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From Citrus Belt to Inland Empire: race, place, and mobility in Southern California, 1880-2000

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From Citrus Belt to Inland Empire: race, place, and mobility in Southern California, 1880-2000

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Content FROM CITRUS BELT TO INLAND EMPIRE:
RACE, PLACE, AND MOBILITY IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 1880-2000

by

Genevieve Carpio
________________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES & ETHNICITY)

December 2013

Copyright 2013 Genevieve Carpio

This dissertation is dedicated with appreciation and affection
to my parents
i
Table of Contents

List of Figures ii

Acknowledgements iv

Abstract ix

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: “There is No Race Suicide Here” 16
The Rise of the Anglo Fantasy Past, 1870-1903

Chapter 2: Laranja de Umbigo? 53
Going Native in the Post-Frontier Era, 1913-1920

Chapter 3: On the Move 95
Racialized Domesticity and Housing, 1913-1920

Chapter 4: Racial Movements 137
Mobilizing Racial Meaning, 1917-1930

Chapter 5: White Routes, Mexican Roots 165
Whitening Automobility in the Depression, 1920-1940

Chapter 6: Regional Divisions 209
The Revival of the Anglo Fantasy Past, 1950-2000

Conclusion 245

Bibliography 254

ii
List of Figures

Figure 1: Map of Inland Empire 5

Figure 2: Mission Inn 25

Figure 3: “Victoria Avenue Brand” Crate Label 32

Figure 4: “Class at Sherman Ranch” 47

Figure 5: USDA Scientists en route to Brazil 57

Figure 6: “Col Roosevelt Judging Shaving Race, Vandyck” 60

Figure 7: “Colonel Lago’s Daughter Painting Navel Oranges” 65

Figure 8: “Col. F. da Costa and Family” 66

Figure 9: “Heavy Drinkers – Coconuts” 68

Figure 10: “Quarters for Mexican Laborers and Their Families” 71

Figure 11: “The City Market” 75

Figure 12: “Inviting You to Attend the Navel Orange Pageant” 82

Figure 13: “Trademark Registered” 84

Figure 14: “Replacing Parent Washington Navel at Mission Inn” 91

Figure 15: Harada House 107

Figure 16: “Homes for Employe[e]s Limoneira Company” 119

Figure 17: “House in Mexican Village” 123

Figure 18: “Filipino Picking Crew in East Highland” 157

Figure 19: “Post Family and Relatives, August 5, 1919” 165

Figure 20: “Uncle Joe Hernandez” and photograph of Sam Coyazo 169

Figure 21: “Madonna of the Trail: 50
th
Anniversary History” 189

Figure 22: “Their Blood is Strong” 198

iii
Figure 23: “Lewis Homes Co-Founder Dies at 84” 211

Figure 24: “Home Brand” 216

Figure 25: Port of Los Angeles 218

Figure 26: Ontario Center and the California Commerce Center 221

Figure 27: California Commerce Center 225

Figure 28: Architectural Renderings of Victoria Gardens 234

Figure 29: Photographs of the Victoria Gardens Food Hall 237

Figure 30: Photographs of Victoria Gardens Brand 238

Figure 31: “American Progress” 249

iv
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the years of support I have received while a graduate student in the
Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
Foremost, I am thankful for the mentorship of George Sanchez, who has been not only my
teacher, but my champion. As a scholar, he has demonstrated unwavering trust and confidence in
my ideas while pushing me to consider the delicate balance between field and interdisciplinarity.
As a teacher, he has been a model for undergraduate mentorship and allowed me the freedom to
embrace experiential learning in my own classroom. And, as a person, I aspire to live the
commitment to community engagement, scholarship, and kindness that he has demonstrated
since we first met at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center in years past.
I have been fortunate to work with a committee of scholars whose balance between
research and publicly engaged work serves as a goal for my own career. I was lucky to enroll in a
qualitative methods course with Greg Hise in my first semester at USC. Greg’s feedback has
pushed me to research with rigor and write with thoughtfulness. I have greatly enjoyed our
conversations at the Huntington and found them to be a source of motivation, as well as a place
to consider the intersections between research, teaching, and public history.
Throughout my graduate study, Laura Pulido has offered me invaluable feedback. She
has pushed me to approach my writing with honesty and purpose. I often drew upon a question
she asked me early on, “What are you trying to say?,” when writing. In moments when my
thoughts were muddied, I drew upon Laura’s example of clarity and transparency. I thank her for
seeing me through difficult questions and pushing me to make sense of complex answers.
William Deverell assured me early on that there was a place for me in historical study.
For myself and many others, Bill’s command of the field, research on metropolitan Los Angeles,
v
and enthusiasm for collaborative work have been enriching. More so, I am appreciative of the
formative programs and resources he has fostered through the USC-Huntington Institute on
California and the West. I am thankful for his feedback and encouragement.
Departmental staff members Kitty Lai, Sonia Rodriguez, Jujuana Preston, and Sandra
Hopwood have been a constant source of guidance in my quest to decipher graduate school.
More so, they have been a source of celebration as I approached each milestone, from passing
my qualifying exam to graduation day.
My Dissertation Writing Group at the Huntington Library provided invaluable feedback
throughout this process. A special thanks to its’ coordinators, Jason LaBeau and Jessica Kim, for
their diligence and thoughtful comments. The Metropolitan History Writing Group read my early
prospectus and offered valuable feedback. These discussions between Max Felker-Kantor, Lily
Geisner, Jorge Leal, David Levitus, and Barbara Solis provided framing thoughts for the project.
And, as it came to its conclusion, I was fortunate to serve with Lily Geisner, David Levitus, and
Becky Nicolaides as a coordinator for the Los Angeles and Metropolitan History group at the
Huntington, where we continued to interrogate spatial relationships in metropolitan history.
I received generous fellowship support from the USC Provost, USC Graduate School,
USC Center for Law, History and Culture, NSF-EDGE, and the American Jewish Archive. I am
especially appreciative of the support I received from the Ford Foundation as both a Predoctoral
and Dissertation Fellow. I am proud to join the community of scholars supported by the Ford
Foundation. More so, I appreciate the political importance of institutional support for scholars
with a commitment to diversity in higher education.
I thank archivists and staff at the American Jewish Archive, Bancroft Library, Historical
Society of Pomona Valley, Huntington Library, Inland Mexican Heritage, Japanese American
vi
National Museum, National Archives in Perris, Riverside Metropolitan Museum, Riverside
Public Library, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Ontario Public
Library’s Model Colony Room, Pomona Public Library, San Bernardino Public Library,
UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA’s Special Collections, UC Riverside’s Tomas
Rivera Library, Upland Public Library, USC’s Special Collections, and the Yuma Historical
Society.
The first chapter of this study developed from an invaluable summer program I attended
in 2011. During the University College Dublin’s Clinton Institute, I had the opportunity to
workshop my dissertation with an international cadre of Americanists led by Liam Kennedy and
Scott Lucas. Participation pushed me to think about disperse points of origins for phenomenon
that manifest locally.
Portions of this dissertation were presented at academic conferences, including meetings
of the American Studies Association, the Urban Historians Association, the American Historical
Association, the California Preservation Foundation, as well as a special meeting examining
diverse suburbs hosted by the National Center for Suburban Studies. I received helpful
comments from Jose Alamillo, Eric Avila, Matthew Countryman, Clara Irazábal, Phoebe Kropp,
Laura Liu, Virginia Scharff, and Mario Sifuentez.
As a masters students at UCLA, seminars within the Department of Urban Planning
taught by Louis Takahashi, Ed Soja, and Michael Storper provided the foundation for my
understanding of the relationship between community development and the built environment. I
am especially grateful for the support I have continued to receive from my thesis advisor
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris.
vii
Seminars I took with Ken Breisch, Vicki Callahan, Karen Halttunen, Virginia Kuhn,
Lanita Jacobs, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Trudi Sandmeier at USC similarly broadened my interest
in critical ways. I owe Kevin Breisch a special debt of gratitude for his invaluable feedback on
early versions of my prospectus, as well as his good humor throughout my graduate coursework
in historic preservation.
As an undergraduate at Pomona College, sociologist Gilda Ochoa introduced me to the
politics of research and I have returned to her example throughout my graduate career. I also
thank Jose Calderon, Toni Clark, Corinne Dearborn, and Ann Quinley for their continued
encouragement beyond my undergraduate years.
I thank alumni from the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity and Department
of History. Laura Barraclough, Michan Conner, Laura Fugikawa, Jerry Gonzalez, Chrisshonna
Grant-Nieva, Dan HoSang, Hillary Jenks, Jessica Kim, Mark Padoongpat, Abigail Rosas, and
Anna Rosas have each offered invaluable mentorship and support. I look to each of them as
models for the type of academic mentor I would like to become.
I am grateful to have been trained by publicly engaged scholars whose commitment to
public knowledge has been motivated by their desire to make the world we live in a more healthy
and equitable one. Mickey Gallivan, Matt Garcia, Robert Gonzalez, Bill King, Juan de Lara,
Yusef Omowale, Sandra Posey, Vicki Ruiz, Michael Wall, Eileen Wallis, and Michele Welsing
who have pushed me to be an active producer of knowledge, thank you. A special debt of
gratitude is owed to the late Cande Mendonza, who served as an inspiring model and invisible
guardian.
viii
I have been sustained by a wonderful group of friends at USC. Deborah Al-Najar, Adam
Bush, Robert Eap, Sara Fingal, Priscilla Leiva, and Sharon Luk have shared unwavering support,
faith, feedback, and coffee over the past six years.
My family remains my greatest cheerleader. For the lifetime of love and support, the late
nights, laughter, and encouragement, thank you to Theresa, Vinnie, Desiree, and Natalie. I have
been fortunate to book end this journey with first meeting and now marrying my partner Eric
Gonzalez. Eric has been my bouncer of ideas, proofreader, shoulder, and research companion. As
my dissertation reaches its end, I look forward to our future together.
Finally, thank you to my father Vince Carpio and mother Grace Carpio. I can never truly
communicate the courage, strength, sacrifice, and support that they have offered me. I am truly
grateful to have been their daughter and for their unwavering commitment to my education. I
dedicate this project to mom and dad.

ix
Abstract
For over a century, narratives of mobility and settlement flourished in regional heritage
campaigns and public policy throughout inland southern California. “From Citrus Belt to Inland
Empire: Race, Place, and Mobility in Southern California, 1880-2000” pushes for analyses that
recognize ideas, policies, and practices of mobility and settlement as agents in the production of
racial difference, and by extension, the boundaries of citizenship. This work focuses on five
periods of economic and demographic change between 1880 and 2000, including the citrus boom
of the 1880s, Issei migration following the second Chinese Exclusion Act in 1892, Mexican
immigration during World War I, Dust Bowl migration in the 1930s, and multiracial
metropolitanization following World War II. In each of these moments, racial distinctions were
debated according to the economic value ascribed to each groups’ (im)mobility. During periods
of prosperity, the mobility of migrant workers was criminalized and in times of recession it was
promoted. In this context, identifications such as pioneer, bird of passage, tramp, and migrant
worker signified a constellation of mobile-meanings that existed dialectically with racial
ideologies. More so, a comparative process of racial formation tied to capital accumulation
operated alongside technologies governing mobility that maintained the dominance of white
territorial claims and reinforced control over the movement of labor. This recognition opens up
questions regarding the terms by which people were included or excluded from the entitlements
of citizenship. Though uniquely expressed in response to each locality and time, ideas of
mobility and settlement consistently reinforced boundaries of racial exclusion and adapted to
enforce those boundaries in times of demographic and economic change. “From Citrus Belt to
Inland Empire” examines this process during a broad stretch of inland southern California
history in an effort to untangle the relationship between race, place, and mobility.
1
INTRODUCTION
In the summer of 1993, Danny Flores parked his Chevy Fleetline lowrider with four
friends at Plaza Park. During an interview with the Shades of San Bernardino project, he would
recall, “I've owned it 29 years, so I've had it in many car shows, books, magazines, movies. I'm
really proud of my car.”
1
That afternoon, Flores organized his fellow lowrider aficionados as a
protest to the downtown Rendezvous, a yearly celebration of Route 66 cruising heritage
sponsored by the San Bernardino Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (SBCVB). Meeting on Mount
Vernon Avenue, what Flores has called “the real Route 66,” the group gathered as a protest to
the SBCVB’s new no “lowrider clause.”
2
The exclusion of lowriders from the festival, a
celebration of automotive Americana, was part of a larger revitalization effort aimed at
encouraging mixed-use development, nostalgic allusion to the region’s past, and active
recruitment of a white middle-class to the largely brown city. The presence of Flores on the route
underscored the contradictory exclusion of Mexican American lowriders from the celebrated
landscape in an increasingly Latino region.
3
The conflicting claims to Route 66 made by Flores
and the SBCVB illustrate the larger set of tensions related to race, place, and mobility that form
the subject of this project.

1
Danny Flores interview by Joyce Hanson, November 5, 2002, transcript, p. 1, San Bernardino Oral History Project
(Historical Treasures of San Bernardino, San Bernardino).

2
Danny Flores interviewed by Robert Gonzalez and Matt Garcia, June 15, 2004, transcript, p. 10-11, Inland
Mexican Heritage Oral History Project (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands).

3
Although many participate in lowrider culture, it is largely a practice associated with Mexican American
subculture in the 1970s. See Denise Sandoval, “Bajito y Suavecito/Low and Slow: Cruising Through Lowrider
Culture” (Ph.D. diss, Claremont Graduate School, 2003).

2
It was shortly after learning of the Rendezvous ban on lowriders that I noticed a rise in
sobriety checkpoints throughout the Inland Empire, as well as efforts to stop them.
4
Long-lines
of residents trapped by blue and red lights, waiting for police officers to confirm their sobriety,
proof of insurance, and identity had enraged local residents. As a consequence of SB 976 (1993),
applicants without proof of lawful presence in the United States were prohibited from receiving a
California Drivers License. When SB 976 (1993) combined with a Supreme Court decision that
upheld the constitutionality of sobriety checkpoints (1990), they essentially created the
framework for immigrant checkpoints. Under the guise of public safety, municipal police
departments identified, criminalized, and penalized unauthorized Latino immigrants. In recent
years, as the proportion of Latino immigrants grew, the checkpoints became a pressing point of
contestation. Community groups formed in protest to discriminating impounds, frequent
citations, and heavy fees levied by municipal governments and towing agencies.
5

When I considered the Rendezvous alongside the recent attacks on unauthorized
immigrant drivers, the contradictions led me to a question. What presumptions about race, place,
and mobility allowed for a celebratory discourse of Route 66 migration to exist alongside
practices punishing Latino mobility? In searching for an answer to this question, I began to
realize that these practices, as well as the ideologies supporting them, represent a continuation of
longer-stretching technologies regulating the ways racialized people move. I realized that the
Rendezvous and sobriety checkpoints were two aspects of the same form of racialization. In the
shifting settler societies of southern California, narratives of mobility and settlement were central
to maintaining hierarchical racial categories that protected differential access to land, labor, and

4
Monica Rodriguez, “Federal Lawsuit Filed Against Pomona Police Involving August 2008 Checkpoint Meeting,”
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, September 8, 2009.

5
Genevieve Carpio, Clara Irazábal, and Laura Pulido, “Right to the Suburb: Rethinking Lefebvre and Immigrant
Activism,” Journal of Urban Affairs, 33 (no. 2, May 2011).
3
legacy.
“From Citrus Belt to Inland Empire” pushes for analyses that recognize ideas, policies,
and practices of settlement and mobility as agents in the production of racial difference, and by
extension, boundaries of citizenship. I seek to unpack the landscape of inland southern
California, where multi-scalar tensions between global capitalism, American race relations, and
regional identity have manifested starkly. Specifically, I examine the tropes of “migrant” and
“settler” as sites where race and place were imbued with meaning since the mid-19
th
century. I
found that the technologies governing mobility were produced alongside a comparative process
of racial formation that was tied to capital accumulation, maintained the dominance of white
territorial claims in a multiracial landscape, and reinforced control over the movement of
racialized labor. More so, mobility persists as an organizing principle of race that delineates the
lines of American citizenship today.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1986) have described racial formation as the “process
by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.”
6
Their work
suggests that racial meaning is far from fixed. Rather, it is shaped by “racial projects” that
simultaneously interpret, represent, and explain racial dynamics and redistribute resources along
racial lines.
7
Building on these themes, sociologist Tomás Almaguer (1994) has argued that the
central organizing principle of California under U.S. rule was a comparative process of
racialization. In the new white dominated society, he explains, Mexican, African, Asian, and
Native Americans were each stratified on a racial hierarchy. That hierarchy was organized

6
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (1986;
New York and London, 1994), 55.

7
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (1986;
New York and London, 1994), 56.

4
according to the unique ways each group posed class-specific obstacles to the white population.
8

For Almaguer, racial formation is a regionally specific, relational process that maintains
privilege and disadvantage along racial lines. I argue that the ideas attached to movement and
stasis, as meaning-filled organizing principles, and race, as a relational process tied to capital
accumulation, were produced alongside one another within, first, an unfolding Citrus Belt region,
and, later, the burgeoning Inland Empire region of southern California.
I examine the values attached to mobility and settlement in the gateway community of
inland southern California, where numerous trail, rail, auto, and air transportation corridors
intersect. I use the term “gateway” to capture the intense movement of commodities, people, and
information generated by the export citrus economy.
9
As explained by geographer A. F.
Burghardt (1971) “gateway cities develop in positions which possess the potentiality of
controlling the flows and goods of people…In connecting a service area to the greater national
matrix of interconnections, they could be likened to the power boxes or valves which connect a
house with the greater urban utility network.”
10
Gateways are characterized by their long-
distance trade connections and are often accompanied by infrastructure facilitating high mobility,
such as railway yards, hotels, restaurants, wholesale trade, and new construction. Within the
United States, for instance, one might think of early St. Louis or Chicago. On an international

8
Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, 1994),
6.

9
Kenneth G. Hirth, “Interregional Trace and the Formation of Prehistoric Gateway Communities,” American
Antiquity, 43, (no. 1, January 1978); A. F. Burghardt, “A Hypothesis About Gateway Cities.” Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, 16, (no. 2, June 1971).

10
A. F. Burghardt, “A Hypothesis About Gateway Cities.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 16,
(no. 2, June 1971), 282.

5
scale, Guaymas Mexico and Cluj Transylvania have served similar purposes.
11
The Citrus Belt’s
centrality as a global nexus connecting the United States, Western Hemisphere, and Pacific Rim
through agricultural export makes inland southern California an especially critical lens through
which to view the relationship between place, mobility, and race. That history becomes visible in
policies regulating resident mobility, as well as the regional heritage campaigns that give
meaning to those movements.

Figure 1 Map of Inland Empire. This rendering includes all of San Bernardino and Riverside Counties.
12

The geography of the Inland Empire is commonly understood as including the western
portions of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, extending south from San Bernardino to
Temecula, stretching westward from Redlands to Pomona, and bounded by the mountains to the
north and desert to the east. The name Inland Empire itself has a long and complicated history.

11
A. F. Burghardt, “A Hypothesis About Gateway Cities.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 16,
(no. 2, June 1971); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, (New York: W.W. Norton,
1991).

12
State of California Department of Justice, “California Card Room Locations by Region,” map, (2013).
6
Journalist Chuck Palmer has placed the origins of the name to 1920, when the local Daily Sun
intermittently ran an “Inland Empire” section in the local paper. The declaration of this regional
identity corresponded with a boost in tourism following World War I. In its promotional use,
“Inland” likely represented an effort to differentiate the area from the coastal valleys of Southern
California, whereas “Empire” may have referred to the region’s promotion as the “Orange
Empire” at the end of the 19
th
century. Alternatively, some residents believe the name Empire is
tied to the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan that was active in the region throughout the
1920s. Others have suggested that the name was first adopted in the 1950s, when the local media
used the term as a referent for the U.S. Department of Commerce’s newly minted Riverside-San
Bernardino-Ontario Metropolitan Area. In 1970, a landscape only occasionally referred to as the
“Inland Empire” was given increased legitimacy when Inland Empire magazine was published.
13

The origin of the term Inland Empire remains uncertain, but each theory suggests an attempt to
differentiate inland southern California from its surrounding social and economic landscapes.
14

Although focusing at the regional level, this dissertation builds upon studies representing
space as unbounded. Geographer Doreen Massey (1994, 2004) disrupts the dichotomy held
between space, as an abstract container, and place, as meaning-filled space. Instead, she theorizes
place as simultaneously existent within expansive spaces of power considered global and
reflective of social relations articulated in particular locations.
15
Likewise, at any time, the values

13
Chuck Palmer, “So Who Decided to Call it the Inland Empire,” Sun, clipping, February 29, 1984, Inland Empire
vertical file, (Upland Public Library, Upland, CA); Chuck Palmer, “Inland Empire: The Name-Calling Mystery,”
Sun, clipping, March 29, 1985, Inland Empire vertical file, (Upland Public Library, Upland, CA); J. Rezendes-
Herrick, “Inland Empire Grows in the Shadow of LA,” clipping, Inland Empire vertical file, (Upland Public Library,
Upland, CA)

14
Throughout the dissertation, I’ve adopted the term inland southern California to refer to the geographic area that
encompasses the former Citrus Belt and contemporary Inland Empire.

15
Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Doreen Massey,
“Geographies of Responsibility,” Geografiska Annaler, 86 (no. 1, 2004), 5-18.
7
attributed to mobility were racially and regionally specific manifestations of global relationships
to capital that enforced hierarchies of domination and subjection. For instance, the celebratory
value given to frontier migration within the Citrus Belt in the early 19
th
century was narrated
within a global discourse of white racial superiority evident in citrus research in Latin America.
Likewise, efforts to prevent Japanese settlement within the citrus communities of southern
California were reactive to national fears of land accumulation by “aliens ineligible for
citizenship” considered racial rivals. Although regional in focus, this study of inland southern
California represents an analysis of interlocking scales of connectivity as manifested within one
locality.
Informed by the work of political geographers, such as Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and
Doreen Massey, a growing body of scholarship began to explore the spatial dimensions of
racialization by the 1980s. Notably, Kay Anderson’s (1987) seminal study of British settler
society unpacked the process by which the idea of Chinatown defined racial difference between
the self and other between 1880-1920 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her work argues that the
depiction of Chinatown as an unsanitary and morally corrupt district produced a class of
outsiders that were simultaneously categorized by racial and place designations. More so,
Chinatown served as a foil for what was clean and moral, namely white European society.
16

Analyses conducted at the intersection of political geography and critical race studies pushed for
recognition of the production of space in its class, gendered, and racial forms. Further, it called
for a historicization of these relationships that opened the door to cross-disciplinary endeavors.
The intersection between race, place, and mobility serves as a foundation for this dissertation.
Urban and ethnic studies scholar Natalia Molina’s (2006) examination of public health officials

16
Kay J. Anderson, “The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the Making of a
Racial Category,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 77 (no. 4, December 1987), 580-598.

8
in Los Angeles suggests a close relationship between the construction of race and place, as well
as that between the maintenance of racial boundaries and mobility. For instance, Molina explains
that ideas of health and disease became synonymous with racial lines during the bubonic and
pneumonic plagues of 1924 Los Angeles. Attributing causality to racial categories, public health
officials erected 24-hour quarantines that demarcated racial place by policing racial mobility.
17

Similarly, Alexandra Stern’s (2005) work on the securitization of the United States-Mexico
border examines the relationship between racial formation and symbolic acts on otherwise
porous borders. As stated by Stern, “The border quarantine helped to solidify a boundary line
that had previously been much more nebulous and, in doing so, helped to racialize Mexicans as
outsiders and to demarcate Mexico as a distant geographical entity despite topographic and
climatic similarity.”
18
Although examining different scales, both of these instances underscore
the importance of place boundaries to creating and maintaining racial categories of difference.
My own work seeks to highlight the idea of mobility within racial projects that, similarly, seek to
define and differentiate racial groups.
Alongside analyses of the production of racialized space, this project calls for analyses
that address the productive power of mobility. The work of human geographer Tim Cresswell
(2001), cultural geographer Don Mitchell (1996), and historian Nayan Shah (2012) serve as
models for this type of work.
19
Their analyses of American identity, class, race, and sexuality in

17
Natalia Molina, Fit To Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (Univ. of California
Press, 2006).

18
Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), 67.

19
Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (University of Minnesota
Press, 1996); Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (Reaktion Books, London. 2001); Shah, Nayan. Stranger
Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2012).

9
20
th
century America provides a foundation for study of the productive power of mobility in both
its practiced and imagined forms. For Mitchell, in World War I America California’s migrant
workforce adopted mobility as a tool. Place-based struggles were expanded as organizations,
themselves, became mobile during industry strikes. In his research on the emergence of the
tramp as a social type, Cresswell examines the tension between mobility as a celebrated
foundation of American identity and as a threatening indicator of criminal vagrancy. When
considered alongside place, Cresswell argues, the social value of mobility most often emerged as
morally abhorrent, a characteristic personified in the “tramp” of sociologists, eugenicists, and
documentarians prior to World War II. Shah similarly examines a migrant workforce and
demonstrates how transiency allowed for “stranger intimacies.” His analysis of South Asian
migrant workers in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada reveals a migrant
support network, as well as the legal policies and practices that regulated them. When considered
together, each of these works reveals a productive element in the value ascribed to mobility and
points towards efforts by those deemed mobile (or sedentary) to engage those ideas for their own
purposes.
My primary concern is that of how power operates through representations, policies, and
practices of mobility and settlement to maintain racial inequality. This work focuses on five
periods of economic and demographic flux, including the east coast citrus boom of the 1870s,
Issei migration following Chinese Exclusion in 1882, Mexican immigration during World War I,
Dust Bowl migration in the 1930s, and multiracial metropolitanization following World War II. I
found that in each of these moments racial distinctions were debated according to the economic
value ascribed to each groups’ (im)mobility. In this sense, racial and class categories were
inseparable. During periods of prosperity, the mobility of migrant workers was criminalized and
10
in times of recession it was promoted. These values were expressed in heritage campaigns,
immigration policies, labor practices, and residential development plans. Although the ways
mobility was discussed and evaluated shifted over time, its use to ascribe meaning to racial
categories was steadfast. Identifications such as pioneer, bird of passage, tramp, and migrant
worker represent a constellation of mobile-meanings reflective of racial ideologies. This
recognition opens up questions regarding the terms by which people were included or excluded
from the entitlements of citizenship.
White agriculturalists, writers, and politicians set the terms of debates on migration and
settlement. This has contributed to what historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot describes as a silence
at “the moment of fact creation.”
20
The records generated by the dominant public sphere can only
offer hints as to how workers interpreted the value of mobility and settlement themselves.
Nevertheless, from the sources available, scholars can draw some inferences as to how laborers
sought to reduce the arbitrariness of immigrant restrictions and the administration of regulations
on mobility. Some of these efforts are introduced in the analyses that follow. For instance,
Japanese residents subject to restrictions on property ownership communicated through
intermediaries such as white attorneys in the state and federal courts and published memorials to
Congress that highlighted the successful agricultural pursuits of Japanese farmers. They waged
opposition to government policies and legislation through a combination of the press and courts.
Likewise, Korean residents pushed into grove work strove for financial stability by building
communal kitchens and bathhouses that catered to the needs of other mobile workers. Further,
Mexican youth living at the margins of car culture manipulated registration records to retain

20
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
For Trouillot, silences enter at four crucial moments: “the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the
moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the
moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).” Michel-Rolph Trouillot,
“Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History” (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) 26.
11
anonymity in response to novel forms of police surveillance. However, the full cultural and
social dimensions of how non-whites responded to these discourses and policies are difficult to
assess. Unpacking these accounts will be a continual project as this work transforms from
dissertation to manuscript.
From the 1930s to the present, the records of response become richer. Family
photographic records chronicle the car in workers’ day-to-day lives. Likewise, oral history
projects of the 1990s provide a repository of testimony by men and women who came of age in
the mid-20
th
century. Their accounts reveal strategic efforts to navigate the push and pull of the
citrus economy. Field visits and personal observations of the material culture left by these
legacies further contextualize vast efforts to re-narrativize the racial meanings infused in ideas of
mobility, a key site of racialization in agricultural communities. This is a necessary first step to
uncovering patterns of change and continuity over time that motivate this project.
The archives of debates surrounding mobility in inland southern California form the basis
of this work. Records of the Department of Commerce and Labor, the personal files of United
States Department of Agriculture scientist Archibald Shamel, site visits, congressional records,
popular media, novels, and planning documents each offer insight into the relationship between
race, place, and mobility. This dissertation also represents the first use of the Inland Mexican
Heritage archives, a collection that I have been involved with over the last decade. Drawing on
my training in urban planning and historic preservation, I combine these archival sources with
spatial analysis, heeding special attention to the relationship between racial formation and public
memory.
This study focuses on debates, publications, and policies that connected mobility and
settlement to racial categories from the mid 19
th
to the 21
st
century as the Citrus Belt became the
12
Inland Empire. Chapter 1 examines the rise of an Anglo fantasy past between the beginnings of
commercial agriculture in the 1870s to its recognition by President Theodore Roosevelt as the
defining feature of local identity in 1903. In a strategic manipulation of regional heritage, the
Riverside Historical Society promoted agrarian mythology and white capitalist development in
the presidential commemoration of the first navel orange tree. The story of the navel’s origin
turned multiracial lands into American frontiers, credited the region’s fertility to enterprising
white settlers, and marked the transition to capitalist agriculture as progress. The celebration of
white settlement within this imperialist transition narrative obscured the process by which non-
white bodies were organized within the citriscape.
Chapter 2 begins in the early 20
th
century. Threats of race suicide propelled Citrus Belt
agriculturalists to transform the navel orange myth from a story of American migrants to one of
American natives. The lines between the United States and Brazil were entrenched in the lines
Shamel drew between Brazilian and American varieties of fruit following a USDA research trip
to Brazil. In a reiteration of the agrarian myth, Brazil was cast as an early California: an
underdeveloped agricultural frontier ripe for capitalist intervention. Reproducing the idea that
Spanish colonists in southern California had failed to realize the potential of the orange,
Portuguese colonists were depicted as naïve of the market potential for orange cultivation in
Bahia. Regional formation was not bound by geography alone. It was through the Brazilian
expedition that the citrus rancher was reimagined from a regional emblem of white racial
superiority to a manifestation of American dominance in a global Orange Empire.
If the international revision of the navel origin myth cast white migrants as natives, it left
the multiracial workforce as foreigners. Chapter 3 examines the contradictory logic by which
Japanese and Korean residents were encouraged to assimilate to the standards of white
13
domesticity in the early 20
th
century, but were denied the mechanisms that would have made it
possible. The Alien Land Laws created a racialized hierarchy that denied the right to accumulate
property and, as an extension, hindered long-term settlement within the region. Existing
alongside land policy that left “aliens ineligible for citizenship” on the move, discourses
surrounding World War I company housing tethered Mexican immigrants to citrus ranches. Ideas
surrounding company housing pathologized worker migration without offering the possibility of
land ownership or its related benefits. Rather, it secured ranchers’ access to labor and promised a
renewable workforce across generations. Seemingly contradictory, both the Alien Land Laws
and the company housing campaigns coalesced around the production of a perception of
whiteness that was imagined as fixed and denied communities of color the opportunity to move
by conditions of their own choosing.
When Congressman John Box of Texas proposed a national quota on Mexican
immigration in 1926, agriculturalists recast the Mexican family man of World War I company
housing. Drawing on the imagery of homing pigeons, birds that could find their way home over
long-distances, Mexicans were strategically recategorized from potential settlers to a category of
person defined foremost by their mobility. Although Mexican immigrants were not subject to
numerical quotas, they were positioned on a global racial hierarchy organized by the principles
of perceived mobility, the desire to settle, and access to citizen rights. Exacerbating American
anxieties towards Puerto Rico and the Philippines, opponents of the Box Bill had argued that
Mexicans posed a far lesser threat than black colonial subjects with the right to permanent
residency. Chapter 4 interrogates this shift and suggests that the tropes of migrant and settler are
best understood as two aspects of the same, long-running force of racialization; one whose most
14
salient feature, whether it has been made as the basis for exclusion or inclusion, is a collective
attempt to defend white access to non-white labor.
In chapter 5, I follow the construction of Mexicans as racial homers to its reverberating
consequences in the Depression years that followed. Agricultural labor in California required a
choreographed movement between rotating harvests that made automobiles a central part of
Mexican-American life. In the years preceding the Depression, however, racial understandings of
Mexican were increasingly divorced from ideas of car ownership. This erasure was
accomplished in a relational process that, first, criminalized Mexican-American automobility
and, second, sanctified white migration. Labor advocates garnered support for white claims to
government relief in an adoption of frontier mythology that equated white migrants traveling
along Route 66 with western pioneers. However, they did so at the cost of a broader social
agenda that advocated for the extension of those same benefits to Mexican-descent workers.
As agriculture gave way to residential expansion in the post World War II era, visions for
an Inland Empire built on the foundation of industrialized agriculture, linked to the global
movement of trade, and tied to long-lasting hierarchical relationship between land owners and
migrant labor emerged. In my final chapter, I examine the ways regional developers and city
officials strategically constructed a new identity for the region as the Citrus Belt became the
Inland Empire. The core of this mythology was the memorialization of white migration and the
denaturalization of Latino immigration. Where the agriculturalists of the late 19
th
century
memorialized the efforts of western frontiersmen, World War II transplants looked to the white
migrant of the Depression era. In a familiar strategy, regional revitalization campaigns drew
upon the iconography of Route 66 in an effort to attract a white-collar population to the declining
region.
15
Across the broad stretch of inland southern California’s history from 1880-2000, regional
narratives attributed oscillating values to mobility and settlement. In each instance, however, the
discourses, practices, and technologies of mobility were produced alongside racially stratified
economic development, undermined competing claims to white territorial accumulation, and
maintained power over the movement of a racialized workforce. The legacy of these practices
persists as an organizing principle of race with broad consequences, including state policies
targeting immigrant drivers in California. These are part of a larger global manifestation of
practices delineating lines of citizenship through movement evident in the passbook system of
South African apartheid, Isreali checkpoints along the West Bank, and the erection of special
administrative regions requiring mainland Chinese nationals to bear special permit when
traveling or working in wealthier regions. Though uniquely expressed in response to each
locality and time, ideas of mobility and settlement consistently serve as agents delineating lines
of citizenship through the production of difference. In what follows, “From Citrus Belt to Inland
Empire” examines this manifestation during a broad stretch of inland southern California history
in an effort to untangle the relationship between race, place, and mobility.

16
CHAPTER 1
“There is No Race Suicide Here”: The Rise of the Agriculturalist Fantasy, 1870-1903
In May of 1903, a large crowd congregated at the Pachappa Train Station in Riverside,
California to welcome President Theodore Roosevelt. The introduction of the navel orange thirty
years earlier had made the town the heart of a burgeoning citrus belt that rivaled those in Florida,
Louisiana, Portugal, Italy, and Brazil. When Roosevelt arrived, he praised the sight of the
abundant orange groves for which the prosperous town was known. After a night’s rest at the
renowned Mission Inn resort, he joined in the ceremonial replanting of Riverside’s “parent”
navel orange tree in its courtyard. As Roosevelt was handed the shovel from President John
North Jr. of the newly founded Riverside Historical Society, he stated, “I am glad to see, Mr.
North, that this tree shows no signs of race suicide.”
1
Roosevelt parted shortly afterwards,
leaving behind an enduring symbol of Riverside’s regional and racial identity.
Tradition, ceremony, and public history are often reflections of a society’s power
structure.
2
The commemoration of citrus as emblematic of regional identity at the beginning of
the 20
th
century reflects the ways Riverside’s colonists hoped to transform inland southern
California from a peripheral Mexican ranch economy to a center of capital-intensive American
agriculture.
3
In a celebration of frontier migration and white western settlement, what I refer to
as an Anglo fantasy past, colonists promoted capitalist development, a selective past justifying
white privilege, and an erasure of non-white claims to the region. An Anglo fantasy past was the
other side of a Spanish fantasy past, a strategic manipulation of regional identity that restructured

1
“Good Bye and Good Luck was the Farewell Greeting,” Riverside Daily Press, May 8, 1903; “President Roosevelt
Replanting Original Navel Trees,” California Citrograph, May 23, 1903.

2
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977).

3
This idea was replicated over a century later in portrayals of the region as a “Sleeping Giant.” See Rob Leicester
Wagner and John E Husing, Sleeping Giant: An Illustrated History of Southern California's Inland Empire (Las
Vegas, 2004).
17
the relationship between racial formation and regional identity to the benefit of white colonists as
access to property and power were renegotiated within the Mexican-American borderlands.
Prior to the arrival of President Roosevelt, the people, economy, and geography of inland
southern California were increasingly defined by citrus. By the time he left, they were
definitively so.
4
The parent navel orange tree served as the physical marker of a symbolic
transformation from Mexican desert to American garden. The mythology of the navel orange,
manufactured by the Riverside Historical Society and embraced by President Roosevelt for its
parallels to his own ideology of American racial progress and U.S. colonial endeavors, relied on
erasing key components of regional history: a multiracial landscape of settlement, trans-Pacific
circuits of citrus expertise, and government efforts to facilitate capitalist expansion in inland
southern California. By celebrating agricultural expansion and the proliferation of the white
household, ranchers justified a racially segmented landscape that echoed the distinctions they
described between inferior and superior fruit. To trace this regional identity is to reveal the
intersecting mechanisms through which the orange became synonymous with whiteness and, in
the process, uncover the symbols, institutions, and policies that were drawn upon as racial
stratification unfolded in the landscape of inland southern California.
5

From Cattle Rancheros to Citrus Ranchers
In 1870, Judge John W. North, an abolitionist and licensed preacher, recruited families
from the Midwest and East Coast to establish a communal colony near the projected line of the
Southern Pacific Railroad. He wrote, “We wish to form a colony of intelligent, industrious and

4
It was neither naturally a region nor preordained to become one. Rather, as explained by historian Douglas
Sackman, it was a fabricated landscape that combined wealthy capitalists, millions of consumers, stratified labor,
and engineered fruit. See Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley,
2005).

5
Anssi Paasi, "Bounded Spaces in the Mobile World: Deconstructing Regional Identity," Tijdschrift Voor
Economische En Sociale Geografie, 93 (no. 2, 2002), 137-148.

18
enterprising people, so that one’s industry will help to promote his neighbor’s interests as well as
his own.”
6
Early on, North envisioned the colony as the site of quality schools, public libraries,
churches, fertile farmland, and irrigated lots within the healthful environment of southern
California. After four months of careful consideration, representatives of the Southern California
Colony Association, or the New England Colony of Southern California, chose to purchase a site
nestled in the inland valleys near the Santa Ana River. Shortly thereafter, they adopted the name
Riverside.
7

As the colonists arrived to Riverside, the presence of large indigenous and Mexican
populations in the valley surprised them. Predating the colonists’ crossing of the Colorado
Desert, the basin had been settled by the Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, Gabrielino, Mojave, and Serrano
people, among others.
8
In addition to long-standing families descending from Native groups,
Riverside colonists encountered California ranchers, such as Antonio Lugo, Ignacio Palomares,
Ricardo Vejar, and Ignacio Alvarado, who had been awarded large land grants following the
secularization of the Spanish missions. Using the territorial legislation of the Mexican
government, indigenous people were dispossessed of communal lands while Mexican elites laid
claim to the California countryside. Far removed from the central power and military defense of
the Mexican capital, however, ranch property was vulnerable to theft and acts of violence. In an
effort to protect his holdings, covering portions of present day San Bernardino County, Antonio

6
John Brown and James Boyd, History of San Bernardino and Riverside Counties: With Selected Biographies of
Actors and Witnesses of the Period of Growth and Achievement (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1922),
25.

7
The Riverside Land and Irrigating Company of San Bernardino County, California (San Francisco: Frank
Eastman, 1877); John Brown and James Boyd, History of San Bernardino and Riverside Counties: With Selected
Biographies of Actors and Witnesses of the Period of Growth and Achievement (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing
Company, 1922), 24-49.

8
For a pictorial history see Clifford Trafzer and Jeffrey Smith, Native Americans of Riverside County (Charleston:
Arcadia Publishing, 2006).
19
Lugo recruited New Mexican families traveling through California to settle along the Santa Ana
riverbank of his property.
9

When the New England Colony reached Riverside in the 1870s, they were met by this
settlement of largely Spanish-speaking Catholics of “Hispanic” descent.
10
Between 1840 and
1850, about 250 people settled on the ranches of Lugo and his southern neighbor, Juan Bandini.
Recruited from Abiquiu, New Mexico, the settlers were already tied to these ranch holdings by
the Old Spanish Trail, a popular trade route between Santa Fe and Los Angeles. In exchange for
forming Politana (1842), a protective settlement separating the Lugo’s holdings from indigenous
attack, the first wave of emigrants received 2,200 acres. Soon afterward, they moved from
Politana to the Bandini ranch. Families, such as the Belardes, Moyas, Peters, Garcias, and
Trujillos, each received 550 feet of property. Upon this land, they established the neighboring
communities of La Placita de Trujillos (1844) and Agua Mansa (1845). Before North set his
sight on inland Southern California, the New Mexican migrants had already cultivated hundreds
of subsistence farms along the riverfront, spotted the countryside with grazing cattle, organized a
community school, opened a dance hall, built a cemetery, and erected a Church that duplicated
the layout of their Abiquiu home.
11

The aftermath of the U.S. war with Mexico (1846-1848) fundamentally unsettled the
political, economic, and social life of these California residents. In 1850, California was granted

9
The most comprehensive exploration of the Agua Mansa community is R. Bruce Harley, The Story of Agua
Mansa: Its Settlement, Churches, and People. First Community in San Bernardino Valley 1842-1893 (San
Bernardino: Diocese of San Bernardino, 1995).

10
In Nieto-Phillips’s examination of New Mexican racial identity, he argues that nuevomexicanos self-identified as
Hispanic or Spanish using a discourse of blood purity. John M. Nieto-Phillips, The Language of Blood: The Making
of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s-1930s. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004).

11
R. Bruce Harley, The Story of Agua Mansa: Its Settlement, Churches, and People. First Community in San
Bernardino Valley 1842-1893 (San Bernardino: Diocese of San Bernardino Archives, 1995).

20
American statehood and the New Mexican communities were incorporated into the Mormon
township of San Bernardino. Deciding to relocate on his San Diego property, Lugo sold 40,000
acres of the ranch to a Mormon colony from the Salt Lake Valley in 1851.
12
Shortly thereafter, in
1852, La Placita, Agua Mansa, and the neighboring community of Jurupa were consolidated into
the township of San Salvador, named so after the Catholic Church. Under American rule,
Mexican-Californians were dispossessed in a complicated land claim process and San Salvador
faced population decline following a flood that destroyed much of the town in 1862.
Nevertheless, many remained in the area to preserve familial relationships and religious ties to
the San Salvador Parish. It was during this period of transition, from Mexican to American
California, that North arrived with a small group of scouts to a valley already well-populated
with indigenous, Mexican, and New Mexican people. And, it was in the shadow of conquest that
these families sought to establish a colony of New Englanders in California.
13

Considerable stress existed between the New Mexican colony and the Riverside colony,
whose unfenced fields of alfalfa were enjoyed by the grazing livestock of San Salvador. Ranch
society and farm society temporarily existed in a state of competition, where changing land-uses
were accompanied by conflicting racial and regional categories. The dominance to capitalist
agriculture, explains David Montejano (1987), depended on subordinating Spanish-Mexican
haciendas to American commercial farms in a process that made Mexicans laborers and Anglos
farmers.
14
As New Mexicans were prohibited from grazing by U.S. policies protecting private

12
For more on Mormon settlement in San Bernardino see Joseph Snow Wood, “The Mormon Settlement in San
Bernardino” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 1968), 92-128.

13
I employ the Lisbeth Hass’s definition of conquest as “the process that extends the political, economic, and social
dominion of one empire, nation, or society over one another.” Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in
California 1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2.

14
David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986. (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1987).
21
property, they were pushed into a racially stratified capitalist structure that limited their
economic opportunities. Farmers became field hands on Riverside citrus farms, manual labor for
the Portland Cement Company in nearby Colton, or section hands for the rail lines.
15
Although
colonists were lured to California by visions of a New England colony, Riverside developed
within a multiracial landscape of contiguous, yet, segmented communities and the transition to
American capitalism was built upon non-white labor. It was in this context that a white identity
was forged through the geo-historical production of regional heritage.
The arrival of the new colonists in 1870 was accompanied by efforts to define and
differentiate their place in a largely Mexican territory. When describing Riverside, boosters first
drew from familiar images. Early promotional materials, for instance, described the climate as
Italian in nature, compared the system of irrigation to a successful Japanese model, and linked
the perfumery of orange extract to the aromatic sense of France.
16
When residents of Riverside
met to organize a Pioneer Society, less than ten years after the colony was established, city
boosters began to craft a distinct regional identity.
17
Anticipating President Roosevelt’s May visit
to Riverside, a scheduled stop on his speaking tour through the western United States, the
Pioneer Society re-emerged in January of 1903 as the Riverside Historical Society.
18

15
See also Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); R Bruce Harley. “An Early Riverside Suburb at La Placita.”
Journal of the Riverside Historical Society. No. 7. February 2003; R. Bruce Harley et al. The Agua Mansa Story: A
Collection of Papers Compiled on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of Agua Mansa (Redlands: San Bernardino
County Museum Association, 1991); Tom Patterson, A Colony for California: Riverside's First Hundred Years
(Riverside: Press Enterprise 1971), 113-118 and 369-370; Tom Patterson, “Life and Death of a Unique Settlement,”
The Press-Enterprise, October 11, 1998; Harold Whelan, “Eden in Jurupa Valley: The Story of Agua Mansa,”
Southern California Quarterly, 55 (no. 4. 1973), 413-429.

16
Riverside Land and Irrigating Company of San Bernardino County, California “Southern California” (San
Francisco: Frank Eastman, 1877).

17
Joan Hall, “Riverside Historical Societies Centennial,” Journal of the Riverside Historical Society, 7 (no. 1,
February 2003).

22
The Riverside Historical Society defined its primary mission as encouraging friendly
relations among members, perpetuating the memory of local heroes, and preserving the city’s
historical resources.
19
As stated at the inaugural meeting, “Riverside is our adopted home, let us
worthily cherish it.”
20
Modeled on the Historical Society of Southern California in Los Angeles,
membership in the Riverside Historical Society was rendered private by its constitution.
Contradicting the formal purpose of the Historical Society to collect and preserve local history,
formal measures made membership exclusive to those who had migrated to the region.
Applicants were further required to attain sponsorship by two current members. Marking
membership impermanent, the constitution safeguarded against those later found unfit for
membership, rendering those found guilty of “misconduct” eligible for removal. Those who did
not meet requirements based on age, the payment of dues, and duration in the county were also
banned.
21
Though avoiding direct references to race, these policies inherently prevented Mexican
and Native people from taking an active role in the construction of local history. The stark
absence of Spanish surnames among officers and committee members reflects the effectiveness
with which the constitution erased competing historical visions of inland Southern California, as
well as ideas of what the region would become.
22

18
Hall, 2003; Brown and Boyd, 1922; “Selected Orange and Lemon Buds,” California Citrograph (Los Angeles,
December 1924), 60; Archibald Shamel, Charles Pomeroy, and R. E. Caryl, “Bud Selection in the Washington
Navel Orange,” California Citrograph (Los Angeles, 1929), 198.
19
J M Guinn. “Curator’s Report, 1900.” Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California and
Pioneer Register 1900 (Los Angeles, 1901), 85.

20
Ron Goff, “Reprint of 1903 Newspaper Story: ‘New Society of Historians’,” Journal of the Riverside Historical
Society, 7 (no. 1. February 2003).

21
Los Angeles County Pioneers of Southern California, "Constitution. [Adopted September 4, 1897.]," Publications,
4, (no. 24, 1898).

22
For more on the relationship between public history and lines of difference see Richard R Flores, Remembering
the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 61-92; See also
Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006), 47-102; In areas of the Southwest where the Hispano elite maintained economic and
23
Requirements limiting Historical Society membership represent early efforts to racially
restrict regional claims to those made by white colonists. Urban historian Dolores Hayden has
described the systematic suppression and elimination of women, the working-class, and ethnic
minorities from the cultural landscape of Los Angeles as “historicide.”
23
The racial exclusivity
through which the Society narrated the city’s history reflects a similar process here. Through
selective membership policies, participation in the Historical Society became a racial marker of
whiteness that bestowed the honorific title of pioneer on some residents and designated others to
nostalgic reminders of a pre-colony past. That it did so within only a ten-year window of
Riverside’s settlement reflects the colony’s urgent desire to establish a selective tradition that
celebrated white pioneers exclusive claims to regional development. Symbolic of white claims to
the region’s past, present, and future, the Historical Society designated protection of the first
navel orange trees as its first call to action.
24

The Mythology of the Navel Orange
Historians have traced the introduction of oranges in southern California to the Spanish
priests of the California missions. Since at least the beginning of the 19
th
century, oranges were
cultivated alongside grapes, figs, and pears. It was from the saplings of Mission San Gabriel that
ranchers such as Antonio Lugo and Luis Vignes began producing the first commercial orange
groves.
25
The navel orange celebrated by the Riverside Historical Society, however, was unique

political power, the Hispano elite remained active in commemorations of public history. See John M. Nieto-Phillips,
The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s-1930s. (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2004).

23
Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1997).

24
Kropp made a similar observation regarding the construction of a Spanish Fantasy Past in 1930s Los Angeles. She
found that while Anglo Los Angeles celebrated a romanticized Spanish past, Mexicans in the present were subject to
harsh discrimination. Kropp, 2006.

24
from this mission variety. Introduced to inland southern California by the United States
Department of Agriculture (USDA), the navel orange represented the stretching arm of the U.S.
nation into California following the Mexican-American War. Where citrus served as a mission
fruit under the Spanish flag and a supplement to cattle ranching under the Mexican flag, the
navel orange represented a highly-specialized, capital intensive, long-distanced market endeavor
in the emerging American West. Accordingly, the parent navel orange tree was a fitting symbol
of the supplication of indigenous communities for eastern colonists, Northern Mexico for
American California, and the ranch economy for capitalist citrus.
When the Historical Society successfully acquired one of the two parent navel orange
trees credited with generating a regional citrus industry, its placement became a question of
symbolic representation. Previously obtained by the city, the first tree had earlier been replanted
on a donated lot at the corner of Arlington and Magnolia Avenues. Placed to face its original
location on the family homestead of Luther and Eliza Tibbets, the tree’s planting at this busy
intersection served as a physical link between the city’s humble beginnings as an agricultural
colony and its emergence as a modern center of commerce.
26
Symbolic of Riverside’s origin, the
replanting of the second tree would likewise reflect the citrus industry’s prominent role in the
region’s development. Following much deliberation, the Historical Society agreed to transplant
the second parent tree in the courtyard of the Mission Inn.

25
See “Chapter IV Introduction of the Orange in California” in William Andrew Spalding, The Orange: Its Culture
in California: With a Brief Discussion of the Lemon, Lime, and Other Citrus Fruits (Riverside: Press and
Hortculturalist Steam Print, 1885); Iris Wilson Engstrand, William Wolfskill, 1798-1866; Frontier Trapper to
California Ranchero. (Glendale: A. H. Clark Co., 1965).

26
By the 1920s, the tree was protected by an iron gate, adorned with a bronze plaque, and a popular tourist site. It
was among the first to receive highway designation by the State Historical Society and it continues to bloom at the
corner of Arlington and Magnolia as an important symbol of Riverside’s citrus heritage. See photographic record of
the replanting in box 6, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).

25

Figure 2 Rendering by artist William Alexander of architect Arthur Benton’s Mission Wing at the Mission Inn.
27

Owned by Frank Miller, an Executive Committee Member of the Historical Society, the
Mission Inn was celebrated as emblematic of the City. It had recently undergone reconstruction
in the mission revival style and was quickly becoming a popular tourist destination. Although
architect Arthur Benton drew on multiple influences to execute Miller’s eclectic vision, the resort
hotel was largely designed as a grandiose facsimile of the premiere symbol of Spanish
California: the mission. Arcades, patios, thick arches, clay tile roofs, plaster covered exteriors,
and towering bells each evoked a romantic portrait of the Mission era.
28
Historians have
attributed the allure of the mission myth to the belief in linear movement from Spanish conquest
of the Americas to U.S. conquest over Mexico; anxieties surrounding racial, class, and national
identities at the onset of California modernity; and an attempt to replace tales of violent conquest

27
Steven Lech and Kim J. Johnson, Riverside’s Mission Inn. (Charleston: Arcadia Press, 2006) 22.

28
Barbara Moore, ed., Historic Mission Inn, Riverside, California. (Riverside: Friends of the Mission Inn, 1998);
James Rawls, “The California Mission as Symbol and Myth,” California Historical Society, 71 (no. 3, Fall 1992);
Steve Lech and Kim Jarrell Johnson, Riverside's Mission Inn (Charleston, 2006).
26
with an inevitable progression to Euro-American civilization.
29
Ultimately deemed underutilized
in the hands of Spain and Mexico, pre-Anglo California was portrayed as an open territory ripe
for the productive hands of Anglo farmers. As reflected in one early Riverside publication:
It is a matter of surprise to many that visit us, that more has not been accomplished; but it
must be borne in mind that the aborigines and their successors, the Mexican and Spanish
races, were so long isolated from the ‘rest of mankind’ that there was no stimulus to
exertion other than to get sufficient to eat and keep them comfortable.
30

By placing the navel orange tree in the courtyard of the Mission Inn, the Historical Society
recognized citrus ranchers as the rightful inheritors of California in a narrative celebrating
European-American migrants’ ability to turn a Mexican desert into an American garden. The
parent navel orange tree was emblematic of this transition. Endowed with the authority of
community heritage, the strategic placement of the navel in the central courtyard of the Mission
Inn discursively and definitively decentralized the cattle ranchers of the Spanish fantasy past
with the citrus ranchers of an Anglo fantasy past.
Alongside select efforts to preserve the material culture of early Riverside, various agents
came together to promote a citrus origin tale that justified U.S. expansion and claims of white
superiority. In this sense, the mythology of the navel orange served as an “imperial transition
narrative” in the white settler society of Riverside. As explained by geographers Laura Brace and
Sherene Raznack, these mythologies turn populated lands into empty spaces, credit
modernization to white settlers, and assume an inevitable progression towards capitalism.
31

29
Kropp, 2006; Phoebe Kropp. "Citizens of the Past? Olvera Street and the Construction of Race and Memory in
1930s Los Angeles," Radical History Review, 81 (2001), 35-60; Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island
on the Land (1946; Layton, 1980).

30
Riverside Land and Irrigation Company of San Bernardino County, California (San Francisco: Frank Eastman,
1877), 19.

31
See Laura Brace, The Politics of Property: Labour, Freedom, and Belonging (Hampshire: Edinburgh University
Press, 2004); Sherene Razack, Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto, Between the
Lines: 2002).
27
Laura Barraclough has since elaborated that narratives of rural land organized around frontier
ideology actively constructed racial and spatial categories in the American West. In her study of
the relationship between discursive representations and urban policy in the San Fernando Valley,
Barraclough argues that the myths and symbols of rural land are created, and in turn, shape
material inequality and identity.
32
In this respect, the seemingly mundane efforts by the Riverside
Historical Society to conserve an orange tree do not merely reflect the ways Riverside colonists
understood categories of racial and regional identity. Rather, their efforts expose the ways they
attempted to shape the world around them. They did so according to the ways they understood
their role in an ongoing process of American conquest within the Mexican American
borderlands, Western Hemisphere, and Pacific Rim.
The navel myth often began with the discovery of a superior type of orange by an
American consular in Bahia, Brazil. The sweet fruit and bold color of the seedless laranja de
umbigo, or navel orange, set it apart from other varieties. The consular wrote of the unique breed
to Dr. William Saunders, the superintendent of experimental gardens and grounds at the
Propagating Gardens of the USDA in Washington D.C.
33
Through their joint efforts, Saunders
secured twelve samples of the Bahian navel tree. Hopeful of the fruits’ commercial value in the
hands of American ranchers, he tested samples at the propagating garden and sent others to
Florida. The last two were mailed to California for care by his former neighbors, the Tibbets.
34

32
Laura R. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley: Rural Landscapes, Urban Development, and White
Privilege (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

33
For more on Saunders see The Gardeners' Chronicle: A Weekly Illustrated Journal of Horticulture and Allied
Subjects (London: Bradbury, Agnew, and Co., December 20, 1906) 423.

34
In a letter from E.S. Hubbard to C. S. Pomeroy of the USDA, he noted that at least one of the 12 original trees had
been sent to Florida. See E.S. Huubard to C.S. Pomeroy, August 1, 1924, box 6, (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside,
CA); Another note suggests the navel may have been introduced much earlier by a Brazilian planter. See Pomologist
to Mr. Has A Harris, August 4, 1924, box 6, (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).
28
Eliza and Luther Tibbets were unconventional characters. Both had divorced multiple
times, Mr. Tibbets had a reputation for filing law suits over minute disputes, and Mrs. Tibbets
was a spiritualist medium who channeled the deceased. When Mr. Tibbets ventured west in 1870
to join the small colony of Riverside migrants, he settled on the southern outskirts of the town.
On the young town’s periphery, he could easily enjoy access to the colony while avoiding the
financial obligations of membership, such as shared irrigation costs. Mrs. Tibbets later joined
him. Like other colonists, the Tibbets experimented with various agricultural endeavors in the
early years of settlement. They searched without success until the arrival of the two orange
saplings. Mrs. Tibbets nourished the trees by her doorway and, without access to the colony
canals, used her dishwater to raise them. Her dedication and the navels’ inherent suitability to the
inland climate were credited with the young plants’ success. In 1884, navel oranges propagated
from the buds of the Tibbets’ trees gained national recognition when awarded first prize at the
World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans.
35
As news of their superior
quality spread, farmers from across the region populated the landscape with navel trees springing
forth from clippings of the seedless Brazilian orange trees of the Riverside colony.
The specifics regarding the navels’ arrival in Riverside vary across accounts. Its details,
ranging from the quantity of trees received to whether it was really Eliza who requested them,
are the subject of much debate. However, one outcome is consistent: the Tibbets’ navel trees had
given birth to an industry that redefined the region.
36
As described in popular accounts of local

35
Archibald Shamel and C. S. Pomeroy, The Washington Navel Orange. (Riverside, CA: Riverside Chamber of
Commerce, 1933).

36
For a sample of publications relating the navel origin story see “A Produção De Laranjas Sem Sementes” (The
Production of Oranges Without Seeds), Bulletin of the Pan American Union (Washington DC), 28 (Jan-June 1900);
Archibald Shamel, “Semi Centennial of the Washington Navel Orange in California” California Citrograph (Los
Angeles, December 1913; The Riverside Chamber of Commerce, “Riverside: The Birthplace of the Navel Orange,”
ephemera, 1926, box 6, p. 6, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA); Archibald Shamel,
29
heritage, it was from the struggles, successes, and superiority of these early pioneers—the Norths
who founded the colony, the eastern migrants who traversed an unknown frontier, and the
Tibbets who cultivated the navel—that the modern citrus rancher was born.
The navel orange origin story leaves out two central characters. The Tibbets’ live-in
domestic, Ah Lan, and a young African-American girl, Nicey Robinson. Lan was among the first
Chinese immigrants to settle in Riverside and like many Chinese domestic workers he would
have completed essential tasks for the family, such as cleaning, laundry, and cooking.
37
His
responsibilities likely extended outside the household as well, for instance, to general gardening.
If the Brazilian navel orange trees credited with the birth of the citrus industry were sustained by
the Tibbets’ dish water, as the origin tale suggested, then Lan may have been the one to water it.
Or, perhaps the young Robinson, who had accompanied Luther when he traveled to California
from Fredericksburg Virginia, cared for the tree.
38
Chinese immigrants, such as Lan, and
African-American migrants, such as Robinson, however, went without the honorific title of
“pioneer” bestowed upon the white migrants of the Riverside colony. They were erased from
official historical accounts in which the mere presence of Chinese, African, Native, and Mexican
American people challenged the hegemony of white claims to regional development. Whether it

“Riverside-Home of the Navel,” The Citrograph (Los Angeles, 1943); Archibald Shamel and C. S. Pomeroy, The
Washington Navel Orange (Riverside, CA: Riverside Chamber of Commerce, 1933).

37
Federal Decennial Census, 1880, General Services Administration San Bernardino County, RG 029, (National
Archives, Riverside); Lan’s presence (who he calls Ah Lau) in the Tibbets’ household is accounted for in Great
Basin Foundation, “A Selected Chronological History,” Wong Ho Leun: An American Chinatown (San Diego:
Great Basin Foundation, 1987), 62; Harry Lawton notes “Chinese often evaded giving their family name to census
takers and county clerks and used the diminutive ‘Ah.’ In Southern China, the diminutive prefix “Ah” was usually
appended informally before a given monosyllabic name to address relatives or friends and in other forms of
designation. It was used indiscriminately by Riverside’s census-taker both as a prefix and suffix.” See Harry
Lawton, “The Pilgrims from Gom-Benn: Migratory Origins of Chinese Pioneers in the San Bernardino Valley,”
Chinese America, History and Perspectives (San Francisco, CA: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1989), 61;
See also Riverside Land and Irrigation Company, 1877, 14.

38
Patricia Ortlieb and Peter Economy, Creating an Orange Utopia: Eliza Lovell Tibbets & the Birth of California's
Citrus Industry (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 2011), 25-40; Federal Decennial Census, 1880, General
Services Administration San Bernardino County, RG 029, (National Archives, Riverside)
30
was Luther Tibbets, Eliza Tibbets, Ah Lan, Nicey Robinson, or somebody else who requested,
planted, or watered the navel are questions that may never have definitive answers. What is more
significant is the fact that some figures were erased from official historical accounts while others
became heroes. The mass popularity of the navel origin tale and its numerous iterations prompts
further interrogation of why.
The Rooted and the Routed
Regional heritage initiatives memorialized the Riverside Colony, and more broadly white
American migrants. Consistent with frontier ideology, the colonists migrated across an unknown
territory in pursuit of opportunity. In their hands, a desert declared underutilized by earlier
Native American foragers, Mexican ranchers, and New Mexican farmers was transformed into a
garden. In their descendants’ hands, this land was credited with reaching its highest use: large-
scale commercial citrus production. This mythology, made popular in the story of the navel
orange, positioned the white citrus rancher as the rightful inheritor of a multiracial region.
During the capitalist transition of California’s economy, it was the discursive distance between
the celebratory aspects of white mobility, implicit to regional heritage, and criminal connotations
of Asian mobility, constructed through immigration policy, that enforced differential racial
access to territorial claims and the profits of agricultural production. The modern citrus rancher,
like the navel orange tree, was rooted to the inland valleys of southern California. Their
settlement, however, was contingent on maintaining the mobility of an immigrant Chinese
workforce.
In an agriculturalist fantasy, where citrus growers envisioned themselves as businessmen
who maximized the bounty of their agrarian forefathers, success in horticulture was linked with
31
the production of model, modern, communities.
39
As explained by historian Matt Garcia, the
ability of citrus growers to harness nature through scientific research was credited with the
uniformly and rationally designed towns, or “citriscapes,” that developed throughout the region.
The Loring Opera House, Riverside County Courthouse, and grand estates of individual growers,
all stood as monuments to the economic accomplishments of white growers, their dominance
over nature, and the inherent superiority of Anglo-American California.
40
Ranchers’ rationale
echoed that of naturalists in northern California, such as the Save the Redwoods League. As
noted by historian Alexandra Stern, “[for many European American settlers], the act of civilizing
what they saw as fertile yet underutilized terrain meant applying modern science, above all, the
maxims of heredity and biology, to graft a new polis onto the Spanish and Mexican past.”
41
The
parent navel tree not only represented the growth of an industry, it represented the growth of the
white population.

39
Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Anthea Hartig, “‘In a World He Has Created’:
Class Collectivity and the Growers’ Landscape in the Southern California Citrus Industry, 1890-1940,” California
History, 74 (no. 1, Spring 1995).

40
“Cornerstone is Laid. Impressive Rites.” Riverside Daily Press. May 7, 1903; “Welcome to California.” Riverside
Daily Press. May 7, 1903; “Riverside Welcomes Nation’s Executives.” Riverside Daily Press. May 7, 1903; For
more on the connection between grower identity and residential construction see Anthea Hartig, “‘In a World He
Has Created’: Class Collectivity and the Growers’ Landscape in the Southern California Citrus Industry, 1890-
1940.” California History, 74 (no. 1, Spring 1995).

41
Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley,
CA: University of California PRess 2005), 85.

32

Figure 3 Images of the tree-lined Victoria Avenue were popularly reproduced as representative of Riverside, as in
the citrus crate label pictured above.
42

The connection between horticulture and the colonization of southern California was
replicated throughout the built environment of Riverside. The neat grid system of streets and
boulevards seemed a direct reflection of the regimented rows of citrus groves that financed urban
development. As later written in The Washington Navel (1933), a Chamber of Commerce
booklet:
When one stops to think of the thousands of attractive homes in the navel orange districts
that have been established and are being maintained through the successful culture of this
variety, it becomes apparent that the financial returns for the crops, large as they may be,
have not been the most important outcome of this outstanding development.
43

Victoria Avenue, a major thoroughfare connecting the citrus producing district of Arlington
Heights and bustling downtown Riverside, was designed as a direct physical and symbolic

42
“Crate Label, ‘Avenue Brand.’ Grown and packed by the Victoria Avenue Citrus Association.” Riverside Public
Library Citrus Label Collection. Riverside Public Library. Riverside, CA, circa 1920.

43
Shamel and Pomeroy, 1933, 31-32.
33
connection between citrus production and the white household.
44
Lined with ornamental plants
from across the globe, Victoria Avenue parallels what historian Douglas Sackman has called “an
imperialistic appropriation of the world’s flora.”
45
In a fitting symbol of his future imperialist
efforts, President Roosevelt was escorted down this landscaped boulevard that passed through
irrigated orange groves, by the large estates of their owners, and led to the center of Riverside.
Where farming evoked preindustrial toil in the fields, ranching now conjured images of modern
white men attending business meetings, reading the latest horticulturalist journals, maintaining
complex records of tree productivity, and applying this knowledge to city planning.
Racial designations were deeply embedded in space. The agriculturalist fantasy was
entrenched in the idealized racial geography of Riverside, where the modern citrus rancher was
segregated from the laboring class within the orderly spaces of the citriscape. Conversely, bodies
of color were to exist on the periphery of white space. Like geographer Kay Anderson’s
Vancouver Chinatown, the “Chinese Quarter” became a local referent for the racial and moral
divisions between whiteness and racial other.
46
Bounded by Eight Street, Ninth Street, Main
Street, and Orange Street, the Chinese Quarter included a mix of wooden boarding houses,
laundries, and general stores, each of which catered to Chinese residents and contract workers.
One-roomed dormitories provided damp dwelling to traveling laborers who slept on wooden
planks or dirt floors. Those unable to afford a boarding house gathered in camps throughout the
streets. Within these spaces, tents clustered together and laborers shared open fires, meals, and

44
Brown and Boyd, 1922; Planning Department. Landmarks of the City of Riverside. (Riverside, CA: City of
Riverside, January 2002); See Matt Garcia’s discussion of Euclid Avenue in Upland, CA. Garcia, 2001.

45
Sackman, 2005, 46.

46
Kay J Anderson, “The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the Making of a Racial
Category,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 77 (no. 4, Dec 1987), 580-598.

34
company. The grid that divided domestic and public space elsewhere was blurred on the unpaved
streets of the Chinese Quarter.
47

The Chinese Quarter was a common topic of complaint among Riverside city leaders.
Editor of the Riverside Press, Luther Holt, led tirades against Chinese washhouses and
encouraged Riverside residents to patronize non-Chinese businesses.
48
As a precursor to similar
portrayals in Los Angeles, the Riverside Press characterized laundries as a sign of unsanitary
living in a city otherwise celebrated for its healthy sun soaked earth.
49
Despite their unfavorable
portrayal in the local news, Chinese laundries remained utilized by a multiethnic clientele.
50

Nevertheless, in October of 1885, the Chinese Quarter was virtually bulldozed when Riverside
ordinances targeted laundering, ironing, and “nuisance” within a square mile of downtown. The
law was selectively enforced and, as later explained by journalist and local historian Tom
Patterson (1971), it was directed at single men washing their own clothing outdoors.
51
By
criminalizing daily life and the communal use of public spaces, the municipal code was
instrumental in pushing Chinese residents out of the downtown business district. However, rather
than attempt to rid the region of Chinese residents altogether, public policy regulated them to

47
Harry Lawton, “Riverside’s First Chinatown.” Wong Ho Leun: An American Chinatown (San Diego: Great Basin
Foundation, 1987); Deborah Wong, “Asian American Riverside,” (Regents of the University of California, 2006),
http://aar.ucr.edu/index.html; Michael Moreau, “Drive May Pave Way for Dig at Ruins of Old Riverside
Chinatown.” Inland Empire Living: Los Angeles Times. (Los Angeles, August 4, 1984).

48
For more on the history of the Press newspaper see Brown and Boyd, 1922, 605; Patterson, 1971, 195

49
In a later example, historian Natalia Molina notes that public health officers often condemned Chinese proprietors
in an attempt to characterize Los Angeles’ Chinatown as a “rotten spot.” Molina, 2006.

50
R. S. Malloch, “When Asked to Put It On Paper…” Wong Ho Leun: An American Chinatown (San Diego: Great
Basin Foundation, 1987); See also Gayle Wattawa, Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California's Inland
Empire. Santa Clara, CA: Santa Clara University, 2006, 72.

51
Patterson, 1971, 194.
35
non-white spaces. Following the dislocation of the Chinese Quarter, a new “Chinatown” formed
in a seven-acre district nearby Tesquesquite Arroyo.
52

The relationship between Chinatown and the rest of Riverside was mitochondrial. From
Chinatown, citrus growers were supplied the manpower for the specialized and labor-intensive
cultivation of citrus. The population of the segregated district swelled during the harvest and
dipped with the crops. Although symbolic boundaries were resilient, physical boundaries were
porous membranes through which growers, contractors, and laborers traveled to keep the citrus
industry running. Maintaining the integrity of this system depended on a constant and well-
regulated supply of labor. In this sense, Chinatown was more than a space of racialization. It was
a circuitous landscape in which the traffic of labor was mediated between white and non-white
space. Space and mobility existed in a dialectic relationship. Just as important as maintaining the
integrity of Chinatown’s boundaries to defending racial homeostasis was the essential task of
regulating mobility.
Although modernity and mobility seemed to walk hand in hand, as advancing technology
facilitated movement between point A and point B, geographer Tim Cresswell (2006) has noted
that the desire to order cities and people existed in tension with the rise in human fluidity at the
beginning of the 20
th
century.
53
Speaking of the same period, sociologist Tomás Almaguer
(1994) has argued that California’s central organizing principle was a comparative process of
racialization, in which racial stratification was organized according to the unique ways each
group posed class-specific obstacles to the territorial claims of the white population.
54

52
The Tesquesquite Chinatown had twenty-one buildings and a population of about four hundred, mostly single
male permanent residents which, during times of harvest, increased to approximately 2,500 people. See “About
Chinatown,” Save Our Chinatown Committee, http://www.saveourchinatown.org/aboutus.html.

53
Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006), 16.

54
Almaguer, 1994, 6.
36
Throughout this project, I argue that the meanings attached to mobility, as a meaning-filled
organizing principle, and race, as a comparative process tied to capital accumulation, were
produced alongside one another. Examining technologies that governed mobility reveal both
processes that reinforced the dominance of white territorial claims in the unfolding citrus belt
and, more broadly, uncovers a means by which the boundaries of American citizenship were
delineated.
Where immigration enforcement was once localized along Pacific Coast ports and the
Canadian and Mexican borders, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1892, or Geary Act, signaled the
rescaling of immigration enforcement to the interior of California. Although, the Act of 1882
prohibited almost all immigration from China to the United States, when reviewed and renewed
in 1892 the law tightened restrictions on people of Chinese descent already living in the United
States. Notably, the law added a provision requiring all Chinese laborers to register and carry a
certificate of residence verifying their right to reside in the country. Certain groups were exempt,
including students, teachers, merchants, and diplomats. Nevertheless, under a law that marked all
Chinese bodies as potentially criminal, even exempt groups were subject to living in the
“shadows of exclusion.”
55
Whereas prior to the Geary Act immigration screening was reserved
for one’s national crossing, federal agents now had the authority to monitor, detain, and question
the validity of all Chinese movements within American borders.
56

55
Lee’s use of “shadows of exclusion” describes the extension of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to “not only legal
and illegal Chinese immigrants but also to native-born Chinese American citizens, whose plight was inextricably
connected to that of their immigrant brethren.” See Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the
Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 223; Anna Pegler-Gordon,
“Chinese Exclusion, Photography, and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy,” American Quarterly 58, (no.
1, March 2006), 51-77.

56
In 1882, the Chinese exclusion act suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years, prohibited
naturalization (an extension of the naturalization act of 1790), and required exempted classes such as teachers,
students, merchants, and casual travelers to present a certificate from the Chinese government upon arriving to the
United States. It also required that Chinese nationals already legally in the United States obtain a certificate of re-
37
The Geary Act divided residency into the categories of authorized and unauthorized for
the first time. Designating unregistered Chinese residents as criminal, the new law
institutionalized the concept of illegal residency. Unique from the “illegal immigrant,” for who
unauthorized entry made one vulnerable to deportation, the idea of an “illegal resident”
suggested the legality of national entrance was inconsequential.
57
Rather, it was the denial to
register within the boundaries of the nation-state—or suspicion of this denial—that marked one
as criminal. In this sense, the Geary Act can be likened to the Fugitive Slave Act. The 1850
revision of the act declared that all runaway slaves were to be returned to their southern
slaveholders upon capture. Paralleling the restrictions placed upon African-Americans, all
Chinese movements within the United States were cast as those of a potential criminal. Further,
like the Fugitive Slave Act, Chinese residents caught evading the law were subject to
imprisonment and forced into manual labor. Chinese nationals who violated the Geary Act were
unique from African Americans in that their illegal residency marked them as subject to
compulsory deportation.
58
Like the Fugitive Slave Act, many challenged the integrity of the
Geary Act, even refusing to register in the face of harsh penalties.
59
Despite these protests, the

entry in order to return to the United States upon the conclusion of international travel. See “An Act to Execute
Certain Treaty Stipulations Relating to the Chinese,” May 6, 1882, Enrolled Acts and Resolutions of Congress,
1789-1996; General Records of the United States Government, RG 11 (National Archives, Riverside).

57
Mae Ngai notes that the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 created the illegal alien as an “impossible
subject.” Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004).

58
Act to Prohibit the Coming of Chinese Persons into the United States, 27 Stat. 25 (May 1892); “Resolution
introduced by Senator Henry Clay in relation to the adjustment of all existing questions of controversy between the
states arising out of the institution of slavery,” January, 29, 1850, Senate Simple Resolutions, Motions, and Orders
of the 31st Congress, ca. 03/1849-ca. 03/1851; RG 46; Records of the United States Senate, 1789-1990, (National
Archives).

59
See “Enforcement of the Geary Law: Letter from the Acting Secretary of the Treasury” (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, September 27, 1893).
38
law justified an elaborate system that regulated Chinese mobility and rested upon the presumed
criminality of all Chinese people in the interior of the continental United States.
In the aftermath of the Mexican American War, Slave Patrols surfaced in the South to
police black bodies. In the modern West, Chinese Inspectors emerged to monitor, threaten, and
criminalize mobile Chinese residents within the broad jurisdiction of the federally mandated
Geary Act.
60
Employed by the Chinese Bureau of the Customs Service and the Chinese Division
of the Office of the Superintendent of Immigration, Inspectors functioned as the regional arm of
federal enforcement.
61
John Putnam was celebrated as “the most thorough, as well as most daring
officer of their peculiar service in ferreting out and deporting Chinese unlawfully within the
United States.”
62
His jurisdiction included the 12,000 Chinese immigrants living from San Luis
Obispo to Fresno, and covered all of southern California with the exception of San Diego.
63

The duties of a Chinese Inspector, predecessors of the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, drew them well beyond the ports and border checkpoints of national boundaries and into
inland communities. Distanced from the San Francisco Port, seditious immigration inland from
the U.S.-Mexico border crossing in San Diego was Putnam’s primary concern. He boasted:
Chinamen now and then come into the country from Mexico, walking across the border
without hindrance. As soon as they reach Los Angeles they are picked up and deported,
for their characteristics quickly betray that they are newcomers.
64

60
Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001); David Delaney, Race, Place, and the Law, 1836-1948 (Austin, TX: University of Texas
Press, 1998).

61
Waverly B. Lowell. “Chinese Immigration and Chinese in the United States.” Records in the Regional Archives
of the National Archives and Records Administration, Reference Information Paper 99, National Archives and
Records Administration, 1996.

62
“Daring Officer Called Beyond,” Los Angeles Times, November 22, 1904, 6

63
John McGroarty, Los Angeles from the Mountain to the Seas (Chicago and New York: American Historical
Society, 1921), 365-366.

64
“Goes to El Paso: Chinese Inspector Putnam Transferred to Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1899, 7.
39
Chinese immigrants increasingly entered California by way of Mexico where, as Lee and Robert
Chao Romero have explained, Mexican authorities under President Porfirio Diaz encouraged the
growth of the Chinese laboring class.
65
Many established businesses, built Chino-Latino
households, and constructed the infrastructure of the Porfirian regime. Others were caught in the
currents of the “transnational business of illegal immigration” that substituted people for
commodities in the long-standing trade and smuggling networks that thrived between border
towns.
66
Putman prioritized immigration enforcement along these circuits. Doing so took him
into the long-standing Chinese communities of the southern California interior. Enforcing the
line between citizen and alien was no longer a pursuit reserved for national borders. Immigration
policy was increasingly a regional matter and it was at the regional scale that the technologies
policing mobility manifested.
Immigration historians have underscored the link between efforts to fortify borders and
attempts to shape the racial contours of the nation. In a “gatekeeping” framework, Erika Lee
describes America’s relationship to Chinese immigration as a technology regulating racial, class,
and gender preferences.
67
Alexandra Stern has linked the solidification of racial lines to the
inspection, fumigation, and sorting of Mexican bodies seeking entry to the United States at the
U.S. Mexico border crossing in El Paso between 1917 and World War II.
68
And, Kathleen Anne
Lytle Hernandez has traced the origins of the border patrol to the federal exercise of keeping

65
Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Robert Chao Romero, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940, (Tucson,
2010).

66
Lee, 2003, 193-198.

67
Lee, 2003.

68
Alexandra Minna Stern, “Nationalism on the Line: Masculinity, Race, and the Creation of the U.S. Border Patrol,
1910-1940” in Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History, eds. Samuel Truett and
Elliott Young. (Duke Univ. Press, 2004), 299-323; Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in
Los Angeles, 1879-1939. University of California Press, 2006.
40
racialized bodies in place.
69
Lee, Stern, and Lytle Hernandez each reinforce that national
boundaries establish and stabilize racial meanings at border crossings. Those who control
mobility, from border agents to medical personnel, become key actors in the maintenance of
place and ethnic meaning. Drawing our attention to the exercise of these technologies inland
reveals the methods by which the border became localized. It was by this localization that
mobility was an act rendered policeable by immigration policy where geographic distance
seemed to render it mute.
The act of mobility was the classification by which Chinese Inspectors could initiate any
individual deportation. The exempt category of merchant was defined by the Customs
Department as a person involved in buying and selling goods, at a “fixed place of business,”
conducted in one’s name, and at no time engaging in manual labor. Where Chinese-managed
businesses were regulated to the segregated spaces of Chinatowns, the fixity requirement
excluded occupations taking Chinese migrants beyond their accepted racial geography. In this
sense, merchant status was a grey area open to interpretation by the court. The travel necessary
for everyday transactions in Chinese dominated employment, such as laundry delivery, vegetable
peddling, and migrant field labor, placed one in the unprotected category of laborer. Merchant
status within the Geary Act was destabilized by the fixity requirement. Since few occupations
were clearly fixed or unfixed, the Geary Act created an opening by which inspectors such as
Putnam could initiate deportation proceedings against virtually any Chinese resident.
Although quotidian Chinese movements could initiate the deportation process, a case’s
legal success required drawing upon the regional racial distinction constructed between farmer
and rancher. White claims to inland southern California were justified by the presumption that

69
Kathleen Lytle Hernandez, Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2010).
41
citrus cultivation represented the highest-use of land. This rationale, however, left territorial
claims vulnerable to competing Chinese agricultural endeavors. Channeling the natural irrigation
of the Santa Ana River, China residents grew and delivered fresh vegetables throughout
Riverside neighborhoods.
70
Unlike citrus investments, which required high start-up costs and
several years of financing without profit while fruit matured, vegetables such as alfalfa, lettuce,
and celery grew within months, rather than years. As Chinese nationals invested in cooperative
agricultural pursuits, cultivation was increasingly divided into subcategories of ranching and
farming. The stratification between citrus “ranchers” and vegetable “farmers” served as a
boundary between whites and non-whites. After the passing of the Geary Act, the symbolic racial
divisions between ranching and farming served as the material division between exempt
residents and deportable aliens.
The accusation that Chinese merchants were farmers in an agriculturally based region
made them vulnerable to deportation. The case of Wong Fong is illustrative of this trend. Fong
co-managed a 120-acre vegetable farm near the Santa Ana River. Like many citrus ranchers, he
employed Chinese laborers to plant, plow, and harvest his crops. Fong acted as a manager. He
handled the bills, supplied provisions for his workers, and supervised sales. However, it was
during his general operations managing vegetable sales—attaining a vegetable wagon license—
that he was arrested as a laborer violating the Geary Act.
71
The privilege enabled by his merchant

70
Harry Lawton, “Riverside’s First Chinatown,” Wong Ho Leun: An American Chinatown (San Diego: Great Basin
Foundation, 1987).

71
United States of America vs. Wong Fong, September 12, 1895, for the Southern District of California. Southern
Division 1887-1907. General Case #763-773, box 40, RG 21 (National Archives, Riverside); See also “Application
of Lawfully Domiciled Chinese Merchant, Teacher, or Student for Preinvestigation of Status,” Records of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service Los Angeles District Office Segregated Chinese Case Files, 1893-1935, box
138, RG 85 (National Archives, Riverside).

42
status, that is exemption from registering under the Geary Law, was revocable when he
embarked on agricultural pursuits in the Citrus Belt.
Merchants were important intermediaries who managed trade and labor relations between
China, the United States, Chinatown, and citrus ranch owners. Fong called upon the relationship
he had developed with his landlord, Pliney Evans of the Riverside Land and Irrigating Company,
in his defense. In an attempt to defend Fong’s claim that he was not a laborer, Evans challenged
the racial line between farmers and ranchers in the Citrus Belt. He explained:
I wouldn’t consider a man that rents 120 acres, a farmer, I would consider him a rancher.
Rancher and farmer are two different things. He was a rancher, we are all ranchers in that
section. I am a rancher…When I speak of defendant being a rancher I mean that he rents
some land, overseer of the ranch. Undoubtedly the defendant does work about his ranch,
the same as we all do up there.
72

In this case, the distinction between rancher and farmer was more than a racial line between
management and labor. It was a legal category whose interpretation meant the difference
between extending elite Chinese immigrants access to capitalist agricultural and deporting those
who tried as violators of the Geary Act.
The court defended the latter option. Despite the mountain of evidence in Fong’s defense,
Federal District Judge Olin Wellborn found Fong guilty and subject to deportation.
73
After more
than a year in detention, Wellborn’s decision was reversed and Fong was released.
74
Despite the
reversal, Putnam grew emboldened by the court’s early support and did not hesitate to continue
arresting Chinese residents who had been allowed legal entry to the United States. As noted by

72
Testimony of PT Evans, United States of America vs. Wong Fong, September 12, 1895, for the Southern District
of California. Southern Division 1887-1907. General Case #763-773. Box 40, RG 21 (National Archives,
Riverside).

73
Lawton has noted that the court’s finding was reversed after Fong spent a year in jail. Harry Lawton, “Two
Riverside Chinatown Merchants Describe Their Operations During a Geary Act Deportation Hearing,” Wong Ho
Leun: An American Chinatown (San Diego: Great Basin Foundation, 1987).

74
“At the U. S. Building. 1896.” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 1896.
43
historian Grace Delgado (2012), deportation decisions driven by anti-Chinese politics marked
national admission as conditional, temporary, and easily withdrawn.
75
More so, threats of
deportation reaffirmed a difference between white and Chinese agriculturalists that delineated
property along racial lines. Where for European-Americans agricultural pursuits affirmed their
claims to inland southern California, farming became a pathway to further exclusion from the
national body for Chinese residents subject to the Geary Act.
Federal law and regional enforcement combined in the criminalization of Chinese
farmers in southern California. It was with the authority of the Geary Act that agents of the
Customs Department were allowed to police the border of citizenry beyond the nation’s ports.
Regional racial ideology was the key to targeting territorial claims by Chinese merchants whose
exempt status was destabilized by the everyday requirements of movement associated with
managing agricultural land. Within the Citrus Belt, enforcement of the Geary Act criminalized
competing claims to ranching and regulated Chinese residents to employment as either seasonal
labor or the merchants who provided access to it.
Fruits of Our Labor
It was a spring morning in May 1903 when the long-anticipated President arrived to
California. For Roosevelt, and indeed many of his contemporaries, the journey across the
western frontier represented the origin of a distinctly American race. Though it was his first visit
to California, Roosevelt had built his public identity on the image of the rugged frontiersman. He
carefully crafted a cowboy persona on his Montana ranch, published the four volume Winning of
the West, and advocated for conservation principles in Congress. Tracing the steps of early
European-American migrants in a thoroughly modern fashion, Roosevelt traveled across the

75
Grace Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico
Borderlands (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012), 88.
44
American West by train as he visited towns, met with local residents, and commemorated
monuments during his western tour. In early May, he reached California. Over a period of two
weeks, Roosevelt attended banquets greeted veterans, and delivered over 50 speeches across the
golden state.
76

When Roosevelt embarked on this tour of the western United States, The Riverside Daily
Press followed his journey closely. The primary newspaper of the “home of the navel orange”
reported frequently on his anticipated tour schedule, the content of his speeches, and the latest
plans of the President’s Welcoming Committee. The members had spent months organizing a
welcome worthy of a war hero turned politician, including a parade featuring marching bands,
state politicians, and members of the infamous Rough Riders.
77
In a display of masculine virtue,
Roosevelt had traded his desk job in the Department of the Navy for the leadership of this small
volunteer regiment during the Spanish-American War. Famously marching up San Juan Hill in
Cuba, Roosevelt was hailed as a war hero and celebrated for his courage. He embraced his new
identity as “Colonel Roosevelt,” effectively replacing his memories of asthmatic boyhood with
claims to virulent manhood. Like the frontiersmen who expanded the American nation in the
Winning of the West, Roosevelt relived the frontier saga he had long admired by asserting
American dominance in the battlefields of the Caribbean.
78

76
Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1980); Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (New York: Putnam's, 1889); Theodore Roosevelt, “Address
at Redlands, California,” California Addresses. (San Francisco: The California Promotion Committee, 1903), 7;
“Welcome to California.” Riverside Daily Press. May 7, 1903.

77
“All Ready for the Day,” Riverside Daily Press, May 6, 1903.

78
Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-
1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 172; See also Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the
Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980); Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West
(New York: Putnam's, 1889).
45
Combining Turnerian frontier ideology with evolutionary science, Roosevelt ascribed to
the popular idea that the American race was forged through racial conflict in the West and, that
in each successful battle, it progressed towards a more advanced state of being. However, he
feared that the higher racial class of native-born Americans descending from Anglo-Saxons was
at risk of extinction in a process known as “race suicide.”
79
As written by Roosevelt, “The
greatest problem of civilization is to be found in the fact that the well-to-do families tend to die
out; there results, in consequence, a tendency to the elimination instead of the survival of the
fittest.”
80
The ease of industrial capitalism and growth in the immigrant population, he warned,
led down a road that ended in degeneration. Where the heroes of the frontier era once guarded
the hereditary key to success, Americans now risked an uncertain miscegenated future. The
burgeoning fields of west coast farms offered a source of relief. If industry on the east coast
promoted the survival of unfit immigrants and decorous gentlemen, western agricultural
capitalism might preserve the fertility and virility of white Americans.
For Roosevelt, the residents of southern California represented the inheritors of the
western pioneer. Linking the yeoman of yesterday to the resident of the present, throughout his
speeches he praised the average Californian for their role in developing the nation. In the first of
these addresses, held in Barstow, Roosevelt congratulated the residents of southern California for
continuing the efforts of the early westerners by building new cities and preserving the state’s

79
Theories of race suicide represented an inversion of Darwinian logic. As explained by Leonard “The race suicide
proposition that persons of inferior stock outbreed their biological betters turns Darwinism on its head, since
Darwinism defines fitness as relative reproductive success. Progressive Era eugenics, in contrast argued that fitness
comprised attributes, such as race, that could be judged independently of reproductive success. Indeed, race-suicide
theory was predicated on what Darwinism denies, what eugenicists called the ‘elimination of the fit.’” Thomas C.
Leonard, "Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era," Journal of Economic Perspectives. 19
(no. 4, 2005), 210; See also Bederman, 1980, 178; Dyer,1980.

80
Theodore Roosevelt, “A Letter from President Roosevelt on Race Suicide,” American Monthly Review of Reviews,
35 (1907), 550.

46
natural beauty. In Redlands, he addressed the crowd as model Americans. He proclaimed, “You
the men of the West, the men pre-eminently American, the men and women who illustrate in
their lives exactly those characteristics which we are proudest to consider as typical of our
country, I greet you because I am at home with you.”
81
By introducing industry, cities, orchards,
ranches, and quality citizenry, Roosevelt declared, agricultural communities were both
exceptionally and “preeminently American.”
82

Upon arriving to the city of Riverside, Roosevelt was guided through a full schedule of
events. In one afternoon, he toured the citrus district, dedicated a palm at the head of the scenic
Victoria Avenue, and rode by rose covered carriage on the streets of downtown. The President’s
procession culminated at a decorated platform where he addressed the crowd. He praised the
beauty of Riverside and its surroundings as a “veritable little paradise.”
83
The material prosperity
of the City’s citrus groves was a striking example of the conservation and irrigation principles he
advocated for throughout his western visit. For Roosevelt, Riverside was a model of the success
possible when the natural resources of the West, superiority of white American settlers, and
national investment combined.
Roosevelt linked the success of the orange-bearing district to the proliferation of the
white household. Seeking to demonstrate their dedication to the fight against race suicide, the
Riverside Welcoming Committee placed white school children holding flowers and American
flags along Roosevelt’s parade route. Recognizing their efforts in his Redlands’ address,
Roosevelt stated, “I am mighty glad, my fellow citizens, that you do so well with fruits and crops

81
Theodore Roosevelt, “Address at Redlands, California,” California Addresses (San Francisco: The California
Promotion Committee, 1903), 7; “Welcome to California,” Riverside Daily Press, May 7, 1903.

82
Theodore Roosevelt, “Address at Redlands, California,” California Addresses (San Francisco: The California
Promotion Committee, 1903), 7; “Welcome to California,” Riverside Daily Press, May 7, 1903.

83
“Successful Parade Its Striking Features,” Riverside Daily Press. May 7, 1903.
47
and all that. But…I am even more pleased that you are doing well with children.”
84
Upon this
declaration the Governor of California interrupted the President. Gesturing towards the children,
he stated, “Mr. President, there is no race suicide here” [emphasis added].
85
The children were
the physical embodiment of European-American development in southern California, better
breeding practices, and the stretching hand of the American nation into the western frontier.

Figure 4 Boys and girls were trained to assimilate into white American modes of domesticity and prepared for the
workforce at the Sherman Ranch.
86

Placed on the other side of the parade route were children from the Sherman Institute.
Opened in 1892 by the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in

84
“Roosevelt Reception and Addresses,” California Citrograph. May 23, 1903.

85
Ibid

86
“Class at Sherman Ranch,” Sherman Photo Gallery, Photo Archives from 1892 to the present, (Sherman Indian
Museum, Riverside, CA).

48
Perris, this off-reservation school housed young Native Americans born between the Tule River
and San Diego. Between 1901 and 1946 the school operated on a 110-acre farm in Riverside,
where the BIA attempted to assimilate Native Americans into American society.
87
Removed
from their homes, boys and girls were separated into tracks that trained boys in farming,
carpentry, and blacksmithing while girls were prepared for lives in the domestic spheres
according to a Victorian ethos that enforced, what Katrina Paxton has called, “gendered cultural
assimilation.”
88
Avoiding race suicide meant more than better breeding. It required exercising
power over lesser races and forcing assimilation into a European-American society deemed
superior.
That evening, Roosevelt attended a banquet held in his honor and stayed at the finest
room at the Mission Inn resort.
89
Before departing the following morning, the Riverside
Historical Society asked him to participate in the replanting of Riverside’s original navel orange
tree—the “parent” of the industry that had come to define the region—in the courtyard of the
hotel. According to the California Citrograph, a widely read trade publication among
Riverside’s citrus ranchers, this replanting endeared residents to the President more than any
other act. Historical Society President John North Jr., son of the Riverside founder, explained, “It
is the progenitor of that great industry which has done most to make Southern California

87
Although much has been lost of these children’s experiences, “The Sherman School Names Project” attempts to
“attempts to recover the ‘humanness’ lost in the hundreds of rosters, numbers, and statistics.” See “The Sherman
School Names Project,” http://www.shermanindianmuseum.org/indexstu.htm.

88
Katrina Paxton, “Learning Gender: Female Students at the Sherman Institute, 1907-1925,” in Boarding School
Blues: Revisiting American Indian Education Experiences, eds., Clifford Trafzer and Jean Keller (University of
Nebraska Press: September 1, 2006), 176.

89
“Hobo Rode on Train,” Riverside Daily Press, April 25, 1903; “All Ready for the Day,” Riverside Daily Press,
May 6, 1903; “Riverside Welcomes Nation’s Executive,” Riverside Daily Press, May 7, 1903; “President
Roosevelt’s Welcome to California,” Riverside Daily Press, May 7, 1903; “Riverside Welcomes the President,”
Riverside Daily Press, May 7, 1903; “City Welcomed Teddy Roosevelt in Gala Fashion: Just Thirty Years Ago
Great President Was Riverside Guest,” Press Enterprise, May 8, 1933; Stephen Ponder, “Publicity in the Interest of
the People: Theodore Roosevelt’s Conservation Crusade,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 20 (no. 3., Summer
1990).
49
famous…The fruit of this tree is so perfect its descendants so numerous, its prosperity so
great…that we believe it merits your unqualified approval.”
90
Drawing on Roosevelt’s work
against race suicide, North’s comment drew a smile from the President and laughter from the
crowd.
91
The pioneering citrus farmers of Riverside, like the parent navel tree, were credited
with beginning the great California citrus industry and transforming a dry desert into a populated
cornucopia.
While recognizing the contributions of the bygone yeoman, those who gathered in the
courtyard of the Mission Inn that morning celebrated the modern rise of the region. In the hands
of Riverside pioneers, the parent navel created a region where no defined region existed before,
one whose boundaries wrapped around the groves of oranges, lemons, and grapefruits of
southern California and away from the eastern desert, western shore, and northern mountains.
The region was popularly described as geographically “inland,” nestled away from the Pacific
Coast and its breeze, which was hazardous to citrus growth. Topographical features such as
valleys, mountains, and deserts were described as both picturesque scenery and physical shields
that protected the arid landscape where citrus thrived. Referred to as “the beautiful land of
sunshine, fruit and flowers,” “the garden spot of the continent,” and “paradise on earth” the
inland valleys of southern California were portrayed as a distinct region, so synonymous with
oranges, lemons, and grapefruit that it was popularly called the “Citrus Belt.”
92
As once
described by Carey McWilliams, “This citrus belt complex of peoples, institutions, and

90
Brown and Boyd, 1922, 825; “President Roosevelt Replanting Original Navel Orange Tree,” The
Citrograph, (Redlands, May 23, 1903).

91
“Picture Showing Ex-President Roosevelt Planting Famous Navel Orange Tree in Court of Mission Inn,”
Riverside Daily Press, January 6, 1919, 7.

92
“Some of the Men I Have Known Who Have Helped to Make California History.” Citrograph (Redlands, May 30,
1903); “Welcome to California,” Riverside Daily Press, May 7, 1903; “Roosevelt’s Praise for Riverside,” Riverside
Daily Press, May 11, 1903.
50
relationships has no parallel in rural life in America and nothing quite like it exists elsewhere in
California. It is neither town nor country, neither rural nor urban. It is a world of its own.”
93

While other citrus bearing valleys promoted a similar regional identity, none were as recognized
as inland southern California.
94

That morning, Roosevelt replanted the parent navel tree in the courtyard of the Mission
Inn. To his delight, several young Native American children were called upon to act as his
personal servants. These same children had likely stood among their classmates from the
Sherman Institute at his parade the afternoon before. As Roosevelt accepted the shovel from the
President of the Riverside Historical Society, he stated, “I am glad to see, Mr. North, that this
tree shows no signs of race suicide” [emphasis added]. It is no accident that this statement
paralleled the one made the day before by the Governor of California. Just as the white children
at Roosevelt’s parade represented the growth of the American nation into the West, the blooming
tree within the mission setting served as a fitting anthropomorphic symbol of Roosevelt’s ideal
national body. Through Roosevelt’s words, “there is no race suicide here,” the parent navel tree
was transformed from an emblem of Riverside’s citrus industry into a model for the superior
American race emerging from the combination of frontier mobility, capital expansion, and power
over races deemed inferior. The commemoration of the navel orange tree, like the procession the

93
Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1973; New York: Duell, Sloan &
Pearce, 1946), 207.

94
My use of the term “regional identity” closely resembles what geographer Anssi Passi refers to as the “identity of
the region.” Passi makes an important distinction between the identity of a region, referring to those features that are
used in regional marketing and governance to distinguish one region from others, and a regional identity, referring to
the multiple identifications of people with the institutionalized region. See Anssi Paasi, “Region and Place: Regional
Identity in Question,” Progress in Human Geography, 27 (2003), 475-85.

51
morning before, rewrote regional history and celebrated racial stratification in a drama of
imperialism, in this case, participated in by Colonel Roosevelt himself.
95

Conclusion
Riverside colonists arrived to a multiracial region at the end of the 19
th
century. The
desire to legitimize their exclusive claims to inland southern California quickly manifested
through the efforts of the Riverside Historical Society, the USDA, and Customs Department.
When President Roosevelt scheduled a visit to the citrus colony, it provided the colonists an
opportunity to articulate this revision with a celebration of regional heritage. Overshadowing the
presence of Native American and Mexican settlers, the replanting of the Tibbets’ “parent” navel
orange tree provided an origin-tale that celebrated the arrival of white colonists and symbolically
christened Riverside as the birthplace of the Citrus Belt. The pageantry surrounding the origin of
the navel orange served as an imperial transition narrative in the white settler communities of
inland southern California. An Anglo fantasy past turned multiracial lands into American
frontiers, credited the region’s fertility to enterprising white settlers, and depicted the transition
to capitalist agriculture as progress.
The celebration of white settlement obscured the process by which non-white bodies
were organized within the citriscape. Segregated districts, like the Chinese Quarter and
Chinatown, reaffirmed the symbolic racial distance between white growers and Chinese laborers.
Despite the guise of well-ordered racial-spatial boundaries, Chinatown was a porous landscape.
Immigration policy reinforced the dominance of white territorial claims where Chinese
movement beyond these boundaries threatened to undermine them. The Geary Act provided a
legal means to criminalize Chinese mobility in a manipulation of a fixity requirement meant to

95
See, for instance, Fiesta de Los Angeles as discussed in William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los
Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
52
exempt Chinese merchants. Chinese Inspectors targeted Chinese merchant-farmers, one of few
groups with the capital necessary to embark on agricultural pursuit. The construction of place
and mobility operated dialectically to promote the bifurcation of land and labor according to
racial lines.
As explained in the next chapter, agriculturalists replayed the myth of progress,
opportunity, and racial dominance in the capitalist frontier of inland southern California.
Scientific research abroad, like heritage campaigns at home, naturalized divisions between white
landowners and non-white laborers. The United States looked to Brazil as the Citrus Belt became
an Orange Empire.

53
CHAPTER 2
Laranja de Umbigo? Going Native in the Post-Frontier Era, 1893-1920
Archibald Shamel, a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) plant physiologist,
boarded the S.S. Vandyck towards Brazil in the fall of 1913. An expert on the navel orange,
Shamel was determined to find the orange grove from which the two Riverside parent navel trees
had originated. Once in Brazil, the ambitious physiologist set out with his team of scientists to
the Cabula orange district of Bahia. Together they met with Brazilian growers, photographed
citrus groves, and studied resident fruits. At the end of the investigation, Shamel declared that the
navel orange was uniquely American. In doing so, he recast the parent navel trees from an
untainted genetic source of Brazilian fruit to relics from which American farmers had developed
the Washington navel.
Although the valleys of inland southern California defined the Citrus Belt geographically,
regional formation was not bound by geography alone. It involved interactions between multiple
scales, or stretched-out relationships between levels of space.
1
The Citrus Belt was one node in a
larger Orange Empire through which various citrus producing regions were connected.
2
Its’
reach permeated beyond individual fields and into the transnational circuits of citrus production.
Inspired by the navel origin-tale, the expedition tied together Riverside growers, the U.S.
government, and Brazil in a revised mythology. Where the symbolic replanting of an immigrant
tree legitimized white migrants’ claims to the populated landscape of southern California, the
reiteration of the navel origin story developed during the Brazilian expedition constructed

1
Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

2
Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley, 2005), 7; See also
George Powell, Letters from the Orange Empire. (Los Angeles, CA: Historical Society of Southern California,
1990).

54
western natives out of eastern migrants in an era of perceived racial crisis. More so, it naturalized
the racial lines of the southern California citrus industry in a global vision of white racial
superiority.
The Wild Western Hemisphere
In 1913, Shamel led a citrus exhibition to Brazil with a small team of USDA scientists
including Palemon H. Dorsett and Wilson Popenoe. Born in Taylorville, Illinois, Shamel
attended the University of Illinois at Champagne where he received a Bachelors of Science in
agriculture. The young scientist began working for the USDA in 1902 and within a few years
made a name for himself in corn and tobacco research. These successes led to USDA sponsored
investigations in Latin America. After completing fieldwork in Puerto Rico and Cuba, Shamel
was reassigned to citrus research in southern California. Spending a brief period in Los Angeles,
he was reassigned to Riverside, the heart of the Citrus Belt.
3

Shamel was sent to California at the request of citrus growers convinced that undesirable
and unprofitable citrus strains were increasing with each bud generation. At the beginning of the
20
th
century, Mendelian genetics suggested that each plant held within it a code that it passed on
to its offspring. As the “parent” source of the navel orange, the Tibbets’ trees were described as
the untainted supply of exceptional fruit characterized by a long growing season, reliable
uniformity, sweet flavor, and bold color. While each sapling contained the potential for superior
oranges, scientists claimed that irresponsible breeding risked the navel’s unique characteristics.
To its protection, the USDA promoted careful monitoring of groves to ensure only exceptional

3
See “Those Who Have Achieved in the Citrus Industry,” California Citrograph, July 1918; EP Clarke. ed.,
“Celebration in Honor of the Eightieth Birthday of Ethan Allen Chase of Riverside California” (Riverside, CA: The
Press Printing Company, 1912), 18-25; Powell, 1990.

55
genetic material was passed down and, further, that degenerative stock was eliminated.
4
By
commemorating and gating the parent navel trees, the Historical Society further hoped to
preserve the value of the citrus for the region. The navel orange had become the primary symbol
of the citrus industry and its buds were considered in need of protection as not only emblematic
of the transformative power of American capitalism, but also as the physical source of superior
fruit.
5
Regional identity, pursuit of profit, and selective breeding had become industry
foundations as citrus ranchers welcomed Shamel to the Citrus Belt.
Shamel’s research on bud selection attempted to create a formula for fruit high in
fecundity, popular in taste, and uniform in size. Through scientific principles, Shamel promised
he could remove guesswork from the orchard. That is, he could identify wayward strains,
eliminate undesirable fruit, and ensure improvement over each generation.
6
As described in the
California Citrograph, “In every movement tending toward better grades of fruit Mr. Shamel is
active.”
7
Direct and outspoken in character, within ten years Shamel became an expert on the
navel orange variety, as well as the leading proponent of selective breeding.
8

Shamel’s efforts to prevent the “running-out” of select citrus varieties echoed the chorus
of progressive-era concerns surrounding race suicide. These theories proposed that a superior
stock of native Americans was at risk of outbreeding by an inferior hoard of immigrants.

Fears

4
Archibald Shamel and C. S. Pomeroy, The Washington Navel Orange. (Riverside, CA: Riverside Chamber of
Commerce, 1933), 23-26.

5
“The Elimination of Poor Citrus Strains,” California Citrograph, July 1918, 224; C.S. Milliken, “Importance of
Having Best Type of Citrus Trees,” California Citrograph, September 1918, 277.

6
Archibald Shamel, “Bud Variation in Lemons,” Journal of Heredity, 8, (no. 1, January 1917).

7
“Those Who Have Achieved in the Citrus Industry,” California Citrograph, July 1918.

8
“Those Who Have Achieved in the Citrus Industry,” California Citrograph, July 1918; “Professor Shamel a ‘Fruit’
Explorer,” The Hartford Daily, clipping, January 31, 1914, box 12, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera
Library, Riverside, CA); “Biography,” Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).

56
stemming from ideas of race suicide manifested in hereditary science surrounding flora.
Historian Alexandra Stern (2005), for instance, likens naturalists’ efforts to preserve the redwood
to a desire for white racial purity and long-term survival.
9
These fears—articulated through
efforts to preserve the navel and the redwood alike—responded to rising immigration and
increasing population density. Californians experienced a disproportionate share of these
changes, undergoing 60 percent growth and a rise in density from an average of 9.5 persons per
square mile to 15.3 people between 1910 and 1920.
10
The statewide question of who was native
found a close cousin in hereditary science. Following the rearticulation of the navel orange from
a Brazilian immigrant to an American native reveals the process by which whiteness was recast
from migrant to resident. In other words, it explains how eastern migrant became native
Americans.
Responses to the threat of race suicide were multiple, including restrictive immigration
measures, eugenic policies, and labor reform meant to sort out the fit from the unfit.
11
Theodore
Roosevelt was among those most concerned with the potential elimination of the white American
race. Where most reformists considered immigrant races living in the U.S. interior to be the
greatest danger to the survival of American whites, Roosevelt feared that the most adverse racial
threat came from overcivilization. In his view, Americans lost their “manly and adventurous
qualities” when devoid of racial conflict, such as that imagined along the American frontier.
12

9
Although contemporaries, efforts to preserve and improve citrus through eugenics predated that of Redwood
preservation in northern California. See Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better
Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 2005), 85.

10
“Population California: From the Census,” The California Outlook. December 2, 1911, 10.

11
Thomas C. Leonard, "Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era," Journal of Economic
Perspectives. 19, (no. 4, 2005).

12
Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life” in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 20, (1899; New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 3-22.
57
President Roosevelt offered recourse. Race suicide could be evaded by living the strenuous life,
practicing better breeding, and recreating the frontier experience in exercises of imperialism
abroad.
13

Figure 5 USDA scientists, P. H. Dorsett, A.D. Shamel, and Wilson Popenoe (left to right), were photographed
onboard the Vandyck en route to Brazil in 1913.
14

The USDA, like Roosevelt, looked to promote national prowess by demonstrating
American superiority in Latin America. Furthering this goal was the expansion of Shamel’s bud

13
Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1980); Kris James Mitchener and Marc Weidenmier, “Empire, Public Goods, and the Roosevelt Corollary.” The
Journal of Economic History, 65 (no. 3, September 2005), 658-692; Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A
Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)

14
Frederic Rosengarten, Wilson Popenoe: Agricultural Explorer, Educator, and Friend of Latin America, (Lawai,
Kauai, Hawaii: National Tropical Botanical Gardens, 1991), 22.

58
selection research to Brazil.
15
The U.S. press promoted the four-month “Brazilian expedition” as
a scientific inquiry into the growing conditions of citrus fruits abroad.
16
As the recognized
birthplace of the navel orange tree, the expedition was publicized for its potential to uncover new
agricultural varieties, novel farming techniques, and the standardization of citrus fruits for
California growers.
17
More so, Shamel’s pursuit of tropical fruits in the Western Hemisphere
served as a reiteration of frontier mythology in which white explorers traversed a potentially
hostile terrain inhabited by racial others. Like the replanting of a parent navel tree by President
Theodore Roosevelt in the courtyard of the Mission Inn, the Brazilian expedition combined a
celebratory discourse of white supremacy and American capitalism in an era of perceived racial
crisis. Only now the American frontier stretched from what was once Mexican California to a
recently independent Brazil.
Consistent with its expansionist agenda, the USDA’s 1913 expedition to Brazil paralleled
one headed by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, as the then former-President was first called during
his tenure in the Spanish-American War. Their shared outward-looking vision was underscored
by the chance meeting of the USDA team and Roosevelt upon the Vandyck steamer as it headed
south from New York. Replicating the western tour that had brought Roosevelt to Riverside, his
expedition included a series of speaking engagements in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Brazil.

15
A.D. Shamel. “The Origin and Development of the Washington Navel Orange,” typescript, undated, box 6,
Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA); Archibald Shamel, “A Brief History of the Origin
and Introduction of the Washington Navel Orange,” typescript, undated, box 6, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas
Rivera Library, Riverside, CA); Archibald Shamel and C. S. Pomeroy, The Washington Navel Orange. (Riverside,
CA: Riverside Chamber of Commerce, 1933); P. H. Dorsett, AD Shamel, and Wilson Popenoe, “The Navel Orange
of Bahia with Notes on Some Little-Known Brazilian Fruits,” Bulletin No. 445, (Washington D.C., United Stated
Department of Agriculture, February 10, 1917).

16
As a precedent, in 1909, USDA pomologist G. Harold Powell was sent to Europe to study the Italian lemon
industry. George Powell, Letters from the Orange Empire. (Los Angeles, CA: Historical Society of Southern
California, 1990); For more on this topic see G Harold Powell, “Survey of the Italian Lemon Situation,” California
Citrograph, June 1926, 288.

17
“Professor Shamel a ‘Fruit’ Explorer’,” The Hartford Daily Time, clipping, January 31, 1914, box 12, Archibald
Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).
59
Roosevelt planned to lecture on “American Internationalism,” “Character and Civilization,” and
“Democratic Ideas” throughout South America over a course of six-weeks. Simultaneously, the
Colonel led a team of researchers from the New York Natural History Museum to collect
unknown species of insects and animals. Further, upon invitation from the Brazilian government,
he planned to map the Río da Dúvida through the Amazon with Brazilian military officer
Cândido Rondon.
18
Onboard the Vandyck, “explorers” from the USDA and Natural History
Museum made each other’s acquaintance, exchanged methods for gathering specimens, and in a
show of masculine bravado competed in a shaving contest. Together, the researchers may have
also enjoyed watching the Carlisle Wild West Show at Sea, which consisted of fifty animals and
a staff of a hundred people, or exchanged stories comparing the skills of western marksmen to
their fellow passengers, an Argentine rifle team whose international victories evoked parallels to
Argentinean and American cowboy life.
19
For these researchers, the steamer itself served as an
intermediary space where the American West merged with the Western Hemisphere.

18
Theodore Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 2, 9; “Wife
with Roosevelt on Trip to Argentina,” New York Tribune, September 22, 1913, 4.

19
Kris James Mitchener and Marc Weidenmeir, “Empire, Public Goods, and the Roosevelt Corollary,” The Journal
of Economic History, 65 (no. 3, September 2005); “Wife with Roosevelt on Trip to Argentina,” New York Tribune,
September 22, 1913.

60

Figure 6 USDA photographers captured this image of Colonel Roosevelt as he judged a shaving contest onboard the
Vandyck.
20

If the American West had closed and the evolutionary process that forged American
character ended, then South America offered a promising arena for continuing America’s
progression. Although separate, the exhibitions led by Shamel and Roosevelt shared an
investment in promoting white racial superiority, and more explicitly, white male superiority.
Both visits straddled the difference between what historian Gail Bederman has described as
“moral manliness” and “aggressive masculinity.”
21
The first entailed a Victorian mores of self-
restraint and character, such as that demonstrated on the USDA’s collection activities and
Roosevelt’s speaking tour. The second implied physical and racial prowess, such as the pursuit
of scientific knowledge in unchartered territory promoted by the U.S. press. Both constructions
operated under a broad “discourse of civilization” that bolstered American male supremacy over

20
“Col Roosevelt Judging Shaving Race, Vandyck,” photograph, October 13, 1913, box 12, Archibald Shamel
Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).

21
Bederman, 1995, 195; Theodore Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1921); Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (New York: Putnam's, 1889).

61
foreign nations.
22
And, in what would follow, the USDA would reinforce white claims to nativity
at the regional level by continuing the frontier saga of migration into a territory deemed non-
white.
Universalizing the Citrus Rancher
In October of 1913, Shamel and his team reached Brazil. Upon arriving to Salvador
Bahia, the team turned to the U.S. Consulate for orientation. After much struggle with limited
Portuguese, a staff member provided an address where the scientists might encounter a grove. An
electric car conductor escorted the team through the city and to the orange district of Cabula, a
suburb less than ten miles northwest of the U.S. Embassy. The men grew eager as they passed
lush groves of fruit. Upon exiting the car, they quickly began documenting the size, color, and
shape of oranges from trees dotting the Brazilian countryside.
23
Alongside the scientists’
examination of fruit, they interacted closely with ranch owners and observed those who tended to
the landscape surrounding them. By globalizing stratified racial relations within the Brazilian
citrus industry, the team naturalized racial and class lines within the southern California Citrus
Belt.
Rather than encountering an unchartered wilderness, Shamel’s team described a
hospitable and tamed environment. Their assessment of Brazilian citriculture was framed by the
government’s deliberate efforts to craft a European sensibility in its urban centers. The USDA
visit closely aligned with the Brazilian government’s efforts to strengthen foreign relations

22
Bederman, 1995, 23.

23
Archibald Shamel, “Government Expert Tells of Visit to Home of Navel Orange,” Riverside Daily Press,
February 1914; P. H. Dorsett, AD Shamel, and Wilson Popenoe, “The Navel Orange of Bahia with Notes on Some
Little-Known Brazilian Fruits,” Bulletin No. 445, (Washington D.C., United Stated Department of Agriculture,
February 10, 1917), 2.

62
following national formation in 1889.
24
The U.S. Monroe Doctrine, reflecting a growing interest
in Latin America, was uniquely embraced in Brazil as a counterweight to European ambitions in
South America. As described by historian Joseph Smith (2010), “Far from being the danger
portrayed by Spanish-American writers…the rising power of the United States was appreciated
in Brazil as a force for peace because it promoted hemispheric political and financial stability
and social order, and it served as a restraint upon European aggression.”
25
Consistent with efforts
to impress a favorable impression upon visiting foreign representatives, government buildings
were modernized. When meeting the Minister of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce, for
instance, Popenoe recalled a decorative reception hall far finer than that of the USDA.
26

Benefiting from the climate of diplomacy generated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the
USDA team was provided transportation in Rio de Janeiro, as well as the use of two interpreters
experienced in agricultural investigations. In response to these national efforts, the U.S. press
described the Brazilian government as “courteous” and the people as “express[ing] great
admiration for the United States.”
27

In their descriptions of Brazil, the USDA drew on similarities between orange growers at
home and the land owning class abroad. Cabula, credited with the expansion of the citrus
industry in South America, bore striking similarities to the California Citrus Belt.
28
Citrus was

24
Thomas Skidmore, Back into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought, (Duke University Press, 1993),
64-68.

25
Whitening efforts to promote the growth of the white population through immigration and miscegenation. See
Joseph Smith, Brazil and the United States: Convergence and Divergence (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2010), 58.

26
Rosengarten, 1994, 25.

27
“Professor Shamel A ‘Fruit’ Explorer.” The Hartford Daily, clipping, January 31, 1914, box 12, Archibald
Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).
28
O. S. A. Passos, “Citricultura na Regiao de Cruz das Almas-BA” (Citriculture in the region of Cruz das Almas),
Embrapa-CNPMF (Brazil), 4, 1980.

63
largely focused within a few regions, land was largely concentrated in the hands of an elite
plantation owning class, and a large non-white population provided the majority of labor on
agricultural estates.
29
Likewise, California growers were disproportionately affluent white
newcomers as a result of the exclusionary high-cost of operating a citrus grove and policies
preventing non-whites from roles in farm management, such as exhibited in the Geary Act
previously described. When rail lines first connected citrus producing communities like
Riverside to eastern markets in 1887 an estimated $3,500 dollars was required for a family farm
of 10 acres. With a maturation period from eight to ten years, small farmers and their families
without accumulated capital were eliminated from the early stages of competitive citrus
cultivation altogether. As time went on, land values increased exponentially and the door closed
to middle-class producers as well. By 1910, only about twelve percent of all farms in California
were under ten acres in size. Competitive citrus production was never within the reach of the
average farmer. Instead, the profits of citrus were reserved for those who brought their own
capital to the groves of southern California.
30

When coupled with the racial distribution of land ownership, the citrus industry’s
cooperative organization facilitated the adoption of a white citrus rancher identity. The
Agricultural Census of 1910 was the earliest to secure information on the demographic make-up
of California citrus growers. According to the Census, ninety-seven percent of all farmers were
white, thirty percent of which were foreign-born. The majority originated from Canada,
Germany, Italy, England, and other European countries. The remainder of foreign whites (four
percent) was referred to only as having originated from “non-European countries, other than

29
Dale T. Graden, From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil: Bahia, 1835-1900, (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico
Press, 2006).

30
See United States Department of Agriculture. Census of Agriculture, 1910. (Washington, 1914).

64
Canada.” Another four percent of farmers were categorized as nonwhite Japanese, Indians,
Chinese, and “Negro.” In California, nativity was unlisted for non-whites, signifying that racial
difference eclipsed nationality.
31
The label of “citrus rancher” was a class and a racial marker
that indicated a wealthy white investor. Through the Brazilian expedition, the citrus rancher was
reimagined from a regional emblem to a globalized manifestation of white racial superiority in
agriculture endeavors. Now chronicled abroad, the racial division of ownership and labor
appeared organic and justified a stratified industry that imagined whites as managers and non-
whites as laborers.
Just as the introduction of the navel was credited to the collaborative efforts of the
Tibbets and USDA, the introduction of oranges to Brazil was attributed to Portuguese
colonists.
32
According to Popenoe’s notes, the youngest of the group and brother of prominent
eugenicist Paul Popenoe, it was an unknown Portuguese gardener who first took notice of a
mutation on a select orange tree. Bud sports with well-defined navels and few seeds had
developed within the popular variety. He grafted the navel twigs on a young sour orange tree,
from which was born “nothing but seedless navel oranges.”
33
Recognizing its “obvious
superiority,” small groves were propagated from these buds by farmers across the Bahian

31
It is unclear where those of Mexican descent fit within these categories, but is likely they were differentiated by
class and included in either white foreign-born from non-European countries or in the category of non-white Indian.
By treaty, Mexicans were white, but according to employment sheets, workers of an “Indian” picker gang in
Redlands only included workers with Spanish surnames. See “Indian Gang.” Picker Sheet. 191?, box 3, binder 1,
(Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA); See also Pablo Mitchell, Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest
in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880-1920, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

32
A.D. Shamel. “The Origin and Development of the Washington Navel Orange,” typescript, undated, box 6,
Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA), 2. Archibald Shamel, “Semi Centennial of the
Washington Navel Orange in California,” California Citrograph, December 1913, 42, 43; Dorsett, Shamel, and
Popenoe, 1917, 3.

33
Wilson Popenoe, “Notes,” in Rosengarten, Frederic Jr. Wilson Popenoe: Agricultural Explorer, Educator, and
Friend of Latin America, Rosengarten, Frederic Jr (National Tropical Botanical Garden: Lawai, Kauai, Hawaii,
1994), 23.

65
countryside.
34
As it had in Riverside, the value of white occupation in a colonial holding was
measured by orange cultivation and the development that followed.

Figure 7 This young woman, the daughter of a plantation owner, was photographed while painting fresh oranges in
front of her home in Bahia.
35

In the series of 1,200 photographs collected during the USDA visit, scientists
foregrounded the shared characteristics of Brazilian and California plantation owners.
36
Through

34
Wilson Popenoe, “Notes,” in Rosengarten, Frederic Jr. Wilson Popenoe: Agricultural Explorer, Educator, and
Friend of Latin America, Rosengarten, Frederic Jr (National Tropical Botanical Garden: Lawai, Kauai, Hawaii,
1994), 23.

35
“Colonel Lago’s Daughter Painting Navel Oranges,” photograph December 11 1913, box 12, Archibald Shamel
Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).

36
Observations are based on a content analysis of photos from the Shamel Brazilian Expedition.

66
familiar visual cues, class and racial status transcended national lines. For instance, in one image,
the daughter of a rancher was photographed painting oranges in front of her home. The woman
was seated and dressed in a long white dress with her hair pulled in a neat up-do. An open door
revealed a home decorated with imported furnishings, wallpaper, and family portraits. The
woman herself was seated at a diagonal that revealed her painting and the lace covered table on
which it stood. Although her indirect gaze lent a sense of observational distance, the close range
of the image suggests she was aware of the photographer’s presence. In this sense, the elements
of the image are revealed as deliberate: the open door that invited the observer to view the
interior of the house, the class-standing reflected in the furnishings and ornamentation, and the
reinforcement of gender roles suggested by the woman herself. Like the ornamental mirror in the
background, ranchers were encouraged to see themselves in an image of shared class standing,
domesticity, and civility on the Brazilian citrus ranch.
37

Figure 8 The USDA took these similar family portraits within one month of another.
38

37
“Colonel Lago’s Daughter Painting Navel Oranges,” photograph December 11 1913, box 12, Archibald Shamel
Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).

38
“Col. F. da Costa and Family, photograph, December 8, 1913, box 12, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera
Library, Riverside, CA) (left); “Family y [illegible] Boaventura,” photograph, January 1914, box 12, Archibald
Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).

67
Reflecting similar themes, a grove owner and his family were photographed seated
among their orange groves. Surrounded by a backdrop of orange trees, the family could have
easily been within the citriscape of southern California. Embodying his elite status, the patriarch
was dressed in a three-piece suit with tie. He was the center of the photograph, but the presence
of his three daughters and wife underscored a sense of domesticity. The presence of children was
reoccurring. In another image, four siblings were photographed seated together on a bench.
Together, they faced the camera, with the exception of the youngest, an infant, who looked away.
Each of the girls embraced a child, the oldest holding her sibling and the other a doll. The boy,
like the patriarch in the earlier image, sits in the center with his hands crossed upon his lap.
USDA photographs offered reassurance of the Brazilian citrus rancher’s masculinity and, more
broadly, the place of European-descent families in the future of Brazilian development.
In representations of nuclear family life, Brazilian citrus growers embraced a form of
domesticity with which American growers could easily identify. Consistent with the tradition of
European portraiture, members of the managing-class were photographed as individuals seated
among backdrops that expressed their interests. The home, orange grove, and nuclear family
each reflected familiar scenes to the California rancher. The direct gaze of the subjects further
underscored the connection between the sitter and the viewer.
39
Rather than objects to be
observed, their direct stare reflected a sense of agency. Their controlled comportment
complimented a Victorian-ethos of self-restraint and civility. Light-skinned, neatly dressed, and
poised, the subjects in the photographs reaffirmed a universal link between citrus ranchers
despite geographic distance.

39
Jean Sorabella, "Portraiture in Renaissance and Baroque Europe," in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, August
2007, (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/port/hd_port.htm.

68

Figure 9 Mr Argolla, Shamel, and Popenoe (left to right) were photographed drinking from coconuts in front of the
home of an unidentified woman. Her house contrasted sharply with that of ranch owners.
40

Photos absent of growers further reaffirmed the collective class standing of citrus
ranchers across the Orange Empire. Where landowners and their families were photographed at
leisure, laborers were exclusively photographed while working. Among the images were those of
workers tending the groves, transporting baskets of fruit, and vending at the market. Breaking
from a Victorian ethos in which the subject of a photograph was somber and stoic, such as that
portrayed in images of the landed elite, workers were commonly photographed while smiling or,
in some cases, laughing. On one level, these images suggested that workers were incapable of
self-restraint and subtly justified their management by those exhibiting higher self-control. On a
second level, they allowed an outlet for the USDA investigators, themselves, to temporarily shed
the mores of proper masculinity—at times photographed smiling or at play themselves—in the

40
“Heavy Drinkers – Coconuts,” photograph, November 10, 1913, box 12, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera
Library, Riverside, CA).

69
pursuit of ethnographic knowledge. Thirdly, these depictions divorced manual labor from any
shadows of worker protest or discontent.
USDA scientists assisted in the evasion of racial and class tensions by globalizing, thus
naturalizing, stratified social relations within the citrus industry. The team’s portrayals obscured
a legacy of runaway slaves, post-emancipation efforts to attain land, and labor organizations
headed by Bahian residents.
41
Nevertheless, Citrus Belt residents would have easily accepted
these images for their parallels to regional heritage. Reminiscent of the California mission myth,
in which indigenous workers were passive recipients of the mission system, members of the
largely Afro-Brazilian workforce were depicted as joyful and docile workers content to exist
within pastoral feudalism.
42
Where the USDA team temporarily enjoyed pre-modern society,
Brazilian workers were resigned to a permanent primitive past. For the citrus rancher, the ability
to expand commercial production to new territories, fulfill Victorian familial obligations, and
demonstrate acts of civility and self-restraint justified white supremacy over a resident
multiracial workforce.
Prior to the Brazilian expedition, Shamel’s work on citrus focused on careful planning
and the scientific investigation of crops. Following the Brazilian expedition he expanded his
expertise to labor productivity in the United States. Photographs of the Brazilian citrus workforce
served as precedent for a photo series of California citrus packinghouses and orchards taken by
the USDA over the subsequent five years. Just as a successful harvest was dependent on
efficiently managing groves, Shamel explained, so was a productive citrus ranch dependent on

41
For more on this legacy, see George Reid Andrews, Blacks & Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988 (Madison,
Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 60-66; Dale T. Graden, From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil: Bahia,
1835-1900, (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).

42
For parallels within Spanish Fantasy Heritage see Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a
Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006),

70
an efficiently managed workforce. Adopting the Brazilian caste system that divided Portuguese-
descent ranchers from Afro-Brazilian laborers, Shamel’s five-article California Citrograph series
“Housing the Employe[e]s of California’s Citrus Ranches” naturalized white management over a
Mexican workforce.
43
Like their Brazilian counterparts, American laborers were photographed at
work, in motion, as objects of careful study. Anglo-American managers promoted efficiency
among a racialized workforce of Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican workers, respectively, and
photography was one means to measure and evaluate productivity where modernization and
science were stressed as the central tools of successful production.
44
Only five years after his
journey to Brazil, Shamel promoted a pastoral system in which docile Mexican families resided
on citrus ranches. By recruiting Mexican families, ranchers sought to create a stratified supply of
labor that would “remain year after year, always on hand when needed, and able to care for
themselves temporarily when turned off.”
45

43
The series included five articles released from February to October of 1918. Additional articles released on the
topic of worker housing included, “How to House and Treat Citrus Ranch Employees,” California Citrograph,
March 19xx, 12; “The Well Housed Employee,” The California Citrograph, September 1918; “Immigration
Regulations Suspended for Mexican Labor,” Sunkist Courier Department, California Citrograph. September 1918,
261-263; “Some Essential Features of Housing Employees.” California Citrograph. September 1920; “Attractive
Houses for Employees.” California Citrograph. May 1921; Historians Gilbert Gonzalez, Matt Garcia, and Margo
McBane have previously referred to the citrus housing campaign launched by Shamel. See, Gilbert G. Gonzalez,
Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950. (University of
Illinois Press, 1994); Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los
Angeles, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Margo McBane, The
House That Lemons Built: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Citizenship and the Creation of a Citrus Empire, 1893-1919.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2001. For more on worker housing in the citrus industry see
Chapter 5 “Housing” In Paul Garland Williamson, Labor in the California Citrus Industry (University of California,
October 1947).

44
H. Vincent Moses, “G. Harold Powell and the Corporate Consolidation of the Modern Citrus Enterprise, 1904-
1922,” Business History Review, 69 (no. 2, Summer 1995).

45
“Prof. Vaile’s Selection for Foreign Work,” California Citrograph, June 1918, 195; Simons Brickyard in
Montebello offers a similar example of a large-scale producer in southern California who encouraged Mexican
workers to marry and have children within worker housing. See, for instance, the “baby bonus program.” See
Deverell, 2004, 136; The slave plantations of the south can be viewed as a precedent for this strategy. See Jennifer
L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

71

Figure 10 The Mexican Quarters at the Chase Plantation in Corona were intended to house the citrus workforce. The
residences photographed here were constructed out of adobe.
46

Ranchers deliberately shaped and enforced racial lines by manipulating the built
environment of the citrus ranch. Using what labor geographer Andrew Herod has described as
“spatial engineering” for the purposes of “social engineering,” the absolute racial divisions
perceived between whites and Mexicans were revealed in descriptions of segregated housing.
47

Across California ranches, white management lived and dined separately from Mexican,
Japanese, and European immigrant workers. Workers were then further divided by race,
occupying geographically and architecturally distinct housing.
48
On one ranch featured in the
series, whites were described as living in “neighborhoods” whereas Mexicans were described as

46
“Quarters for Mexican Laborers and Their Families,” California Citrograph, March 19, 2918. Photo has been
cropped to magnify the adobe constructed housing.

47
Andrew Herod, “Social Engineering through Spatial Engineering: Company Towns and the Geographical
Imagination,” in Company Towns in the Americans: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities, ed.,
Oliver Dinius and Angela Vergara (University of Georgia Press: Atlanta, GA, 2011), 21.

48
Superintendents and managers were housed separately from all field labor, irrespective of race in a shared home
with sleeping quarters, bathrooms, and an office room for meetings. Ranch owners lived on separate estates. For an
analysis of this housing and how it reflected rancher identity, see Anthea Hartig, "In a World He Has Created: The
Reconstruction of the Southern California Citrus Landscape, 1890-1940," California History, Spring 1995.

72
living in “villages.”
49
Images of worker housing served as a foil to the estates of the landed elite.
Landscaping, stucco walls, and imported furnishings characterized grove owner
accommodations. Conversely, mud, branches, and thatched roof comprised the homes of the
workforce.
50
Like worker housing in Brazil, Shamel advocated for the use of earthen materials.
Surrounded by lush vegetation, Mexican housing seemed to merge with the hillside. Shamel
explained that Mexicans preferred adobe, which he personally found to be “economical,
comfortable and particularly well adapted to the conditions in this region.”
51
Like adobe,
Mexicans were viewed as inexpensive, tractable, and ideally suited to the environment of
southern California.
52

Instead of finding a tropical wilderness, Brazil offered a familiar environment for
scientists interested in studying the navel orange. USDA representatives found lush groves of
orange trees, an elite class of planters, and a hospitable government that supported their efforts.
The ethnographic record of photographs resulting from the expedition underscored areas of
commonality between growers abroad and within southern California, foremost racial and class
lines. When considered together, depictions of Brazilian citrus ranches naturalized the
bifurcation of land ownership in the hands of European descendants within the California Citrus

49
Archibald Shamel, “Housing Employe[e]s of California’s Citrus Ranches,” California Citrograph, March 1918;
Archibald Shamel, “Housing Employe[e]s of California’s Citrus Ranches,” California Citrograph, May 1918.

50
Content analysis of photographs from the Brazilian Expedition and Worker housing.

51
Archibald Shamel, “Housing Employe[e]s of California’s Citrus Ranches,” California Citrograph, October 1918.

52
For a discussion of symbolic meaning attached to materials such as adobe and brick see William Deverell,
Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004), 133 – 137; See Chris Wilson’s work for am example of preservation efforts in Santa Fe and
their connection to constructions of Native American authenticity. Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a
Modern Regional Tradition, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.

73
Belt, as well as the designation of non-whites to the role of laborers.
53
However, in U.S.
portrayals of Brazilian agriculture to follow, the connections drawn between citrus ranchers were
only deep enough to allow Americans to see themselves as the inheritors of the fertile
countryside. In a familiar narrative, the U.S media would portray an underutilized Brazil ripe for
American intervention.
From Laranja de Umbigo to the Washington Navel
Although depicting class and racial parallels between citrus growers in Brazil and the
United States, the USDA expedition reflected the limits of U.S.-Brazilian relations. Rather than
evoking a sense of equality between two nations, the team’s conclusions implied the superiority
of American agriculture, and more broadly, the American race. The U.S. press followed the
“fruit explorer[s’]” journey closely. Articles were printed in special government publications,
trade journals, and local dailies. The popularity surrounding the USDA’s progress served as a
second navel orange origin tale. The earlier mythology of the parent navel trees, constructed by
the Riverside Historical Society, focused on the arrival of the Brazilian orange to Riverside, as
well as its role in propagating the California citrus industry. The retelling surrounding the USDA
expedition, instead, explained how a native American orange, a “Washington Navel,” was born
of Brazilian parents.
While accounts of Brazilian agricultural potential were generous in their portrayals of the
country’s natural riches, they emphasized a capitalist frontier rather than a fully developed
industry. As described in one newspaper account, “The people are just beginning to awaken to an

53
In Brazil, the backbone of citrus labor was provided by “negros.” In California, it was the “Mexican.” The racial
category of “negro” in Brazil differed from that of the U.S. George Andrews explains that the Brazilian system of
racial categorization recognized various intermediate categories of African ancestry (ie pardos, mulattos, pretos,
negros) each with different legal and social status. See Appendix B Brazilian Racial Terminology in Andrews, 1991.
74
appreciation of the immense resources of their country.”
54
Echoing the tale first told in Riverside,
which credited white eastern pioneers with the introduction of the navel orange to southern
California, Shamel credited Portuguese settlers with the introduction of the select orange to
Bahia. In Shamel’s estimation, however, Brazilians had yet to adopt the advanced scientific
methodology and marketing practices that had been developed by Citrus Belt growers. Rather,
Portuguese colonists were depicted as naïve of the market potential for orange cultivation in
Bahia. Just as theories of race suicide differentiated between shades of white, the expedition
differentiated between European-descent colonists. Its conclusions regarding the business
practices of citrus industry ranchers favored the achievements of Anglo pioneers over that of
Portuguese-descent ranchers. In doing so, it reproduced the idea that Spanish colonists in
southern California had failed to realize the potential of the orange. Brazil was cast as an early
California: an underdeveloped agricultural frontier ripe for capitalist intervention by Anglo-
Americans.

54
“Professor Shamel A ‘Fruit’ Explorer.” The Hartford Daily, clipping, January 31, 1914, box 12, Archibald
Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).

75

Figure 11 Citrus sales were largely a local enterprise in Brazil. Photographer here is a vendor selling oranges,
unwrapped and unboxed, in the Rio de Janeiro Marketplace.
55

The USDA’s differentiation between Bahian and California citrus production was
grounded in their divergent marketing techniques. Through the aid of British capital, coffee,
sugar, cotton, and cocoa had become Brazil’s major exports. The main infrastructure for these
commodities, including rail and international markets, was concentrated in the southern ports of
Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Oranges, however, were primarily a domestic commodity used for
local consumption. Sales revolved around two methods. The first was direct purchase by the
public from individual groves. The second was sale at local city markets, where laborers
transported fruit by basket and mule.
56
Conversely, the southern California citrus market was
largely coordinated by cooperative organizations. For instance, the Southern California Fruit

55
“The City Market,” photograph, October 25, 1913, box 12, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library,
Riverside, CA).

56
Werner Baer, The Brazilian Economy: Growth and Development. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group,
2001).

76
Exchange (SCFE) managed multiple grove owners in an effort to collectively pack, market, and
set sale rates. Only a small minority of fruit was sold in the local market. Rather, consolidated
fruit was prepared for long-distance export to the east coast and abroad.
57
These endeavors
required mass capital, seasonal labor, and elaborate marketing techniques to create a geography
that maximized local production and linked southern California to distant places.
58

As California citrus farming became a citrus industry, growers formed a citrus rancher
identity united by whiteness, an elite class-background, and horticultural science. Fruit
exchanges began to organize fruit growers as early as the 1890s. By the time of the Brazilian
expedition, they had reached full maturity. Although fruit was independently cultivated, the
Exchange was responsible for packing, selling, and marketing oranges as a collective product to
large brokerage firms in eastern markets, which then distributed fruits within the United States
and overseas. Its cooperative organization promised the financial benefits of an economy of
scale, a standard pay rate, and uniformity.
59
The Citrus Experiment Station, the regional arm of
the USDA, similarly facilitated the development of a collective rancher identity. USDA scientists
successfully encouraged ranchers to standardize production through the adoption of bud
selection, irrigation projects, and productivity records.
60
Further, industry publications such as
the California Citrograph and USDA Bulletins, as well as SCFE meetings, contributed to the
distribution of a shared language and methods among American growers.

57
William Wilson Cumberland, Cooperative Marketing: Its Advantages As Exemplified in the California Fruit
Growers Exchange, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1917); Cronon, 1997.

58
For more on the commodity movement and its reshaping of landscapes in the 20
th
century west, see William
Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).

59
Correspondence Sgobel and Day to the Cucamonga Citrus Fruit Growers Association, March 10, 1897, box 1,
Cucamonga Citrus Fruit Growers Association Collection (Huntington Library, San Marino, CA); William Wilson
Cumberland, Cooperative Marketing: Its Advantages As Exemplified in the California Fruit Growers Exchange,
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1917).

60
For more on standardizing production, the transformation of oranges into a product, and cooperative marketing
see Cronon, 1997; Sackman, 2005; Cumberland, 1917.
77
The USDA teams’ assessment of the Brazilian citrus industry relied on the underlying
assumption that long-distance trade, such as that developed in southern California, was superior
to local consumption, such as that dominant in Brazil. San Bernardino served as the inland
industry’s largest distribution center, shipping between 25,000 to 40,000 cars of citrus yearly
between 1887 and 1921. A palimpsest of transportation corridors based on cattle ranching
formed the skeleton of the long-distance trade networks necessary for the large-scale production
of commercial citrus. The Southern Pacific began operating trains between the inland hub of
Colton and growing metropolitan center of Los Angeles in 1873. Its reach extended north to San
Francisco and east across the Mojave Desert within three years.

North of Colton, the California
Southern reached San Bernardino in September of 1883. Shortly thereafter, the Atchison,
Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad acquired the rail line and established a West Coast repair shop in
town. The route, itself, was a physical mapping of the Citrus Belt. The 166-mile “Belt Line,” or
“Kite-Shaped Track,” of the Santa Fe encircled the citrus bearing region from Mentone to its
commercial center in Los Angeles when completed in 1892.

And, in 1905, the San Pedro, Los
Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad, later integrated in the Union Pacific System in 1921, became
the valley’s third transcontinental route.
61
If orange exports were the USDA’s measure of
modernity, Brazil was sure to fall short.

61
Mark Landis, “‘No Scene Twice Seen:’ On the Santa Fe Railroad’s Splendid ‘Kite-Shaped Track’ Excursion.”
Library News. (San Bernardino, CA: City of San Bernardino Historical and Pioneer Society, October 2011); John
Brown and James Boyd, History of San Bernardino and Riverside Counties: With Selected Biographies of Actors
and Witnesses of the Period of Growth and Achievement (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1922); In 1935,
for instance, the citrus industry shipped over 1,000 cars of grapefruit, 2,700 cars of lemons, and close to 17,000 cars
of oranges. “San Bernardino County for Pleasure and Homes.” San Bernardino County Chamber of Commerce.
Ephemeral Collection Huntington Library, San Marino, 1935; William Wilcox Robinson. “The Story of San
Bernardino County.” (san Bernardino, CA: Pioneer Title Insurance Company, 1958); “Historic Resources
Reconnaissance Survey.” Prepared by Architect Milford Wayne Donaldson, A. I. A.., Inc. Vol. 2. City of San
Bernardino Department of Planning and Building Services. April 30, 1991, 3.

78
The differences between the organization of American and Brazilian citrus production
served as a foundation for portrayals of Brazil as a capitalist frontier. In an implicit reference to
the superiority of American methods of shipment, the USDA team attributed frequent injury and
fruit loss to haphazard and inefficient packing practices. Testing the viability of shipment
between the United States and Brazil, the team carefully picked and packed a box of 96 oranges.
They then sent the oranges from Bahia to Washington, D.C. The shipment reportedly arrived in
near perfect condition. The team concluded that with American techniques, the Bahian orange
could be integrated into the larger Orange Empire.
62
Through the advanced practices of bud
selection, training workers in efficient handling, and cooperative marketing, the team suggested
that American farmers could transform the underutilized Bahian countryside into a rich Citrus
Belt. In a frontier discourse reminiscent of early Riverside, Bahia was portrayed as an untapped
market ripe for American intervention and pioneering ranchers.
When war abroad offered an opportunity for the United States to expand in the British
dominated market, the USDA served as the publicist for Brazilian financial and agricultural
promise. Its depiction of Brazil as an agricultural frontier served to induce American investment
abroad. Commercial opportunities seemed to flourish in the press’s descriptions of exotic fruits
and vegetables. Fruits such as the jaboticaba (trunk cherry), caju (fruit of the cashew tree), and
abacaxi (pineapple) were a curiosity to those reporting the team’s findings. The pitanga (surinam
cherry), for instance, was described as a cherry with a unique flavor, “Now, a California can

62
P. H. Dorsett, AD Shamel, and Wilson Popenoe, “The Navel Orange of Bahia with Notes on Some Little-Known
Brazilian Fruits,” Bulletin No. 445, (Washington D.C., United Stated Department of Agriculture, February 10,
1917), 12-13.
79
imagine a tamale flavored with red pepper, but a cherry?”
63
Brazil seemed a near virgin territory
rich in exotic varieties and commercial promise.
Alongside portrayals of agricultural potential and the promise of new markets were
depictions of residents eager to invite Americans to Brazil. Indeed, Brazilian leaders hoped that
economic relationships with the United States would further the country’s standing in South
America. Resulting from government efforts to attract U.S. investment, Brazilians were
described as having “great admiration for the United States.”
64
Like Cuba, the press exclaimed,
the government sought to rebuild their cities “under American supervision.”
65
Public sanitation
campaigns were highlighted to produce the image of Brazil as a healthful place in which white
Americans could operate. The modernization of dock facilities, the picturesque Avenida Beira
Mar, and the campaign to rid Rio de Janeiro of yellow fever each generated positive publicity
and attracted foreign investors.
66
The USDA suggested that it was to this development that the
agricultural capitalist was welcomed. The Hartford Daily reported, “The great need of the
country is more people to cultivate the land and develop the mines. The Brazilians look with
favor on the people of North America and wish their northern neighbors would emigrate in large
numbers to Brazil.”
67
Where the Brazilian government sought to increase its own position in

63
“Shamel Brings Back New Fruits,” Riverside Daily Press. Riverside, CA. February 11, 1914; “Professor Shamel
A ‘Fruit’ Explorer.” The Hartford Daily, clipping, January 31, 1914, box 12, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas
Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).

