Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal

by Devra Weber

In her incisive analysis of the shaping of California's agricultural work force, Devra Weber shows how the cultural background of Mexican and, later, Anglo-American workers, combined with the structure of capitalist cotton production and New Deal politics, forging a new form of labor relations. She pays particular attention to Mexican field workers and their organized struggles, including the famous strikes of 1933.

Weber's perceptive examination of the relationships between economic structure, human agency, and the state, as well as her discussions of the crucial role of women in both Mexican and Anglo working-class life, make her book a valuable contribution to labor, agriculture, Chicano, Mexican, and California history.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Labor

364 pages, Paperback

First published November 8, 1994

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to know where to locate the significance of Weber's text as it relates to food studies, except that it argues about the industrialization of one form of agriculture--cotton--as the impetus to standardize several other systems of farm labor. If the specialization of industrial farming in cotton required greater power on the part of farm owners to retain and manage labor, and supervise that labor in more pronounced ways, it is no surprise that such adjustments would fall most heavily upon migrant Mexican laborers in the form of heightened supervision (via tenant camps), managerial hierarchies, more automated/anonymized farmer-laborer relations, and ultimately greater forms of economic, spatial, and migratory exploitation. Yet Weber also notes that laborers came into these agricultural settings with particular systems of knowledge and resistance--political, cultural, and otherwise--that allowed them to foster community and push back against management in key periods and in key ways. Even as the patterns of migration changed and poor white migrants were included in the parameters of farm labor (and were more able to move up the "agricultural ladder" of status), the combination of class and labor experiences fostered a different form of political resistance than in previous eras. I do wonder how much California as an agricultural landscape determined a sense of opportunity and resistance here, especially as countless immigrant laborers (not just Mexican) were dispersed across farms of the era and surely were aware of each other's presence. How would Weber address the emergence of not just class consciousness, but also ethnic solidarity, in making this era possible?

[Riley Cooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good reminder that California isn’t the liberal bastion it’s often made out to be; its political economy is largely based on an outrageously exploitative plantation-style agricultural industry. Interesting and exhaustive analyses of labor’s varying responses to agricultural unions and federal intervention during the New Deal era

[Mariah Oleszkowicz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book mostly taught me how the New Deal left out farm workers; that it benefitted large CA farms and pushed out small farmers. She did a beautiful job showing how the Mexican migrant farmer organized and used their resources to better themselves. Unfortunately, there was a lot that I just didn't find interesting or that was very repetitive.

[Piker7977 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting study that compares the Mexican and Mexican-American migrant cotton pickers with the migrant laborers from the Southwestern states. Weber also points out some unscrupulous practices by the cotton industry elites and organizations such as the Associate Farmers.