Migrant Citizenship

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

by Verónica Martínez-Matsuda

Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

Series: Politics and Culture in Modern America

Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press

376 Pages, 21 illus.

Web PDF
9780812297157
Published: May 2020

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An examination of the Farm Security Administration's migrant camp system and the people it served
Today's concern for the quality of the produce on our plates has done little to guarantee U.S. farmworkers the necessary protections of sanitary housing, medical attention, and fair labor standards. The political discourse on farmworkers' rights is dominated by the view that migrant workers are not entitled to better protections because they are "noncitizens," as either immigrants or transients. Between 1935 and 1946, however, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) intervened dramatically on behalf of migrant families to expand the principles of American democracy, advance migrants' civil rights, and make farmworkers visible beyond their economic role as temporary laborers. In more than one hundred labor camps across the country, migrant families successfully worked with FSA officials to challenge their exclusion from the basic rights afforded by the New Deal.
In Migrant Citizenship, Verónica Martínez-Matsuda examines the history of the FSA's Migratory Labor Camp Program and its role in the lives of diverse farmworker families across the United States, describing how the camps provided migrants sanitary housing, full on-site medical service, a nursery school program, primary education, home-demonstration instruction, food for a healthy diet, recreational programing, and lessons in participatory democracy through self-governing councils. In these ways, she argues, the camps functioned as more than just labor centers aimed at improving agribusiness efficiency. Instead, they represented a profound "experiment in democracy" seeking to secure migrant farmworkers' full political and social participation in the United States. In recounting this chapter in the FSA's history, Migrant Citizenship provides insights into public policy concerning migrant workers, federal intervention in poor people's lives, and workers' cross-racial movements for social justice and offers a precedent for those seeking to combat the precarity in farm labor relations today.

"Martínez-Matsuda provides a detailed glimpse into a moment of historical possibility that has many lessons for present-day advocates of civil rights for immigrant communities. Migrant Citizenship is powerfully written, exceptionally researched, and an outstanding contribution to the literature on immigration, labor, and citizenship studies." ~Journal of American Ethnic History

"Migrant Citizenship tells a powerful story about how agricultural workers, Popular Front activists, and New Deal liberals reimagined the power of the state. Spanning multiple regions and communities, Martínez-Matsuda beautifully animates individuals, families, and communities." ~Labor

"Verónica Martínez-Matsuda's research takes us far beyond John Steinbeck's Weedpatch Camp, the Joad family's gleaming refuge in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), to the multiracial, nationwide network of migrant labor camps as sites of contest over full national belonging and citizenship. . . . With archival research and oral histories from camps across the nation, including Texas and Florida as well as California, Martínez-Matsuda reveals the physical layout of FSA camps (110 total in 1942) as spaces that not only contained and disciplined residents but also formed the literal grounds for new connections, communities, and improved health and welfare." ~Journal of American History

"In Migrant Citizenship, Martínez-Matsuda tells the hopeful story of a short-lived experiment by New Deal progressives to extend the era’s promise of robust citizenship and a dignified standard of living to farmworkers, including Mexican Americans and African Americans. While historians to date have dismissed the Farm Security Administration (FSA) camp program for its failures, Martínez-Matsuda foregrounds migrants’ own perspectives to hold it up as a useful example of historical possibility. The result challenges both the characterizations of the New Deal as having effectively ignored the rural poor and the overdetermined declensionist narratives of farmworkers’ rights in the face of twentieth-century agricultural capitalism." ~Southwestern Historical Quarterly

"Migrant Citizenship is a magisterial study of the Farm Security Administration and the people it served. In an evocative work that speaks across several fields, Verónica Martínez-Matsuda reveals how FSA officials on the ground and in Washington challenged the political mind-set during World War II by expanding the range of services offered and the hopes for reform encoded within them, highlighting the agency's visionary experiments in democracy." ~Vicki L. Ruiz, University of California, Irvine

"Verónica Martínez-Matsuda foregrounds the perseverance of the workers-especially Japanese and Mexican-who occupied agricultural labor camps in the 1930s and 1940s and drew upon the promises made during the New Deal to argue for 'civil rights' well before the concept applied to Latinx or Asian Americans. Her most important intervention may be her argument that the Farm Security Administration tried (and failed) to extend rights to noncitizens, anticipating the current vogue of rights regardless of citizenship. Migrant Citizenship will appeal to anyone interested in understanding the origins of farm worker activism in this country and the continued struggle to hold the state accountable for injustice in our food system." ~Matt Garcia, author of From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement