Customer Reviews

Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal

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This is another title I've instantly ordered based on a recommendation from the amazons, which was in turn based on my review of Factories in the Fields. This is a much more recent book treating many of the same themes, using different sources. Here's what the editorial description offers:

In her incisive analysis of the shaping of California's agricultural work force, Devra Weber shows how the cultural background of Mexican and, later, Anglo-American workers, combined with the structure of capitalist cotton production and New Deal politics, forging a new form of labor relations. She pays particular attention to Mexican field workers and their organized struggles, including the famous strikes of 1933.

Weber's perceptive examination of the relationships between economic structure, human agency, and the state, as well as her discussions of the crucial role of women in both Mexican and Anglo working-class life, make her book a valuable contribution to labor, agriculture, Chicano, Mexican, and California history.

Anyone interested in comprehensive immigration reform should study this and other books about farm labor systems of the past with great care. The Bush administration's proposal to create a system of temporary labor visas is nothing new; it's merely a reprisal of the worst and least successful abuses of the past.