersweet Harvest .” We collected over 800 stories from Bracero communities, that your readers can listen to at braceroarchive.org . The goal of all of these efforts was to remind Americans that Mexican migrant workers have been contributing to American culture and society for a very long time. But my personal goal was also to make sure that Latinx youth knew this history. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Often immigrants are cast as unwanted interlopers and as a problem. The history of Braceros and migrant workers generally shows that is absolutely not true. American growers and American policymakers wanted Mexicans to come; that is why they crafted programs to bring them to the United States. Grievously, they made sure those programs kept these workers at the margins. As I was working on the Bracero history project, when I encountered Latinx youth, I’d say, ‘this history is yours; it shows that your ancestors paid a high price for your belonging in America.’ Whether documented or undocumented, Latinx history is a central part of American history. Migrant workers have been essential to American economic development for many generations. When this younger generation learns that, they sit taller and prouder."