64
“Shamel Brings Back New Fruits,” Riverside Daily Press, Riverside, CA, February 11, 1914.

65
“Professor Shamel A ‘Fruit’ Explorer.” The Hartford Daily, clipping, January 31, 1914, box 12, Archibald
Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).

66
Joseph Smith, Brazil and the United States: Convergence and Divergence (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2010), 55-80.

67
“Shamel Brings Back New Fruits,” Riverside Daily Press, Riverside, CA, February 11, 1914.

80
South America, the USDA maintained that its rise required the guiding hand of the U.S.
government and the innovation of American agriculturalists.
The lines between the United States and Brazil were entrenched in the lines Shamel drew
between Brazilian and American varieties of fruit.
68
Most clearly illustrated in 1933, Shamel
stressed the genetic distance between the “Brazilian select orange” and the “Washington navel
orange”:
Navel oranges grown at Bahia are similar to those grown at Riverside in their seedless
and navel characters but are conspicuously different in other characteristics such as size
and shape of fruits, texture, color and thickness of rinds, composition and flavor of
juice…it seems quite proper that the California grown navel oranges which are so
different in many varietal characteristics from those produced in Brazil should have a
distinctive name, Washington navel, which is now accepted in all orange growing
sections.
69

Although Shamel conceded that the oranges he studied in the Cabula suburb of Bahia were
strikingly similar to the Tibbets’ navel orange, and its likely source, he declared that the
Brazilian and the Riverside orange represented two distinct varieties. Like the Portuguese-
descent Brazilian rancher was to the American rancher, Shamel believed he had found the
inferior Brazilian parent of superior American fruit.
Shamel’s work in bud selection pushed for the careful and deliberate breeding of trees.
Even today, navel oranges rarely produce seeds. As a result, each plant is propagated from its
own bud. The bud is then inserted into the bark of another variety.
70
Although the navel created a
virtual clone of its parent, variation exists as a result of naturally occurring mutation. “Superior

68
Reproduced note by William Saunders dated December 20, 1898 in P. H. Dorsett, AD Shamel, and Wilson
Popenoe, “The Navel Orange of Bahia with Notes on Some Little-Known Brazilian Fruits,” Bulletin No. 445,
(Washington D.C., United Stated Department of Agriculture, February 10, 1917), 5.

69
Shamel and Pomeroy, 1933, 10.

70
Navel oranges are still grown by citrus using the same method today. See “Citrus 101: How Citrus Trees Are
Grown.” Sunkist Growers, Inc, 2012, http://www.sunkist.com/products/how_citrus_trees.aspx

81
trees” were determined by assessing individual productivity records. By tracking the bud wood
of each tree, growers could monitor their progeny. The California Citrus Institute described the
grove of Henry Huntington as exemplar of these efforts. Careful records were kept at his San
Marino grove, where trees were arranged in a grid and divided in rows to be recorded for ten
years. Equating “superiority” with unit of export, productivity was measured by the number of
boxes picked yearly from each tree. Assessment was further considered for pruning, fumigating,
fertilizer applied, and other horticultural practice. The cost of such data collection was explained
as a question of long-term investment over the span of several generations. A “good tree” would
produce more superior fruit than a bad tree, “For a good tree is a good tree for a long time.”
71
By
isolating superior fruit from inferior fruit, the navel itself was remade in the image of its maker,
the highest specimen of its kind.

71
C. S. Miliken, “The Importance of Using Reliable Citrus Trees in New Plantings,” First Annual Report of the
Citrus Institute, June 1920, 71.

82

Figure 12 Images of women were frequently used in citrus advertisements. Doing so highlighted the role of the
Tibbet’s navel as the mother of the industry while also alluding to the fertility of southern California.
72

The connection between protecting the genetic superiority of the navel orange and the
proliferation of the white household was direct. The navel was commonly represented in
combination with white women, particularly on citrus labels and regional ephemera.
73
The
striking superimposition of young white women upon an image of navel oranges featured on an
invitation to the Riverside Navel Orange Pageant in 1934 is indicative of the lasting resonance of
this relationship. In particular, by almost all accounts, Mrs. Tibbets was described as the mother

72
“Inviting You to Attend the Navel Orange Pageant at Riverside,” May 4, 1934, Riverside Chamber of Commerce
Collection (Riverside Public Library, Riverside, CA).

73
Observation Based on a content analysis of the Citrus Label Collection at Pomona Public Library, Special
Collections; See also B. R. Montgomery, “Inviting You to Attend the Navel Orange Pageant at Riverside,” May 4,
1934, Riverside Chamber of Commerce Collection (Riverside Public Library, Riverside, CA); See also Sackman,
2005.

83
of the seedless navel orange.
74
Commonly referred to as a “navel,” because of the protruding
shape at its base, the reference to an umbilical cord provided a visual and material connection
between the orange and a human child. Similarly, popular accounts of Mrs. Tibbets nursing the
young trees with her dishwater served as a metaphor for a mother providing her children with
milk. In this conflation, Mrs. Tibbets became the iconic mother of a citrus region and the orange
was symbolically connected to the white household.
According to Shamel, the navel had been given new life by the commitment of California
ranchers to deliberate breeding and the guidance of USDA research. He wrote, “It is an
inspiration to all plant breeders from the standpoint of emphasizing the importance of the new
science of bud variation and its importance in the origin, conservation, and improvement of
valuable varieties of plants propagated vegetatively.”
75
Like the colonists who migrated from the
eastern United States to the unsettled West, Shamel described the Tibbets’ navel orange trees as
“two small and apparently insignificant plant immigrants [who] arrived in southern California.”
76

Once a minority in fear of running out, their qualities were maintained, isolated, and improved
through careful breeding to produce superior offspring. In Shamel’s estimation, the progeny of
the parent navel trees were so distinct that they comprised a new race.

74
“Mrs. Eliza Tibbets ‘Mother’ of Great Navel Orange Industry,” Riverside Daily Press, clipping, May 3, 1933, box
6, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA); Pomona Progress-Bulletin. February 16, 1933.

75
Shamel and Pomeroy, 1933, 34.

76
Shamel and Pomeroy, 1933, 42.

84

Figure 13 Distributed by the Riverside Board of Trade and the Riverside Growers Associations, this citrus label
sought to brand and trademark the navel orange even prior to the citrus expedition in Brazil.
77

When William Saunders of the USDA originally sent the laranja de umbigo to the
Tibbets’ family in the 1870s, he distributed it under the name of the Bahian navel.
78
Following
its success in local and national citrus fairs, the name itself inherited commercial potential.
Growers increasingly referred to the fruit as the Riverside navel. After much deliberation,
Riverside residents once again renamed the orange, this time to the Washington navel. The shift
from the local designation of “Riverside” to that of “Washington” was linked to the Bahian
navel’s acquisition by the USDA. Shamel explained, “This name was adopted in recognition of
the fact that the variety was introduced and the first trees in this country were propagated by the
Agricultural Department of Washington D.C.”
79
Shamel provided the scientific justification for
this change. That Saunders, himself, believed the name “Bahian” should have remained suggests
that Shamel conclusions were more subjective than the scientific language of selective breeding,
propagating records, and the Brazilian expedition surrounding his renaming might suggest. After

77
Image from Harry Lawton and Lewis Weathers, “The Origins of Citrus Research in California,” in The Citrus
Industry, 5 (Riverside, CA: University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, 1989), 299.

78
Reproduced note by William Saunders dated December 20, 1898 in P. H. Dorsett, AD Shamel, and Wilson
Popenoe, “The Navel Orange of Bahia with Notes on Some Little-Known Brazilian Fruits,” Bulletin No. 445,
(Washington D.C., United Stated Department of Agriculture, February 10, 1917), 5.

79
Archibald Shamel, “The Origin of the Washington Navel Orange,” The Journal of Heredity. Reprinted in
California Fruit News. February 12 1916, 4.

85
some hesitation, even Saunders ultimately acquiesced to the popular renaming.
80
The navel
orange was now popularly accepted as a distinct variety native to Riverside.
Following the Brazilian expedition, Citrus Belt growers were increasingly described as
the leaders of a global market. As stated in a bulletin of the Pan American Union, formed to
promote hemispheric cooperation, “From California trees of this variety have been sent to Japan,
Australia, South Africa, and other foreign citrus districts…The navel orange of California has
been the foundation upon which the citrus industry as a whole has been developed.”
81
Even as
late as the 1940s, Shamel would write, “During the development of the Washington navel orange
industry, Riverside became the center of scientific and commercial research on the culture and
handling of citrus fruits, the results of which have been of world wide significance.”
82
These
declarations confirmed and expanded the earlier western expansionism first expressed by the
Riverside Press during President Roosevelt’s visit to Riverside in 1903.
83

Through the combination of symbolic mythology and scientific discourse, the navel
orange and eastern whites became American natives. Shamel’s quest for origins justified the
renaming of the Brazilian navel to the Washington navel, a designation which Brazilian
agriculturalists continue to ignore as a variety distinct from the laranja de umbigo.
84
Rather than

80
Reproduced note by William Saunders dated December 20, 1898 in P. H. Dorsett, AD Shamel, and Wilson
Popenoe, “The Navel Orange of Bahia with Notes on Some Little-Known Brazilian Fruits,” Bulletin No. 445,
(Washington D.C., United Stated Department of Agriculture, February 10, 1917), 5.

81
Archibald Shamel, “The Washington Navel Orange.” The Journal of Heredity, October 1915. Reprinted in
Bulletin of the Pan American Union, 41 (Washington, July-December 1915), 529.

82
Archibald Shamel, “Riverside-Home of the Navel,” The Citrograph (Los Angeles, 1943), 322.

83
“Cornerstone is Laid. Impressive Rites, ” Riverside Daily Press, May 7, 1903.

84
Histories of citrus in Brazil, as well as contemporary accounts of citrus, often allude to the Brazilian introduction
of citrus to California. There is no acknowledged distinction between Washington and Brazilian varieties of navel
orange. See for instance O. S. A. Passos, “Citricultura na Regiao de Cruz das Almas-BA” (Citriculture in the region
of Cruz das Almas), Embrapa-CNPMF (Brazil), 4, 1980; See also Luiz Eduardo Dórea, Historias de Salvador Nos
Nomes Das Suas Ruas (History of Salvador in the Names of Its Streets), (Brazil: EDUFBA 2006).
86
representing a surprising scientific conclusion, Shamel’s declaration emerged from the iteration
of the Brazilian navel as a symbol of the American nation embodied in President Roosevelt’s
replanting of the Tibbets’ tree ten years earlier. From a symbol of white racial superiority in
California, the navel had become an indicator of American nativity and international
supremacy.
85

“Impending Death”
The death of President Roosevelt in 1919 brought renewed attention to the two parent
navel trees planted in Riverside. The local press remembered the former President with pride,
publishing multiple articles commemorating his 1903 visit and recounting the replanting of the
parent navel in detail.
86
Interest in his death was underscored by the declining health of the two
parent navel trees themselves.
87
In the words of the Riverside Daily Press, the tree’s plight
rivaled that of Roosevelt’s own struggle, “Today the tree is in the hands of the California
experimental station experts who are trying to save its life, just as the experts and scientists in the
Roosevelt hospital tried every way to save the life of the great statesman for whom the tree was
named.”
88
Although concerted energy was dedicated to the trees, something had fundamentally
changed between efforts to protect the trees before President Roosevelt’s visit in 1903 to efforts
following his death in 1919. Inaugural attempts to preserve the parent navel trees by the

85
Roosevelt’s Corollary expanded the role of the Monroe Doctrine to justify U.S. intervention in Latin American.
Throughout his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt preached the benefits of a global eye throughout his western tour.
See Kris James Mitchener and Marc Weidenmeir, “Empire, Public Goods, and the Roosevelt Corollary,” The
Journal of Economic History, 65 (no. 3, September 2005).

86
“Picture Showing Ex-President Roosevelt Planting Famous Navel Orange Tree in Court of Mission Inn,”
Riverside Daily Press, January 6, 1919, 7.

87
“In Danger of Losing Parent Washington Navel,” California Citrograph, January 1918.

88
“Picture Showing Ex-President Roosevelt Planting Famous Navel Orange Tree in Court of Mission Inn” Riverside
Daily Press. January 6, 1919, 7; Ironically, Roosevelt’s death was partly attributed to an injury he endured while on
the Brazilian Expedition. “Theodore Roosevelt Dies Suddenly at Oyster Bay Home,” New York Times, January 6,
1919.
87
Historical Society, through replanting and fencing, attempted to safeguard both the trees’
economic value, as an untainted source of superior buds, and their symbolic value, as living
markers of the citrus industry. Shamel, however, had severed the unique tie between the parent
Brazilian trees and the Washington navel during the citrus expedition abroad. The resources
dedicated to the revival of the ailing tree at the time of Roosevelt’s passing were no longer
invested in maintaining the trees’ lives, but in venerating their death. In doing so, concerned
citizens embraced the legacy of the Brazilian tree while accepting both themselves and the trees’
progeny as native.
Responding to public concern over the parent navel trees’ declining health, the Riverside
Park Commission organized a consulting board of experts on the species, including the Dean of
the Citrus Experiment Station Dr. Herbert John Webber, Frank Chase, F.A. Little, B. K. Marvin,
and Shamel.
89
The board suggested an intense treatment regime. First, a foot and a half of soil
was to be removed. Next, injuries caused by small animals were to be treated. Following care,
misplaced roots were to be removed, virgin soil was to be added, the surface was to be mulched,
and wire was to enclose the tree. The top of the tree was to be heavily pruned to protect it from
frost. The trunk was to be whitewashed to protect it from sunburn.
90
A series of tests concluded
that the cause of the trees’ decline was dry root rot, characterized by decay of bark around the
crown and the covered base of the tree’s trunk.
91
Ironically, the trees that had come to represent
the roots of the Riverside colony were dying as a consequence of having been planted too
deeply.

89
“In Danger of Losing Parent Washington Navel,” California Citrograph, January 1918.

90
“In Danger of Losing Parent Washington Navel,” California Citrograph, January 1918.

91
J. T. Barrett, “Some Important Fungus and Bacterial Diseases of Citrus,” First Annual Report of the California
Citrus Institute, June 1920, 153-158.
88
The Citrus Experiment Station took drastic measures to revive the trees. Established in
1907, the station provided a centralized knowledge center formerly served by SCFE meetings,
trade magazines, and statewide citrus fairs. Its establishment stemmed from the rise of
agricultural science from 1880-1890 and government funding for such experimentation after the
passing of the 1887 Hatch Act.
92
For Citrus Experiment Station scientists, efforts to revive the
trees served as an opportunity to further research into causes and treatments for diseases
threatening citrus breeds. Administratively, their good will towards the City of Riverside
coalesced with public relations efforts under the Webber administration.
93
Under the acting
directorship of plant pathologist J. T. Barrett, the tree planted in the Mission Inn courtyard
underwent inarching, in which new seedlings were grafted near the base onto the parent tree, and
the Magnolia Avenue tree underwent bridge grafting, in which the experiment station grafted an
orange twig connecting the roots to an upper portion of the tree.
94
In both instances, efforts to
support the dying body were dependent upon a support system of foreign roots.
Despite a flurry of efforts to revive the parent navels, the press predicted the trees’
“impending death.”
95
The community quickly organized to commemorate their passing and
preparations were made to memorialize both sites with permanent bronze tablets. As noted by
Shamel, “All that is left to be done is for F. A. Miller, master of the Glenwood Mission Inn, who
owns one of the trees and the city of Riverside which owns the other, to plan a monument to be

92
Harry Lawton and Lewis Weathers, “The Origins of Citrus Research in California,” in The Citrus Industry, 5,
(Riverside, CA: University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, 1989).

93
Harry Lawton and Lewis Weathers, “The Origins of Citrus Research in California,” in The Citrus Industry, 5,
(Riverside, CA: University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, 1989), 299.

94
“Skilled Surgery Necessary to Keep Famous Trees from Dying,” Riverside Independent Enterprise, Riverside,
CA. January 28, 1919, 6.

95
“Riverside Mourns Impending Death Orange Tree Pioneers,” Twin Falls News, January 14, 1920, 2.
89
placed on the spot where these two parents of the great citrus industry stood during their lives.”
96

Just as quickly as forces had gathered to ensure the vitality of the parent navels, they united to
venerate their passing.
The newly founded Pioneer Memorial Museum Society (PMMS) led the efforts to erect a
monument. An outgrowth of the Pioneer Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution,
the PMSS was “open to anyone interested in preserving the relics of the early pioneer days in
Riverside and in Southern California.”
97
The purpose of the society—to secure a place for the
“relics” of “pioneer days”—coalesced with the memorialization of the navel trees. Like the
museum they enthusiastically planned, the PMMS hoped to preserve the memory of California’s
pioneers in “conquering the virgin territory” that was “transformed into the sunny southland.”
98

Encouraged by the Daughters of the American Revolution, the members planned to dedicate the
monument to Mrs. Tibbets.
99

Despite reports of both trees’ demise, the efforts of the PMSS were premature. Barrett
declared that the Magnolia Avenue tree was improving as a result of scientific intervention.
100

The determined efforts of area scientists were lauded. The Riverside Independent Enterprise
reported, “although their death may be impending in that their recovery is not a certainty, no
effort is being spared to bring them back to their natural vigor, and as long as there is the
slightest hope the experiment station will continue its work.”
101
Despite these improvements,

96
“Parent Navel Orange Trees are Fast Dying,” Riverside Daily Press, November 8, 1919, 3.

97
“Pioneer Memorial Museum is Taking Shape,” Riverside Independent Enterprise, July 12, 1919, 4.

98
“Tibbet Collection of Pioneer and Southwestern Relics and Curios to be Made Nucleus of Unique Museum,”
Riverside Independent Enterprise, July 15, 1919, 3.

99
“Boulder is to Honor Mrs. Tibbets.” Riverside Independent Enterprise, November 8, 1919, 8.

100
“Navel Orange Tree Will Not Die Soon Declares Expert,” Riverside Daily Press, January 2, 1920, 3.

90
news of the “impending death” of the navels did not falter. News of their declining health
received press coverage from across the United States, including Idaho, Nebraska, and New
Jersey.
102
The Trenton Evening Times reported:
Forty-five years of useful activity form a proud record for any living being, vegetable,
animal or even human. Considering that their progeny bore over a $40,000,000 crop of
fruit last year, according to the estimate of the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange, these
trees must be regarded as important contributors to the material welfare of this country.
103

The premature declaration of their imminent passing was made possible by the idea that the
parent trees had already achieved their primary purpose: to promote American commerce in the
American West. Now that the Brazilian navel had given birth to the Washington navel, the
parent tree was a relic, a memorial to the humble beginnings of a great industry that was
impressed upon the landscape by government intervention, capitalist acumen, and scientific
practice.
Following treatment from E. M. Byrns of the USDA, the ailing tree on Magnolia Avenue
was predicted to live another 50 years.
104
In actuality, it lived much longer. To this day, it can be
found standing tall at the corner of Magnolia Avenue. Alongside it sits a plaque dedicated to
Mrs. Tibbets. The inscription, prepared by the USDA, reads:
To Honor Mrs. Eliza Tibbets and to commend her good work in planting at Riverside in
1873 the first Washington navel orange trees in California; native to Bahia, Brazil;
proved the most valuable fruit introduction yet made by the United States Department of
Agriculture 1920.
105

101
“Parent Navels are Still Alive.” Riverside Independent Enterprise. February 5, 1920, 2.

102
“Riverside Mourns Impending Death Orange Tree Pioneer,” Twin Falls News, January 24, 1920, 2; “First Orange
Tree Settlers are Dying,” Omaha World Herald, February 5, 1920, 1; “Luscious Oranges Through Year,” Trenton
Evening Times, March 6, 1920, 4.

103
“Luscious Oranges Through Year,” Trenton Evening Times, March 6, 1920, 4.

104
“Navel Orange Has Birthday. Fiftieth Anniversary of Seedless Fruit’s Arrival in U.S. Observed,” Macon
Telegraph, August 26, 1920.

105
Riverside Chamber of Commerce. “Riverside: The Birthplace of the Navel Orange,” pamphlet, 1926, box 6,
Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).
91

The parent tree replanted at the Mission Inn did not fare so well. In 1922, the tree replanted by
President Roosevelt during his western tour, the one that showed “no sign of race suicide,” was
declared dead.
106
The Mission Inn tree was replaced with little fan-fare by an 11-year-old navel
tree budded from the original. In death, its role as a relic of the industry’s past was complete. The
tree was cut into small pieces and distributed as souvenirs to memorialize its role in the
California industry.
107

Figure 14 The parent navel tree was replaced with another at the Mission Inn following its death.
108

106
“Good Bye and Good Luck was the Farewell Greeting,” Riverside Daily Press, May 8, 1903; “President
Roosevelt Replanting Original Navel Trees,” California Citrograph, May 23, 1903; “California’s First Orange Tree
Dies,” Salt Lake Telegram, December 22, 1922.

107
“11-Year-Old Child Succeeds Father.” Riverside Daily Press, March 20, 1923, 2.

108
“Replacing Parent Washington Navel at Mission Inn,” photograph, March 20, 1923, box 6, Archibald Shamel
Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).
92
The Anglo fantasy past was no longer grounded in the pioneering buds of the parent
trees. They had been studied and improved through the methods of the USDA. The Brazilian
expedition had legitimized their superiority, both in cultivation and exportation. Where the
frontier of the past was defined by physical toil and the prowess of pioneers, the frontier of the
future was to be conquered through science. The parent navel origin myth had justified Riverside
colonists’ settlement in southern California. USDA investigation into the origin of the navel
orange in Brazil had made its offspring a native. A plaque, wooden souvenirs, and a living relic
on Magnolia Avenue would commemorate the early navel industry, but regional heritage had
evolved. Through science, white Americans were not only settlers. They were natives and they
did not need the parent navel tree to prove so.
Conclusion
At the beginning of the 20
th
century, the Western Hemisphere was depicted as a substitute
for the American West that promised to reinvigorate American masculinity and evade threats of
race suicide. The Brazilian expedition offered USDA scientists an opportunity to pursue exotic
fruits in a capitalist frontier ripe for American intervention. The USDA and the Brazilian
government drew universal parallels between citrus ranchers in an effort to strengthen
commercial connections between the two countries. The desire of the USDA to promote
American intervention in Brazilian agricultural, however, drew upon a familiar narrative of
American exceptionalism that ultimately served as a referent of the distance between the two
countries.
Regional identity and racial formation developed across scales, despite geographic
distance. As described by geographer Doreen Massey (1994), the global is part of what
93
constitutes the local.
109
Investigation into citrus production abroad gave credibility to global class
relations between whites and non-whites within the imagined space of the Orange Empire.
Where European-descent residents were imagined as managers, those considered distinctively
non-white were regulated to the role of laborers. At the same time, efforts by the Brazilian
government to convey a purely modern nation-state were undermined by nuanced constructions
of whiteness. Portuguese-descent Brazilians were likened to Spanish Californians and, in a
patronizing portrayal of citrus production with parallels to colonial endeavors elsewhere, were
described as civilized patrons yet incapable of the advanced development of the California Citrus
Belt.
110

Analysis of the Brazilian expedition alongside study of its localization in southern
California reveals the process by which American migrants became American natives. Now
backed by scientific rationale, navel orange mythology proposed that the Brazilian orange had
been refined and improved through the careful efforts of American scientists and California
citrus growers. Resultantly, the value of regional citrus heritage was no longer aimed at
maintaining a virgin source of unaltered fruit, but to transform it into a relic of its superior
progeny. Efforts to save the parent navel tree and the premature declaration of its death reflect
this shift. The parent navel now served as a testimony to the transformative power of science
when yielded in the hands of white American citrus ranchers.
As the USDA looked towards a global stage, state leaders focused on the perceived racial
threat within national borders. If investigation into citrus practices abroad suggested that
American farmers were entitled to the Brazilian countryside based on superior cultivating

109
Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

110
See, for instance, parallel efforts in Philippine-American colonial history. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of
Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
94
practices, then by extension American land was vulnerable to competing agricultural endeavors
as well. The following chapter explores the means by which land was first symbolically, and
then legally, reserved for white settlers to the exclusion of those deemed threatening to white
territorial claims.

95
CHAPTER 3
On the Move: Racialized Domesticity and Housing, 1913-1920
Jukichi Harada first arrived in the United States as a galley attendant aboard a naval ship
traveling between the United States and Japan. At the age of 23, he settled in Riverside where he
managed the Washington Restaurant and a boarding house with his wife, Ken Indo, and their
five children. One winter morning in 1913, the Haradas unexpectedly lost their five year old son
Tadao, who suddenly and violently choked in his father’s arms. Later found to be suffering from
diphtheria, an upper respiratory illness, Mr. Harada attributed his son’s death to the family’s
cramped quarters and exposure to the migrant workers living in the boarding house. Motivated to
find a more healthful environment, in 1915 he purchased a home at 3356 Lemon Street in
downtown Riverside. Although filed in the names of his three American-born children, Mr.
Harada’s efforts were quickly challenged by his neighbors and the resulting court case became
one of the first tests of the Alien Land Law.
1

The exclusivity of white claims to space within the Citrus Belt were fraught with tension.
At the same time the Riverside court questioned the Harada’s ability to live in a white
neighborhood, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) began to advocate for the
mass adoption of worker housing on citrus ranches. Targeting a recent wave of immigrants from
central Mexico, worker housing campaigns promoted long-term settlement where the Alien Land
Law prevented it. If the mythology of the navel orange had made middle-class European
migrants natives, it left the multiracial workforce of Japanese, Korean, and Mexican immigrants
as foreigners. Although seemingly contradictory, the Alien Land Act and citrus ranch housing
programs were two manifestations of like efforts to police the boundaries of white domesticity.

1
The first Alien Land Law was a state statute that prevented land title in the name of “aliens ineligible for
citizenship.” See Edwin E. Ferguson, "The California Alien Land Law and the Fourteenth Amendment," California
Law Review, 35 (no. 1, 1947).
96
An analysis of these two cases alongside each other deconstructs the oscillating logic that
simultaneously confined non-whites to transient space and criminalized worker mobility in the
World War I era.
The Harada family and citrus company housing campaigns reveal the unsettled
contradictions of mobility within capitalism at the beginning of the 20
th
century. Although
worker migration was a necessity of the citrus economy, mobility was pathologized.
Simultaneously, settlement was idealized as a sign of American domesticity. However, non-
whites in search of permanent housing found themselves pushed into the groves. As evidenced
by the Alien Land Law, Japanese resident who sought to built permanent homes or embark on
agricultural pursuits were thrust into transiency. Agricultural interests went to great lengths to
maintain racial divisions when permanent settlement and full citizenship were pursued by those
for which it was never intended.
Crossing the Lemon Street Line, 1913-1917
The turn of the 20th century witnessed a rapid shift from predominantly Chinese to
Japanese and Korean agricultural labor. Chinese immigration had receded as a consequence of
not one, but two federal exclusion acts (1882, 1892). Further contributing to Chinese population
decline within the Citrus Belt was a disastrous fire in the summer of 1893. Essentially burning
seventy-five percent of the Chinatown at Riverside’s periphery, the fire was responsible for
multiple injuries, reduced sixteen buildings to ash, and caused $50,000 worth of property
damage.
2
Within ten years of the second Chinese Exclusion Act and the Chinatown fire, county
census records reflect that the Chinese population dropped from 316 to 187 permanent

2
“Chinatown Burned Out,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1893, 2; For more on the use of fire as a means of
racial removal see Connie Chiang’s work on a Chinese fishing village near Monterey in the Spring of 1906. Connie
Y. Chiang, Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2008).
97
individuals. Even this stark dip fails to account for the policy’s effect on migratory field laborers
contracted from various parts of California.
3
Dependent on this workforce, ranchers began to
draw from a transnational circuit of workers along the Pacific Rim. Doing so forever altered the
well-defended racial spatiality that had characterized the early Orange Empire.
When the labor reserves of southern California waned, citrus growers turned to Hawaii.
Like the farm-labor farm-owner bifurcation that characterized agricultural production in the
Citrus Belt, Chinese immigrants provided the majority of labor in the Hawaiian sugar fields.
Through the cooperative efforts of the Bureau of Immigration and the Royal Hawaiian
Agricultural Society, 46,000 workers, largely farmers, migrated from China to Hawaii in the
years between 1864 and 1900.
4
Japanese workers shortly outnumbered Chinese workers as a
result of a formal labor agreement entered between the Hawaiian government and Japan in
1885.
5
Hawaii’s workforce further diversified as Korean, Portuguese, Filipino, and Puerto Rican
workers joined the fields. When Hawaii was declared a U.S. territory at the end of the 19
th

century, it became a “stepping stone” to the United States. The Organic Act of 1900 ended the
contract labor system, thus declaring all legal binds to an employer unconstitutional.
6
Unbound
by contracts, many left for the continental United States.
Beckoned by the Orange Empire, the transnational circuits that had formed between Asia
and Hawaii stretched to California. Mary Paik Lee has provided an autobiographical description

3
Mark H. Rawitsch, The House on Lemon Street: Japanese Pioneers and the American Dream, (Boulder:
University of Colorado, 2012).

4
See Chapter 5. John Vandercook, King Cane: The Story of Sugar in Hawaii (New York and London: Harper &
Brothers Publishers, 1939). Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920 (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1983).

5
Alex Ladenson, “The Background of the Hawaiian-Japanese Labor Convention of 1886,” Pacific Historical
Review, 9 (no. 4, Dec. 1940), 389-400.

6
Adon Poli, “Japanese Farm Holdings on the Pacific Coast.” Berkeley, CA: United States Department of
Agriculture Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1944, 3.
98
of her family’s Riverside sojourn in a rare window into the experience of Asian laborers entering
the Citrus Belt.
7
Her parents, Paik Sin Koo and Song Kuang Do emigrated from Korea, worked
at a Hawaiian sugar plantation, and then moved to Riverside with their daughter. Paik Lee
recalled her first impression of the community:
The Japanese, Chinese, and Mexicans each had their own little settlement outside of
town. My first glimpse of what was to be our camp was rows of one-room shacks, with a
few water pumps here and there and little sheds for outhouses.
8

Like many other Koreans in California, Paik Lee’s family lived in a one room wooden home
built for railroad workers during the 1880s. Without gas or electricity, Paik Lee and her siblings
filled the holes in their new home with mud in a makeshift attempt to protect themselves from
the Santa Ana winds. Like other Korean migrants, Paik Lee inherited the conditions of the
Chinese migrants who had provided the main source of manual labor prior to her arrival.
An unprecedented multiracial element characterized working-class housing. Arriving to a
dense city, rather than the small colony first encountered by earlier Chinese migrants, Japanese
and Korean immigrants arriving to southern California between 1892 and 1907 founded small
settlements throughout Riverside. The central downtown, the northern agricultural fields, the
Eastside district, and the largely Latino Casa Blanca neighborhood each served as fertile areas
for these recent migrants. As remembered by Alice Kanda, whose Korean family resided and
owned a store in Casa Blanca, “My mother learned to speak Spanish before she even learned to
speak English.”
9
Although home to more ethnic diversity than the proceeding Chinatown
districts, the social boundary between white and non-white was reproduced in the racial

7
For another autobiographical account, see Easurk Emsen Carr. The Golden Mountain: The Autobiography of a
Korean Immigrant, 1895-1960. Wayne Patterson (ed.). (University of Illinois, 1996).

8
Mark Paik Lee, Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America (University of Washington Press, 1990), 14.

9
Alice Kanda interviewed by Deborah Wong, August 18, 1999, transcript, Asian American Riverside (University of
California Riverside, Riverside).
99
geography of segregated districts.
10
As discussed in chapter 1, these boundaries were
mitochondrial in nature, allowing for worker movement to and from places of employment while
maintaining racial segregation. These lines were made visible in the 1913 Alien Land Law,
which exposed the conflict between those seeking to settle and state policies designed to keep
them on the move.
The Alien Land Law was a state policy passed in 1913 that prohibited “all aliens
ineligible for citizenship” from owning land or entering long-term leases. Targeting Japanese
farmers, but affecting all Asian emigrants, the category of “aliens ineligible for citizenship”
referenced a 1790 Naturalization Law that denied citizenship to all residents with the exception
of free whites and persons of African descent.
11
Although receiving strong support at the state
level, the law undermined efforts to build relationships between Japan and the United States as
both countries turned their gaze to the international stage. Already precarious relations,
aggravated by the Gentlemen’s Agreement (1907) and on-going efforts to segregate Japanese-
descent children in California schools, were intensified as nativists sought to maintain the
exclusivity of white territorial claims to inland southern California.
12

The Harada case illustrates the tensions at play as various stakeholders debated whether
or not Japanese residents were to be included in a citriscape that was imagined as established by
whites in the navel orange myth. That Mr. and Mrs. Harada were denied the right to naturalize

10
See George Sanchez’s discussion of “geography of difference in "What's Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the
Jews: Creating Multiracialism on the Eastside during the 1950s,” American Quarterly, 56, (no. 3, 2004), particularly
pages 634-640; For more on multicultural neighborhoods germinating from shared racial segregation, as well as
efforts to reengineer racial difference, see George Sanchez, “Face the Nation: Race, Immigration, and the Rise of
Nativism in Late Twentieth Century America,” International Migration Review, 31, (no. 4, Winter 1997).

11
Edwin E. Ferguson, "The California Alien Land Law and the Fourteenth Amendment," California Law Review,
35, (no. 1, 1947).

12
Japanese Association of America, “Memorial Presented to the President While at San Francisco,” typescript,
September 18, 1919, box 1, p. 4-5, Masakazu Iwata Collection (Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles,
CA).
100
and their American-born children were granted national citizenship at birth was law. However,
the question of their integration into mainstream white society—as the right to occupy a home in
a white neighborhood—was a matter of debate. The Alien Land Law would provide the forum
for this deliberation. Proponents of a lawsuit brought against the Harada family by the State of
California maintained that the purchase violated the racial integrity of the neighborhood.
Opponents contended that the family had assimilated to American standards and had the right to
occupy a home for use by citizen children. At its core, the case was a battle over who had the
right to settle in California and, as an extension, who could claim an American identity.
Public confusion quickly surrounded whether or not American-born children of Japanese
parents were entitled to property and, more broadly, the full rights of citizenship. The question
was first asked when Mr. Harada attempted to file the deed of the newly purchased home with
the County of Riverside in the names of his three American-born children, nine year old daughter
Mine, five year old daughter Sumi, and three year old son Yoshizo. Like the Geary Act, the
Alien Land Law cast a “shadow of exclusion” that covered not only Japanese nationals, but
marked the right to property of all Asian-descent residents as suspect.
13
Recorder I. S. Logan
sought the expertise of his neighboring County Recorder in Los Angeles when presented with the
deed. The Los Angeles recorder answered that he had never seen a similar attempt. Logan then
turned to the Office of Naturalization. Agent W. T. Jones advised the recorder that the Harada
children, if born in the United States, were entitled to own property. Upon Mr. Harada providing
his children’s birth records, the deed was filed.
14
However, the question of whether or not the
family could reside in a home “in a strictly American residential district” remained

13
Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943, (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 221-243

14
“Japanese Buy on Lemon Street,” Riverside Daily Press, December 23, 1915, 3; “Minor Children of Japanese
Purchase Residence,” Riverside Independent Enterprise, December 23, 1915, 7.
101
unanswered.
15

When news of the Haradas’ move reached Lemon Street, the neighbors organized in
protest. Their objection, as described by the Riverside Daily Press, “was made on the ground that
the purchase would tend to depreciate property values in the neighborhood and not because they
objected to the Japanese family as neighbors.”
16
Despite the neighbors’ colorblind rhetoric,
concern with declining property values was racial in origin. As reported by the Riverside
Independent Enterprise, “It is said they fear if one sale is made to a Japanese family in the
neighborhood, similar sales will follow until the whole east side of Lemon street between Third
and Fourth will come into the possession of the Japanese.”
17
The downtown Mile Square was
largely a white middle-class residential area. As described by scholar Mark Rawitsch (2012) in
his detailed study of the Harada case, their neighbors were largely European immigrants and the
children of European immigrants. They included “a stenographer, bookkeeper, barber,
automobile mechanic, wallpaper hanger, sign painter, insurance superintendent, produce
salesman, nurse, jeweler, practitioner of Christian Science, and even a fortune-telling medium.”
18

As proprietors of a restaurant and boarding house, the Haradas had a similar class-background,

15
“Alien Land Law Test Suit Filed,” Springfield Union, Springfield, MA, October 6, 1916, 6; Lisa Lowe draws
attention to the construction of Asian Americans as always “foreigners-within.” See Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On
Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1999). In her study of the racialized ethnic experience of
middle-class Japanese and Chinese Californians, sociology Mia Tuan has found that although Asian ethnics exercise
flexibility in how they retain cultural elements in their own lives, they experience great pressure to identify in ethnic
terms, despite generation an assumption of foreignness clings to them, and they are not considered “real”
Americans. She writes, “First, not only is racism still an issue haunting middle-class Asian ethnics, the particular
strain that plagues them also involves xenophobic elements that play up the notion of being foreign. Their class has
done little to validate their authenticity as long-time Americans in the eyes of the public.” See Mia Tuan, Forever
Foreigners: The Asian Ethnic Experience Today (1998; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2003), 154.

16
“Japanese Buy on Lemon Street,” Riverside Daily Press, December 23, 1915, 3.

17
“Minor Children of Japanese Purchase Residence,” Riverside Independent Enterprise, December 23, 1915, 7.

18
Mark Rawsitch, The House on Lemon Street: Japanese Pioneers and the American Dream (Boulder, CO:
University Press of Colorado, 2012), 85.

102
however, the neighbors contended that the racial difference between white and Japanese was too
large a gap to breach. Their own right to property secured, the neighbors organized the Lemon
Street Committee in an effort to defend the geographic boundaries of their whiteness.
The Lemon Street Committee quickly offered to purchase the home from Mr. Harada at
an advance of $500. Refusing the offer, the family was subject to verbal and physical assaults.
Even the youngest neighbors participated by throwing rocks at the Harada children.
19
Despite
their ill treatment, Mr. Harada remained confident that the intolerance of his neighbors would
fade with time. He explained, “It is only temporary, I am sure. At any rate, I have the property
and I want my children to keep it. It is a good investment and there is no question but that they
have a right given by the Constitution of the United States to be owners of property.”
20

Indicating their intention to settle in the neighborhood long-term, the Harada family added a
second story to the home.
21
Deed in hand, contract for improvements signed, and construction
started at the cost of $1,000, the family showed no signs of retreating from Lemon Street. In
response, Deputy Attorney General Robert Clark and Attorney Miguel Estudillo brought suit
against Mr. Harada and his children in October of 1916. The prosecutors claimed that Mr.
Harada had an interest in the home and, as an alien ineligible for citizenship, his effort
represented an intentional violation of the Alien Land Law.
22

Estudillo was the driving force behind the prosecution. Ironically, his own ability to
benefit from white privilege underscored the malleability of racial lines. Described as “a native

19
“Jap Minors May Own Land, Win In Alien Land Law Opinion,” Los Angeles Examiner, January 5, 1916.

20
“Jap Minors May Own Land, Win In Alien Land Law Opinion,” Los Angeles Examiner, January 5, 1916.

21
“Harada Makes Improvements,” Riverside Daily Press, January 10, 1916, 5.

22
The People of the State of California vs. Jukichi Harada, el al. Superior Court of the State of California in and for
The County of Riverside; “To Test Alien Land Law Here,” Riverside Enterprise, October 5, 1916, 1, 3; “Alien Land
Law Test Suit Filed,” Springfield Union, 6.
103
son of California,” Estudillo traced his lineage to the Spanish military, as well as early California
ranchers Jose Estudillo and Louis Rubidoux.
23
Historian John Nieto-Phillips has argued that
discourses of hispanidad originated in struggles against political marginalization and efforts to
collectively identify with racial superiority, even if at the expense of others.
24
Similarly here,
Estudillo’s claims to Spanish identity allowed him to evade discrimination and integrate into an
elite class of American professionals. He graduated from college, served as a county clerk in San
Diego, and was admitted to practice law by the California Supreme Court. Upon moving to
Riverside in 1899, Estudillo opened a law office, successfully ran for state assembly, and
occupied a seat in the Senate. His membership in the racially exclusive Jonathan Club and
marriage to a direct descendant of the Mayflower further reflect his ability to cross the racial
boundary of whiteness.
25
If an elite man of Mexican descent could access white privilege, then
perhaps a middle-class Japanese family could as well.
On November 20, 1916, the Harada’s defense attorneys stood before Superior Court
Judge Hugh Craig to argue a demur in response to the plaintiff’s complaint. In a crowded
courtroom, attended by the Japanese Consul from Los Angeles and local Japanese residents,
Purington and Adair drew upon foreign policy to defend the right of Japanese nationals to
property in the United States. They cited the Philander Knox Treaty (1911), a treaty between the
United States and Japan that provided Japanese citizens had the liberty “to own or lease and
occupy houses…to lease land for residential and commercial purposes, and generally do
anything incident to or necessary for trade upon the same terms as native citizens or

23
Elmer Wallace Holmes, History of Riverside County, California, (Los Angeles, CA: Historic Record Company,
1912), 345; Brown and Boyd, 1922, 740-743.

24
John M. Nieto-Phillips, The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s-
1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004).

25
Elmer Wallace Holmes, History of Riverside County: With Biographical Sketches (Los Angeles, CA: Historic
Record Company, 1912), 345-348.
104
subjects…”
26
Further, the defendants rebutted the prosecution’s assertion that when Mr. Harada
purchased the Lemon Street home he acquired an interest in fee, or property rights, to the land
and, as a violation of the Alien Land Law, the property had automatically transferred to the state.
Their claim evoked ire in the prosecution. Estudillo responded passionately to the assertion that
Japanese parents of American-born children could hold property in trust until their minor
children reached twenty-one. He answered, “In other words, the purpose for which this law was
drafted has not been accomplished, and, if I may coin a word, there is nothing to prevent the state
of California becoming ‘Japanized’!”
27
As a third cause of dissent, the defense attorneys argued
that the case of Mr. Harada had been improperly joined with that against his three children.
28

In April of 1917 Judge Craig ruled on the demur. He found that the Philander Knox
Treaty did not protect the right of Japanese nationals to landownership, that the Harada’s
property did not immediately escheat to the state, and that the case had not been misjoined
between Mr. Harada and the American-born minor plaintiffs.
29
The ruling served to define the
parameters of the state case against the Haradas that was to follow. By interpreting the treaty’s
guarantee as extending only to structures, rather than land itself, Judge Craig closed the door to
further challenges regarding the constitutionality of the Alien Land Law. In joining the cases, he
sought to prevent a multiplicity of suits brought against the family. And, in ruling that the

26
“Opinion of Honorable Hugh H. Craig.” The People of the State of California versus Jukichi Harada. Superior
Court of the State of California in and for the County of Riverside, 3; “Treaty of Commerce and Navigation
Between the United States and Japan.” The American Journal of International Law. 5, (no. 2, April 1911), 100-106.

27
“Jap Fights to Null Land Law of California,” Muskegon Chronicle, December 29, 1916, 8.

28
“Opinion of Honorable Hugh H. Craig.” The People of the State of California versus Jukichi Harada. Superior
Court of the State of California in and for the County of Riverside,

29
“Opinion of Honorable Hugh H. Craig.” The People of the State of California versus Jukichi Harada. Superior
Court of the State of California in and for the County of Riverside; “Antialien Land Law of California Upheld,”
Seattle Daily Times, April 5, 1917, 12; “Anti-Alien Land Law No Violation of Japan Treaty,” San Diego Union,
April 5, 1917, 3.

105
property had not transferred to the state at time of purchase, he found that property transfer must
be preceded by judgment in a court of law. Judge Craig further explained, “If the purpose of the
law is to prevent the ownership of land by aliens of the class designated, the reason for applying
the law ceases when the title of the land is held by persons not within the proscribed class, no
matter through what channels the title may have passed.”
30
In his demur ruling, Judge Craig
restricted the purpose of the forthcoming court debate to the question of illegal title, a burden left
to the prosecution.
The Harada family received broad support, including financial backing from the
Riverside Japanese Association, encouragement from Mission Inn proprietor Frank Miller, and
legal aid from Purington and Adair. On the local level, sociologist Morrison Wong (1977) has
argued that Japanese residents were more easily accepted in Riverside than other California cities
due to high-rates of Christianity, the aid of cultural institutions, and the presence of influential
advocates. Mission Inn proprietor Frank Miller, for instance, employed Japanese workers at his
hotel, visited Japan, and commonly hosted Japanese dignitaries.
31
Were the Haradas’ property
rights found to be revoked, Rawsitch has suggested, Miller offered to serve as a proxy for the
family on legal documents. Socialite Eva Purington was an active supporter of the Methodist
mission church, which organized English-language classes, traveling ministers, and services in
the Japanese and Korean immigrant community.

The law firm of her husband, William
Purington, represented the Harada family at a reduced cost.
32
The presence of the Japanese

30
“Opinion of Honorable Hugh H. Craig.” The People of the State of California versus Jukichi Harada. Superior
Court of the State of California in and for the County of Riverside, 10.

31
Morrison Gideon Wong, The Japanese in Riverside, 1890 to 1945: A Special Case in Race Relations (University
of California, Riverside, 1977), 21-26.

32
“Japanese Work: California,” American Missionary, 71, (New York, January 1917), 485-487; G.L. Cady, “The
Japanese in America,” American Missionary, 76, (New York, January 1922), 589-593.

106
Consul further served in the interest of the Haradas. Their physical presence in the courtroom
suggested that the Japanese government was watching the case with interest.
33
Although
regarding the rights of one family, the case had potential international implications for
perceptions of, on the one hand, Japanese potential to assimilate into American culture, and, on
the other, American goodwill towards Japan. Although a language of liberal individualism
supported Japanese integration in the abstract, public policy and private prejudice worked
together to maintain white privilege over land titles.
34

The case received wide interest and, in the media attention that followed, the Haradas
were cast as exemplars of American acculturation. Fulfilling the standards of progressive-era
Americanization, Mr. Harada attempted to naturalize upon emigrating, spoke English, married,
raised several children, and established a single-family home. The local Enterprise newspaper
pointed to the family’s Christianity as further evidence of the family’s character, noting,
“[Jukichi] and his family are members of the Methodist mission of this city and it is a matter of
common repute that they are quiet, clean, respectable people.”
35
When assuming ownership of
the Washington Restaurant, Mr. Harada decorated it with American flags, posters of U.S.
presidents, and offered an all-American menu.
36
The family’s effort to move from a rooming

33
For more on the influence of foreign consulates in trials dealing with racial discrimination against non-whites, see
my work on Mexican consulate attorney David Marcus. Genevieve Carpio, “Unexpected Allies: David C. Marcus,
Civil Rights, and the Mexican American Legal Landscape of Southern California,” Annual Review of the Casden
Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, 9 (2012), 1-23.

