North for the Harvest: Mexican Workers, Growers, and the Sugar Beet Industry. By Jim Norris. (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2009. xii, 223 pp. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-0-87351-631-0.)

Abstract

North for the Harvest is an overdue study examining, as the subtitle suggests, the tripartite interdependence of Mexican workers, growers, and refining companies of the sugar beet industry. Focusing largely—but not exclusively—on the Red River valley region of Minnesota and North Dakota, Jim Norris diligently details the business relationship of the American Beet Sugar Company (absc) with growers who were eager to cultivate a lucrative specialty crop. Both growers and refining companies found in Mexican workers a cost-effective and fluid labor force. A central claim within Norris's tripartite thesis is that the tension that defined this relationship consisted of: (1) the efforts of refiners to rationalize all aspects of sugar beet production, from the use of seeds to harvest methods; (2) growers' steady pressure on the absc—renamed the American Crystal Sugar Company (acsc) in 1943—to contract for increased sugar beet acreage; and (3) Mexicans (migrant and Red River valley residents) who chose whether to work in the fields of elbetabel (sugar beets) depending on the wage rate, opportunities in other industries, and living conditions provided by the absc and individual growers.