Elizabeth E. Sine. Rebel Imaginaries: Labor, Culture, and Politics in Depression Era California.

Abstract

Elizabeth Sine’s Rebel Imaginaries draws upon previous studies and oral histories to study marginalized California communities in the 1930s. She emphasizes that she is primarily interested in the ways that such communities “coalesced around their shared insubordination to the varied forces of dehumanization they faced” (202) and in the cultural patterns that underlay and shaped those communities’ oppositional activities. Sine recognizes that her study is not “a comprehensive or conclusive account of the era’s social movements,” but is instead “a new way of looking at them” (20). Her analysis proceeds in six chapters, each treating a different community. Of the six communities, four have been studied at length and in depth: the 1930 Imperial Valley lettuce strike and subsequent agricultural strikes over the next few years; San Francisco during the longshore, maritime, and general strikes of 1934; Upton Sinclair’s EPIC organization in 1934; and the deportation and repatriation of Mexican Americans in the early 1930s. Sine’s wide-ranging study involving such disparate communities necessarily required drawing on secondary works, but her reliance on Mike Quin’s account of the 1934 San Francisco strikes rather than the carefully researched and documented account by David Selvin led her into some factual errors in chapter 2.