34
See George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics
(Philadelphia, Temple University, 2006).

35
“Minor Children of Japanese Purchase Residence,” Riverside Enterprise, December 23, 1915, 7.

36
“Washington Restaurant,” menu, box A1598-AC.108.36, Harada Collection (Riverside Metropolitan Museum,
Riverside, CA); His efforts preceded the “Americanization efforts” of the American government and the Japanese
Association. See Japanese Association of America. “Memorial Presented to the President While at San Francisco,”
typescript, September 18, 1919, box 1, p. 4-5, Masakazu Iwata Collection (Japanese American National Museum,
Los Angeles, CA).

107
house to a single-family home was represented as the most striking evidence of their
acculturation.
37
Mr. Harada’s desire to move to a white neighborhood was one that Riverside’s
European American residents could easily understand. The reproduction of white households
supported by the profits of agrarian production formed the bedrock of Riverside’s regional
identity. Even if not eligible for national citizenship, the family had consistently asserted their
cultural citizenship.

Figure 15 The Harada family, including Ken, Masa Atsu, Jukichi (left to right), were photographed together in Japan
prior to Jukichi’s emigration in 1903. Jukichi, Masa Atsu, Ken (back, left to right), Mine, Sumi Tadao (front, left to
right) were photographed in Riverside following their relocation circa 1911.
38

Family photographs of the Harada family are reflective of growing ties between the
United States and Japan, as well as the family’s attempt to navigate this change. For instance, in
1903, Mrs. Harada and son Masa Atsu were photographed with Mr. Harada during a return visit
to Japan. Mr. Harada stood beside his wife and son in a suit and derby. A reflection of Japan’s

37
“Minor Children of Japanese Purchase Residence,” Riverside Enterprise, December 23, 1915.

38
Rawsitch, 2012, 23, 74.
108
rising international presence, by the 1910s Japanese men of higher standing commonly wore
western style clothing. Mrs. Harada and Masa Atsu were beside him dressed in Japanese-style
kimonos. Although reflective of trends in rural areas, kimonos were also worn for formal or
festive occasions, such as in this memento of the family’s last time together in Japan.
39
In future
family photos, and as was typical of many other Japanese families living in Riverside, the attire
of Mrs. Harada and the children was indistinguishable from any other couple walking in
downtown Riverside. As in the photograph, urban historian Gail Dubrow has explained that first
generation Japanese migrants masked outward sigs of ethnicity in a strategic effort to blend into
American society and ward off discriminatory treatment.
40
If outward signs of identity served to
reaffirm the Haradas affiliation with American culture, the shedding of such signs was
distinctively Japanese American.
The Haradas and their advocates did not necessarily seek to disrupt broad racial
segregation. Instead, they hoped for inclusion on the other side of the line. Months prior to
purchasing the Lemon Street home, Mr. Harada purchased a small lot in the name of his daughter
Mine. Located on the east side of town where many Japanese, Mexican, and African American
residents had settled, the addition of a Japanese family raised no attention. As later described by
Mine Harada, “No one bothered or hollered because it was across the tracks.”
41
Whether or not
the Haradas purchased the lot for themselves is a matter of debate. Historian Rawsitch has
argued that the purchase represented an early effort by Mr. Harada to test the viability of buying

39
Mark Rawsitch, The House on Lemon Street: Japanese Pioneers and the American Dream (Boulder, CO:
University Press of Colorado, 2012), 22-23; Jacqueline Atkins, “Omoshirogara Textile Design and Children’s
Clothing in Japan 1910-1930,” Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, Textile Society of America,
September 2008.

40
Gail Dubrow, “Deru Kugi Wa Utareru or The Nail that Sticks Up Gets Hit: The Architecture of Japanese
American Identity, 1885-1942,” Journal of Architecture and Planning Research, 19 (no. 4, Winter 2002).
41
As quoted in Rawsitch, 2012, 93.
109
property under the names of American children. As an alternative explanation, historian Cathy
Gudis has suggested that Mr. Harada never intended to live on the lot himself, but rather acted in
the interest of a Japanese friend seeking to purchase property under the land law.
42
Both
explanations suggest that the Haradas had the option to buy property and build a home in the
Eastside neighborhood without protest.
Although the Haradas had the option of purchasing a home in the Eastside neighborhood,
they chose instead to move to Lemon Street. According to a survey conducted by California
Commission on Immigration and Housing Inspector Luther Mott, seventy-eight percent of homes
in the Eastside, as well as the Casa Blanca and Arlington neighborhood of Riverside, were
“lacking sewers (in Casa Blanca), deplorably overcrowded, poorly ventilated, and breeding
places for disease.”
43
That the Eastside was largely home to a multiracial workforce was no
coincidence. The economic benefits of the citrus industry had been unevenly distributed to white
families in planning and development decisions. Infrastructure, park space, and land itself were
systematically denied to its multiracial workforce. Whiteness had material benefits that Mr.
Harada attempted to access by objecting to living in the same neighborhood as working-class
Japanese, Mexican, and African-American families. As explained in the Enterprise:
[Jukichi] Harada objects to living in that section of Riverside in which the Japanese,
Mexicans and negro population are segregated. He says he does not want his children to
be compelled to associate with negro and Mexican children. He is carefully educating his
children, one of the boys being in high school and an exceptionally good student.
44

42
Catherine Gudis, “Draft: Reconnaissance Survey and Context Statement for the Marketplace Specific Plan, City
of Riverside, California.” Prepared for the City of Riverside Community Development Department, July 2012, 74.

43
As quoted in Catherine Gudis, “Draft: Reconnaissance Survey and Context Statement for the Marketplace
Specific Plan, City of Riverside, California,” Prepared for the City of Riverside Community Development
Department, July 2012, 61.

44
“Minor Children of Japanese Purchase Residence,” Riverside Enterprise, December 23, 1915, 7.

110
Mr. Harada distanced his family from racially stigmatized groups, including other Japanese
residents, in order to claim equal access to the benefits only available to Riverside residents
deemed white. Although seemingly sympathetic, press coverage of Mr. Harada seeking “the
right sort of environment for his children” presumed the superiority of white residents and reified
the value of segregation.
45

Both Harada and his Lemon Street neighbors sought to secure their place within
Riverside’s racial hierarchy. For Mr. Harada, this meant disassociating himself and his family
from the multiracial Eastside and settling in a single-family home within a white neighborhood.
However, his aspirations towards asset accumulation and upward mobility were undermined by
the Alien Land Law. For his neighbors, it meant maintaining a “possessive investment in
whiteness” that affirmed distinctions between themselves, as middle-class whites, and upwardly
mobile Japanese families.
46
In both cases, it meant defending claims to residential space.
Receiving communities, such as Riverside, became the frontline in efforts to maintain control
over white territorial acquisitions as a new wave of Asian residents struggled to find a place
outside of fieldwork in an agriculturalist economy. Their efforts, however, would be interrupted
by U.S. entrance into the war abroad. Between the demur hearing and the postponed 1918
hearing of the State of California vs. Jukichi Harada et al., citrus ranchers’ efforts to secure a
permanent Mexican workforce reversed the logic that criminalized the permanent settlement of
Japanese residents.

45
“Minor Children of Japanese Purchase Residence,” Riverside Enterprise, December 23, 1915, 7.

46
See George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics
(Philadelphia, Temple University, 2006).
111
Unsettling Mobility, 1917-1919
Considering the Alien Land Law alongside the adoption of worker housing by large-scale
citrus ranches reveals the oscillating logic by which non-whites were either pushed out of or
pulled into long-term settlement. Between 1870 and 1910, seasonal waves of agricultural
harvests required a migrant source of labor to gather perishable fruits and vegetables. The Alien
Land Law safeguarded this movement by preventing the accumulation of property and the
pursuit of productive farm endeavors by Asian residents. During World War I, a half century of
employment dependent on worker migration was flipped. In an inversion of previous practices,
USDA representatives advocated for the permanent settlement of citrus workers as a wartime
labor shortage undermined ranch productivity. However, rather than advocate that workers
purchase property, agriculturalists pursued a form of pastoral feudalism that pushed them into
settlement on company-owned land.
Commercial citrus production in California was founded on claims to rational production
and scientific expertise. However, where bud selection, irrigation, and careful monitoring
promoted high returns, technological advances did not ensure protection against unfavorable
weather, destructive pests, or changing consumer tastes. As described by one Citrus Belt rancher,
“The state passes laws against gambling and takes police action to enforce them. But it passes
laws and maintains a Department of Agriculture and an experiment station to encourage
producers to go into the citrus business.”
47
Like a high-stakes card game, citrus was an expensive
and unpredictable past time with the potential for high rewards and high losses.

47
Harry Chase quoted in Charles Collins Teague, Fifty Years a Rancher: The Recollections of Half a Century
Devotes to the Citrus and Walnut Industries of California and to Furthering the Cooperative Movement in
Agriculture (Anderson and Ritchie, 1944), 64; For more of the economic tensions of specialization see Devra
Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994); Don Mitchell, “Are We All Braceros Now? Lessons from the Bracero Program on the
Casualization and Control of Labor,” paper delivered at Guest Workers: Western Origins, Global Future
Conference, April 15, 2011 (electronic version available at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA).
112
If indeed citrus cultivation was “a bigger gamble than playing poker,” then ranchers
shifted the risks of the market onto workers themselves.
48
By maintaining a flexible supply of
laborers who arrived with the harvest and moved on when it was completed, ranchers mitigated
the inherent unpredictability of agricultural production. Rather than maintaining responsibility
for a yearlong labor force, citrus ranchers hired workers seasonally. As a consequence, the
livelihoods of citrus workers were tied to a choreographed movement between the region’s
agricultural crops. As remembered by citrus worker Blas Coyazo:
Sometimes we went up to Fresno to pick grapes, some years we used to go do that. Stay a
couple of months over there and pick grapes and finish the grape season, it’s only about a
month. And then from there on we, by that time its time for the cotton in a place called
Corcoran. That’s where the cotton, they used to, I don’t know about now. And that would
keep us away for a couple of months, or maybe three months, in the meantime, the
oranges were coming to season here again, and that’s why we came back to wait for the
season to start again and pick oranges.
49

While commercial agricultural was built on the predicatbility of worker migration, laborers such
as Coyazo balanced the push and pull of the seasonal harvests in an attempt to ensure the
economic well-being of themselves and their families.
Although the citrus-based economy of communities such as Riverside depended upon the
seasonal migration of laborers, once in Riverside Korean and Japanese workers were to remain
immobile. For instance, Wong found that the single most common reason for the arrest of
Japanese residents between 1907 and 1913 was the violation of bicycle laws.
50
In a broad
ordinance, the city criminalized speeding, riding on sidewalks, and bicycle use at night without a
light.
51
As both a popular past time among Japanese men and a means of transporting themselves

48
Teague, 1944, 64.

49
Blas Coyazo interviewed by Robert Gonzalez, April 1994, transcript, p.5, Inland Mexican Heritage Oral History
Project (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA).

50
Wong, 1977, 75.

113
to groves inaccessible by public transportation, bicycle policies allowed a means for arbitrary
arrests and harassment of the migrant labor force.
52
The bicycle laws embodied what geographer
Don Mitchell has called the struggle of “finding ways to control the movement of labor, and…of
finding the means to make that mobility subversive.”
53
The threat of regional worker mobility
allowed by the bicycle was twofold. On a cultural level, bicycles violated the obscuration of the
migrant workforce. Upon their bicycles, Asian workers could traverse the cultural geography of
the region and make themselves visible upon central public streets. On an economic level, the
bicycle enabled workers to violate their contracts with individual growers, seek out better wages,
and protest ill treatment. In both cases, it allowed for an autonomy that threatened the hegemony
of white ranchers and permitted for a sense of agency.
Single room attics, woodsheds, and bunkhouses on or near ranch property were the most
common forms of shelter provided to these migrant workers prior to World War I. James
Culbertson, manager of the Limoneira Company, succinctly explained the rationale behind
providing such dwellings, “[single men] could be housed more cheaply, secured with the least
complications, and if unsatisfactory or not needed, discharged with only casual reluctance.”
54

Housing single males, bunkhouses were sites of “queer domesticity.” As described by historian
Nayan Shah, in these spaces “strict gender roles, the firm division between public and private,
and the implicit presumptions of self-sufficient economies and intimacy in the respectable

51
“Ignorant of Law,” Riverside Independent Enterprise, May 18, 1909, 2; “Pool-Room Man is Fined $15,”
Riverside Daily Press, June 15, 1907, 1.

52
“Sports,” Riverside Enterprise, January 2, 1906, 4

53
Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (University of Minnesota
Press, 1996), 195.

54
J. D. Culbertson, “Housing of Ranch Labor,” First Annual Report of the California Citrus Institute, February
1919, 99.

114
domestic household” were upset.
55
Critical of such residences, Archibald Shamel of the United
States Department of Agriculture described a typical dining scene, “The men sat on long benches
and each one made a grab for some food, swallowing it hurriedly so as to get out into the open
air as soon as possible.”
56
Emblematic of middle-class mores, the dining room table was both a
place for family meals and a site to exercise social conventions of domesticity, from using proper
tableware to engaging in polite conversation.
57
Drawing on the symbol of the table, Shamel
critiqued the failure of ranch accommodations to encourage proper middle-class customs among
the migrant workforce.
While ranchers provided bunkhouses on citrus ranches, Korean and Japanese residents
managed multiracial kitchens, bathhouses, and dormitories within commercial district such as
downtown Riverside. For instance, the Paik family opened a kitchen and bathhouse that catered
to Korean workers. Sin Koo drew on the resources of Chinese merchants who offered him credit
to start the business. The men were able to communicate using hanmun, a character writing that
is the same in Korea as China. With the help of their neighbors, the family constructed a mess
hall and bathing house using wood and tin found at a nearby junkyard. Do was the first to rise
each morning. She prepared breakfast by 5 a.m., packed the men lunches, and prepared supper
by their return at 7 p.m. Adapting to her mother’s work schedule, additional responsibilities fell
upon their Paik Lee. As a child, she was responsible for her younger siblings, maintaining the
home, and preparing baths for the workers before dinner. By investing in a kitchen and

55
Shah describes queer domesticity as a blurring of the public and the private sphere, in which Chinese boarders
lived collectively and shared domestic roles traditionally reserved for women in Anglo American society. See
Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001), 13-14.

56
Archibald Shamel, “Housing Conditions of the Employe[e]s of California Citrus Ranches,” typescript, undated, p.
5, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).

57
Lindsy Lawrence, “Seriality and Domesticity: the Victorian Series and Domestic Ideology in the Family Literary
Magazine,” (Ph.D diss., Texas Christian University, 2008), 77-106.
115
bathhouse, the Paik family chose an economic strategy that offered them an alternative to ranch
labor, provided a sense of community among emigrant Koreans, and catered to the needs of
migrant workers with the agricultural economy.
Negative attitudes towards boarding houses embodied a larger tension between
agriculturalists need for migrant workers and the desire to maintain a segregated citriscape.
Coincidentally, when Chief of Police Frank Corrington inaugerated his “clean-up crusade” at the
end of January in 1913 he began with the Haradas’ lodging house. As a result of his raid,
manager Dan Bara, was charged with “keeping a disorderly house.” When the police found two
escaped students from the Sherman Institute, an Indian boarding school nearby, they accused the
boy and girl of occupying the same room. As proprietor, Mr. Harada was charged in the same
round-up with “renting a place for immoral purposes.” As reported by Chief Corrington to the
local press, “This is the first move on the part of the department to clean these places up, and I
propose to see that they are kept clean.”
58
Although Mr. Harada was ultimately released, Judge
French warned that he was to instruct his employees to deny lodging to “questionable lodgers.”
His manager, however, was fined.
59

When later interviewed in the Lemon Street case Mr. Harada distanced his family from
the negative perceptions of racialized boarding house occupants. He noted, “We always lived
ourselves in the lodging house. It was filled with Mexicans and others; but we tried to keep it
nice and clean.”
60
Cleanliness, in this sense, had two different meanings. On one level, it implied
keeping an orderly home. Seeking fresh air, a yard, and open space, the Haradas sought to

58
“Chief of Police States on Clean-Up Crusade,” Riverside Daily Press, February 1, 1913, 4; “Jap Faces Serious
Charges,” Riverside Independent Enterprise, February 1, 1913, 5.

59
“Manager Fined $25: Japanese Lodging House Owner is Released from Charge,” Riverside Independent
Enterprise, February 4, 1913, 5.

60
“Riverside Takes Up the Alien Land Law,” Hemet News Hemet, November 10, 1916, 9.
116
protect their children from the health hazards they attributed to their son Tadao’s death. Mr.
Harada explained, “Perhaps it was the dust; perhaps it was living all the time in the house
without a good place to play. But, anyhow, our children were sick much of the time.”
61
His
allusion to cleanliness also evoked a moral dimension implicit in Shamel’s critique of boarders’
dining habits and Chief Corrington’s clean-up crusade. Dirtiness, disease, and a rejection of
domestic norms were all affiliated with the state of transience, a perception inseparable from
race. Daughter Mine recalled the Haradas’ boarders were “mostly laborers, usually people that
couldn’t find places to live, Mexicans and Japanese.”
62
Geographer Tim Cresswell (1996) has
demonstrated that mobile populations are often depicted as deviant because of their lack of a
fixed residence, intermittent employment, and rejection of private property.
63
Similarly, in each
of these contexts, migrancy has been viewed as an individual shortcoming rather than the natural
consequence of economies dependent upon seasonal labor. In the case of southern California,
migrancy was simultaneously a consequence of policies preventing permanent non-white
settlement, rather than the result of people’s own choosing.
Despite extensive attempts by ranchers to direct the benefits of worker migration solely
towards their own accumulation of wealth, mobility was never wholly controllable. Rather,
workers regularly engaged migration for their own purposes. For instance, Carey McWilliams
(1949) has described the network of neighborhoods born of California’s Mexican and Mexican-
American migrant circuit as a “colonia-complex.”
64
As expanded by historians Gilbert Gonzalez
(1994) and Matt Garcia (2001), this scattered network facilitated a regional consciousness among

61
“Riverside Takes Up the Alien Land Law,” Hemet News, November 10, 1916, 9.

62
As quoted in Rawsitch, 2012, 68.

63
Tim Cresswell, In place/Out of place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression (University of Minnesota, 1996).

64
Carey McWilliams. North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (1949; New York:
Praeger Publications, 1990).
117
Mexican-Americans, offered a familiar space for traveling workers, and provided a place away
from the watchful eyes of employers.
65
Mobility, in this context, endangered the hegemony of
ranch owners. When in the hands of workers, mobility exposed laborers to competing offers by
bilingual Mexican-American contractors. Further, as activism increased with the rise in
agricultural prices, the exposure of workers to labor organizers during migration posed a
substantial threat to ranchers. Roland Vaile of the Citrus Experiment Station warned if ranchers
themselves did not provide workers with information then he was likely to “get his knowledge of
the country and of civilization in general from the rabble of near-anarchists, or worse, that
congregate around such places as the Little Plaza of Los Angeles.”
66
During World War I, the
power balance between ranchers and field hands was tipping. It was out of this disequilibrium
that renewed efforts flourished to ensure citrus laborers were geographically bound.
Mexican immigration had become the primary source of citrus labor following the
“Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1907.
67
Although Japanese laborers continued to immigrate to the
United States subversively by way of Mexico, absentee marriage (“picture-brides”), and
claiming dependence on authorized immigrants, the agreement significantly curtailed the
availability of Japanese labor. The cumulative impact was, first, the diversification of the citrus
workforce and, ultimately, the transition to a Mexican workforce. J. D. Culbertson of the
Limoneira Ranch in Santa Paula explained, “The Japanese had been our chief source of labor

65
Gilbert G. Gonzalez. Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County,
1900-1950, (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1994). Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making
of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 52 –
69.

66
Roland Vaile, “Mexican Labor,” California Citrograph, 1918; Tensions still rang large from previous worker
demonstrations. For instance, the International Workers of the World staged a strike, often referred to as the
Wheatland Riots, in 1913 that involved close to 3,000 workers, many of them Mexicans. Although those who
participated experienced few material gains, they drew attention to the poor living conditions of agricultural
workers. See Guerin-Gonzalez, Camille. Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and
California Farm Labor, 1900-1939 (Rutgers University Press, 1994).

67
This agreement between the United States and Japan curtailed the immigration of Japan laborers.
118
supply for many years, but our inability to obtain them in sufficient numbers in the spring of
1910 obliged us to look to other sources.”
68
At the same time, the availability of northbound rail
and mining work in Mexico, as well as dislocation caused by the Mexican Revolution,
contributed to a rise in Mexican immigration to the United States.
69
Manager James Maxwell of
the San Bernardino branch of the Holmes Supply Company, a general merchandise and boarding
contractor operating along the Santa Fe line, estimated that in an eight-month period 25,000
Mexican laborers were carried from El Paso to San Bernardino by recruiters.
70
These new
immigrants added to the force of Japanese, Korean, Mexican American, as well as Sikh
laborers.
71

68
Shamel. “Housing Employees of California’s Citrus Ranches.” California Citrograph. May 1918, 151.

69
For testimonies of these migrations, see Lupe Yglesias interviewed by Robert Gonzalez, August 21, 2000,
transcript, Inland Mexican Heritage Oral History Project (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA); See also Danny
Flores interview by Joyce Hanson, November 5, 2002, transcript, San Bernardino Oral History Project (Historical
Treasures of San Bernardino, San Bernardino).

70
Charles Snyder to A. C. Ridgway, November 8, 1909, Department of Commerce and Labor, Investigation Report.
No. 1494, records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85 (National Archives, Riverside).

71
Victor Clark, “Mexican Labor in the United States,” Bulletin. (Washington, DC: Department of Commerce and
Labor Bureau of Labor, 1908), 482-485.
119

Figure 16 J. D. Culbertson of the Limoneira Ranch published this rendering of housing at the Limoneira Ranch in
1919. The caption reads, “Homes for Employe[e]s Limoneira Company Santa Paula Cal.” Notice the linearity
shared in both the groves and residences.
72

The emergence of company housing on citrus ranches marked the evolution of ranch
owners’ interpretation of worker mobility from a benefit to a cost.
73
Where worker mobility once
protected profits, it now threatened the potential financial gains of ranch owners. The change in
rancher’s perceptions emerged out of conditions caused by U.S. entrance into World War I.
Foremost, American enlistment in the military, the burgeoning war industries, and the demand
for more acreage combined to create an increased demand for labor.
74
The situation was

72
J. D. Culbertson, “Housing of Ranch Labor,” First Annual Report of the California Citrus Institute, February
1919, 101.

73
There is an extensive historiography on company housing during this period, both within the U.S. and abroad. See
Takaki; Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008); Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press. 1999); For international examples see, Elizabeth Esch, "Whitened and Enlightened: The Ford Motor
Company and Racial Engineering in the Brazilian Amazon," in Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape,
Power, and Working-Class Communities eds., Oliver J Dinius and Angela Vergara (Athens, GA: University of
Georgia Press, 2011). For more on citrus housing following World War I, see G Harold Powell, Annual Report of
the General Manager of the California Fruit Growers Exchange for the Year Closing, (Los Angeles, CA. October
31, 1921), 19-20.

120
particularly acute on citrus ranches, where production was remote, unpredictable, and highly-
intensive.
75
Ranchers attempted to control workers in a rationalized version of scientific
management that mimicked that of citrus itself.
Racial preference was organized along a hierarchy that equated immobile workers with
passivity and mobile workers with subversive behavior. Recent Mexican immigrants were
perceived as particularly prone to family housing and were aggressively recruited by ranchers.
According to ranch managers, boards, tin, iron, canvas, sacks, and other materials found near the
ranch quickly became walls, floors, and canopies in the resourceful hands of Mexican workers.
Culbertson found it remarkable that out of the self-constructed “impoverished sordid-looking
camp” that preceded company-constructed housing the “best type” of Mexican labor emerged
each Monday morning.
76
He described the laborers as “men with clean washed clothing—
jumpers and overalls, as well as shirts and bandanas—showing the wholesome effects of soap
and water. These men could be depended upon for a full-measure day’s work.”
77
Similarly,
Shamel distinguished Mexican workers from all other workers by their “frequent instances of

74
According to the Annual Report of the California Fruit Growers Exchange from 1916-1918, the demand for citrus
increased exponentially due to increasing advertisement campaigns, rising incomes resulting from wartime industry,
and international demand stemming from decreased competition from the Italian citrus belt. See G Harold Powell,
Annual Report of the General Manager of the California fruit Growers Exchange for the Year Closing August 31,
1916, Los Angeles, CA. August 13, 1916; G Harold Powell, Annual Report of the General Manager of the
California Fruit Growers Exchange for the Year Closing August 31, 1917, Los Angeles, CA, August 31, 1917; E.G.
Dezell, Annual Report of the General Manager of the California Fruit Growers Exchange for the Year Closing
August 31, 1918, Los Angeles, CA, August 31, 1918; J. D. Culbertson, “Housing of Ranch Labor,” First Annual
Report of the California Citrus Institute, February 1919.

75
J. D. Culbertson, “Housing of Ranch Labor,” First Annual Report of the California Citrus Institute, February
1919.

76
Archibald Shamel, “Housing Conditions of the Employe[e]s of California Citrus Ranches,” typescript, undated, p.
7, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA); AD Shamel. “Housing Employees of
California’s Citrus Ranches.” California Citrograph, May 1918.

77
Shamel, Undated, 7; Charles Teague, Fifty Years a Rancher (Los Angeles, CA: Anderson and Ritchie, 1944), 55.
121
unusual devotion to their work, solicitude for the mental and moral welfare of their children, and
their striving for home surroundings made cheery with flowers and music.”
78

Throughout citrus communities during World War I, even those expanding beyond
Riverside and San Bernardino counties, Mexican workers were uniquely pursued as permanent
labor. The housing program at the Sespe Ranch in Ventura County was exemplar. Although all
laborers were provided housing, white, Japanese, and Mexican workers were each offered
separate and distinctive residences. White families paid about $6.50 a month to live in a four to
five bedroom house that had cost approximately $1,000 to construct. Japanese families paid
$6.00 a month for a three-bedroom home that cost an average of $650 to construct. Mexicans
workers, however, were required to build and finance the construction of their own houses.
79
The
Sespe housing policy deliberately and exclusively bound Mexican workers to the ranch. It
intentionally indebted laborers for the use of ranch owned building materials and physically
linked home ownership to ranch owned land. In doing so, the company created a cost-benefit
paradox to mobility. As home equity increased, the cost of leaving the ranch increased. Company
housing created an incentive for settlement, as well as its converse; a disincentive for migration.
The housing of workers at the Sespe ranch was featured in the California Citrograph, a
popular trade publication, alongside Limoneira in Santa Paula and the Chase Plantation in
Corona.
80
From the time the U.S. entered the war in 1917 to its conclusion in 1919, the

78
Shamel, Undated, 9; Archibald Shamel, “Housing Employe[e]s of California’s Citrus Ranches,” California
Citrograph, May 1918 (Riverside Public Library, Riverside, CA).

79
Archibald Shamel, “Housing Employes of California’s Citrus Ranches,” California Citrograph, March 1918
(Riverside Public Library, Riverside, CA).

80
Gilbert G. Gonzalez. Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County,
1900-1950 (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1994); Margo McBane, The House That Lemons Built: Race, Ethnicity, Gender,
Citizenship and the Creation of a Citrus Empire, 1893-1919 (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles,
2001); “How to House and Treat Citrus Ranch Employees,” California Citrograph, March 19, 12; “The Well
Housed Employee,” The California Citrograph, September 1918; Attractive Houses for Employees. California
122
publication discussed multiple alternatives to white male labor, from employing women and boy
scouts to requiring soldiers on furlough to work in the fields. Where Margo McBane (2001) has
noted that media coverage of “farmerettes” from the Women’s Land Army of America in the
vegetable fields distracted residents from the growing wave of workers arriving from Mexico, as
a trade magazine the California Citrograph had no such preoccupation with masking ranchers’
dependence on Mexican workers.
81
At the urging of agriculturalists, the Department of Labor
(DOL) had even reversed stipulations enacted by the Immigration Act of 1917, including
suspending mandated literacy tests, contract labor provisions, and the eight-dollar head tax.
Paralleling efforts to push Asian immigrants into field labor prior to WWI, the order stipulated
that, “Aliens admitted under the provision hereof are allowed to enter temporarily upon the
understanding that they will engage in none other than agricultural labor.”
82
Abandoning farm
labor or seeking employment in other industries was punishable by incarceration and
deportation. In other words, the residency of the most recent wave of Mexican immigrants was
bound to their sole participation in field labor.

Citrograph. May 1921; “Some Essential Features of Housing Employees.” California Citrograph. September 1920;
“Immigration regulations Suspended for Mexican Labor.” Sunkist Courier Department. California Citrograph.
September 1918. pgs. 261-263; For more on worker housing in the citrus industry see Chapter 5 “Housing” in
Williamson, Paul Garland. “Labor in the California Citrus Industry.” University of California, October 1947.

81
Margo McBane, The House That Lemons Built: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Citizenship and the Creation of a Citrus
Empire, 1893-1919 (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2001).

82
U.S. Congress, Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico, 69
Cong., 1
st
session., Jan. 28, 29, Feb. 2, 9, 11, 23, 1926, pp. 382. The order was later expanded to admit other types of
manual labor.
123

Figure 17 This photograph of a “House in Mexican Village” was taken by the USDA at the Sespe Ranch in January
1918. Two months later, it was reprinted in the California Citrograph.
83

In 1918, shortly after the U.S. entered the war, Shamel published a multipart series in the
California Citrograph titled “Housing the Employe[e]s of California’s Citrus Ranches.”
84
Just as
a successful harvest was dependent on efficiently managing groves through careful planning and
scientific investigation, Shamel explained, so was it dependent on creating an efficiently
managed workforce promoted by company housing. Adopting a strategy exercised in USDA
investigations abroad, Shamel’s articles were accompanied by a series of photographs. One
striking image featured a Mexican family in front of their ranch home. Although featuring one
family, the image signified the domesticity of the Mexican household. The close attachment of
the women and children to the home was emphasized by their placement behind the barbed wire

83
“House in Mexican Village,” photograph, January 1918, Archibald Shamel Collection (Tomas Rivera Library,
University of California, Riverside, CA); Archibald Shamel, “Housing the Employe[e]s of California’s Citrus
Ranches,” California Citrograph, March 1918 (Riverside Public Library, Riverside, CA).

84
Shamel produced the five part series from February to October 1918; Historians Gilbert Gonzalez, Matt Garcia,
and Margo McBane have previously referred to the citrus housing campaign launched by Shamel. See, Gilbert G.
Gonzalez, Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950.
(University of Illinois Press, 1994); Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of
Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Margo
McBane, The House That Lemons Built: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Citizenship and the Creation of a Citrus Empire,
1893-1919. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2001. For more on worker housing in the citrus
industry see Chapter 5 “Housing” In Paul Garland Williamson, Labor in the California Citrus Industry (University
of California, October 1947).

124
fence. The woman's position upon the doorstep with her hand upon the shoulder of a young boy
provided a physical connection between her role as mother and manager of the household.
Conversely, the male served as a transitionary figure between the Mexican household and the
citrus ranch. Although the unnamed man stood beside the open gate directly in front of his home,
he was physically located on the road. One can assume that the road leads to the grove of his
employer. Dressed in work overalls, he appears as if ready to leave for work.
85
The man was
ideally located at the crossroads of labor and domesticity, an intersection that rancher's
themselves were seeking to foster among workers within the tight labor shortage of the World
War I period in which the photograph was taken.
Before this image was reprinted in the California Citrograph, it was collected and labeled
by the USDA. The photograph served as an ethnographic record of a typical Mexican household.
Although the viewer’s attention was drawn to the household located in the center of the
photograph, it was pulled rightward towards the contrasting space of the empty lot. In the
distance, a second home is visible. Its inclusion implies that this specific home and family do not
represent themselves as individuals, but rather as something typical within a larger network of
worker housing. In contrast to the images of ranch owning families taken during Shamel’s
expedition to Brazil four years earlier, the vague details of the subjects' faces underscored by the
caption “House in Mexican Village” further depersonalized the photo and implied its broad
descriptive use.
86
Notably, when reproduced in the California Citrograph this caption was

85
Archibald Shamel, “Housing the Employe[e]s of California’s Citrus Ranches,” California Citrograph, March
1918 (Riverside Public Library, Riverside, CA).

86
“House in Mexican Village,” photograph, March 1918, box 4, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library,
University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA).

125
changed to “Seven future employe[e]s in this family.”
87
The change in caption radically altered
the meaning of the image. Consumed by an audience of citrus ranchers interested in adopting
working housing, it now emphasized the long-term economic benefits of recruiting a permanent
labor force.
88
The photograph was intentionally transformed from one of documentation to one
that underscored the primary incentive for worker housing. Like investment in a “good” tree
promised to propagate a fertile grove, company housing ensured a workforce that would renew
itself across generations.
Even if born in the United States, the children of Mexican immigrants were idealized as a
permanent source of foreign workers. Their only future, the caption implied, was to provide
agricultural labor. In company housing, ranchers had unprecedented control over these families’
lives. Even schools were located on the ranch.
89
Like the Alien Land Law, company housing
prevented racial integration and fostered a renewal of a racialized farm labor force by preventing
the accumulation of property for use by workers beyond their own subsistence.
The distinctions articulated between settled families and unmarried migrants increasingly
differentiated the Mexican workforce. Whereas married Mexican men were described as
amicable and anxious to resolve disputes, men without family ties where described as “lawless,
inefficient and unreliable.”
90
They were little better than the European-origin “fruit tramps.”
91
As

87
Archibald Shamel, “Housing Employees of California’s Citrus Ranches.” California Citrograph. May 1918
(Riverside Public Library, Riverside, CA), 151.

88
“House in Mexican Village,” photograph, March 1918, box 4, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library,
University of Riverside California, Riverside, CA). 4; Archibald Shamel, “Housing Employees of California’s
Citrus Ranches,” California Citrograph, May 1918 (Riverside Public Library, Riverside, CA), 151.
89
Site visit and tour of the Limoneira Ranch. Santa Paula, CA.

90
AD Shamel. “Housing Employees of California’s Citrus Ranches.” California Citrograph. May 1918, (Riverside
Public Library, Riverside, CA) 151.

91
Shamel, Undated, 3.
126
described by Shamel, “These traveling vagabonds often slept under the open sky wrapped in
their blankets, and gathered their meals from convenient gardens and hen roosts and cooked
them in a tin can or pan over a campfire wherever they happened to be.”
92
It was their potential
for mobility, and not their marital status that was equated with a lack of work discipline. Where
married men were described as reinvesting earnings in their homes, single men were critiqued
for pursuing short-lived enjoyments such as gambling and drinking. Where a desire for housing
was affiliated with the dependability and loyalty, mobility indicated a predisposition towards
slothfulness and criminal vagrancy when divorced from a desire to adopt a sedentary lifestyle.
93

In a report to the California Citrus Institute, Culbertson wrote:
We realized that unattached men of this nationality are not very dependable workmen.
Most of them worked well when they did work, but all too many of them made Sunday
last an extra day or two, or stayed in our employ only long enough to earn a small
pocketful of money.
94

Those tethered to the ranch, whether by familial or financial investment in a home, were
uniformly preferred over those without dependents or property. The single agricultural worker
was caught in the unsettled contradictions of mobility within capitalism. Workers were expected
to be loyal to their employers while at the same time responding to the most lucrative
opportunities in the market. When choosing to leave company housing for opportunities
elsewhere, workers were depicted as disloyal employees rather than agents of the free market,
elsewhere, embraced.

92
Shamel, Undated, 3-4.

93
Geographer Tim Cresswell has written extensively on the emergence of the ‘tramp’ in the late 19
th
and early 20
th

century. Rather than reflecting the action of tramping, ‘tramp’ came to represent a noun—a racial type that
biologically prone to nomadism. See Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (Reaktion Books, London, 2001).

94
Shamel, Undated, 7; Archibald Shamel, “Housing Employees of California’s Citrus Ranches,” California
Citrograph, May 1918 (Riverside Public Library, Riverside, CA), 151; See also James D Culbertson “Housing of
Ranch Labor,” First Annual Report of the California Citrus Institute, 1920, 97-105.
127
The agricultural economy of southern California necessitated a migrant force of non-
white labor but restricted these movements to the advancement of white capitalist accumulation.
As evidenced by the Alien Land Law, and the Geary Act before it, when non-whites attempted to
build permanent homes or embark on agricultural pursuits their efforts were criminalized. The
labor shortage of World War I unsettled the seasonal migratory patterns of the 19
th
century. In
need of a reliable source of labor, large citrus ranches began to offer company housing to its
workforce. Company housing served the dual purpose of recruiting laborers and tethering them
to individual ranches. The discourses surrounding company housing denaturalized worker
migration and pathologized those who chose this economic strategy over the incentive of
settlement. Company housing, however, did not extend the opportunity for accumulating wealth
implicit in land ownership. Rather, the only productive value intended was the reproduction of
the workforce.
Frontier Illogic, 1918-1920
Following a series of postponements related to World War I, the Harada trial began on
May, 28, 1918. Joseph Lewinsohn, Deputy Attorney General, represented the state with Estudillo
by his side. Standing in front of Judge Craig two years after the case was originally filed, the
prosecutor argued that Mr. Harada had intentionally circumvented the Alien Land Law by
purchasing land in the names of his American-born children. The defense, represented by A. A.
Adair and A. H. Winder, claimed that Mr. Harada had no interest in the land. Although he had
purchased it with his own money, they argued, Mr. Harada had bought the property as a present
for his children.
95
In a high-profile non-jury trial, San Bernardino Court Judge Hugh H. Craig
ruled in favor of the defense. Exerpts from his opinion were reprinted by the local press:

95
Correspondence with the California State Archive notes that the Reporter’s Transcript has been misplaced or is
missing. The account here relies on press coverage of the case. See “Harada Case is Up Again,” Riverside Daily
128
Doubtless many of the neighboring residents, as well as others, object to the presence of
the defendents as neighbors, but that is not sufficient reason for depriving these children
of their property. The law is not sufficiently broad to deny the right to own land to the
American born children of aliens ineligible to citizenship. The law must be enforced as it
is written and its terms may not be enlarged by the courts to include others than those
mentioned in the statute itself. If an embarrassing or unfortunate situation results by
reason of the limitations of the statute, the remedy is not to be sought in the courts, for
they cannot deny to American citizens the right to own or hold an interest in land under
our laws as they now exist.
96

Although Judge Craig affirmed the Harada daughters’ right to own property as American born
citizens, his finding foreshadowed the tightening of California law rather than its expansion.
97

The excerpt denounced the court’s ability to enforce the deprivation of property where it was not
explicitly denied by the law. In doing so, the Judge pointed towards the specificity of the Alien
Land Act, which only excluded “aliens ineligible to citizenship” from the right to acquire
property. The statute, he explained, cannot protect against “embarrassing or unfortunate
situations,” in this case the integration of a Japanese-descent family in a white neighborhood.
Notably, the excerpt concluded with “[the courts] cannot deny to American citizens the right to
own or hold an interest in land under our laws now exist.”
98
His statement gestured towards the
revisiting of the Alien Land Law by the California legislature that would shortly follow the
decision.
Judge Craig’s ruling followed changing sentiment towards Japan, who served as a
powerful ally during World War I. Domestically, Japanese Americans helped raise funds vital to

Press, Riverside, CA, May 28, 1918, 2; “Did Harada Intend to Evade the Law or Was the Purchase Gift,” Riverside
Independent Enterprise, May 30, 1918, 3.

96
“Judge Craig Decided that Native Born Japanese May Own Land Here,” Riverside Daily Press, Riverside, CA,
September 17, 1918, 3.

97
“Judge Craig Rules This Morning that State Could Make Children Parties to Suit Against J. Harada for Violation
of California Alien Land Law,” Riverside Daily Press, June 30, 1917, 8; “Harada Case is Not to Have Jury,”
Riverside Independent Enterprise, May 25, 1918, 5. Tom Patterson. “Japanese in Riverside Areas: New Mystery
about Old Tragedy,” Press-Enterprise, February 21, 1971.

98
“Judge Craig Decided that Native Born Japanese May Own Land Here,” Riverside Daily Press, September 17,
1918, 3.
129
the war effort through bond sales. The year preceding the trial, during a banquet at the Mission
Inn celebrating the Japanese Emperor’s birthday, proprietor Frank Miller acknowledged the
vigorous support of the Japanese Association for the federal Liberty Loan Campaign. The
Haradas’ attorney was one among many speakers that night expressing the shifting attitude by
which California residents approached Japanese residents.
99
Following Judge Craig’s ruling, the
press speculated that further appeals would be dropped given federal efforts to “remove all
possible friction” between the United States and Japan.
100
Although the state requested a new
trial, it was denied. Within two weeks, the state announced that it would not appeal.
101

Although the Harada case represented a victory for the opponents of the Alien Land Law,
anxiety directed at Japanese residents did not dissipate. Within a year, a second Alien Land Law
was debated by the California State Legislature. The Japanese Association of America (JAA), an
advocate for Japanese nationals living in the United States, presented a memorial to President
Woodrow Wilson in San Francisco in response to policies directed against Japanese residents. Its
members appealed to Wilson based largely on Japanese advancements in agriculture.
Underscoring Japanese success in rice cultivation, the memorial described the Japanese farmer as
“a great developer and improver,” a ”skillful agriculturalist,” a ”horticulturalist,” an
“adventurer,” and a “persistent experimenter.”
102
Its authors carefully chose to describe

99
“Japanese Guests on Anniversary,” Riverside Daily Press, November 1, 1917.

100
“Judge Craig Decides that Native Born Japanese May Own Land Here,” Riverside Daily Press, Riverside, CA.
September 17, 1918, 3.

101
“Denies Motion for New Trial,” Riverside Daily Press. Riverside, CA, January 21, 1919, 6; “Harada Case will
Not be Appealed,” Riverside Daily Press, 5

102
Japanese Association of America. “Memorial Presented to the President While at San Francisco,” typescript,
September 18, 1919, box 1, p. 4-5, Masakazu Iwata Collection (Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles,
CA).
130
themselves as “resident,” “pioneer,” “colonist,” and “settler.”
103
Although adopting the same
rationale used by Riverside ranchers’—first as settler colonists in southern California and later as
scientific explorers in Brazil—their invocation of agricultural success evoked white fears of
competition rather than cooperation. In attempting to assert their contribution to the advancement
of California agricultural development, the JAA had unintentionally undermined white
superiority. The exclusivity of white claims to land were destabilized when a race other than
white could also claim the ability to utilize scientific principles, profit from underproductive
land, and build settled households.
The JAA addressed the struggle to set roots faced by many Japanese families. The
organization wrote, “most of the Japanese in the state, with their families, are forced to wander
about from one place to another without any aim of settling down.”
104
Sociologist Ralph
Burnright (1920) similarly observed that the Alien Land Law prevented long-term settlement by
Japanese families. Contradicting critiques of the Japanese standard of living, he described the
Alien Land Law as a direct cause for the lack of investment in home construction:
Is it not strange then, that they should refuse to build houses according to our standards when
they know that at the end of three years they may be obliged to move to some other locality.
What would Americans do under similar circumstances? There is something fundamentally
wrong with the law. It removes all incentive for the upkeep of land.
105

The reflections of the JAA and Burnright pointed towards a conflicting value system that
simultaneously chastised the living standards of Japanese Americans while criminalizing the
very conditions by which they could satisfy American perceptions of proper domesticity.

103
Japanese Association of America, “Memorial Presented to the President While at San Francisco,” typescript,
September 18, 1919, box 1, p. 1, 5-6, Masakazu Iwata Collection (Japanese American National Museum, Los
Angeles, CA).

104
Japanese Association of America, “Memorial Presented to the President While at San Francisco,” typescript,
September 18, 1919, box 1, p. 6, Masakazu Iwata Collection (Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles,
CA).

105
Ralph Burnright, “The Japanese in Rural Los Angeles County,” Studies in Sociology, 4 (no. 4, June 1920), 9.
131
Despite the Harada victory and the efforts of the JAA, a second California Alien Land
Law was enacted in 1920. Passed by ballot initiative, the law renewed and tightened the
provisions of the 1913 law by a 75 percent vote. In addition to upholding the provisions of the
1913 law, the Alien Land Law now forbade ineligible aliens from owning stock in corporations
aquiring agricultural land, prohibited guardianship of land ineligible aliens could not legally
own, necessitated the filing of a yearly report by property agents of ineligible aliens and their
minor children, and made efforts to circumvent the law a criminal offense.
106

In a study of Japanese Farm Holdings on the Pacific Coast conducted by the USDA
Bureau of Agricultural Economics in 1944, Adon Poli concluded that the statute had broad
consequences for the settlement of the Japanese resident population. Although targeting aliens
ineliglble for citizenship, he noted, even Japanese Americans exempt from the law prefered short
land tenure. By choosing a tenure that allowed movement on short notice, he wrote, Japanese
Americans elected for a safety valve in case of threat of violence. He expanded:
Although the restrictive measures may have directly or indirectly achieved the primary
objectives of their sponsors in preventing extensive farm ownership by persons of Japanese
ancestry, they may have also served to establish in its stead an unstable tenure pattern
associated with some of the undesirable features inherent in short-term leasing, insecurity of
land occupancy, and high tenant mobility.
107

When non-white settlement occurred independently of white capitalist accumulation, as
illustrated in the case of the Haradas, settlement was stigmatized. The Alien Land Law of 1920
further pushed Japanese and Japanese Americans into the migrant lifestyle that scholars,
politicians, and the general public critiqued when exercised by workers of Mexican descent.

106
See Edwin Ferguson, “The California Alien Land Law and the Fourteenth Amendment,” California Law Review,
35, (no. 1, March 1947). The California Alien Land Laws were reversed through a combination of the Oyama v.
State of California (1948) and Fujii v. State of California (1952). See R.C. Villazor, "Rediscovering Oyama v.
California: At the Intersection of Property, Race, and Citizenship," Washington University Law Review, 87, (no. 5,
2010), 979-1042.

