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Matt Garcia
Matt Garcia is Associate Professor of American Civilization, Ethnic Studies and History at Brown University. His research interests include Chicano/Latino identity and community formation, race and ethnicity in the U.S, labor history,
Latina/o education, American popular culture, and urban /suburbanization. He is currently at work on a project that documents the struggle for worker rights and educational equity in Southern California rural communities.
Abstract
"The Culture of Grapes: Race
and Cooperation in the Making of an
Agro-industry"
While most accounts of the United Farm Workers acknowledge the immigrant origins of workers, few consider similar experiences among a diverse group of farm owners that included Croatian, Italian, Armenian, and Japanese immigrants. In terms of business, such divisions served as an impediment to the formation of the most important innovation in agro-economics during the 20th Century: The agricultural cooperative. While cooperatives provided more control over marketing, they also suggested a degree of sameness in modes of production. In reality, growers often grew a variety of crops using culture-bound methods on farms located within ethnic-specific colonies. Like the rest of society, communities in grape country participated in a process of racial formation, exploring and determining the racial fault lines among them. This fluid condition produced resentment, suspicion, and even hatred among growers, even as they strove for greater cooperation.
My paper will explore a process of racial formation during the twentieth century in rural California among grape growers. I will focus particular attention on two immigrant groups—Armenians and Japanese—considered “Asian” when they arrived in the San Joaquin Valley in the 19th century, but ended up at very different positions on the racial ladder by the mid-20th century. The paper will conclude by considering how the formation of the United Farm Workers union and the grape boycott during the sixties and seventies produced new racial divisions that continue into the 21st Century.
This topic will be presented on Friday, April 17th at 1:00 p.m. as part of the Panel II discussion "Historical Formations of Race.
Select Publications
“A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles,” 1900-1970, The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Co-editor Geographies of Latinidad: “Mapping Latina/o Studies for the Twenty-First Century,” with Angharad Valdivia and Marie Leger, Duke University Press, forthcoming.
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