Salinas: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City by Carol Lynn McKibben

Abstract

In this community history of Salinas, an agricultural powerhouse in Central California, McKibben outlines the city’s changing ethnic and racial composition since it emerged in the 1860s, eventually to be incorporated as the seat of Monterey County in 1874. The author focuses primarily on Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican immigrants, as well as on Dust Bowl migrants, to explore the complicated and nuanced ways by which the lettuce capital of California took shape as a “multiracial, gendered community with a shared belief in American ideals of democracy and equality, even when that belief system proved naïve or misplaced” (5). In that passage lies the crux of McKibben’s argument: Although the city’s residents recognized that all groups were necessary to the endeavor of city-building, not until recent decades did whites begin to acknowledge the contributions of minority groups to any extent. Race relations in Salinas involved “complex mixtures of inclusiveness and marginalization” that nonetheless tended to support “a system of white supremacy” (126). Change in the form of meaningful access to political power finally arrived late in the twentieth century when Salinas became a minority-majority city that is now overwhelmingly Latino/a.McKibben tells this story in nine chronological chapters, consulting a wide range of local sources—records from the Monterey County Historical Society and the chamber of commerce, city-council minutes dating back well into the nineteenth century, the minutes of the Grower-Shipper Association (gsa) that provide insights into labor relations during the Great Depression, local newspapers, and interviews in the collections of the John Steinbeck Library. In addition, the author conducted numerous oral interviews across a wide range of the city’s population. Although this book is largely a local history, it ripples outward to include the economy and demographics of the greater central-California region, statewide immigration (and migration) developments, and evolving federal immigration policy from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 though the reforms of the 1950s and 1960s. With this layered approach, Salinas contributes to our understanding of cities embedded in rural regions with agricultural economies, and of city-building processes in the context of race relations during periods of rapid demographic change. The book is informed by a number of fields in addition to urban history, including ethnic studies, Chicano/a history, agricultural and labor history, and the history of California and the West.McKibben argues that migrants of all ethnic and racial backgrounds who came to Salinas and the Salinas Valley viewed farming (even tenant farming) as a way to enter the middle class. Her contention that socioeconomic mobility was available for Asians (or at least their American-born children who could own property in California), as well as whites challenges the prediction of McWilliams and Steinbeck that industrialized agricultural production in 1930s California would result in a permanent caste system.1 This path to middle-class life, however, was still limited by white hegemony. It was only “possible for enough members of excluded groups to move into property ownership … to make it appear that there was opportunity for all” (95).Spatial boundaries based on race and class exist in Salinas as elsewhere in the state and nation. The unincorporated adjacent community of Alisal, located east of downtown, housed much of Salinas’ poor and working-class families both before and after Salinas annexed it in 1963, becoming increasingly Latino/a. The Latino/a community, as well as the female population, in Salinas and Alisal were long underserved in terms of infrastructure, housing, education, and political representation. By the closing decades of the twentieth century, however, individual and collective activism had managed to secure gains for them in city government and planning, but, according to McKibben, this new sense of belonging was just sufficient to forestall further challenges to white privilege.