107
Adon Poli, “Japanese Farm Holding on the Pacific Coast,” (Berkeley, CA: USDA, December 1944), 14.
132
Ideas of white supremacy existed uneasily alongside white racial insecurity as Japanese
residents attempted to acquire property and Japan became a world power. The Alien Land Laws
abandoned an evolutionary frontier logic that equated land occupation with survival of the fittest
and, instead, upheld white territorial claims through law. As highlighted by the Osaka based
paper, Asahi, “No man, whether of his native land or in a foreign country, should be deprived of
the elemental rights to live and to enjoy the fruits of his honest labor and the legitimate rewards
of his brain.”
108
Indicative of white racial insecurity, the redistributive aspects of property were
increasingly tethered to whiteness through the California court.
109
The inherent contradictions of
an Anglo fantasy past based on a celebratory mythology of white agricultural settlement on
underproductive lands required the intervention of the state to maintain the hierarchical
relationships first formed in the late 19
th
century.
Racial insecurities evident in the land laws were also played out on the cultural front. The
inclusion of Arthur Kaneko—the first Japanese American resident to graduate from Riverside
High School—in the 1905 graduation program became the inspiration for a popular 1921 racial-
morality play written by well-regarded American novelist and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter.
110

108
As reprinted in “Japan and the Land Law,” Literary Digest, May 31, 1913, 1214.

109
See Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier, Cambridge, Mass:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005; L. R. Freeman, “Labor: Farmer's Hardest Problem, Some of His
Trials in California,” Jun 21, 1914; For more on the intersections between race, property, and citizenship in the
Alien Land Laws and Oyama v. California see R.C. Villazor, "Rediscovering Oyama v. California: At the
Intersection of Property, Race, and Citizenship," Washington University Law Review, 87, (no. 5, 2010), 979-1042

110
Born in Japan, Arthur Kaneko was naturalized as an extension of his father Ulysees Kaneko’s successful petition
for naturalization in 1896. Honorable George Otis to Ulysees Kaneko. Naturalization Certificate, March 27, 1896,
Box 1, Superior Court of the County of San Bernardino State of California, M Iwata Collection (Japanese American
National Museum, Los Angeles, CA); Emanuel E. Parker, “Historic Site Designation Asked for Grave of Japanese-
American,” Press-Enterprise, April 12, 1980; Mary H. Curtin, “Riverside’s Mine Okubo,” Journal of the Riverside
Historical Society (no 16., Riverside, CA: Inland Printworks, February 2012). Kim Jarrell Johnson. “Parks Family-
Early Jurupa Pioneers,” Journal of the Riverside Historical Society (no 16, Riverside, CA: Inland Printworks,
February 2012). “Class Sixteen in Riverside,” Los Angeles Times Jun 21, 1905; Tom Patterson. “Japanese in
Riverside Area: New Mystery About old Tragedy.” Press-Enterprise. February 21, 1971; The novel was not wholly
embraced. The American Missionary Association described the author of the novel, along with Wallace Irvin Seeds
of the Son and John Kyne’s Pride of Palomar, as “as ignorant of the Sermon on the Mount as is the ‘wild man of
133
Published just after the passage of the second Alien Land Law, the novel reflected the tension
between American exceptionalism and racial insecurity during the 1920s and the perceived threat
from Japan to the United States. Unlike land law, which prevented Japanese land ownership
through the California courts, in Her Father’s Daughter Stratton-Porter provides the reader an
opportunity to overcome a Japanese threat through the proxy of its white protagonists.
Her Father's Daughter centered on the competition for class valedictorian by Oka Sayye,
a Japanese student based loosely on Kaneko, and Donald Whiting, a universal representative for
young white boys approaching manhood. In the novel, fellow classmate Linda Strong prompted
Whiting to action. In the opening scene, she chides Whiting for allowing Sayye to out perform
his fellow classmates, “You and every boy in your class ought to [be] thoroughly ashamed of
yourselves. Before I would let a Jap, either boy or girl, lead in my class, I would give up going to
school and go out and see if I could beat him at growing lettuce and spinach.”
111
Not only was
Sayye integrating into the American school system. He was surpassing white students and, as a
consequence of their passivity, undermining the superiority of the white American race. With the
aptly named “Strong” pushing him forward, Whiting entered a silent competition with Sayye for
valedictorian.
112

The stakes embodied in the battle between Sayye and Whiting reflected the insecurity
surrounding white feelings of racial supremacy in California. Military victory in the 1905 Russo-
Japanese War secured Japan’s superiority and its role as an imperial power in the eyes of most
Americans. Forceful occupation and annexation of Korea in the first decade of the 20
th
century

Borneo.” See G.L. Cady, “The Japanese in America.” American Missionary, 76 (New York, January 1922), 589-
593.

111
Gene Stratton-Porter, Her Father’s Daughter, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1921), 6.

112
For more on role of white women in constructing white manhood in novels see Richard Phillips, Mapping Men
and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (New York: Routledge, 1997).
134
further affirmed Japan’s potential as a rival along the Pacific Rim. High rates of assimilation
within the United States further exacerbated concerns of a racial threat from within. Strong
expressed her fears to Whiting, “When Japan sends college professors to work in our kitchens
and relatives of her greatest statesmen to serve our tables, you can depend on it she is not doing it
for the money that is paid them.”
113
The battle between Japanese nationals and white Americans
was portrayed as a reiteration of racial conflict in the West. Throughout the novel, Sayye and his
fellow countrymen were portrayed as equally hard working and intelligent as cunning and
violent. In his attempts to outshine Whiting, Sayye was a formidable threat that unabashedly
resorted to mimicry, violence, and deception. Whiting, on the other hand, overcomes Sayye by
tapping into his inherently superior capacity, spending long nights studying, and heeding
Strong’s warnings.
Throughout the novel, Sayye’s success, and by extension the success of all Japanese people
living in California, was best met with suspicion. A racial warning to white students, as Her
Father’s Daughter unfolds it is revealed that Sayye is not a teenager at all. Rather, he is an adult
man posing as a student. In an attempt to feign the youthful appearance of a high school student,
the adult Sayye dies his hair black and wears rouge. His willingness to alter his appearance using
female beauty products alludes to the gender uncertainty surrounding Asian men, whose
historical involvement in domestic work and cohabitation with other males in boarding houses
violated Victorian norms of masculinity. Similarly, posing as a youth alluded to a popular
method of subverting immigration restrictions set by the Gentlemen’s Agreement.
114
When
Sayye realized Whiting was suspicion of his true age, he was willing to resort to murder to

113
Stratton-Porter, 1921, 115.

114
California State Board of Control. California and the Oriental: Japanese, Chinese, Hindus (Sacramento, 1922).

135
conceal the secret. In his final attempt on Whiting’s life, Sayye inadvertently caused his own
demise. Falling to the bottom of a dark canyon, his fellow countrymen retrieved his body in an
act of racial brotherhood meant to protect their surreptitious acts.
115

Japanese immigration represented a second wave of racial conflict along the frontier for
those suspicious of Japan’s advancement on the world stage and those threatened by Japanese
farm endeavors. In an effort to maintain white dominance over agricultural production, the state
legislature enacted restrictive land measures meant to prevent land accumulation. On the cultural
front, as vividly portrayed by Stratton-Porter, it was up to whites to maintain racial dominance.
Public policy and social marginalization combined in a double-sided criminalization that both
prohibited the means by which Asian residents could pursue American-notions of domesticity
and pathologized the transiency that resulted.
Conclusion
Although Japanese residents were encouraged to assimilate to the standards of white
domesticity, they were denied the mechanisms that would have make it possible. The Alien Land
Law embedded fears of foreign competition within law to create a racialized hierarchy that
denied the right to accumulate property, as both a unit of generational wealth and a means to
permanent settlement, to “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” Existing alongside land policy that
left Asian residents on the move, discourses surrounding World War I company housing tethered
Mexican immigrants to citrus ranches. They did so, however, without the possibility of land
ownership or its related benefits. Rather, it facilitated ranchers’ access to labor and promised a
renewable source of workers across generations. Although seemingly contradictory, both the
Alien Land Laws and the company housing campaigns coalesced around producing a perception

115
Stratton-Porter, 1921.
136
of whiteness that was imagined as fixed and denied communities of color the opportunity to
move by conditions of their own choosing.
The conclusion of World War I was closely followed by restrictive federal measures
targeting eastern Europeans and Asian immigrants. When Congressman John Box of Texas
proposed that a quota system be placed on Mexican immigration as well, agriculturalists quickly
inverted the logic that had denaturalized Mexican mobility a decade earlier. The chapter that
follows explores the ways that the family man of WWI company housing was transformed into a
bird of passage.

137
CHAPTER 4
Racial Movements: Mobilizing Racial Meaning, 1917-1930
Between World War I and the Great Depression, agricultural interests described farm
labor as intrinsically migrant, Mexican workers as innately itinerant, and immigration from
Mexico as non-threatening to the racial composition of the United States. When war abroad
created a worker shortage, citrus ranchers had eagerly sought to recruit laborers from Mexico,
whom they described as uniquely prone to building permanent households. Agricultural interests
quickly abandoned this portrayal when, in 1926, Congressman John Box proposed that a
restrictive immigration quota be placed on the Western Hemisphere. In making a case for
unhindered Mexican immigration, ranchers recast Mexicans from settlers to birds of passage.
Drawing upon American anxieties towards Puerto Rico and the Philippines, opponents of the
Box Bill argued that Mexican immigrants posed a far lesser threat than colonial subjects with the
right to permanent residency. Interrogating this shift suggests that the tropes of migrant and
settler are best understood as two aspects of the same, long-running force of racialization; one
whose most salient feature, whether it has been made as the basis for exclusion or inclusion, is a
collective attempt to defend white access to non-white labor.
“Like the Pigeon He Goes Back to Roost”
1

Just prior to U.S. entrance into World War I, Congress implemented an act that widely
restricted immigration to the United States. The Burnett-Smith Immigration Act of 1917 enacted
a literacy test, increased the entrance tax, enlarged officer discretion at national ports, and
excluded applicants from the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” Coupled with the Chinese Exclusion Act
(1882, 1892) and Gentlemen’s Agreement (1907), the law tightened the boundaries around entry

1
U.S. Congress, Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico, 69
Cong., 1
st
session., Jan. 28, 29, Feb. 2, 9, 11, 23, 1926, pp. 6. Hereafter referred to as “Seasonal Agricultural
Laborers from Mexico.”
138
to the United States. The law paved way for the Jackson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, an
annual quota based on nationality that largely reduced, and in some cases eliminated,
immigration from Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Asia. The quota was calculated based
on the origins of the American population according to the 1920 Census. Consequentially, the
law increased the percentage of visas available to Western Europe while reducing immigration
elsewhere in an era of profound nativism.
2

As wartime transitioned to the postwar era and immigration from Mexico became an
issue of growing concern, agricultural interests distinguished between migrant laborers and
settler immigrants to protect the flow of Mexican labor into the United States. Although the 1924
Jackson-Reed Immigration Act passed with relative ease, a 1926 proposal by Congressman John
C. Box to extend immigration quotas to the Western Hemisphere and Caribbean initiated a
heated debate. The Box Bill, in multiple forms throughout the 1920s, threatened to curtail
immigration from Mexico. In a strategy that created a hierarchy of desirable and undesirable
workers, agricultural interests mapped “itinerancy” and “permanency” onto laborers as inherent
racial differences. Ranchers successfully defeated the bill in a rhetorical battle that spanned from
the pages of the Los Angeles Times to the halls of Congress.
3
Their success, however, depended
upon the creation of a new regional axiom, one that cast Mexican nationals and Mexican

2
Immigration historian Mae Ngai has described the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924) as the first
comprehensive immigration law to establish numerical limits and to establish a national hierarchy that favored some
migrants over others. See, Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3; The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act),
43 Stat. 153 (1924).

3
By the 1930s, the “Box Bill debates” came to encompass a wide range of immigration legislation debates in the
House and Senate, including variations produced by Johnson, Box, and Bacon. See, Ethel Mae Morrison, “A History
of Recent Legislative Proposals Concerning Mexican Immigration,” (Thesis, University of Southern California,
1929); “Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico,” 1926; “National Affairs: Whip Box,” Time Magazine,
December 17, 1928.
139
Americans not as immigrants with a desire to settle but as birds of passage seasonally bound for
the American harvest.
Responding to increased Mexican immigration that resulted from restrictions placed on
Europe and Asia, Congressman Box argued that the Southwest was falling into racial and
economic degeneration. He proposed protection at the federal level. Although the Immigration
Act of 1924 reduced the majority of non-Western European immigration to the United States, the
Caribbean and Western Hemisphere were exempt from quotas as a matter of diplomatic
relations. Without further restrictions, Box warned, the United States would grow increasingly
dependent on an underclass of non-white labor. As a Texas representative, Box witnessed the
growth of Mexican immigration following restrictions placed on other nationalities. By 1920,
most Mexican nationals living in the United States resided in Texas (63 percent), Arizona (22
percent), and California (~14 percent).
4
Responsive to this trend, Box explained, “If Mexico,
South America, and the West Indies are left open as practically limitless sources from which to
make importations of serf labor, the country will be flooded with peon populations, unless the
people and Congress protect the country against that ruinous mistake.”
5
Internal tensions plagued
Texas agriculturalists. Historian Neil Foley (1997) explains, “Cotton growers and industry
leaders in Texas were caught in a dilemma because, on one hand, they desired a large Mexican
labor force that was available, tractable, and cheap. On the other hand, they were sensitive to
charges that they were sacrificing the whiteness of America for higher profits.”
6
As the premier
gateway of Mexican entry, Texas agriculturalists faced the largest protests against Mexican

4
See Will, French, G. H. Hecke, and Anna L. Saylor. “Mexicans in California: Report of Governor C. C. Young’s
Mexican Fact-Finding Committee,” San Francisco, October 1930, 39.

5
“Seasonal Agricultural Laborers in Mexico,” 1926, 324.

6
Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1997), 53.
140
immigration. In the California Citrus Belt, however, ranchers stood uniformly before Congress to
defend the value of Mexican labor.
California agricultural interests in opposition to the bill adopted a strategy reflective of
racial ideals of fixity, as the desire to settle, and flow, as the drive to migrate. In a process of
racial triangulation, Box Bill opponents organized the desirability of various racial groups’
immigration based on a scale that ranged from most mobile to least mobile. Unlike workers from
Asia, the Caribbean, and certain sections of Europe, agricultural interests described Mexicans as
non-threatening temporary sojourners. This was a stark departure from World War I citrus
worker housing campaign that claimed Mexican immigrants had an innate desire to settle. In the
context of heightened immigration restrictions aimed at the Western Hemisphere, agriculturalists
now argued that Mexican laborers were nomads drawn to travel in a circuit between the seasonal
crops of the Southwest and Mexico. Ranchers, Chamber of Commerce representatives, and the
Los Angeles Times each sought to defeat the Box Bill by challenging the very idea that Mexican
nationals were immigrants.
Examining the uses of settlement and migration within these debates provides a new
paradigm for understanding immigration policy in the 20
th
century. Immigration historians have
largely focused on the Immigration Act of 1924 for its role in creating categories of racial
difference based on national origin that favored some immigrants over others.
7
As exempted
nations, the ways Latinos were conceptualized has largely been written out of these analyses.
Rather, investigations of Latino racialization during this period have focused on the role of
Mexican labor in the economy. These investigations have provided rich research on the forging
of a Mexican-American identity among the resident population and attempts to manage these

7
Ngai, Princeton, 2005.
141
communities at the local level.
8
An examination of mobility as an agent of racial formation
within this failed proposal yields insight into the ways the racial meanings attached to movement
were manipulated to maintain the economic and social advantages of agricultural interests. It
suggests that although Latino immigrants were not subject to numerical quotas, they were
positioned on a global racial hierarchy organized by the principles of perceived mobility, the
desire to settle, and access to citizen rights.
The Immigration Act of 1924 organized entrance to the United States by a quota system
stratified nationality. While in effect the new policy privileged northern European immigration, it
also institutionalized a definition of “immigrant” that expanded beyond racial boundaries. In the
simplest sense, an immigrant was defined as “any alien departing from any place outside the
United States destined for the United States.”
9
This broad category was tempered by the
numerous explanations of who was not an immigrant. Government officials and their families,
tourists, a person in continuous transit, a seaman, and an assortment of other groups defined by
transnational linkages, such as “an alien entitled to enter the United States solely to carry on
trade under and in pursuance of the provisions of a present existing treaty of commerce and
navigation” were each explicitly excluded from the category of immigrant.
10
The common thread
that united exempt groups to each other, as well as differentiated them from others, was their
mobility. And, it was the broad exclusion of exceptionally mobile people that provided an
opening for the shared strategy of Box Bill opponents.

8
Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (University of Minnesota
Press, 1996); Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles,
1900-1970 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Natalia Molina, Fit To Be
Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

9
The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act), 43 Stat. 153 (1924), 154.

10
The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act), 43 Stat. 153 (1924), 154.
142
Among the strongest challengers of the Box Bill was southern California’s resident
agricultural expert, George Clements. In 1918, Clements was appointed as the new manager of
the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce Agricultural Committee. As manager, he organized 200
agricultural producers from within a hundred mile radius of Los Angeles. Together, they
championed a regionally oriented gospel, one that suggested Los Angeles businessmen needed to
be concerned with the welfare of farmers in the surrounding hinterland. Clements’ work often
put him at odds with development and tourism agendas, earning him a reputation as the “Jiminy
Cricket” of Los Angeles. Nevertheless, Clements and developers shared a common belief. That
without Mexican laborers, agriculture would end and so would go industry, commerce, and
regional prosperity.
11
It was through Clements’ influence and reputation that Mexican itinerancy
became part of regional mythology in inland southern California, while the Mexican descent
population, was in fact, becoming more permanent.
12

Beneath the claims of Mexican itinerancy and racialized nomadism made by agricultural
interests, there existed a growing, long-term, integrated source of Mexican and Mexican-
American labor in southern California. In response to the Box Bill, the Central Chamber of
Commerce surveyed the extent to which agribusiness depended on Mexican labor. It instructed
municipal Chambers collect data from local educators, ranchers, and social service providers. An
analysis of these surveys reveals that the majority of Mexican workers (about 1,000) had
permanent ties to Redlands. According to ranchers, most Mexican and Mexican-American

11
Frank J. Taylor, “Heretic in the Promised Land: Los Angeles’ Own Jiminy Cricket,” The Saturday Evening Post,
December 21, 1940; George Clements, “Why Should We Rely Upon ‘Bootleg’ Labor?” Los Angeles Times, July 18,
1926.

12
According to the Central Chamber of Agriculture and Commerce—representing Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
Colorado, and California, “While we have a fairly accurate record of those entering the Unites States, no complete
record is kept of those returning to Mexico. It has been variously estimated that between 80 and 90 percent of this
labor returns to Mexico at the close of the season.” The Central Chamber of Agriculture and Commerce,
“Declaration of Principles,” presented at the El Paso Conference, November 18 and 19, 1927.
143
workers owned or leased homes, regularly migrated from Los Angeles for seasonal work, or
were immigrants with families in the area.
13
As affirmed by N. B. Hinckley, the manager of the
Bryn Mawr Fruit Growers Association, “Our laborers are mostly local.”
14

The highly intensive cultivation of citrus fruits in the inland valley provided nearly year
round employment for Mexican residents, on whom respondents depended for over 50% of their
workforce and, in some cases, 100% of their crews.

Rather than returning to Mexico at the end
of the citrus harvest, the Redlands Chamber of Commerce found that Mexican workers migrated
to adjacent counties. As explained by N. L. Lelean, the Secretary Manager of the Redlands
Cooperative Fruit Association, “They will only migrate when they get short of work.”
15
The
resident Mexican community in the Citrus Belt supplied seasonal labor for the cotton, lettuce,
and cotton harvests in the Imperial Valley, as well as the grape and cotton harvests of the Central
Valley.
16
When completed, they returned to the citrus harvest in their home base of Redlands.
The Chamber of Commerce findings preempted what Berkeley economics professor Paul S.
Taylor, state economist William French, economist Louis Bloch, and the Census of 1930 would
conclude shortly thereafter: that Mexicans were a growing and permanent part of the California
farm labor force.
17

13
The final Chamber of Commerce report is unavailable, but the surveys reveal valuable information about
ranchers’ perceptions of Mexican citrus labor in the orange bearing districts surrounding Redlands. See “Chamber of
Commerce, Inc,” typescript, September 19, 1929, Chamber of Commerce Collection. (Inland Mexican Heritage.
Redlands, CA).

14
N.B. Hinckley to the Redlands Chamber of Commerce, September 18, 1929, Chamber of Commerce Collection
(Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA).

15
N.L. Lelean, September 18, 1929, Chamber of Commerce Collection (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA).

16
Kathryn Cramp, Louise F. Shields, Charles Alexadner Thomson, “Study of the Mexican Population in Imperial
Valley, California,” 1926, 3.

17
Will French, G. H. Hecke, and Anna L. Saylor, “Mexicans in California: Report of Governor C. C. Young’s
Mexican Fact-Finding Committee,” San Francisco, October 1930; U.S. Census. Appendix: Statistics of Mexican,
Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Families (Washington, 1930), 197-217; Paul Taylor, “Mexican Labor in the United
144
The mythology of seasonal circular mobility between the United States and Mexico drew
primarily upon Clements’s work. For instance, when the Central Chamber of Agriculture and
Commerce instructed local Chambers to write to Congress in opposition to the Box Bill in 1927,
it provided an article by Clements with the rhetoric for their pleas.
18
In “Immigration Bill Big
Economic Loss,” Clements wrote, “The Mexican immigrant comes to the United States to sell
his labor for United States dollars, without any idea of permanent residence, 85% of them return
to Mexico at the completion of their employment, and the balance vacillate between the two
countries.”
19
This figure originated from Congressman John N. Garner of Texas, who testified
before the House Committee on Immigration in 1926, “My observation is, living right here on
the border, or within fifty miles of it, that 80 percent of the Mexicans that come over for
temporary work go back.”
20
Although net Mexican immigration was affected by a growing
recession, Garner’s anecdotal estimates were a gross overstatement. For instance, a state study
later showed that the percentage of immigrant Mexicans who declared California their state of
intended future permanent residents rose 1,305 percent between 1909-1912 and 1924-1927.
Economist Louis Bloch (1930) concluded, “only a very small number of Mexicans return to their

States. Migration Statistics II,” 12, (no. 1, University of California Publications in Economics, January 10, 1933), 1-
10; Louis Bloch, “Facts About Mexican Immigration Before and Since the Quota Restriction Laws,” Journal of the
American Statistical Association, March 1929.

18
E. J. Walker to A. E. Isham, December 10, 1927 (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA).

19
George Clements, “Immigration Bill Big Economic Loss,” undated (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA);
See also George Clements, “California Casual Labor Demands,” typescript, paper presented to Friends of the
Mexicans, November 13, 1926, George Clements Papers (Young Research Library, University of California Los
Angeles, Los Angeles, CA).

20
“Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico,” 1926; These figures were repeated in the Will French, G. H.
Hecke, and Anna L. Saylor, “Mexicans in California: Report of Governor C. C. Young’s Mexican Fact-Finding
Committee,” San Francisco, October 1930 and by Charles Teague in “A Statement on Mexican Immigration,”
Saturday Evening Post, (no. 107, March 10, 1928), 45-46, Reprinted in Daily Life in American History Through
Primary Documents, ed., Randall Miller (Santa Barbara, ABC-CLIO, 2012), 132-133.

145
native land...between 200,000 to 250,000 Mexicans now reside in the state of California.”
21
It
was only through Clements reputation that Garner’s informal estimate was infused with authority
and became popular truth.
Clements’ claims adopted an anthropological component founded upon environmental
determinism. He described Mexican aversion to permanent settlement within the United States
using the rhetoric of the noble savage, a romantic invocation of non-white primitivism.
22
In
doing so, Clements renewed a discourse of Mexican nomadism that predated the World War I
period. As explained by Victor S. Clark in his 1908 study of Mexican labor in the United States:
The Mexican who comes to the United States as a laborer is from the peon or from the
tramp labor class of Mexico. The term ‘pelado,’ by which those migrating into Texas are
known, signifies literally the man who has been stripped, a sort of intensified ‘sans
culottes,’ and indicates that the Mexicans crossing the lower Rio Grande comes largely
from the migratory laboring class of their own country.
23

Clements explained in a Los Angeles Times editorial, “The Mexican in his own country lives
along the lines of least resistance. Nature is very kind to him, providing him an equable climate
and natural foods for the greater part of the year.”
24
According to Clements, “Mexicans” were a
racial type that had not developed a desire to build permanent homes because nature had
provided for their immediate needs. In Clements’ estimation, without the pressure to plan for
harsh weather or famine, such as that encountered by early Europeans, Mexicans did not develop
an orientation towards planning for the future. Rather, they adhered to the tenets of a tribal life.
Clement’s claims of Mexican itinerancy were echoed throughout the 1920s by the California

21
Louis Bloch, “Facts About Mexican Immigration Before and Since the Quota Restriction Laws,” Journal of the
American Statistical Association, March 1929, 56-57, 60.

22
Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 2.

23
Victor Clark, “Mexican Labor in the United States,” Bulletin. (Washington, DC: Department of Commerce and
Labor Bureau of Labor, 1908).

24
George Clements, “Why Should We Rely Upon ‘Bootleg’ Labor?” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1926.
146
Development Association (CDA), local Chambers of Commerce, and the Los Angeles Times,
each of which began to uniformly describe Mexicans as “transients,” “itinerants,” and
“homers.”
25

Still consistent with the general discourse of itinerancy, some opponents appealed to the
human-interest dimension of the fact, specifically its effect on family reunification. For instance,
the Redlands Chamber of Commerce appealed to Congress by noting the close relationship
between Mexican nationals and Mexican-Americans. As a land of Mexican origin, they argued,
Mexicans existed in a long-standing diasporic relationship between the United States and
Mexico. A letter submitted to the House of Representatives on behalf of the Redland’s Chamber
noted, “Much intercourse of personal and family nature has been common among these people
back and forth across the border.”
26
It further noted that a forced quota would disrupt
transnational familial ties seeped in the geography of the border region. This line of argument,
although drawing on a humanitarian discourse, served to protect the economic relationship
between citrus ranch owners and Mexican labor by alluding to the more pragmatic precedent of
policies providing exemptions to maintain the integrity of the family unit. Even the largely
popular Chinese Exclusion Acts included allowances for the dependents of Chinese laborers
already residing in the United States.
Ties existed between Mexican descent communities in the United States and Mexico, but
the appeals of Citrus Belt ranchers overrepresented the international aspect of Mexican and

25
California Development Association, Survey of the Mexican Labor Problem in California (San Francisco, 1928),
2-3; “It Must Not Pass!” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1928, J4; “Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico,”
pp. 45. See also Douglas Monroy. Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression,
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Camille Guerín-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and the
American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900-1939, (New York: Rutgers Univ.
Press, 1994).

26
Redlands Chamber of Commerce to the Immigration Committee, House of Representatives, January 7, 1928,
Chamber of Commerce Collection. (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA).
147
Mexican American migrant life. Most Citrus Belt laborers traveled within a regional rather than
in an international pattern. In 1930, the Governor of California commissioned a state study
examining Mexican immigration before and after the Immigration Act of 1924. Birthrates
collected suggest that Mexicans were becoming a permanent part of the population of southern
California. By 1928, more than 40 percent of births in San Bernardino and Riverside counties
were of Mexican-descent.
27
The deliberate concealment of Mexican settlement patterns by
ranchers was a deliberate attempt to minimize the threat perceived by opponents of Mexican
immigration. Although harkening to California’s Mexican origins, ranchers’ descriptions marked
Mexican Americans as fluid rather than rooted.
Although internal figures affirmed what ranchers already knew—that workers of
Mexican descent were a growing population of permanent residents—the Los Angeles Times
publicly contested figures from the Census Bureau and Bureau of Immigration that suggested
Mexicans were increasingly becoming permanent residents. For instance, in April 1928, the Los
Angeles Times ran an article titled “Mexico Has Her Own Ideas About Quotas” on the cover of
its weekly Farm and Orchard Magazine. The article posited that the Mexican Department of
Labor was making strong inducements for Mexicans to stay at home in order to develop national
agricultural and mineral resources in the post-Revolution nation.
28
In “Saviors of California,” the
newspaper suggested Mexican settlement was actually dwindling, “It is known that thousands [of
Mexican immigrants] return across the border after a season’s work here, and if those returning
under present conditions number as many as they did when passage was freer there is a net

27
Will French, G. H. Hecke, and Anna L. Saylor, “Mexicans in California: Report of Governor C. C. Young’s
Mexican Fact-Finding Committee,” San Francisco, October 1930, 180.

28
“Mexico Has Her Own Ideas About ‘Quotas’,” Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1928, J3; See also “It Must Not Pass.
Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1928.
148
loss.”
29
Another article, published in April 1930, dismissed restrictive immigration measures
proposed by Box, and others, as “ill-considered” studies that were “framed on nothing but
prejudice and theorist opinion.”
30

Earlier iterations of European immigrants as “birds of passage” offered a reference point
by which to evoke the idea of seasonal non-immigrant Mexican labor. Where immigrants
originating from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were described as old stock families who
intended to settle in the United States, the 20
th
century wave of immigrants from Italy, Austria-
Hungary, and Russia were described as non-immigrant male laborers. According to Frank Warne
(1913), Special Expert of the Foreign Population for the U.S. Census, the majority of these
sojourners remained in the United States for a period of eight to ten years and then returned
abroad. According to the Committee on Immigration and National Civic Federation (1916), “[the
European] ‘bird-of-passage’ class of workers…think mainly of their own immediate economic
needs with no permanent interest in the welfare of this country.”
31
Having benefited from the
higher-wages in American industry, critics suggested eastern Europeans returned to their families
abroad without fully investing in the United States. Other immigrants, largely Italians, were
described as seasonal travelers. Enabled by advances in transportation and the higher-wages
available to American workers, they traveled between the United States and Europe with relative
ease.

A silent army of invaders, Italian immigrants were accused of threatening the American
standard of living, plundering the United States of its riches through reparations, and displacing
native-born workers. Critics of Italian immigration argued that their ease of migration, as single

29
“Saviors of California,” Los Angeles Times, December 19, 1929.

30
“Get the Facts First,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1930, A4.

31
Committee on Immigration of the National Civic Federation. Washington D.C., 1916. Quoted in Frank J. Warne,
The Immigrant Invasion (New York, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1913), 72-73.
149
migrant workers, allowed them to follow slight increases in wage. Like swallows followed the
seasons, Italian birds of passage followed the rises and drops of the economy to the disadvantage
of settled Americans.
32

Where circular migration by white ethnic industrial workers was criticized as deleterious
to Americans during World War I, by the postwar period circular Mexican migrants were praised
by agriculturalists as essential to farmers in the Southwest.
33
When speaking before the Chamber
of Commerce of USA in 1929, Executive Secretary of the California Agricultural Committee,
Ralph Taylor, proposed that the ideal organization of labor consisted of:
[Maintaining] a group of people [Mexican itinerants] who will supply the demands for
peak labor loads, and when these are past in any one place move on to the peak load in
another locality, thereby utilizing their own efforts over as large a portion of the year as
possible and increasing the return to all classes using this type of labor.
34

According to agriculturalists, profitable production required a category of worker that was
perpetually in motion. As definitively declared by Clements before a meeting of the Lemon’s
Men’s Club, “California’s casual labor must be fluid”; and fluidity meant Mexican.
35

Efforts to recruit a migrant labor force harkened back to the notion of California ranchers
as scientific managers. As described by Clements:

32
Frank J. Warne, The Tide of Immigration (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1916); Mark
Wyman, Round-trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930 (1993; Cornell University Press,
1996), 74-98; Work showing women as birds of passage in modern world include Mirjana Morokvasic. “Birds of
Passage Are Also Women,” International Migration Review (Special Issue: Women in Migration), 18 (no. 4., 1984),
886-907.

33
See also the statement of Mr. Joe Worsham of Texas before Congress in an earlier meeting. He noted, “the
Mexican is an itinerant laborer in one section to-day and he goes somewhere else to-morrow, whereas the tenant
farmer is anxious to stay in one place year after year.” See U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on
Immigration and Naturalization, “Temporary Admission of Illiterate Mexican Laborers,” 66
th
Cong., 3 sess.,
February 1920, 243.

34
Ralph Taylor, “Mexican vs. American Farm Labor” address at Seventh Western Divisional Meeting, Chamber of
Commerce of USA, Ogden, Utah, typescript, October 1, 1929, p. 6 (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA).

35
George Clements, “Mexican Immigration and its Bearing on California’s Agriculture,” paper delivered to the
Lemon Men’s Club, October 2, 1929, box 12, Ron Lopez Papers (Chicano Studies Research Center, University of
California Los Angeles, Los Angeles).
150
Casual labor, let me emphasize, must be fluid—must be mobile—and to be so must be
fostered and cared for by some organization co-operative or corporate, that will not only
be able to supply it to the farms as needed, but to undertake responsibility as to health,
sanitation, advantages in education and character upbuilding, religious training and
standards of living of the workers.
36

Historian Cletus Daniels has argued that in its earliest iteration, western agrarian mythology
supposed a steady progression from farm hand to farm owner.
37
As farm labor became
impermanent, the promise of upward mobility was abandoned.
38
The role of the agriculturalists,
then, was not as a farmer, but as a manager of labor flows in an increasingly specialized and
capital-intensive field of agriculture.
As white farm workers moved out of the groves and into manufacturing, farm labor was
increasingly divorced from the celebratory aspects of agrarianism and the racial line between
Mexican and American grew deeper.
39
Opponents of the Box Bill deepened this chasm when
they claimed Anglo-Americans were racially incompatible with modern fieldwork.
Agriculturalists argued before congress that white men, especially those without a history of
working on a farm, could not withstand the high temperatures, stooping, and seasonal nature of
fieldwork in southern California. As related in the testimony of one farmer, white men were
simply unable to complete extensive farm work. He shared the story of a university youth who
once worked at his grape ranch. After training in the hay field for two weeks, the young man felt
prepared to work in the vineyard. On his first day, the youth earned $1.25 and on the second day

36
George Clements, “Why Should We Rely Upon ‘Bootleg’ Labor?” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1926.

37
See Chapter 1. Cletus E. Daniels, Bitter Harvest. A History of California Farmworkers 1870-1941 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981).

38
Cletus E. Daniels, Bitter Harvest. A History of California Farmworkers 1870-1941 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1981).

39
Their discourse homogenized the class and ethnic lines between whites who were native born and Eastern and
Southern European immigrants in industrial work. See David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How
America’s Immigrants Became White (Basic Books, 2005); “Southwest Has Inning,” Los Angeles Times, January 29,
1930.
151
he earned $1.50. However, by the third he was bed-ridden.
40
Although strong and determined he
was simply unable to perform menial labor. Others explained that while capable, whites simply
refused to engage in work deemed primitive. As explained by Dr. E. Peterson, a speaker before
the Central Chamber of Commerce:
It is this type of labor, involving sometimes excessive heat, dust, isolation, and temporary
employment, and occupations which make little demand upon the intellect, that the
citizens of the United States refuse to perform and in many cases are physically or
temporarily unable to perform in economic competition with races better adapted to such
toil.
41

Ranchers explained that although white farm workers were their “first consideration,” the
fluidity required of the workforce made whites incompatible with fieldwork.
42
The symbolic
bifurcation between industrial work and farm labor was marked by lines that had developed
earlier between whites and non-whites, such as that evident in the settler colonialism of early
Riverside, the Brazilian expedition of the USDA, and the company housing campaigns of the
World War I period. In all cases, the racial distinction between the superior and the inferior were
organized alongside categories of the settled and migrant.
During the immigration debates of the 1920s, agriculturalists proposed that farm
production depended on a seasonal force of migrant workers. According to this logic, the
American people were forced to choose between two options. As noted by Peterson:
Shall we force our own citizens to perform these largely physical labors, now performed
in the areas under consideration by foreign labor or machinery, which are so distasteful to
our own citizens and thereby encourage them to reduce their standard of living to the
level suggested by such labor and remuneration or shall we import common labor

40
“Seasonal Agricultural Labor from Mexico,” 1926, 17.

41
Dr. E.G. Peterson, “Mexican Immigration,” address to the Chamber of Commerce of U.S.A. at the Seventh
Western Divisional Meeting, Ogden, Utah, October 1, 1929 (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA), 2.

42
George Clements, “Why Should We Rely Upon ‘Bootleg’ Labor?” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1926.
152
sufficient to handle this phase of our industry and ask our own citizens to aspire to other
more skilled employment?
43

The only acceptable solution to the regional need for agricultural workers and the national desire
to maintain a majority white population of skilled-workers was to look south of the border. In
Mexico, ranchers promised there existed an ideal workforce of migratory unskilled laborers, that
is, birds of passage who would arrive to harvest crops and return to Mexico of their own volition.
“The Worst Cancer”
44

Following World War I, debates over immigration restrictions and the maintenance of
American racial purity flourished. Asians, Europeans, and those deemed likely to become a
public charge were restricted from entering the United States by quota law. The exclusion of
immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, however, sparked heated debates. Where ranchers
were dependent on seasonal labor, they fought immigration along the discursive lines of
temporary migration and permanent settlement. In a process of racial triangulation that
criminalized the potential for permanent settlement by colonial subjects from the Philippines and
Puerto Rico, Mexicans were discursively described as birds of passage that arrived to the United
States in times of harvest and returned to their families in Mexico at its completion.
As agricultural interests attempted to preserve their primary source of field labor, they
described a racial hierarchy of desirable foreign itinerants and undesirable immigrants. In placing
Mexican nationals at the top of this hierarchy, ranchers criminalized migrant laborers whose
residency and travel rights imbued them with protections unavailable to Mexican nationals.
Subverting fears of racial change in California linked to Mexican immigration, agriculturalists

43
Dr. E.G. Peterson, “Mexican Immigration,” address to the Chamber of Commerce of U.S.A. at the Seventh
Western Divisional Meeting, Ogden, Utah, October 1, 1929 (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA), pp. 5.

44
U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Western Hemisphere
Immigration, 71 Cong., 2
nd
sess., January 24, 1930, pp. 223.
153
argued that seasonal Mexican labor abated a far worse threat: a permanent underclass of Puerto
Rican and Filipino workers. Fears surrounding the unique rights held by American colonial
subjects were framed by claims that they were sexual deviants who threatened the racial integrity
of whiteness in California.
The United Stated obtained the former Spanish colonies of the Philippines and Puerto
Rico when the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1898. After 1917, Puerto Ricans were granted
national citizenship.
45
Though experiencing divergent paths towards American citizenship, their
migration and residency rights as colonial subjects marked them both as potential permanent
sources of labor. Puerto Ricans and Filipinos had the federal right to travel, live, and work
throughout the continental United States as American “nationals.” More so, they had access to
state relief. Exercising these freedoms led to disdain at the local level. Nevertheless, the threat
posed to profit-driven agriculturalists by colonial nationals was largely framed as an issue of
maintaining racial, rather than economic, integrity. Whereas Mexican labor became a referent for
temporary migration, Puerto Rican and Filipino labor became synonyms for permanent black
settlement.
When San Felipe (Okeechobee), a roaring hurricane with highs of 150 mph, hit the
Puerto Rican islands in 1928, it positioned Puerto Rican migration to the Pacific Coast as an
issue of growing concern. Congressional leaders were placed in a difficult situation. The
hurricane left many on the verge of starvation, cost millions of dollars in property damage,
destroyed the backbone of Puerto Rican agriculture, and pushed 250,000 rural people into

45
The Jones Act, established U.S. citizenship for Puerto Ricans by congressional act. See Jones-Shafroth Act, 39
Stat. 951, (1917).

154
homelessness.
46
In the aftermath of this natural disaster, Congress found it particularly difficult
to justify the importation of Mexican labor. They could not force those seeking relief to the
confines of Puerto Rico. To do so, would violate the constitutional right to travel across state and
territorial lines. Agricultural interests in the Southwest claimed that circular Mexican migration
served as their only protection from the permanent settlement of displaced colonial people.
47

Ranchers’ protest against replacing Mexican with Puerto Rican labor stemmed from the
differential access to state protections allowed to each set of laborers. Agriculturalists had
experimented with Puerto Rican workers with the aid of the Secretary of Labor (SOL) in 1926.
Although Puerto Ricans were free to travel to the continental United States, the financial means
to do so eluded most workers. At the cost of $70,000, the SOL aided Puerto Rican migration to
the cotton region of the Salt River Valley in Arizona. Rancher D. B. Wiley of Phoenix, a
participant in the experiment, was unsatisfied with the result. In testimony before Congress, he
claimed that Puerto Ricans proved a poor substitute for Mexican labor.
48
Kenneth B. McMicken,
representing the Arizona Cotton Growers Association, echoed Wiley’s dissatisfaction. He
described Puerto Ricans as the worst labor he had encountered. According to McMicken, Puerto
Ricans were unskilled workers who depended on charity and felt entitled to rancher care.
49

46
Stuart B. Schwartz, “Hurricanes and the Shaping of Circum-Caribbean Societies,” The Florida Historical
Quarterly, 83 (no. 4, Spring, 2005), 381-409.

47
“Southwest Has Inning,” Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1930.

48
“Statement of D. B. Wiley, Manager, Arizona farm Bureau, Phoenix, Arizona” in Western Hemisphere
Immigration, 1930, 122-24.

49
“Statement of K. B. McMicken, Representing the Arizona Cotton Growers Association,” in Western Hemisphere
Immigration, 1930, pp. 136.

155
Félix Córdova Dávila, the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, a territorial non-voting
delegate in the House of Representatives, countered their critiques.
50
According to Dávila, the
experiment failed because Puerto Ricans received inferior treatment upon arriving to Arizona. As
noted in a report by Puerto Rican specialist Clarence Senior in 1947, the chief complaint among
workers was that American companies failed to abide by their contracts. Although guaranteed
comfortable houses and modern facilities, workers received tents, dilapidated adobe, and lumber
shacks when they arrived. These were likely the same facilities formerly used to house Mexican
workers. Of at least 1,200 Puerto Ricans living in Arizona in the 1920s, no more than 147 were
reported in Arizona by the 1940s.
51

The Puerto Rican experiment taught ranchers that colonial subjects were unlike previous
waves of labor arriving to the United States. Puerto Ricans’ status as U.S. nationals offered
protections that were unavailable to Mexican immigrants. Where Puerto Rican workers were
entitled residency and state relief, Mexicans were left vulnerable to deportation, homelessness,
and starvation were they to refuse the conditions set by local authorities. For instance, when
Puerto Rican workers were unable to earn a subsistence income based on 10-16 hour workdays
and rate of 1-2 cents per pound picked, they abandoned their contracts. Without income, they
turned to the Phoenix Central Labor Council for food and housing.
52
In a similar situation,
Mexican workers would have been without support. Congressman Box, himself, likened

50
“Statement of Hon. Felix Cordova Davila, The Resident Commissioner to the United States from Porto Rico,” in
Western Hemisphere Immigration, 1930, pp. 145-147.

51
Clarence O. Senior, Puerto Rican Emigration (Puerto Rico: Social Science Research Center, University of Puerto
Rico, 1947), 22. For a comprehensive history of Puerto contract labor, see Edwin Maldonado, “Contract Labor and
the Origins of Puerto Rican Communities in the United States,” International Migration Review, 13 (no. 1, 1979).

52
“Phoenix Central Labor Council,” Arizona Labor Journal, November 20, 1926.

156
Mexican immobility beyond agricultural labor to slave conditions.
53
In claiming their rights as
citizens, Puerto Rican workers gained the ire of the Arizona Cotton Grower’s Association in a
refusal that would not soon be forgotten.
54
As concisely explained by Taylor, “The American
negro, the Porto Rican negro and the Filipinos cannot be deported if they prove later to be a
crime menace. The Mexican can be.”
55
Ranchers quickly learned that race alone did not ensure
control over workers.
Those who defended Mexican immigration united in their disapproval of colonial
subjects’ settlement. Fred Hart, Managing Editor of the California Farm Bureau Monthlies,
maintained that Puerto Rican migration should be restricted before Mexican immigration. When
Chairman Johnson reminded Hart that Puerto Ricans were citizens, he responded with a heated
interrogation of the Chairman. He declared:
Let me ask you this question: Do you think that I should take this attitude from your
statement, take back to my wife and family and my relatives that you are going to shut
the Mexican out, so that if we are going to exist we must bring the Porto Rican in and put
him alongside our families, the thin lipped Porto Rican, an agitator, a trouble-maker, and
a man that I don’t want my family to have to associate with continuously?
56

Taylor echoed his claims, noting that the vacuum caused by a quota restriction on Mexico would
draw Puerto Rican workers with rights to permanent settlement.
57
In a similar effort, Harry
Chandler, President of the Los Angeles Times Corporation, stood before Congress praising

53
See Marshall Roderick, “The ‘Box Bill’: Public Policy, Ethnicity, and Economic Exploitation in Texas” (Thesis,
Texas State University, December 2011) 51

54
Senior, 1947, 22; Maldonado, 1979, 110; "500 Porto Ricans Lured to Arizona, A. F. of L. Charges," The Sun, Oct
7, 1926, 17; "Answer Given on Idle Labor," Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1927, 2.

55
Ralph Taylor, “Mexican vs. American Farm Labor” address at Seventh Western Divisional Meeting, Chamber of
Commerce of USA, Ogden, Utah, typescript, October 1, 1929, p. 16 (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA).

56
“Statement of Fred J. Hart, Managing Editor, California Farm Bureau Monthlies” in Western Hemisphere
Immigration, 1930, pp. 207.

57
“Statement of Ralph H. Taylor, Sacramento, California, Executive Secretary Agricultural Legislative Committee
of California” in Western Hemisphere Immigration, 1930, pp. 222.
157
Mexican labor and warning of the dangers of Puerto Rican migration to the Los Angeles
region.
58

Figure 18 Filipino picking crew comprised an important part of the citrus labor force in southern California. Pictured
above is a picking crew in East Highland.
59

Although it was a Puerto Rican hurricane that introduced a discussion of colonial
migration to the debate on Mexican quotas, Puerto Ricans and Filipinos alike were addressed as
glaring causes of concern. Opposition manifested most starkly in elaborate threats of black
miscegenation. Southwestern growers offered two possible futures: that of Anglo-American
agriculture aided by temporary Mexican immigrants or that of a racial melting pot where white

58
“Statement of Harry Chandler, President Los Angeles Times Co.” U.S. Congress, House of Representatives,
Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Western Hemisphere Immigration, 71 Cong., 2
nd
sess., January 24,
1930.
59
“Filipino Picking Crew in East Highland,” photograph, undated, in Simona Castillo interview by Robert
Gonzalez, November 20, 1995, Inland Mexican Heritage Oral History Project, (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands,
CA).

158
women and black men freely intermixed. Opponents of the Box Bill pointed towards Hawaii,
where many Puerto Ricans and Filipinos had immigrated when their own sugar cane industries
began to decline. In a cacophony of insults, Congressman Arthur M. Free of California described
these migrants as the “scum of the earth,” “the worst cancer,” and “an ulcer.”
60
For Free, Hawaii
served as a cautionary tale. As California’s closest gateway, its racial problem could quickly
become that of California. Igniting fear of Puerto Rican and Filipino settlement, ranchers hoped
to maintain access to Mexican labor.
Charles Teague of the Limoneira Ranch and Federal Farm Board Commissioner argued
that imported laborers from American territories posed a serious racial threat to the United
States. In an issue of the Saturday Evening Post he wrote:
If, as some claim, there is some social problem connected with the immigration of
Mexicans, those who are proposing the closing of the door to them will bring to the
Southwestern states a much more serious one by forcing the agriculturalists to bring
Puerto Rican Negroes or Filipinos.
61

Teague was far from exceptional in his characterization of Puerto Ricans and Filipinos as
“negroes.” Epithets such as “nigger,” “black rascals,” and “black devils” were placed upon
Puerto Ricans and Filipinos alike. American control over the colonies was justified by
interpolating a black racial status that equated island residents with child-like, primitive people,
incapable of self-government and likened the United States to a benevolent parent guiding them

60
U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Western Hemisphere
Immigration, 71 Cong., 2
nd
sess., January 24, 1930, 223.

