Migrant Citizenship: Race, Rights, and Reform in the U.s. Farm Labor Camp Program - Couverture souple

Martínez-Matsuda, Verónica

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1512826928 ISBN 13 : 9781512826920

Editeur : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024

Synopsis

An examination of the Farm Security Administration's migrant camp system and the people it served

Today's concern for the quality of the produce on our plates has done little to guarantee U.S. farmworkers the necessary protections of sanitary housing, medical attention, and fair labor standards. The political discourse on farmworkers' rights is dominated by the view that migrant workers are not entitled to better protections because they are "noncitizens," as either immigrants or transients. Between 1935 and 1946, however, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) intervened dramatically on behalf of migrant families to expand the principles of American democracy, advance migrants' civil rights, and make farmworkers visible beyond their economic role as temporary laborers. In more than one hundred labor camps across the country, migrant families successfully worked with FSA officials to challenge their exclusion from the basic rights afforded by the New Deal.

In Migrant Citizenship, Verónica Martínez-Matsuda examines the history of the FSA's Migratory Labor Camp Program and its role in the lives of diverse farmworker families across the United States, describing how the camps provided migrants sanitary housing, full on-site medical service, a nursery school program, primary education, home-demonstration instruction, food for a healthy diet, recreational programing, and lessons in participatory democracy through self-governing councils. In these ways, she argues, the camps functioned as more than just labor centers aimed at improving agribusiness efficiency. Instead, they represented a profound "experiment in democracy" seeking to secure migrant farmworkers' full political and social participation in the United States. In recounting this chapter in the FSA's history, Migrant Citizenship provides insights into public policy concerning migrant workers, federal intervention in poor people's lives, and workers' cross-racial movements for social justice and offers a precedent for those seeking to combat the precarity in farm labor relations today.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Veronica Martinez-Matsuda is Associate Professor of History at the University of California San Diego.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1512826928
• ISBN 13: 9781512826920
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 376
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible