Can't Live With Them—Or Without Them

Abstract

Can't Live With Them—Or Without Them Don Mitchell (bio) Mireya Loza. Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xiii + 237 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, index. $80.00 (cloth). $29.95 (paper). Sarah D. Wald. The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl. Seattle; University of Washington Press, 2016. xxv + 297 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, index. $90.00 (cloth). $30.00 (paper). Writing of immigrant Latino day laborers only then beginning to arrive in large numbers on Long Island in April 2001, New York Times reporter Matthew Purdy pithily summarized local attitudes: "Can't live with them, can't landscape without them."1 This formula might just as easily sum up the entirety of immigration to America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, at least as it has been understood economically, politically, and culturally within dominant society. We have created and live in landscapes that seem to "need" immigrants—for their cheap labor predominantly, but also (eventually) for the cultural infusion they provide. But, with the possible exception of highly trained engineers and doctors, we really don't want them here, especially if they might live near us. And, at the same time, how immigrants have maneuvered within this dilemma, and the political and cultural contexts it shapes, has been a decisive force in shaping immigrant struggles, immigrant politics, and immigrant identities. In quite different ways, Mireya Loza and Sarah Wald seek to illuminate the nature of this dilemma for immigrant laborers and the landscapes in which they work. In Defiant Braceros, Loza details how men—many of them indigenous—who worked in the bracero program (1942–1964) struggled to claim some control over their own lives within a program that continually sought to strip them of all humanity—to turn them from laboring people into nothing more than vessels of labor power—and how they (and their descendants) have continued to struggle to attain a modicum of justice from a system that had injustice lodged right in its heart. In chapters on how the program reworked indigeneity and modernity through the bodies of bracero workers; camp life; transnational union organizing; and the rise of the Bracero Justice Movement in [End Page 658] the last twenty years (each set apart from the next by an "Interlude" typically focusing on telling comments or experiences of a single bracero), Loza's goal is to show how braceros, by continually defying what the program sought to force them to be, made themselves into the complex, contradictory men they always were. Against this defiance have been arrayed all manner of influential or powerful others including their families, agents of the Mexican state, farmers and politicians in the United States, and latter-day immigrant rights activists supporting their claims for restitution of wages withheld and stolen from them, who have worked to define them differently: as bearers of mestizo nationhood, for example, or as good family men, or as shiftless workers undeserving of the riches of American capitalism. This struggle over identity has persisted into the current era, as seen most clearly in the complex politics of representation that shaped the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's traveling exhibit on the program, "Bittersweet Harvest" (2009–2015) and the larger Bracero History Archive related to it (http://braceroarchive.org/). An incisively critical Epilogue examining "Bittersweet Harvest" and the Bracero History Archive (in which Loza worked as an oral history interviewer) brings the question of how to represent—and how to understand—those we can neither live with nor landscape without right into the present. The broad question of how to represent working people and the landscapes they make is what animates Wald's The Nature of California, an exploration of literature, muckraking reporting, and activist interventions about (and sometimes by) immigrant workers in California's farm country. Over the first two-thirds of the book, Wald brings critical race theory (predominantly) to bear on readings of California's landscape, labor, and immigrant life as they have been promulgated by reformers, radicals, and activists like Carey McWIlliams, John Steinbeck, Ernesto Galarza and Carlos Bulosan; lesser known but...