61
Charles Teague in “A Statement on Mexican Immigration,” Saturday Evening Post, (no. 107, March 10, 1928),
45-46, Reprinted in Daily Life in American History Through Primary Documents, ed., Randall Miller (Santa
Barbara, ABC-CLIO, 2012), 133; Numerous statements before Congress echoed this sentiment. See also the
proceedings of the Central Chamber of Commerce, in particular Ralph Taylor, “Mexican vs. American Farm
Labor,” address at Seventh Western Divisional Meeting, Chamber of Commerce of USA, Ogden, Utah, typescript,
October 1, 1929, p. 15 (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA); A similar sentiment is in Dr. E.G. Peterson,
“Mexican Immigration,” address to the Chamber of Commerce of U.S.A. at the Seventh Western Divisional
Meeting, Ogden, Utah, typescript, October 1, 1929, p. 14 (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA).
159
towards civilization.
62
Drawn to higher-paying employment in the industrial north, African-
Americans were a relative minority in the Southwest. Colonial workers posed the more salient
hazard to white racial dominance. Ranchers threatened that were they forced to abandon
Mexican labor they would have no choice but to recruit a permanent, colonial, black labor force.
To do otherwise risked the demise of California agriculture.
Filipino men, in particular, were portrayed as hyper-sexual threats to white racial purity.
63

As stated by Taylor before the Central Chamber of Commerce, “the Filipino, far away from
home, without a family, and with well developed social aspirations, and reeking with disease is a
very definite menace to the American blood-stream.”
64
When a Filipino citrus worker, Santiago
Raynas, was accused of attacking Eunice Lawyer, an “attractive white girl” in Alta Loma that
same year, it sent ripples throughout San Bernardino County. The Daily Sun ran large headlines
on the attack that read as a multi-series melodrama on the dangers of interracial contact between
Filipino men and white women. Raynas, who met the young girl at her family restaurant, was
forced out of their establishment when his love-interests’ father found a series of letters he had
written to the girl. One night after Raynas’ expulsion, he arrived at her house, climbed into the
window, and begged her to elope with him. Were she to refuse, the newspaper reported, he
threatened a murder-suicide. Screaming for her parents, Raynas stabbed Lawyer three times in
her arm and once in her leg with a pocket knife. During the confusion that followed, he escaped

62
Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire Race, Sex, Science, and U.S.
Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Ngai, 2004.

63
See Ngai 2004 and Kramer 2006 for more on fears of relationships between Filipino men and white women.

64
Ralph Taylor, “Mexican vs. American Farm Labor,” address at Seventh Western Divisional Meeting, Chamber of
Commerce of USA, Ogden, Utah, typescript, October 1, 1929, p. 15 (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA).
160
through the family’s front door. Raynas was swiftly pursued by Deputy Sheriffs and caught ten
miles away attempting to board the Etiwanda Pacific Electric freight train.
65

The details of the Raynas-Lawyer case were highly dramatized and it is difficult to know
the nature of their relationships prior to the assault. What is known is that the Raynas incident
was viewed within the longstanding connections between Filipino sexuality, white women, and
white male vigilantism.
66
Upon capture by the Deputy Sheriff, Raynas begged the sheriff not to
take him to Alta Loma, the site of the attack, stating “the white men will kill me.”
67
His pleas
foreshadowed his own persecution and a racialized discourse of Filipino sexual deviance that
justified broad attacks on the larger Filipino community.
68
In the wake of the Watsonville dance
riots, the Raynas assault became a catalyst for wide-spread anti-Filipino sentiment and a rallying
cry for the end to Filipino farm labor in the Citrus Belt.
69
Within two weeks, ranchers fired 60
Filipino citrus workers. The victims of racial intolerance, they swiftly left the district. Soon
afterwards, the San Bernardino Central Labor Council, American Legion, and Native Sons of the
Golden West joined forces in a fit of anti-Filipino sentiment. Disregarding Filipino’s protected

65
“Filipinos Leave Alta Loma,” Riverside Daily Press, August 23, 1930, 6; Filipinos Leave District, Riverside Daily
Press, August 22, 1930, 6; The Ryanas incident prompts consideration of the violent lynchings of African-American
men across the South, as well as the means by which black communities survived mob violence. See Koritha
Mitchell, Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930
(Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2011).

66
See Valentin R. Aquino. “Ch. 4. Agitation seen in Watsonville riots of 1930.” The Filipino Community in Los
Angeles (Thesis, University of Southern California, 1952); See also Linda España-Maram, Creating Masculinity in
Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s (Columbia University
Press, 2006).

67
“Filipino Will Face Assault Hearing Today,” The Sun, September 2, 1930.

68
The 1920s marked a dramatic increase in Filipino immigration, as they supplemented excluded Chinese, Japanese,
Korean, and South Asian laborers in canneries and fields. Most who came to California, were single, male, and
between the ages of 16 to 30 years old. See Yen Le Espiritu, Filipino American Lives (Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press, 1995), 9-14.

69
As discussed elsewhere, the Watsonville Riots involved an assault by 400 hundred white vigilantes at an
interracial Palm Beach dance hall earlier that year. See Valentin R. Aquino. “Ch. 4. Agitation seen in Watsonville
riots of 1930.” The Filipino Community in Los Angeles (Thesis, University of Southern California, 1952).
161
status as “nationals,” the organizations advocated for a full investigation into Filipino labor, a
ban from public works projects, and attempted to secure restrictions against their migration into
the county. Their successful collection of pledges from local citrus organizations was part of a
larger state effort to ban Filipino migration into California.
70

While dark-skinned Filipinos were viewed as an acute threat against white women,
Puerto Ricans were described as an insidious danger to the white racial stock.

Box Bill opponents
portrayed Puerto Ricans as a multiracial people of mixed Portuguese, Spanish, Taino, and
African descent. Unlike the United States, where miscegenation was discouraged by law and
violent protest, racially mixing was used as a colonizing tool of the Spanish Empire. In the
United States, following a Mendelian rationale, a “red haired, blue eyed, freckle faced, thin
nosed and thin lipped” Puerto Rican was suspect of harboring the primitive genes of an Indian or
African masked by those of the Portuguese and Spanish colonizer. Unlike other non-whites, the
“Portuguese nigger,” as Clements openly referred to them, could easily blend with the general
population, breed with white women, and spread their inferior genes. He warned, “Biologically,
they are a serious menace, particularly in California and the border states where we have so
many dark skinned races and blends; since they are without the distinguishing features of the
negro there is no protection.”
71
Like the popular 1920s figure of Jay Gatsby in F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s novel, the “pale” faced man of an “indeterminable race” who attempts to live as a

70
“Native Sons, Legionnaires May Aid Move,” The Sun, September 24, 1930.

71
George Clements, “Mexican Immigration and its Bearing on California’s Agriculture,” paper delivered to the
Lemon Men’s Club, October 2, 1929, box 12, p.6, Ron Lopez Papers (Chicano Studies Research Center, University
of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles).

162
wealthy white man in order to earn the affection of a coveted white woman, Puerto Ricans were
suspect of racial passing that proved an invisible threat to white racial purity.
72

In a process of racial triangulation, the risk posed by Puerto Ricans and Filipinos to the
white household served to highlight the benign relationship of Mexican men to white women.
Like homing pigeons, Mexicans were said to be family-oriented migrants who found their way to
their partners over long-distances. For instance, S. Parker Frisselle of the Fresno Chamber of
Commerce testified before Congress that Mexican workers consistently returned to families in
Mexico at the end of the picking season.
73
In his address to the Chamber of Commerce of the
USA, Taylor likewise noted that Mexicans rarely intermarried with [white] Americans.
74

Historian Karen Leonard’s study of the biethnic Punjabi-Mexican community in the Imperial
Valley, however, destabilizes this claim. Where ranchers claimed that Mexicans maintained
racial lines, she has found that the way the children of these biethnic marriages chose to
understand and use their ethnic identity changed according to socioeconomic and political
circumstances. That is, Mexican descent people both formed familial bonds and ideas of their
own identity that crossed back and forth between racial categories.
75

Respectful and courteous to white women, Mexicans were described as a minimal threat
to the United States.
76
Hart continued:

72
See “Chapter 4 Jay Gatsby’s Passing in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby,” in Carlyle Van Thompson, The
Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination (Peter Lang Publishing, 2004).

73
“Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico,” 1926, 26.

74
Ralph Taylor, “Mexican vs. American Farm Labor,” address at Seventh Western Divisional Meeting, Chamber of
Commerce of USA, Ogden, Utah, typescript, October 1, 1929, p. 13 (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA).

75
See Karen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press, 1992).

76
“Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico,” 1926, 176.
163
[Mexicans] live together in their home and they are clean and they dress nice, particularly
the men and women dress nice and are clean, and they take care of their families, and
when they are through at my place they move over to a neighboring place, and when they
are through in my valley you will find them up at San Jose picking prunes, and Vince
Garrod, a personal friend of mine, says that he has one family that has been coming to
him regularly for 10 years.
77

Box Bill opponents consistently countered claims that Mexican families would become a social
nuisance, arguing instead that migrant family labor helped workers earn more money, promoted
dependability, deterred alcoholism, and promoted fidelity.
78
Hart noted, “The Mexican is well
adapted to California field conditions, and being a family type, of a roving disposition, fits in
very nicely in our field crop picture.”
79
Contradicting the conventional logic that Mexicans were
uninterested in establishing households, when countering fears of miscegenation, Mexicans were
positioned as simultaneously migrant and familial.
Despite the prevalence of claims describing Mexican itinerancy, there were those who
feared an imminent race problem if the Box Bill was not passed. Nevertheless, agricultural
interests were steadfast in their assertions. Even claims by the infamous eugenicist Charles
Goethe that “Indian” (Mexican) blood was a danger to white purity were adamantly denied
before Congress. In a reply to Goethe, Congressman Garner warned that Mexicans were the only
safeguard against the more acute threat of Puerto Rican and Filipino blacks, “[the Puerto Rican]
is over here and he is a citizen and he can, if he is brought, or if he so wills, he can come in, and

77
“Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico,” 1926, 209. For comparable accounts, see the testimonies of
Fleming, Chandler, and Handler in U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Immigration and
Naturalization, Western Hemisphere Immigration, 71 Cong., 2
nd
sess., January 24, 1930.

78
“Western Hemisphere Immigration,” 1926, 361-362, See the testimony of Mr. Hushing and the Appendix 407,
439.

79
“Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico,” 1926, 203.

164
here we have a migrating class of people [Mexicans] that have settled our country and have lived
in it and have made good citizens and they can’t come in and yet they fit into our condition.”
80

Conclusion
The relationship of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, and Europeans with fixity and
flow provided the architecture for an ongoing social process of differentiation between laborers.
Box Bill opponents manipulated these depictions in a strategy meant to defeat the enactment of
immigration quotas on Mexico. Agricultural interests promoted farm labor as intrinsically
migrant, Mexican workers as innately itinerant, and immigration from Mexico as non-
threatening to the racial composition of the United States. The shift from criminalizing regional
Mexican mobility during World War I to celebrating circular migration between the United
States and Mexico during the immigration debates of the 1920s suggests that the social meanings
attributed to movement changed within various geographical and temporal contexts to maintain
racial and economic stratification between white ranchers and non-white farm workers.
The construction of Mexicans as racial homers had reverberating consequences in the
Depression years that followed. As discussed in previous chapters, agricultural labor in
California required a choreographed movement between rotating harvests. Following the Box
Bill debates, studies of these movements were of interest to social scientists. Mexican
Americans, however, were increasingly divorced from their primary means of regional
migration. The chapter that follows examines the ways popular culture denaturalized Mexican
car usage as it became a marker of a white middle-class identity. Further, I argue, that as
economic decline created a proletariat of white migrant workers, progressives drew on a
sacrosanct image of white mobility reaching back to the western frontier. Doing so legitimized
relief efforts targeting white workers to the exclusion of Mexican-descent residents.

80
“Western Hemisphere Immigration,” 1930, 208.
165
CHAPTER 5
White Routes, Mexican Roots: Whitening Automobility in the Depression, 1920-1940

Figure 19 The Post Family standing beside their car in San Bernardino.
1

Mount Vernon Avenue served as the central transportation corridor for San Bernardino’s
west side throughout the 20
th
century. In 1916, the Automobile Club of Southern California
provided a boost to motor traffic by designating the neighborhood a rest stop for travelers along
the National Old Trails Road.
2
Like other interstate migrants, the Post family traveled from Iowa
to join relatives living in California. A teenager at the time, Richard Post remembered, "We
came in a big, old, V-8 Cole touring car. It took us a whole week…The roads were terrible; we

1
“Post Family and Relatives, August 5, 1919,” Historical Treasures of San Bernardino. (San Bernardino Public
Library, San Bernardino, CA).

2
“The National Old Trails Road to Southern California,” (Los Angeles, CA: Automobile Club of Southern
California. 1916).

166
didn't hit paving until we got to Victorville, California.”
3
Traveling down the Cajon Pass through
the San Bernardino Mountains in 1923, the Posts found a home and employment with their
immediate family. Within ten years, Richard Post graduated from Valley College, built a
household in the west side, and found employment at a service station along Mount Vernon
Avenue.
4
The process by which Midwestern migration stories such as that of the Post family
became typical and those of Mexican families were erased is the subject of this chapter.
The automobile played a central role in the lives of the Mexicans and Mexican
Americans living in citrus communities. Comprising the majority of the migratory workforce
following World War I, the economic lives of Mexican-descent families were uniquely
intertwined with car ownership.
5
Remote fields and seasonal harvests parsed throughout the state
necessitated a workforce with access to vehicles. By the 1930s, however, the prevalence of the
automobile in Mexican and Mexican American life was eclipsed by its square association with
whiteness. This slide of hand was accomplished in a relational process that, first, criminalized
Mexican automobility and, second, sanctified white migration.
6
Contradicting migration methods

3
Richard Post interviewed by Joyce Hanson, November 12, 2002, transcript, San Bernardino Oral History Project
(Historical Treasures of San Bernardino, San Bernardino).

4
“History in the Making: S. B. District Pioneered In Building Desert Roads,” The Sun, clipping, December 16,
1962, Route 66 vertical file, (San Bernardino Public History, San Bernardino, CA).

5
Camille Guerín-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and the American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California
Farm Labor, 1900-1939 (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994).

6
The concept of “automobility” has been used as an umbrella term to describe the spatial and social relationships
generated by the automobile. Automobility, according to communications professor Jeremy Packard, is most
commonly understood as the “increasing mobility that the automobile and other forms of personal motorized
transportation allow.” That is, automobility refers to increased individual, physical mobility resulting from advances
in transportation technology. But, as sociologist John Urry notes, automobility means more than physical travel. For
Urry, automobility “reconfigures civil society, involving distinct ways of dwelling, traveling and socializing in, and
through, an automobilized time-space.” He describes automobility not as a private, self contained practice, but as a
complex system that enables new forms of freedom while at the same time creating “distinct ways of dwelling,
traveling and socializing.” Cotton Seiler, ""So That We as a Race Might Have Something Authentic to Travel By":
African American Automobility and Cold-War Liberalism," American Quarterly, 2006; Jeremy Packer, Mobility
without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); John Urry, Sociology
Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2000).
167
of the previous two decades, Mexican American automobile use was denaturalized in the
Depression-era through popular accounts in mass media of criminality, irresponsible spending,
and a lack of self-control.
Alongside the villainization of Mexican car use, labor advocates imbued white migration
with the symbolism of the pioneer migrant family. In an adoption of frontier mythology,
“agrarian partisans” such as John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange, and Paul Taylor equated migration
with qualities such as strength, perseverance, and the pursuit of opportunity.
7
Together, these
discourses functioned to garner support for white claims to government relief. However, they did
so at the cost of a broader social agenda that advocated for the extension of those same benefits
to Mexican-descent workers.
“An Essential Part of the Household Equipment”
8

As a child, Blas Coyazo often walked from his home to the citrus packing district of
Redlands where oranges and lemons were prepared for shipment. He watched as the dexterous
women wrapped the fruit in bright tissues and packed it gently into crates with colorful labels.
He watched the men load the boxes onto refrigerated freight cars destined for Chicago, St. Louis,
and New York. The car was like a freezer. Workers placed ice on each of its four corners so that
the out-bound fruit, and indeed almost all of it was exported, would survive the journey to
eastern auction houses. Usually, Coyazo could convince a worker to spare him an orange or two
as a treat. Recalling these instances decades later, he remembered it tasting wonderful.
9

7
Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (University of California Press,
2005). 182.

8
Archibald Shamel, “Housing Conditions of the Employe[e]s of California Citrus Ranches,” typescript, undated, p.
4, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).

9
Blas Coyazo interviewed by Robert Gonzalez, April 1994, transcript, p. 3-9, Inland Mexican Heritage Oral History
Project. (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands).
168
In 1924, at the age of thirteen, Coyazo attended his last day of school. His father needed
him to drive the family Durant to Smiley Heights Park, where he tended to the eucalyptus trees.
Behind the wheel of their touring car, an economical vehicle known for its rugged construction,
Coyazo traveled the winding road and passed the lush flora of Smiley Heights Drive to its scenic
summit overlooking the valley.
10
No longer attending classes, Coyazo joined his older brother,
Sam, who managed orange picking crews in nearby groves. Together, they arrived each morning
at 7 am. Too young to carry a ladder, he started at the bottom. Coyazo reached for the lowest
branches and picked the oranges that hung beside him using gloves and clippers supplied by
packinghouses, just like the one he had visited as a child. Standing beneath the tree, he placed the
oranges into a homemade picking bag and transferred them into a box until 4 pm. Coyazo
followed this pattern until the end of the harvest. When it concluded, he said his farewells to his
mother and sister. After loading their belongings, Coyazo, his father, and his brothers piled in the
Durant; their livelihood depended on it as they followed the succession of harvests across
California.
11

10
“Flexible Power,” The Literary Digest, October 18, 1924, 81; “Some Possibilities of a Pleasure Tour in Southern
California,” Sunset (San Francisco, CA: Press of H.S. Crocker Company) 1, 1898, 72.

11
Blas Coyazo interviewed by Robert Gonzalez, April 1994, transcript, Inland Mexican Heritage Oral History
Project. (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands).

169

Figure 20 Joe Hernandez with picking crew (left) and Sam Coyazo standing on his truck bed with crates of fruit
(right).
12

Although some cooperative associations provided vehicles, individual pickers and their
families more often owned their own automobiles.
13
Ranchers that offered company housing to
workers provided garages alongside bathrooms, running water, electricity and other utilities
deemed fundamental to housing. As described by Archibald Shamel, the United States
Department of Agriculture (USDA) pomologist who wrote extensively on World War I company
housing, “[the automobile is] an essential part of the household equipment.”
14
For some
employees, car ownership meant an extra form of income. In an interview with Inland Mexican
Heritage, former citrus worker Howard Herrera remembered, “In those days you had to pay for
your ride. Sometimes the house would pay it. If the house would hire a truck to take the crew to
work they’d pay the driver for all the heads that would drive and arrive in the truck.”
15
The car
was an essential and advantageous resource for citrus workers who could afford to own one.

12
In Antonio Gonzalez Vazquez and Genevieve Carpio, Mexican Americans in Redlands (Charleston: Arcadia
Publishing, 2012).

13
Archibald Shamel, “Housing Conditions of the Employe[e]s of California Citrus Ranches,” typescript, undated, p.
1-2, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).

14
Archibald Shamel, “Housing Conditions of the Employe[e]s of California Citrus Ranches,” typescript, undated, p.
4, Archibald Shamel Papers (Tomas Rivera Library, Riverside, CA).

170
Economist Paul S. Taylor’s series “Mexican Labor in the United States” (1927-1933)
offers unique insight into Mexican and Mexican American car use. Funded by the newly created
Social Science Council’s Committee on Scientific Aspects of Human Migration, Taylor
embarked an a multi-site study of Mexican migration.
16
His first inquiries focused on the
migration patterns of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, defined together as “Mexican.”
According to Taylor, “great seasonal mobility,” “almost ceaseless movement,” and “the basic
fact of mobility” typified Mexican labor.
17
To the disruption of the bird of passage myth, he
found that even in the border region of the California Imperial Valley this movement was largely
nation-bound. He wrote:
The best information from both employers and Mexicans indicates that the proportion of
Mexicans who come from Mexico to Imperial Valley for seasonal employment, and who
return to Imperial Valley for seasonal employment, and who return to Mexico at the close
of the season is small indeed.
18

Although a minority of workers commuted daily between Mexico and the United States, even
this small flow was disrupted by the discouragement of immigration officials at the border.
19
As
detailed by historian Kelly Lytle-Hernandez, the United States Border Patrol along the
California-Arizona region aggressively pursued unsanctioned Mexican border crossings to the ire
of those in search of agricultural laborers.
20
Although immigration figures during this period are

15
Howard Herrera interviewed by Robert Gonzalez, transcript, April 13, 1994, Inland Mexican Heritage Oral
History Project. (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands).

16
Abraham Hoffman, “An Unusual Monument: Paul S. Taylor’s Mexican Labor in the United States Monograph
Series,” Pacific Historical Review, 45 (no. 2, May 1976).

17
Paul S. Taylor, “Mexican Labor in the United States Migration Statistics. II,” University of California
Publications in Economics, 12 (no. 1, 1933), 1.

18
Paul S. Taylor, “Mexican Labor in the United States Imperial Valley,” University of California Publications in
Economics, 6 (no. 1, December 17, 1928), 39.

19
Paul S. Taylor, “Mexican Labor in the United States Imperial Valley,” University of California Publications in
Economics, 6 (no. 1, December 17, 1928), 39.

171
often contradictory, estimates consistently show that Mexican immigration reached its height
between 1927-1929 then steeply declined between 1930-1933.
21
That is, regional and not
transnational migration defined Mexican mobility by the 1930s.
To conduct his migration study, Taylor partnered with the California State Department of
Agriculture and the Standard Oil Company. He created two survey sites. The first was a
quarantine checkpoint located between Arizona and California. Originally established to prevent
the entry of diseases and pests dangerous to California agriculture, the quarantine now served to
tabulate the manual labor necessary for the groves’ continued production. The second was a
service station off of U.S. Highway 99 at Gorman. A central point between the southern and
central California harvests, Gorman represented a necessary crossroads for those traveling
between state harvests. Both were transformed to survey sites for assessing patterns of Mexican
automobility. At the quarantine checkpoint, westbound cars driven by someone who was
“obviously Mexican of the manual laboring class” were recorded.
22
Taylor initiated a similar
arrangement with the Standard Oil Company. He trained service station attendants at Gorman to
collect the quantity of farm workers driving through the Tehachapi Mountains to and from the
San Joaquin Mountains.
23
However, unlike the quarantine stations on the eastern ends of
California, travelers were not compelled to stop at Gorman. Where speed, lighting, and busy

20
See also Kelly Lytle-Hernandez, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2010).

21
Paul Taylor, “Mexican Labor in the United States Migration Statistics. IV,” University of California Publications
in Economics, 12, (no. 3, September 1934).

22
Paul S. Taylor, “Mexican Labor in the United States Migration Statistics. II,” University of California
Publications in Economics, 12 (no. 1, 1933), 2-7.

23
Paul S. Taylor, “Mexican Labor in the United States Migration Statistics. III,” University of California
Publications in Economics, 12 (no. 2), 12-13.
172
workers undermined the integrity of data, Taylor claimed that racial markers unique to Mexicans
collaborated worker’s tabulations:
The characteristic modes of travel and dress, the type and condition of car, and the
physical types, etc., of the Mexican laborers in California were sufficiently distinct to
make identification of the overwhelming majority relatively easy for those accustomed to
look for them; and to render unlikely conclusion with Negro, Asiatic, Filipino, or other
non-white laborers.
24

Although the data was further confirmed by unannounced inspections of service men and a brief
check by State horticultural inspectors along Highway 99, the primary means of collection was
left to racial markers of movement. The ambiguous categories of “modes of travel” and “type
and condition of car” served as identifiable categories of racial type when phenotype was
obscured.
25

Mexicans Who Entered California By Motor Vehicle at Fort Yuma
Between May 16 and December 31, 1927, Classified According to Type of Vehicle Used
! !
Transportation Type Number
Autos* 9,802
Stages 1,888
Trucks 455
Train NA
Total 12,145
Table 1 Mexicans Entering California by Vehicle Type
26

Throughout Taylor’s study, Mexicans were wholly and squarely associated with
automotive travel. Officers and service station employees made a report of passing motorists,

24
Paul S. Taylor, “Mexican Labor in the United States Migration Statistics. III.” University of California
Publications in Economics, 12 (no. 2, 1933), 13.

25
Paul S. Taylor, “Mexican Labor in the United States Migration Statistics. III,” University of California
Publications in Economics, 12 (no. 2, 1933), 13.

26
*Data for the table was made by Taylor using daily reports from officers at the Fort Yuma, Blythe, and Daggett
quarantine checking stations, courtesy of the California State Department of Agriculture. Taylor collapsed those
travelling by team and wagon into autos. “Practically no Mexicans traveled by team and wagon; their number was so
negligible that they have been included in the tables with those entering by motor vehicles.” Paul S. Taylor,
“Mexican Labor in the United States Migration Statistics. II,” University of California Publications in Economics,
12, (no. 1, 1933), 3.
173
marking Mexicans traveling by passenger car with an “M” and Mexicans traveling by auto truck
with an “MT.”
27
Those traveling by team and wagon, autostage, and rail were not included in the
traffic count. Their exclusion contributed to an overestimation of Mexican car usage. For
instance, those riding by team and wagon were collapsed within the count of those entering by
motor vehicle. Although tabulated, those carried by autostage were completely excluded from
the study. Lastly, those traveling by train were unaccounted for based on the perception that few
Mexicans would chose to pay the proportionally higher fee of rail travel.
28
Mexican migration
was considered an automotive exercise to the exclusion of other forms of transportation.
Taylor’s multi-volume study suggests that the quantitative study of Mexican migratory
patterns was of considerable scholarly interest to social scientists by the end of the 1920s and
well into the mid-1930s. Where the debates of the Box Bill era proposed that Mexican mobility
was a transnational phenomenon comprised of seasonal travel between the United States and
Mexico, Taylor’s work suggested that it was largely a statewide and inter-state phenomenon. The
growing permanent Mexican-descent population living in the United States further indicated the
domestic nature of Mexican travel. As estimated by historian David Gutierrez, the Mexican-born
population residing in the United States grew from 68,000 to 478,000 people between 1880 and
1920.
29
In a continuing upward trend, the U.S. census indicated that foreign-born Mexicans had
grown to over 641,000 people by 1930.
30
In Taylor’s estimation, this exceptionally mobile

27
Paul S. Taylor, “Mexican Labor in the United States Migration Statistics. II,” University of California
Publications in Economics, 12, (no. 1, 1933), 2.

28
Paul S. Taylor, “Mexican Labor in the United States Migration Statistics. II,” University of California
Publications in Economics, 12, (no. 1, 1933), 3.

29
See David Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity,
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 44-45.

174
population was traveling by automobile and they were doing so to the virtual exclusion of other
forms of transportation.
Although there are no available statistics on Mexican American car ownership in San
Bernardino or Riverside Counties, a 1933 Heller Committee Cost of Living Study by the
University of California sheds light on patterns of car ownership, expense, and usage in southern
California. In a survey of 100 Mexican-descent families living in San Diego, the Heller
Committee found that 26 owned and operated an automobile. Families typically purchased their
cars second hand. Only two had been purchased new and the remainder averaged between three
to five years old. The survey found that cars had a variety of functions, including leisure,
traveling to family events, and searching for work in surrounding towns.
31
In San Bernardino, a
transportation gateway and citrus center, the figures were likely higher than those estimated in
San Diego. For one, the distance of groves from residential hubs necessitated a car more so than
in urban centers such as San Diego, where public transportation connected industry to housing.
Second, the agricultural economy of the inland valley fiscally rewarded those who followed the
seasonal harvests. And, three, social mobility from the position of picker to the higher-paying
position of foreman largely depended on one’s ability to manage and provide transportation for
crews of laborers. Despite the centrality of car usage to Mexican employment, however, the
Heller Committee study categorized automobile use as a non-essential expense. And
contradicting the importance of the automobile to Mexican-American life, the study attributed

30
This represents the first enumeration of “Mexican” as a racial category. Census of 1930. Chapter 5 Country of
Birth of the Foreign Born. Table 1. Country of Birth of the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1930 and
1920, 225.

31
Constantine Panunzio and The Heller Committee for Research in Social Economics of the University of
California, “Cost of Living Studies V. How Mexicans Earn and Live: A Study of the Incomes and Expenditures of
One Hundred Mexican Families in San Diego, California,” University of California Publications in Economics, 13
(no. 1, 1933).
175
the ability to save and purchase high priced items, such as a personal vehicle, as evidence of
assimilation into American culture.
32

Contrary to portrayals of cars as quintessentially American, the rise in Mexican-
American ownership paralleled rising automobile registration in Mexico. Before 1910, there
were no more than 3,000 vehicles registered in the nation. This quickly changed when Francisco
Madero replaced Porfirio Diaz as President of Mexico in 1911. President Madero abolished a
prohibitive tax on automobile ownership. As a result, in a fifteen-year period spanning from
1911 to 1925, automotive registration increased 3,500 percent, from half a million to 17.5
million.
33
The continued rise in automotive ownership can be attributed to the 1925 opening of
the Ford Motor Company assembly plant in the San Lazaro neighborhood of Mexico City. Henry
Ford expanded these operations in 1932, when he built a new factory. Commonly referred to as
“Planta de La Villa,” the plant was the center of operations and development for the company.
34

Nevertheless, in the eyes of American economists, car ownership had become so aligned with
what was “American” that it became a statistical measure of acculturation.
35
This contradiction

32
Panunzio, 1933, 67.

33
Ricardo Romo, “Work and Restlessness: Occupational and Spatial Mobility among Mexicanos in Los Angeles,”
Pacific Historical Review, 46 (no. 2, May 1977), 176.

34
Ford Motor Company, “Historia de Ford de Mexico” (The History of Ford Mexico),
http://media.ford.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4166; “Cumple Ford Mexico Sus Primeros 85 Anos de Vida,”
(The Birthday of Ford Mexico It’s First Eighty Five Years of Life), Al Volante (Mexico), June 23, 2010,
http://www.alvolante.info/nacionales; The flip side of Ford’s attempts to export production to Mexico was his
acquisition of property in Brazil and construction of a large-scale rubber plantation. See Greg Grandin, Fordlandia:
The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York: Picador, 2009); Elizabeth Esch, “Whitened
and Enlightened: The Ford Motor Company and Racial Engineering in the Brazilian Amazon” in Company Towns in
the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities, eds., Oliver Dinius and Angela Vergara
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

35
For more on American identity and the car see, Cotton Seiler, “’So That We as a Race Might Have Something
Authentic to Travel By’: African American Automobility and Cold-War Liberalism," American Quarterly, 2006 and
Jeremy Packer, Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
176
poses the question, how was the car as a personal and family vehicle divorced from ideas of
Mexican? And, to what end was it associated with whiteness?
Automobile use was Americanized in the eyes of the U.S. public through an intentional
affiliation with qualities considered complementary to whiteness, such as individualism,
consumerism, and self-control. Scholar Jeremy Packer has argued that regulations on
automobility offer a window into attitudes towards various publics on the margins of this
construction, from women to youth to racial minorities. Writing of the post-World War II era, he
explains that crack downs on hitchhiking, media portrayals of motorcycle use, and the
symbolism of the Cadillac each served to delineate relationships of power in the name of
safety.
36
The rise of automotive insurance in the 1920s, similarly, reproduced racial and class
boundaries by dividing motorists into four groups of clients based on their “desirability as
risks.”
37
The first group was considered the lowest risk and the last group was the highest. White
clients fell into the first two groups, both of which received higher coverage at lower rates. Non-
whites fell into the latter two groups and received lower coverage at higher rates. Within the two
categories of non-white, racial minorities were divided by class. Group three consisted of long-
term homeowners and residents. Those who did not own a home fell into the fourth group,
receiving the minimum amount of coverage at three times the price of group one.
38
Early on,
home ownership and car ownership were intertwined with visions of whiteness.

36
Jeremy Packer. Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

37
By 1925, leading auto manufacturer General Motors required all motorists to insure their vehicles. Arthur Pond,
The Turning Wheel: The Story of General Motors through Twenty-Five Years, 1908-1933 (New York: Doubleday,
1934), 389.

38
Whereas mainstream insurance practices promoted racial and class divisions amongst motorists, those most
negatively affected by these practices challenged them through creating their own forms of coverage. In 1947, for
instance, the “Loyal Automobile Insurance Company” offered automobile insurance to African Americans at a time
when other dealers made insurance difficult to obtain, inflated prices, and enacted wholesale cancellations on
African American clients.

See "Cites Aid to Negro Automobile Owners and Race in General," California Eagle,
177
Automobility as practiced by non-whites was accompanied by the presumption of
criminality. Calling all Cars, a popular detective drama running from 1933 to 1939, illuminates
the perceived threat of mobile brown bodies in the 1930s. Based on cases encountered by the Los
Angeles Police Department (LAPD), the docudrama series itself reflected the changing nature of
law and order in a city built for automotive travel.
39
In the episode “Missing Mexican Sheiks”
(1934), a crime reported by a Japanese woman led the police to pursue two unidentified suspects
across the sprawled geography of metropolitan Los Angeles. The distraught woman explained to
the police that while she was walking two men pulled beside her in a sedan and demanded her
money. The challenge of apprehending the men was compounded by the woman’s broken
English and the racially ambiguity of the suspects. As described across police radio, all cruisers
were to keep watch for “two bandits, number one dark complextion, Mexican or Filipino about
20 years of age wearing a dark suit and gray cap, number two is also dark, wearing a gray suit
and gray cap.”
40
Without a clear description of the suspects or their vehicle, the situation
underscored the tension between the freedom of white automobility and its threat to public safety
when exercised by those perceived incapable of handling that freedom.
In the course of pursuing the two suspects, LAPD detectives adopted multiple methods of
police surveillance unique to the appearance of the personal automobile. Suspicious that the
robbers were heading towards a draw bridge connecting the Port of Los Angeles at Terminal
Island to the City of San Pedro, the detectives ordered that the bridge be dropped. Delaying
traffic in the pursuit of the suspects, to the ire of the driving public, the police collected the

December 18, 1947.

39
Kathleen Battles, Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

40
“Missing Mexican Sheiks,” mp3, Calling All Cars, Episode 6, January 3, 1934.
178
license plate of each passing motorists, recorded the name and address of each occupant, and
searched each car for suspects matching the victim’s description for immediate arrest. When the
checkpoint failed to unearth the suspects, the sedan itself became the center of the search. Found
abandoned at the pier with a warm radiator soon after the incident, the detectives concluded that
the suspects were near. The detectives were further able to confirm their suspicion by
questioning a women at the port who had seen two men leave the car. However, if the
mechanisms enabling automotive travel could be used to assist police surveillance, they could
also be used to subvert it. Anticipating that the police would attempt to track the vehicle, the men
avoided the police checkpoint by boarding the local ferry. Further, by manipulating car
registration with a fabricated name and address, the owners preemptively avoided police tracking
of their sedan.
41

Despite the suspects’ best efforts to elide capture, the episode suggested, efforts to derail
the detective’s investigation were ultimately thwarted by the LAPD’s vigilant commitment to
automotive investigation. A serendipitous encounter with a warehouse guard named Sebastian
led the detectives closer to their suspects. A few days earlier, Sebastian had collected the license
plate of a group of “Mexican sheiks.” He explained, “They were innocent enough. Had a couple
of girls with them and they were taking pictures. Here’s how the hunch comes in. Somehow they
didn’t look on the up to up to me so I took the license number of the coup they were driving.”
42

Although engaging in “innocent” behaviour, the presumed criminality surrounding Mexican
American youth prompted the guard to interpret their presence with suspicion. Their animinity
was betrayed by the license plate on the vehicle, which the guard collected with anticipation of

41
“Missing Mexican Sheiks,” mp3, Calling All Cars. Episode 6. January 3, 1934.

42
“Missing Mexican Sheiks,” mp3, Calling All Cars. Episode 6. January 3, 1934.

179
criminal activity. Their presumed guilt deemed legitimized, the detectives cross-referenced the
license plate provided by Sebastian to information collected during the checkpoint earlier that
afternoon. Using information on file with the Department of Motor Vehicles, the detectives
tracked Dolores Gonzalez and Mona Martinez to their residence and, ultimately, apprehended
their boyfriends, the two male suspects.
43

In their search, the detectives were aided by new methods of surveillance. These
strategies were made possible by the mass adoption of the car: invoking the eyes of fellow police
cruisers over radio, erecting traffic checkpoints distinguishing the suspects from the law-abiding
mobile public, and tracking car owners to their residences by means of car registration. The
threat to law and order supposed by the free movement of the Mexican Sheiks was transformed
to a mode of surveillance when engaged by the detectives of the LAPD. Popular radio broadcasts
like Calling All Cars celebrated these efforts. Casting the LAPD as heroes, youth of color were
resigned to the role of bandits when behind the wheel of a vehicle.
The showroom of the 1920s, as an architectural and social form, further reflected the
separation of white from non-white automobility in the popular imagination.

Denied service in
the showroom, minorities were forced to choose between hiring a white go-between or buying
used.
44
Historian Lizabeth Cohen has argued that despite the Depression, by the 1930s the
general good of the nation was framed by ideas of consumption. Large manufacturers,
economists, and government officials alike claimed that aggregated consumer buying power
could pull Americans out of the Depression. That is, spending was equated with economic

43
“Missing Mexican Sheiks,” mp3, Calling All Cars. Episode 6. January 3, 1934.

44
According to Jeremy Packard there were two ways for African-Americans to purchase a car: 1. bird-dogging: in
which African American consumers would use a “go-between” to connect them to a white dealerships” and 2.
buying used. See Packer, 2008, 206.

180
recovery.
45
Historian Charles McGovern has similarly noted that a “consumer citizenship”
prevailed in which common spending habits were believed to indicate national unity, market
egalitarianism, and the fulfillment of civic duty.
46
Showrooms were designed as large open
spaces with high windows and flashy signage designed to attract the eye of passing pedestrians
and motorists. Inside, friendly salesmen greeted consumers, new cars were exhibited for “Mr.
and Mrs. Auto Shopper,” and shoppers were welcomed as mobile citizens.
47
However, this
“opulent experience” was dependent on refusing service to people of color.
48
Through showroom
segregation, non-whites were denied inclusion as mass consumers of high-ticket items and
excluded from ideas of citizenship affiliated with consumption.
A notable exception to Mexican exclusion from American car culture was Felix
Chevrolet in Los Angeles. Winslow Felix, an Arizona native and WWI veteran of Mexican
decent, had a self-proclaimed “humble start.”
49
After moving to California, he worked as a
salesman and, later, as a used-car manager for the Chevrolet Motor Company. By 1922, Felix
opened his own Chevrolet branch on Eleventh and Olive Streets in Downtown Los Angeles’
“auto row.”
50
An automotive entrepreneur, he initiated the trial purchase plan, founded the
Greater Los Angeles Motorcar Dealers, organized the annual Southern California auto shows,

45
See Chapter 1 of Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar
America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 20.

46
Charles McGovern, Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 2006).

47
“Auto Show Crowd Reflect Better Times,” Los Angeles Times, Nov 5, 1935; Cultural Heritage Commission,
“Historical-Cultural Monument Application Part 2, " (Los Angeles, CA: Office of Historic Resources, May 2006).

48
Cultural Heritage Commission, “Historical-Cultural Monument Application Part 2, " (Los Angeles, CA: Office of
Historic Resources, May 2006).

49
“What Price Success,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1927, 10.

50
“Comical Auto Cat Making Things Purr,” Los Angeles Times, February 1, 1925; Cultural Heritage Commission,
“Historical-Cultural Monument Application Part 2, " (Los Angeles, CA: Office of Historic Resources, May 2006).
181
and staged midget-car races.
51
Recognizing the power of advertising, he adopted Felix the Cat as
his personal mascot, a favor bestowed by friend and artist Pat Sullivan in exchange for a new
car.
52
Felix was an active socialite who crossed racial lines, with memberships at the Breakfast,
Los Angeles Athletic, the Optimist, and Jonathan Clubs. Although benefiting from white
privilege, Felix adopted a “broad visioned policy of fairness.”
53
He was not only among the first
to openly sell cars to racial minorities. He was among the first major car dealerships to hire
Latino salesmen. His breaching of the social contract between whiteness and car ownership
earned the company long-running loyalty among Latino car enthusiast.
54
His actions, however,
were not enough to challenge the broad disassociation of the car with Latinos that was accepted
as conventional wisdom by the 1930s.
By the onset of the Depression, Mexican-American automobile ownership was a matter
of growing concern among progressives. In a 1928 issue of the professional social work journal
Survey, for instance, Alice Evans Cruz published a short fiction story that underscored the
incompatibility of Mexican-Americans with the automobile.
55
The well-received story illustrated
the cumbersome process of migration by a “typical Mexican family,” as well as the
accompanying difficulties faced by social workers, teachers, and government officials.
56
The

51
Jim Childs, “Here, Kitty, Kitty,” West Adams Matters, 23, (Los Angeles: CA, West Adams Heritage Association,
May 2006) 2; “Eleventh Annual Auto Show is Gorgeous in its Sheen,” Los Angeles Times, November 11, 1923;
Lynn J. Rogers, “Auto Show Crowds Reflect Better Times,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 1935.

52
Cultural Heritage Commission, “Historical-Cultural Monument Application," (Los Angeles, CA: Office of
Historic Resources, May 2006).

53
Cultural Heritage Commission, “Historical-Cultural Monument Application Part 2, " (Los Angeles, CA: Office of
Historic Resources, May 2006); “What Price Success,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1927, 10.

54
Site visit, Salute to the Route, September 20, 2008, San Bernardino, CA; Site visit, Rendezvous, September 20,
2008, San Bernardino, CA; Site visit, Slammin’ San Bernardino, April 15, 2008, San Bernardino, CA.

55
Alice Evans Cruz, “The Romanzas Train Senora Nurse,” Survey, August 1928, 468-469, 488; Cara Finnegan,
Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs, (Smithsonian Books, 2003).

182
first-person account centered upon a visiting nurse’s encounter with a Mexican immigrant
family. She opened the tale by describing her first encounter with the Romanza family, whose
cries drew her attention away from a procession of northbound Mexican fruit pickers. She
explained, “Curiosity getting the better of discretion, I went out into the dusty road and found, as
I had expected, a prehistoric Ford in the last stages of decrepitude from which it appeared the
entire population of Mexico, in assorted sizes, was tumbling furiously, at an imminent risk of life
and limb.”
57
At the cost of 100 pesos, the dilapidated Ford had transported the family from
Sonora Mexico to central California, where the family was intent on increasing their fortune by
picking fruit.
Upon purchasing insurance with the nurse’s company, the family quickly became wards
of the local Charity office. The eldest son was perpetually unemployed, another fell into a gang
of “sheiks,” and at 15 years old the eldest daughter eloped with an elder widower, only to be
abandoned with three children from his earlier marriage shortly thereafter. The Romanza family
called upon the visiting nurse’s services for a string of medical problems, including the removal
of five of the children’s tonsils and adenoids, observing the youngest when he swallowed a
marble, treating the grandmother’s rheumatism, and pumping the stomach of a two-year-old after
he inadvertently poisoned himself. Overwhelmed by the cost and attention required by the
family, the nurse concluded that the Romanza family would have to be returned to Mexico “as
too much a responsibility altogether.”
58
However, before the family could be removed, their son
Juan won a large lottery.
In this fictional story, the family quickly spent their newly acquired money on decadent

56
Birth Control Review, 12, 1928. Pp. 263; “The Prize Story Contest,” The Public Health Nurse, 20 1928, 111

57
Evans Cruz, 1928, 468.

58
Evans Cruz, 1928, 469.
183
furnishings and a new Dodge car purchased on a partial-payment plan. Where Ford vehicles such
as the one the Romanzas arrived in represented economy and thrift, Dodge had just introduced a
new line of passenger cars that were markedly more expensive than not only Fords, but also their
own previous models.
59
The nurse scolded the family for the irresponsible investment that far
exceeded their winnings. She chided:
Why, Mrs. Romanza, this is terrible, to saddle yourselves with such a debt, and to be so
foolish in the use of this money which, no matter how dishonestly won, should be used
for your children's education, and food. I, with no family, have no overstuffed furniture,
and certainly would not purchase all these useless things on a time payment.
60

In response to the nurse’s concern, Mrs. Romanza explained that the purchase was consistent
with the nurse’s own efforts to Americanize the family. In their new Dodge, Mrs. Romanza
explained, the family “should ride about like [American] ladies and gentlemen.”
61
The family’s
new possessions distanced them from the “dirty Mexicans who had only a bed and a stove in
their houses.”
62
To the nurse’s discouragement, her efforts to assimilate the Romanza family had
resulted in overspending and the pursuit of superficial markers of success.
The Survey story is a colorful example of the ways Mexican-American car ownership
was denaturalized during the rise of white migration. In the context of the economic recession,
the family’s spending highlighted the burden caused by Mexican immigrants living in the United
States. The Romanza family’s troublesome behavior, drain on social services, and poor use of
their resources was further magnified by the contemporary backdrop of toiling white American
migrants from dust bowl states. The story served as a morality tale in which automobile

59
See Chapter 5 of Charles Hyde, Riding the Roller Coaster: A History of the Chrysler Corporation (Detroit,
Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2003).

60
Evans Cruz, 1928, 488.

61
Evans Cruz, 1928, 488.

62
Evans Cruz, 1928, 488.
184
ownership progressed from a subsistence means of transportation, to a symbol of respect, to a
seductive fruit causing the family’s destitution. Ultimately unable to pay their debt, the
Romanzas traded the new Dodge purchased from their lottery winnings for a small Ford truck.
Together, the Romanzas left in the same condition they had arrived; household goods hanging
from the side of the car and the family piled on top.
63

Evans Cruz’s observation reflected a long rooted idea that Mexicans were incapable of
saving. Corresponding with the rise of Mexican immigration to the United States in the early 20
th

century, economist Victor S. Clark (1908) analyzed the relationship between financial behavior
and Mexican character. As a race, Clark noted, Mexican laborers maintained poor credit and
failed to pay debt unless tied to sentimental obligation.
64
He claimed that those born in the
United States, and to a lesser degree the immigrant population, exhibited a “love of display” that
led to positive behaviors, such as improvement of the home, as much as negative consumption,
such as spending on “whisky, gambling, and fine clothes.”
65
Rather than enjoying the fruit of
surplus income, Clark explained, Mexican spending habits reflected a lack of planning, “Their
lavish expenditures seems to be due partly to actual lack of foresight, to forgetfulness, when they
have money, that they will ever again be without it.”
66
At one time content with bare necessities,
Clark attributed these distinctly Mexican habits to the expansion of the American railroad. In
exchange for their labor, the rail placed money and new commodities at the disposal of a race
unable to manage them. Mexican women, who most cherished displays of wealth according to
Clark, were credited with this shift in behavior. He wrote, “In fact, showy furniture frequently

63
Cruz, 1928.

64
Victor Clark, “Mexican Labor in the United States,” Bulletin. (Washington, DC: Department of Commerce and
Labor Bureau of Labor, 1908). 496

65
Clark, 1908, 498.

66
Clark, 1908, 498.
185
stands as a symbol of means rather than of use. A well-draped bed will occupy a prominent place
in an apartment where the family sleeps on the floor. And these new standards of style and
ostensible comfort are set by the women rather than the men.”
67
In Clark’s analysis, the pursuit
of luxury drove Mexican Americans towards spending. By the middle of the Great Depression,
the discourse of Mexican spending had remained relatively consistent.
68

The fate of the Romanza family was illustrative of the habits credited with causing the
Depression, foremost accumulating debt and spending beyond one’s means. The consumer
citizenship of the 1920s existed in tension with the economic fallout of the 1930s. Questions of
debt were foregrounded in car ownership, an expenditure second only to the house. Although
Ford placed the automobile within the reach of middle-class America by 1908, nearly all cars
were purchased with cash before 1919. With the introduction of automotive consumer financing
by General Motors, car sales became dependent on future rather than saved earnings. By the end
of the 1920s, installment sales of automobiles rose from 0 to 60 percent of total car sales.
69

Partial payment plans had become a staple of American life; placing cars, washing machines,
phonographs, and other high-priced items within households throughout the country. By the
Depression, however, mass foreclosures revealed the limits of consumer credit. Installment credit
enabled the purchase of goods otherwise unaffordable without long-term saving. When the
bubble burst, public faith in credit turned to blame. As explained by economic historian Louis
Hyman (2012), “In the New Era economy of the late 1920s, a lack of thrift, though morally

67
Clark, 1908, 502.

68
In 1934, leading sociologist Emory Bogardus wrote, “In Mexico he did not have enough income to meet the
necessities of life. There was nothing for him to save. Saving is a foreign concept to him. His higher wage in the
United States, therefore, is something to be spent—usually at the end of the week that it is earned.” Emory
Bogardus, The Mexican in the United States (Los Angeles, CA University of Southern California Press, 1934) 40.

