The Nature of California

Wald’s study reveals that the U.S. agrarian sector remains shaped by Jefferson’s vision of the independent farmer—meaning a European descendent or immigrant and not a black slave—as the “bedrock of democracy,” the universal citizen. The Nature of California focuses on the racialized contextualization of farming and citizenship in American life and how that ideology has evolved and countered into the twenty-first century The work opens with the Great Depression. Wald analyzes 1930s literature that incorporated Jeffersonian ideals, such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field. The works centered on Dust Bowl migrants and their right to settle collectivized land. McWilliams conflated “race and citizenship.” Ward points out that in his previous and subsequent works all farmworkers are equal. In the 1930s, Asians and Latinos, excluded from citizenship, threatened by deportation, and yet valued as labor, utilized Jeffersonian ideals to underscore their politics. The anarchist Hisaye Yamamoto analyzed race and class within in the Japanese community, arguing for community farming to resolve the pitfalls of industrial capitalism. Japanese farmers contended they were natural land owners—and that farmworkers (Japanese or not) were aliens, ignoring that they too were “aliens.” Farmworkers sought their natural rights via strikes that the Japanese and white landowners fought.

Citizenship · Ideology · Immigration · Jeffersonian democracy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · American Literature and Culture · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · Law