69
Louis Hyman, Borrow: The American Way of Debt: How Personal Credit Created the American Middle Class
and Almost Bankrupted the Nation (New York: Vintage Books, 2012) 52
186
dubious, would not threaten the country. In the aftermath of the stock market crash, what had
passed as merely profligate now seemed traitorous.”
70
Increasingly the poor were blamed for
their lack of foresight and impoverished families who had spent credit on luxuries during more
prosperous times were blamed for their bad decisions.
Set in Los Angeles during the Depression, John Fante’s autobiographical novel Ask the
Dust (1939) underscores the limits of consumer citizenship. The Depression-era novel follows
Arturo Bandini, a struggling Italian American writer, who has recently migrated from Boulder
Colorado to Los Angeles California. When on the edge of destitution, Bandini meets Camilla
Lopez, a Mexican American waitress at a seedy cafe. Their relationship is reflective of their
racial and gendered positions in Los Angeles. Bandini, who painfully remembers the rejection he
has faced for his own marginal whiteness, casts Lopez into the racial role of a “filthy little
greaser,” “brown princess,” and “a cheap imitation of an American.”
71
His sadistic efforts to
highlight her ethnicity undermine Lopez’s own attempts to reaffirm an explicitly American
identity. Lopez was caught in the tensions of consumer citizenship, in which purchasing power
did not necessarily extend cultural inclusion to those of Mexican descent.
Ask the Dust draws on the symbolism of the automobile to underscore the futility of
Lopez’s attempts to claim an American identity. After an altercation with Bandini, Lopez invites
him for a ride to the beach in her 1929 Ford roadster. Although the car allows Lopez to freely
travel through Los Angeles, the experience is marked by racial uncertainty. From the downtown
café, they cross the railroad tracks into an African American neighborhood. Together, they
passed by movie palaces, nightclubs, and a busy Wilshire Boulevard. Although the car allowed

70
Hyman, 2012, 83

71
John Fante, Ask the Dust (1939; Harper Perennial, 2006), 44, 87, 122.

187
Lopez some autonomy, her inability to merge with incoming traffic caused a scene. Lopez
aggressively moved through the glittering lights of Los Angeles, honking, yelling, and often
causing a spectacle. Betraying her efforts to join a “republic of drivers,” Lopez was neither able
to demonstrate control over her vehicle nor herself.
72
Despite these limitations, Lopez’s
ownership offers her a sense of control. When Bandini seeks to caution her, she recants,
exclaiming, “I’m driving this car.”
73
Although the car “kicked like a mule, rattled and jerked and
broke wind,” for Lopez it is a source of pride.
74

Fante’s novel imagines car ownership as a means of expressing an American identity
while at the same time revealing its limits. Reversing the equation made earlier between car
ownership and consumer citizenship, Lopez serves as a foil for its boundaries. Glancing at the
certificate of ownership, Bandini noticed that the car was registered to a “Camille Lombard”
rather than Camilla Lopez. As described by scholar Catherine Kordich (1995), this homage to
actress Carole Lombard reflects the “cultural blanching of Latina actresses such as Rita
Hayworth (Margarita Cansino) and Camilla’s adoption of Hollywood values.”
75
Car ownership
as Camille Lombard, reflects Lopez’s efforts to adopt an Americanized persona. The exchange is
characterized by a recurring theme in the novel: ethnic marginalization in Anglo American Los
Angeles. Representing a more extreme example of his own rejection as an Italian American, the
symbolic rejection of Lopez illustrated in her dystopic adoption of car culture comes as no
surprise. Instead, it was consistent with accounts critical of Mexican car ownership prevalent
throughout 1930s American popular culture.

72
See Chapter 2 in Cotton Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America, (Chicago:
Universiy of Chicago Press), 2009.

73
Fante, 2006, 63.

74
Fante, 2006, 64.

75
Catherine Kordich, “John Fante’s Ask the Dust: A Border Reading,” Melus, 20 (no. 4, Winter, 1995), 24.
188
The automobile was an essential part of life for Mexicans living in southern California,
particularly those engaged in seasonal agricultural labor. At its peak, the equation between
Mexican workers and automobiles was so absolute that citrus ranchers provided garages to their
employees and economist Taylor substituted car use as a referent for Mexican identity. In the
economic crisis of the 1930s, however, the automobile was distanced from Mexican Americans
and squarely identified with a white American identity. Through mass media, the showroom, and
novels, the car was reserved for whites in a shared narrative that deemed Mexicans as both
incapable of self-governance and a danger to the white public.
“Gypsies by Force of Circumstance”
76

The evolution of Route 66 from a highway to a symbolic pilgrimage completed the
process by which the automobile became typically “American” and depictions of automobility
were distanced from understandings of what was typically “Mexican.” The highway covered
close to 2,500 miles and served as an east-west artery from Chicago to Los Angeles. From the
beginning, it integrated already established highways and rural main streets, thus earning it the
nickname the “Main Street of America.”
77
Route 66 was a racial line through which white
American identity was constructed. The pioneer monument of the Daughters of the American
Revolution, the writings of John Steinbeck, and the collaborative work of Paul Taylor and
Dorothea Lange each erased state-sanctioned violence upon the multiracial landscape of early
California in favor of the history of white pioneer mythology. The process by which Mexican

76
John Steinbeck. Their Blood is Strong (San Francisco, California: Simon J. Lubin Society of California, 1938), 3.

77
Chairman of the Oklahoma Highway Commission Cyrus Avery is credited with first referring to Route 66 as the
Mainstreet of America. See Gordon Slethaug, “Mapping the Trope: A Historical and Cultural Journey,” in Hit the
Road Jack: Essays on the Culture of the American Road, eds., Gordon E. Slethaug and Stacilee Ford (Quebec:
McGill Queens University Press, 2012), 27.
189
mobility was denaturalized cannot be divorced from the celebratory histories of white migration
emerging in the 1930s.
In drawing upon the image of the pioneer family, Depression-era progressives called
upon the symbolism of a revered image. The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), a
women’s organization whose membership traced their lineage to the Revolutionary War, was a
leader in historic preservation and patriotic pageantry. One such cause was the outlining,
commemorating, and publicizing of national pioneer trails. Between 1928 and 1929, the DAR
erected 12 statues, one in each state along the path of the National Old Trails Road, including
one in Ontario California.
78

Figure 21 Sculptor Liembach was photographed working on the Madonna while observed by DAR members in
1928.
79

78
“Madonna of the Trail Volume 1,” scrapbook, (Ontario Library, Model Colony Room, Ontario, CA); “Madonna
of the Trail Volume 2,” scrapbook, (Ontario Library, Model Colony Room, Ontario, CA); “Madonna of the Trail
Volume 3,” scrapbook, (Ontario Library, Model Colony Room, Ontario, CA); “Madonna of the Trail Volume 4,”
scrapbook, (Ontario Library, Model Colony Room, Ontario, CA). See also Fern Ioula Bauer, The Historic Treasure
Chest of the Madonna of the Trail Monuments (John McEnaney Printing, 1984).

79
“Madonna of the Trail: 50
th
Anniversary History,” Daily Report, clipping, February 8, 1979, Madonna of the
Trail File, vertical files (Ontario Public Library, Model Colony History Room, Ontario, CA).
190
The statue, like the road itself, was envisioned as a memorial to the sacrifice of the
western pioneers of the frontier era. As described by Mrs. William H. Talbott of the National Old
Trails Road Committee:
[These pioneers] reduced the dense wilderness to broad fields for cultivation; they
harnessed great rivers, subdued the Indian, making him a good neighbor, and on the great
plains in the long night-watches as they communed with the Great Spirit they gathered
inspiration for greater adventure until, at last, after enduring every possible hardship, they
laid their lives upon the altar of patriotism.
80

The timely appearance of the statue series and the DAR’s concerted efforts to commemorate the
migrant family are exemplary of the prevailing social currency of pioneer mythology in 1930s
southern California, one that provided fodder for those seeking to legitimize white migrant’s
claims to relief.
Dubbed the “Madonna of the Trail,” the statue assumed a sacrosanct value. It loomed
large at 18 feet high from top to base. Designed by sculptor August Leimbach, the statue featured
a woman cradling a baby in her left arm and gripping a rifle in her right. To her side, a young
boy clung to her apron. The woman was portrayed walking in tall grass and surrounded by cactus
bushes. The visibility of a partially covered rattlesnake intensified the precariousness of the
situation. The artist, a German immigrant, traced his admiration for the frontier and inspiration
for his sculpture to his childhood:
When I was a schoolboy in the old country, the American history of the pioneer days
made a deep impression on me. I thought often of those who had left the old home and all
that was dear to them and had come to this country to find a hold for their ambition.
81

80
Mrs. William Talbott, “Annual Report of Progress in the Work of the National Old Trails Committee,” proceeding
of the Continental Congress of the Daughter of the American Revolution, 31 (National Society of the Daughters of
the American Revolution, 1922, 102).

81
Originally appearing in a summer issue of the 1928 Federal Illustrator, Leimbach was later quoted in Carla
Sanders, “O Pioneers!,” Inland Living Magazine, clipping, February-March, 2011, p. 16, Madonna of the Trail File,
vertical files (Ontario Public Library, Model Colony History Room, Ontario, CA); For more on constructions of the
American frontier in the popular imagination (although writing of a later period), see Richard White and Patricia
Limerick, The Frontier in American Culture (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994).

191

From its inception, the statue represented an imagined history of the “Wild West” and the
“pioneer type” who settled the American continent.
82

Each statue, while identical, adopted an inscription specific to the local history of the
state in which it was erected. The eastward facing inscription reflected the past of the
community. It noted, “This trail, trod by padres in Spanish days, became, under Mexican rule,
the road connecting San Bernardino and Los Angeles, later the American post road.” The
inscription to the west represented its future. It stated, “Over this trail, Jedediah Smith, seeking a
river flowing westward, led a band of sixteen trappers, the first Americans to enter California by
land.”
83
The statue was a physical monument to a larger pageantry quite typical of southern
California, one that depicted an evolutionary progression from Mexican to American
California.
84
It was unique, however, in its national serialization and focus upon the white
migrant family to the absence of the more popular Spanish Fantasy Past.
The statue was erected in Upland California, at the crossroads of San Bernardino and Los
Angeles Counties. Tellingly, it was placed at the intersection of the picturesque Euclid Avenue
and Foothill Boulevard. Euclid Avenue was a landscaped showcase of technology and botanicals
for the city. The 200 foot wide boulevard extended from the Southern Pacific Railroad to the San
Antonio Canyon and was bisected by the streetcar. Formerly a part of Ontario, “the model
colony” of the Chaffey brothers, Euclid Avenue was a physical display of advanced

82
Carla Sanders, “O Pioneers!,” Inland Living Magazine, clipping, February-March, 2011, p. 16, Madonna of the
Trail File, vertical files (Ontario Public Library, Model Colony History Room, Ontario, CA).

83
Site visit by author to Madonna of the Trail, Ontario, CA.

84
See William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Phoebe S. Kropp, "Citizens of the Past? Olvera Street and the
Construction of Race and Memory in 1930s Los Angeles," Radical History Review, 81 (2001), 35-60.
192
transportation, exotic flora, and charming cottages along a heavily landscaped boulevard.
85

Intersecting Euclid Avenue was Foothill Boulevard, better known by its national designation as
Route 66. The physical placement of the Madonna of the Trail monument along Route 66, what
would become the primary artery associated with dust bowl migration, preceded the symbolic
link between the pioneer migrant of the western frontier and the modern day migrant of the
Depression. Considering pioneer mythology alongside progressives’ depictions of white migrant
families illuminates its strategic adoption and exclusionary consequences.
The celebratory discourse of migration attached to the Madonna of the Trail did not
ameliorate the conditions faced by the Mexican workers of the present. During the Depression,
migration was an economic strategy commonly employed by Mexican agricultural workers.
Already accustomed to seasonal shifts in the California harvest, many migrated to eastern and
southern Los Angeles where additional opportunities existed in agriculture, transportation, and
manufacturing.
86
For instance, Graciano Gomez, a longtime resident of Redlands, lived with his
relatives in Los Angeles during the summers so that he could work in the city. He remembered,
distinct job segregation, “All the Mexicans got the dirtiest jobs. They got the jobs that no one
else wanted or would like to have.”
87
Sociologist Emory Bogardus (1968) placed the beginning
of what might be called the modern day labor economy to 1930s Los Angeles. He recalled
“small groups of six, eight, or ten Mexican immigrant unskilled laborers would appear on street
corners as far west as Western and Vermont Avenues and north to Washington Blvd, and wait

85
J. M. Guinn, A History of California and an Extended History of Its Southern Coast Counties, 1, (Los Angeles,
CA: Historic Record Company, 1907); For more on the model colony of Ontario, as well as a the broader country
life movement in the Citrus Belt, see Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of
Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 17-46.

86
Ricardo Romo, “Work and Restlessness: Occupational and Spatial Mobility among Mexicanos in Los Angeles,”
Pacific Historical Review, 46 (no. 2, May 1977), 157-180.

87
Graciano Gomez interviewed by Robert Gonzalez, January 27, 1995, transcript, Inland Mexican Heritage Oral
History Project (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA), 2-3.
193
for some unidentified employer to seek out their services for a few days, chiefly in rural areas.”
88

The number dwindled as the day waned and men had either found employment or returned
home. The geography of metropolitan job disparity necessitated the mobility of inland southern
California residents.
Those unable to collect a subsistence income turned to government relief. Wally Sanchez
remembered carpooling from Whittier to Los Angeles in order to collect public assistance.
During the Depression years, Sanchez collected clothing and shoes at the “dole.” He recalled,
“there were Mackinaw jackets, big heavy jackets, but they were red and green and they had
corduroys. But, I mean, it was like a prison. Everybody in that goddamn school knew that you,
[laughter], you were getting all of this free stuff...They pointed you out you know?”
89
Relief was
commonly accompanied by embarrassment. Six decades after the Depression, Angelina Sumaya
Cosme remembered a purple dress that she was issued by welfare, “If you had one of those
dresses…they were from the Welfare and everybody knew it. I’m not a proud person when it
comes to saying to anybody whoever might be interested, that I’m poor, that I’ve always been
poor. But I think I was a little hurt at that.”
90
Figures from the Office of the Superintendent of
Charities suggest that Mexican Americans accounted for 5.4 percent and Mexicans accounted for
9 percent of all welfare and unemployment cases. Together, those of Mexican descent comprised
close to twice the proportion of their share of the population in Los Angeles County.
91

88
Emory Bogardus to Ron Lopez, February 1, 1968, box 27, Ron Lopez Collection (Chicano Studies Research
Center, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA); Emory Bogardus to Ron Lopez, February 15,
1968, box 27, Ron Lopez Collection (Chicano Studies Research Center, University of California Los Angeles, Los
Angeles, CA).

89
Wally Sanchez interviewed by Robert Gonzalez, July 15, 1994, transcript, Inland Mexican Heritage Oral History
Project (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA).

90
Margaret Roque Castro and Angeline Sumaya Cosme interviewed by Robert Gonzalez, July 17, 2000, transcript,
p. 8, Inland Mexican Heritage Oral History Project (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands, CA).

194
All field workers were caught in the tensions of local, state, and national relief as
authorities debated the distribution of scarce local resources. Emerging from relief efforts was
the question of, for whom was relief intended? And, who was to provide it? The defense of state
lines emerged as a strategic response to the enterprise of distributing relief. 1n 1935, Los
Angeles Chief of Police James E. Davis headed the newly created Los Angeles Committee on
Indigent Alien Transients. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce established more than a
dozen border patrols staffed by members of the LAPD throughout California. Far removed from
the City of Los Angeles, the checkpoints served as a blockade against migrant workers who, in
previous years, had been actively recruited by agriculturalists. Described as a “flat disregard of
constitutional provisions” by Carey McWilliams (1939), the patrols denied American citizens
guarantees of sovereign movement protected in the U.S. Constitution. When challenged by the
American Civil Liberties Union, as described by McWilliams, the plaintiff was intimidated by
the police and dropped the case. Stationed at state points of entry, from November 1935 to April
1936 a staff of 125 police officers determined the employable from the unemployable, sending
the latter across state lines.
92
LAPD blockades were just one of many strategies used to stem the
flow of relief away from out-of-state workers. Local governments offered free gas to migrants
headed across county lines, municipal police broadly enacted vagrancy laws, and, in the most
extreme manipulation of migrant flows, county charities offered Mexican and Filipino residents
one-way tickets in a massive repatriation movement that was responsible for the coercive return
of over one million Mexicans by the U.S. government between 1929-1939.
93

91
The Mexican descent population comprised approximately 8 percent of the population. J. H. Winslow to Rex
Thomson, “Mexicans,” January 26, 1934, box 12, Ron Lopez Collection (Chicano Studies Research Center,
University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA).

92
See Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (1939;
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 310-312.

195
The exclusionary technologies enacted by local governments were broadly applied. They
threatened to realign existing arrangements of power that had previously upheld distinctions
between whites and non-whites. The growth of migrant families placed American whites in a
category that had previously been firmly associated with non-whites. As whites entered the
California agricultural landscape in search of employment, racial lines were muddied and whites
were “blackened.”
94
In one central California community, as described by historian Charles
Wollenberg (1988), migrant whites were relegated to the theater balcony alongside African
Americans.
95
At their core, affiliation with either migrant or settler status had very real
consequences for access to the material benefits of the state. As explained by a young boy
staying in a squatters’ camp, “When they need us they call us migrants, and when we’ve picked
their crop, we’re bums and we got to get out.”
96
The enterprise of assigning settler status was
bound to regimes dictating relief as well as exclusion from the privileges of whiteness.
At the same time migration unsettled the category of whiteness, it allowed for new forms
of affiliation. Where solidarity had previously been drawn along racial lines, there was potential
for an expanded consciousness based upon shared class-status. Eunice Romero Gonzales fondly

93
Lange and Taylor explain that at the conclusion of the pea harvest one county approved a $2,500 expenditure to
fill migrant tanks with just enough gas to get them from one county to the next. See Dorothea Lange and Paul
Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties, (1939; Jean Michel Place, 1999), 146;
McWilliams similarly note that Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties appropriated $2,000 to buy gasoline
for destitute workers bound for inland counties. See Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of
Migratory Farm Labor in California (1939; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 312-314; Devra
Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal, (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1994); For more on repatriation see Francisco E Balderrama, and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade
of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Camille
Guerín-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and the American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm
Labor, 1900-1939 (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994).

94
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso, 1999).

95
Wollenberg has noted that, “in one Central Valley community the local movie theater required ‘Negroes and
Okies’ to sit in the balcony,” John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath, ed.,
Charles Wollenberg, (1936; Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1988), xiii

96
Wollenberg, 1988, 4.

196
described Fairbanks Ranch, near Redlands, as one such site. As a place where displaced white
workers from the dust bowl, resident Mexican, and African descent workers formed close ties,
multiracial forms of socialization were commonplace. She remembered, “My dad used to like to
have people over and sing and dance, play music. They were more like family gatherings than
big parties.”
97
However, rather than risk that American whites would become the next in a long
wave of racialized migratory workers, leftist agrarian partisans overtly differentiated American-
born whites from the waves of Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican workers preceding them. As
described by McWilliams in Factories in the Fields, his popular treatise against industrial
agriculture, white families were the new face of field labor. He wrote, “They have migrated as
families, bringing their possessions with them, and they are in search of homes. Most of them are
in California to stay.”
98
As Americans, Steinbeck likewise argued, white laborers would not
respond to the old methods of repression. Contrary to a long legacy of labor activism, he
proposed that Mexican workers passively accepted low wages, intimidation, and physical abuse.
White migrants, he explained, were cut from the old American stock that would rise to a middle-
class standard of living through mass participation in unionization.
99

Successfully articulating a white migrant subjectivity with which the majority of the
population could sympathize first required that progressives distance newcomers from earlier
articulations of the white tramp. Although the white tramp had a history reaching back to feudal

97
Gonzales, Eunice Romero. Interview with Robert Gonzalez. Inland Mexican Heritage. Redlands, CA. July 8,
1994, 14.

98
Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (1939; Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2000), 309; For another example of this sentiment, see also California State
Chamber of Commerce, “Migrants: A National Problem—And Its Impact of California. Report and
Recommendations of the State-Wide Committee on the Migrant Problem,” May 1940, box 63, p. 15, George
Clements Papers (Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA).

99
Charles Wollenberg has pointed out Mexicans and Filipinos were more likely to organize than white migrants,
even given bigger consequences. John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath, ed.,
Charles Wollenberg, (1936; Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1988).

197
Europe, as described by geographer Tim Cresswell (2001), the tramp emerged as a social type in
the United States as the frontier was closing at the end of the 19
th
century. In sociological studies,
the eugenics movement, vaudeville performances, and photography, he (and it was almost
always a he) was depicted as deviant, shiftless, and, even, pathological.
100
Behind the reference
to pioneer mythology was an attempt to undermine negative perceptions surrounding the tramp
through the morality of the nuclear migrant family. As described by historian Nayan Shah
(2001), the close living quarters, shared domestic responsibilities, and possibility for erotic
encounters between migrant men cast the tramp as a symbol of masculine ambiguity.
101
The
reappearance of the migrant family in the 1930s, as a trope in popular culture, helped alleviate
these fears by reaffirming the heteronormativity of poor white workers and by attributing a
morality to white mobility that reached back to frontier conquest. In a strategic recasting of
public memory, progressives explained that white migration was a necessary first step towards
the settlement of latter day pioneers.
Foremost among those adopting this strategy was novelist John Steinbeck. The plight of
California migrant families was immortalized in his Pulitzer Prize winning Grapes of Wrath
(1939). No longer aimless tramps, white migrants became the Joads: displaced families pushed
into migrancy by poverty, industrial agriculture, and the pursuit of a permanent home in the
American West. Geographer George Henderson (2003) has described the novel as a “drama of
settlement” that revolved around the struggle between fixity (power) and perpetual motion
(powerlessness). Those with dominance over land, such as industrial agriculturalists, sought to
maintain power by keeping workers in motion. As described by Henderson, “The point was to

100
Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion Books, 2001).

101
See also his discussion of queer domesticity in Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San
Francisco's Chinatown, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 104

198
define the laborer merely as a means of production rather than as inheritor of the rewards of an
agrarian tradition, one of which would be the very privilege of belonging to the landscape by
being a landholder.”
102
Settlement was the ultimate goal, one prevented by the needs of industrial
agriculturalists that consistently pushed families into migration.

Figure 22 The cover of the pamphlet “Their Blood is Strong” featured an image of Florence Thompson from
Lange’s iconic photo “Migrant Mother.”
103

An important and often overlooked precedent to the Grapes of Wrath was a pamphlet
published by Steinbeck in conjunction with the Sam Lubin Foundation. A watchdog of

102
George Henderson, California and the Fictions of Capital (Temple University Press, 2003), 217. See also Don
Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (University of Minnesota Press,
1996).

103
John Steinbeck, Their Blood is Strong (San Francisco, California: Simon J. Lubin Society of California, 1938).
199
California agribusiness the foundation promoted unity between small-scale farmers and migrant
laborers. In one such effort to rally support behind white workers, the organization printed “Their
Blood is Strong” (1938). Drawn from a collection of Steinbeck articles printed in the San
Francisco News (1936) and accompanied by Dorthea Lange photographs collected during her
work with the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the 1938 pamphlet painted a sympathetic
portrait of white migrants and the struggles they faced within California communities.
104
Not one
for subtlety, the foundation selected a cover photo that featured an emaciated mother
breastfeeding her young son on the side of a road. In an effort to invoke sympathy for the newest
wave of field workers, a multiethnic landscape of western field labor was cast as monolithically
white.
105
As described by Steinbeck, “The names of the new migrants indicate that they are of
English, German, and Scandinavian descent. There are Munns, Holbrooks, Hansens, and
Schmidts.”
106
The white American migrant family of the 1930s replaced the white ethnic tramp
of the 1920s and, in doing so, contributed to the reaffirmation of white agricultural heritage in
the California Citrus Belt.
Steinbeck overtly differentiated American-born whites from the preceding waves of
Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Sikh, and Mexican workers.
107
He wrote:
The earlier foreign migrants have invariably been drawn from a peon class. This is not
the case with new migrants. They are small farmers who have lost their farms, or farm
hands who lived with the family in the old American way. They are men who have
worked hard on their own farms and have felt the pride of possessing and living in close

104
John Steinbeck, Their Blood is Strong (San Francisco, California: Simon J. Lubin Society of California, 1938).

105
See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London:
Verso, 1998).

106
John Steinbeck, Their Blood is Strong (San Francisco, California: Simon J. Lubin Society of California, 1938), 3.

107
Charles Wollenberg has pointed out Mexicans and Filipinos were more likely to organize than white migrants,
even given bigger consequences. John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath, ed.,
Charles Wollenberg, (1936; Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1988).

200
touch with the land. They are resourceful and intelligent Americans who have gone
through the hell of drouth (ibid), have seen their lands wither and die and the top soil
blown away; and this, to a man who has owned his land, is a curious and terrible pain.
108

Steinbeck’s description likened the white migrant worker of the present to the yeoman of years
past. These were the families who had pursued and lived the agrarian dream of individual land
ownership reminiscent of the frontier era.
109
Steinbeck juxtaposed these migrants to “Chinese in
the early period, then Filipinos, Japanese and Mexicans.”
110
These men, he explained, worked
cheaply, traveled without children, and were subject to deportation when exhibiting signs of
organization.
111
In succession, Chinese workers were described as accustomed to a standard of
living with which white labor could not compete, Mexicans were portrayed as ineffective
organizers without rights, and Filipinos were characterized as a miscegenating threat.
112
As a
whole, these workers were depicted as the past of farm labor. Although white migrants treaded a
thin line between racial insiders and racial outsiders, Steinbeck was unwilling to risk the
privileges of whiteness, even if at the expense of a largely Mexican workforce.
113

108
John Steinbeck, Their Blood is Strong (San Francisco, California: Simon J. Lubin Society of California, 1938), 3.

109
In Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, he explains the symbol of the Western yeoman farmer held considerable
weight on the eastern imagination.
109
Cletus Daniels similarly explains that a society of farmers working their own
land was popularly viewed as the surest guarantee of a moral and democratic nation. However, agricultural
development in California, Daniel elaborates, was vastly different from the family farming celebrated elsewhere. In
a relatively short time, California agriculturalists began operating “farm factories” that more closely resembled an
industrial than an agricultural economy; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
(Harvard University Press, 1950); Ann Fabian provides a helpful analysis of changing views on the “myth-and-
symbol” school of Virgin Land. See Ann Fabian “In Retrospect: Back to Virgin Land.” Reviews in American
History, 24 (no. 3, 1996); Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest, a History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).

110
John Steinbeck, Their Blood is Strong (San Francisco, California: Simon J. Lubin Society of California, 1938), 2.

111
John Steinbeck, Their Blood is Strong (San Francisco, California: Simon J. Lubin Society of California, 1938), 2,
25.

112
John Steinbeck, Their Blood is Strong (San Francisco, California: Simon J. Lubin Society of California, 1938),
25-28.

113
As described by George Lipsitz, “The power of whiteness depended not only on white hegemony over separate
racialized groups, but also on manipulating racial outsiders to fight against one another, to compete with each other
201
Implicit to Steinbeck’s depictions was his acceptance of white superiority. An earlier
work, Tortilla Flat (1935), betrayed his disparaging understanding of Mexican American
communities.
114
The popular novel, his first to focus on Mexican American characters, depicted
community life as characteristically simplistic, passive, still, and impoverished. His caricature
existed in unstated juxtaposition to the economic fallout of the white household in the 1930s.
Where the Mexican was accustomed to a pastoral existence in Steinbeck’s ethnographic fiction,
asserted that white families were unaccustomed to poverty in Their Blood is Strong. Although
unintentionally, Steinbeck’s acceptance of white exceptionalism was evoked by his pamphlet’s
title. As Helen Hosmer of the Sam Lubin Foundation recalled, “These people in Germany wrote,
thinking it was something to do with the purity of blood or something and ordered five
copies.”
115
Raised by Jewish parents in a socialist household the request from “Nazi Germany”
seemed incongruent with her ideology of racial equality. Neverthless, the allusion to white racial
superiority was not lost on the larger public.
116

for white approval and to seek the rewards and privileges of whiteness for themselves at the expense of other
racialized populations.” George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from
Identity Politics (Philadelphia, Temple University, 2006), 3

114
Between 1932-1954, Mexican American characters appear in seven of Steinbeck’s works, including The Pastures
of Heaven, To a God Unknown, Tortilla Flat, The Long Valley, Cannery Row, The Wayward Bus, and Sweet
Thursday. See Robert Gentry, “Nonteleological Thinking in Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat,” in The Short Novels of John
Steinbeck: Critical Essays with a Checklist to Steinbeck Criticism, ed., Jackson J. Benson (Duke University Press,
1990).

115
Helen Hosmer interviewed by Randall Jarrell, transcript, p. 2, Special Collections (University Library, University
of California Santa Cruz).

116
During the Box Bill debates, Simon Lubin himself had publicly described agriculturalists opposition to the bill as
antithetical to the cause of supporting American laborers. “Putting the two resolutions together and reading fairly
between the lines, we have this story: American Labor has the highest standards of living which, being the basis of a
prosperous, happy and contented nation, should be protected at all costs. Therefore, let us bring into this country
large quantities of Mexican labor that American farm wages may be kept down or further depressed; and let us put
on tariffs to increase food prices that the price of food may not go higher.” See Simon Lubin, “Two Vital Questions:
Labor, Marketing,” paper presented to the Sacramento Region Citizens’ Council, California, December 10, 1927, p.
6, box 63, George Clements Papers (Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles,
CA).
202
If the Joads were the center of a “drama of settlement,” they were simultaneously the
center of a drama of mobility. In American Exodus (1939), a vivid portrayal of the dust bowl
plight by photographer Lange and economist Taylor, photographs of cars and trucks conjured
images of settler families. As if frontiersmen traveling by covered wagon, migrant families were
photographed piled into trucks with all of their possessions beside them. Like Taylor’s earlier
equation between Mexicans and cars, automobiles were synonymous with a new wave of
migrant labor in which “fruit tramps” and “hoboes” were interchangeable with “auto campers”
and “gasoline gypsies.”
117
References to jalopies, flivvers and tins stood in for references to
migrant families themselves. Driven from fields to highways, the automobile and not the plow
became the iconic symbol of Midwestern farm labor.
Agrarian partisans such as Steinbeck, Lange, and Taylor returned to a frontier discourse
of white western migration. Where frontier migration was depicted as a means towards
individual farm ownership, in the new context of the Great Depression, the end result of
migration was portrayed as dystopic. If the western frontier once signified opportunity and open
land, it was now an irrigated landscape monopolized by insatiable capitalists.
118
With farmland
replaced by industrial farms, Americans who followed westward in the tradition of their pioneer
forefathers found starvation. California, “the last west,” was a gilded landscape; one transformed
by settlement, mechanization, and endless streams of disposable farm labor for which the road
was its conduit.
119
Migrants from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri were consistently

117
McWilliams, 1939, 197-198.

118
Over 33 percent of all large-scale farms were located in California, as were 60 percent of all large-scale truck and
fruit farms. Paul S. Taylor and Tom Vasey, “Contemporary Background of California Farm Labor,” Rural
Sociology, 1 (no. 4, December 1936), 403.

119
Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties, (1939; Jean
Michel Place, 1999), 107.
203
painted as a continuum of western-bound, modern day, yeoman in a vain search for the agrarian
dream.
Whereas the Mexican bird of passage that emerged during the Box Bill debate was
described as itinerant by nature, white migrants were “gypsies by force of circumstance.”
120

They were driven to move by their innate desire to settle. As described by Steinbeck, “In their
heads, as they move wearily from harvest to harvest, there is one urge and one overwhelming
need, to acquire a little land again, and to settle on it and stop their wandering.” In succession,
Lange and Taylor quoted migrants as stating, “People has got to stop somewhere. Even a bird
has got to nest,” “We just make enough for beans, and when we have to buy gas it comes out of
the beans,” “What bothers us travellin’ people most is we can’t get no place to stay still.”
121
If
earlier iterations of the wandering white tramp invoked disdain, the migration of displaced white
farmers was depicted as a desperate attempt by white Americans to find a means of subsistence,
settlement, and an end to their status as a mobile proletariat.
122

The process by which the white migrant was transformed from a tramp to a pioneer
depended upon an erasure. If the yeoman had forged forward in an unknown frontier, then the
migrant family must as well. However, in a contradiction of frontier mythology, Midwestern
migrants chose their western destinations based on news received from friends and families. The
decision to migrate drew on earlier chains of workers who preceded the Depression-era. In his
recent dissertation, Daniel Cady convincingly argues that the Los Angeles Chamber of
Commerce played a pivotal role in populating California with white protestant, republican,

120
John Steinbeck. Their Blood is Strong (San Francisco, California: Simon J. Lubin Society of California, 1938), 3.

121
Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties, (1939; Jean
Michel Place, 1999), 141

122
Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties, (1939; Jean
Michel Place, 1999), 130-135

204
Midwestern migrants through targeted advertising campaigns in the 1920s. Southerners, though
“uninvited,” also came to take advantage of industrial opportunities in southern California.
123

Contrary to portrayals of whites as innate modern day yeoman, these expatriates of the U.S.
South and Midwest displayed a distinct aversion to farm labor, preferring oil fields to orange
groves. Although historian Becky Nicolaides has demonstrated there was an overall marked
growth in white home ownership during the 1930s, Cady has found that white Southerners, as a
subgroup, were less likely than other whites to own their own homes.
124
They rented along the
metropolitan fringe where housing was affordable and agricultural areas were avoidable.
125

Agricultural work, homeownership, and the pull of an unknown frontier did not characterize
Midwestern or Southern migrants. Nevertheless, where racial categories were in flux, reaffirming
whiteness meant linking migrant laborers with the celebratory migration of frontier mythology
and progression to white settlement.
126

By recasting white migrants as settlers in the making, labor advocates provided a
moralistic argument for extending social and economic aid to homeless workers. As noted in the
preface for Their Blood is Strong, “This is the most important social and economic problem that
faces the people of the State of California…The Sam J. Lubin Society in publishing this
pamphlet hopes that it may be able to rally wide-spread support for the abolition of this waste of

123
Daniel Jay Cady, “’Southern’ California: White Southern Migrants in Greater Los Angeles, 1920-1930” (Ph.D.
diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2005), 42-55; James Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration
and Okie Culture in California (Oxford University Press, 1989); Denise Spooner. “A New Perspective on the
Dream: Midwestern Images of Southern California in the Post-World War Decades,” California History 76, (Spring
1997), 44-57, 74-75.

124
Daniel Jay Cady, “’Southern’ California: White Southern Migrants in Greater Los Angeles, 1920-1930” (Ph.D.
diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2005), 117; Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the
Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

125
Daniel Jay Cady, “’Southern’ California: White Southern Migrants in Greater Los Angeles, 1920-1930” (Ph.D.
diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2005), 108

126
John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath, ed., Charles Wollenberg, (1936;
Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1988), 62
205
human lives. Your help is needed.”
127
Even preceding the pamphlet’s reproduction by the
Society, Steinbeck’s research had been aided by the federal Resettlement Administration. The
New Deal agency assigned a staff member to assist the author in an attempt to garner positive
publicity for their migrant camps.
128
Similarly, in 1935, Taylor was employed by the California
Emergency Relief Administration (CERA) to “undertake research designed to help in shaping
public action toward this human tide.”
129
Working with Lange, his future spouse, Taylor sought
to provide evidence supporting CERA recommendations, including the construction of sanitary
camps for agricultural families. Simultaneously, Taylor worked with the board of Social Security
to assess the administrative feasibility of extending social security benefits to agricultural
laborers widely dispersed throughout the state.
130
American Exodus emerged out of the research
for this project with the hope that as migrants became white in the popular imagination, farm
workers would once again be worthy of saving. Although working separately, Steinbeck and
Taylor had a shared goal of promoting government-funded housing for white migrant workers.
By evoking public sympathy, labor advocates legitimized public assistance targeting
white families. Consequentially, however, the question of who was entitled to relief could be
answered to the exclusion of the largely permanent Mexican-descent workforce. This absence
provided the foundation for legislation, such as a 1939 bill proposed by Senator Ralph Swing.
The former San Bernardino City Attorney and a celebrated President of the Chamber of

127
Sam Lubin Foundation, “Preface,” in Their Blood is Strong, John Steinbeck, (San Francisco, California: Simon J.
Lubin Society of California, 1938).

128
John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath, ed., Charles Wollenberg, (1936;
Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1988), vii

129
Paul Taylor, On the Ground in the Thirties (Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1983), xi.

130
Paul Taylor, On the Ground in the Thirties (Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1983), xi, xii
206
Commerce introduced a Senate bill denying “aliens” access to government relief.
131
As described
by the Los Angeles Times, its purpose was “to relieve the taxpayers of the cost of caring for
indigent aliens who have no moral or legal right to be a burden on California.”
132
Echoing this
sentiment at the San Bernardino Kiwanis Club luncheon was District State Relief Agency
Director William Fitzer. Unlike white recipients who intended to settle long-term, Fitzer argued,
Mexicans migrated to California during the Depression solely seeking government assistance.
133

In the hands of agrarian partisans, white migrant workers were disassociated from the
tramp of years passed and replaced with the white migrant family. By drawing upon the
sacrosanct image of the pioneer family, labor advocates placed the responsibility for white
migrants in the hands of the public. Harrison S. Robinson, Chairman of the Committee on
Migratory Problems, pressed that just as gold-rush adventurers were assimilated into California
so could migrants of the Midwestern and Southwestern states. Although migrants today,
Robinson noted, “The future will know them, not as transients, but as part of hundreds of
communities and as citizens of the State. Their good and the good of the State must merge.”
134

This recasting was part of a strategic effort meant to invoke sympathy for out-of-state migrants.
By replacing the largely Mexican workforce with modern day yeomen, progressives hoped to
move forward a government agenda set on providing government-funded housing to this wave of
newcomers from dust bowl states.

131
“Legislators Launch Final Rush of Bills,” Sun June 19, 1939.

132
“Alien Relief Curb Voted: Measure to save Huge Sum for State Passed, 43 to 28, by Assembly,” Los Angeles
Times, June 19, 1939; “Ralph Swing, Former State Senator Dies,” Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1961; Wiloughby
Rodman, History of the Bench and Bar of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA: William J. Porter. 1909); As a
precedent see “Stubbs Wants to Bar Aliens from Relief,” microfilm, Daily Sun, May 1, 1936.

133
“Confiscatory Taxes Seen in Relief Burden,” microfilm, The Sun. San Bernardino, CA. June 1, 1939.

134
“Action Asked on Migrants,” Los Angeles Times, December 1, 1939.
207
Conclusion
Between 1910 and 1930, depictions of Mexican American car use underwent a profound
transformation. Early investigations, such as Taylor’s migration studies, squarely associated
Mexican identity with the automobile. The onset of the Great Depression, however, witnessed
the denaturalization of Mexican automobility. Evident in popular culture, cars were increasingly
markers of Americanization for their association with aggregate consumerism, self-control, and
membership in a republic of drivers. As cars were reserved for whites, Mexicans were deemed as
both incapable of self-governance and a danger to the white public. The distancing of Mexicans
from the automobile created an erasure that would aid in the revitalization of pioneer mythology
during the dust bowl migration of the 1930s.
The growth of the white migrant farm worker created a moment of tension. Steinbeck,
Taylor, and Lange sacrificed a broad stand of solidarity with all seasonal agricultural laborers for
the more palpable white migrant family. The exclusion of non-white workers from these
depictions left many without claims to relief. Pioneer mythology cast out-of-state whites as part
of a larger American story of frontier migration and permanent settlement in the American West.
Dust Bowl migrants, it was claimed, would eventually integrate into the larger white population.
As explained by Ruth Tuck, a local anthropology student at the University of Redlands, “[an]
Okie with a good job, a nice car, and a decent suit of clothes could not be distinguished,
superficially, from the grandson of a pioneer.”
135
Mexicans, on the other hand, were marked as
perpetually foreign.
The onset of World War II definitively shifted the economic context of the Depression.
The conclusion of the war also marked the demise of the celebrated citrus industry on which
regional identity had been founded during the previous century. In its place would emerge a

135
Ruth Tuck, Not with the Fist: Mexican-Americans in a Southwest City (Harcourt, Brace, 1946), 51.
208
burgeoning logistics industry and a revised regional mythology that combined agrarian and
automotive mythology. Consistent in both of these transitions was a deep rooted suspicion of
non-white mobility and the rise of technologies rendering these movements as criminal acts.

209
CHAPTER 6

Regional Divisions: The Revival of the Anglo Fantasy Past, 1950-2000

Moving forward to the second half of the 20
th
century, the towns and colonias that had
been central to southern California agriculture became the peripheral suburbs of Los Angeles and
Orange Counties. As agriculture gave way to residential expansion following World War II, the
Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles underwent their own transformations. The shift from
transporting cargo by ship to land created a new demand for inland distribution centers. Out of
the declining Citrus Belt emerged visions for an Inland Empire built on the foundation of
industrialized agriculture, linked to the global movement of trade, and tied to long-standing
hierarchical relationships between land owners and migrant labor set earlier. Single-family
homes and warehouses were the economic backbone of this new region as goods and people
increasingly flocked to inland southern California.
The romanticized landscape of citrus country has long been critiqued. Lawyer and
journalist Carey McWilliams (1939) debunked the agrarian myth when he denounced
California’s large-scale agricultural operations as “factories in the field,” historian Douglas
Sackman (2005) described the Sunkist Campaign as a systematic effort to regiment nature, and
geographer Don Mitchell (1996) warned that the imaginary production of California’s landscape
erased the contests between farm workers and ranch owners.
1
As commercial agriculture
transitioned to a logistics based economy in the 1980s, the southern California booster romance
with citrus was reinvigorated with another myth, one that has not yet received the same scholarly

1
Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Fields: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little,
Brown, and Co, 1939); Douglas Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005); Don Mitchell, Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape
(University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
210
attention. The core of this mythology has been the memorialization of white migration and the
denaturalization of Latino immigration within the celebratory rhetoric of Route 66.
Regional developers and city officials strategically constructed a new origin myth as the
Citrus Belt, based on commercial agriculture, became the Inland Empire, a region based on
logistics. Agricultural heritage along the Highway 66 corridor rooted/routed revitalization efforts
in this former citrus colony. Like the agriculturalist fantasy discussed in previous chapters, this
celebratory narrative traced the region’s origins to the search for an agricultural utopia by white
pioneers. However, where the agriculturalists of the late 19
th
century memorialized the efforts of
western frontiersmen, World War II transplants looked to the white migrant of the Depression
era. In a familiar strategy, territorial and symbolic claims were legitimized in a regional narrative
that erased the larger multiracial and transnational flows of southern California.
Lewis Homes
Among the first to take advantage of the expanding housing market of inland southern
California following World War II were Ralph Lewis and Goldy Lewis. They met at UCLA and,
upon graduating with matching degrees in accounting in 1941, married. During the war, Mr.
Lewis served as head of accounting at the March Army Air Force Base near Riverside. Upon Mr.
Lewis completing his service, the couple started an accounting firm in Inglewood. Together, they
watched clients such as developers John Lusk and Ray Watt thrive in home building following
the war. Motivated by the G.I. fueled real estate boom, Mr. Lewis accepted a job as the chief
financial officer for Lusk. The former Los Angeles banker built a $500 million real estate empire
by the time of his death.
2
Following in his employer’s footsteps, Lewis established a home

2
John O’Dell, “John D. Lusk, Pioneering Developer in Southern California, Dies at 91,” Los Angeles Times, March
2, 1999.
211
building company that would provide affordable housing on the urban periphery and drew
unprecedented racial and class diversity within residential tracts.

Figure 23 As the owners of Lewis Homes, Ralph and Goldy Lewis had a profound impact on the shape of the Inland
Empire.
3

Where Lusk concentrated his efforts on first-time home buyers in Orange County, Mr.
Lewis built on the former agricultural land of the Inland Empire.
4
In 1955, Mr. Lewis and partner
Robert Olin launched their first housing track, Claremont Highlands. Soon afterward, Mr. Lewis
separated from Olin to launch a family business, Lewis Homes.
5
As later recalled by Mrs.
Lewis, “We thought if they can do it, we can do it, too.”
6
From the garage of their Claremont
home, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, the couple embarked on a lifetime of real estate
development with a profound and long-lasting influence on the shape of the region.

3
Darren Schenck, “Lewis Homes Co-Founder Dies at 84,” USC News, March 23, 2006,
http://news.usc.edu/#!/article/21594/Lewis-Homes-Co-Founder-Dies-at-84/

4
“John Lusk, 91, Dies; Built California Suburbs.” New York Times. March 9, 1999.

5
Rochelle Kass, “A Family Affair,” Daily Bulletin, February 15, 1999; Andy McCue, “Lewises Made Home
Building a Family Affair: Ralph and Goldy Lewis Started the Upland Company in 1957,” Press-Enterprise, October
21, 1998.

6
Chris Ehrlich, “Lewis Family Business Worth $1 Billion,” Daily Bulletin, December 16, 2001, A-1.

212
As a husband and wife team, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis engaged discourses of both
professional and familial practice to the benefit of their company. Their land review process was
illustrative of this strategy. All land purchased by Lewis Homes was subject to rigorous review.
Mr. Lewis’s “Land Buying Checklist” became a best-selling pamphlet of the National
Association of Home Builders. The 36-page workbook provided a step-by-step guide to
evaluating the potential of land for development. It instructed investors to review restrictions,
conduct in-depth physical analysis, evaluate government requirements, calculate costs, and
assess the market area, among other markers of potential profit.
7
However, the family described
its crowning means of evaluation as the “Goldy test.” In a masculine-feminine polemic between
qualitative and sentimental evaluation, the Goldy test consisted of one simple question “Would
Goldy want to live here?”
8
Conjuring a sense of women’s intuition, the intangible criteria of
“neighborhood livability” targeted young single families and, in particular, women. Within the
broader Lewis strategy of family-oriented branding, livability was a quantitative measure when
appealing to the male-dominated field of development and a sentimental measure when
appealing to the female-led consumption of home buying.
If Mr. Lewis was successful at building houses, Mrs. Lewis was the key to building
homes. Although the career of Mrs. Lewis was unlikely in a male dominated field, she was able
to flip traditional understandings of women’s place in the household to increase the marketability
of Lewis Homes. According to the Lewis model of development, choosing an appropriate site
was the first step towards successful real estate investment. The second step was ensuring
customers were satisfied with the physical space of the home. Mrs. Lewis took personal

7
Ralph M. Lewis, Land Buying Checklist, 3
rd
edition. (1981, 1985; Washington D.C.: National Association of Home
Builders, 1988).

8
“Goldy’s Vision: A Better Suburbia,” Daily Bulletin, June 24, 2004, A-6.

213
responsibility for monitoring construction materials, supervising the floor-plan design,
decorating model homes, and soliciting feedback from customers. Using her family as a
reference point, Mrs. Lewis pushed for large pantries, top appliances, spacious rooms, and
master bedrooms with walk-in closets. Her “woman’s touch” has been credited with the
company’s reputation for high-quality affordable homes, high customer satisfaction, repeat
buyers, and customer referrals.
9
If Eliza Tibbets was the mother of the Citrus Belt, then Mrs.
Lewis may well have been the mother of the Inland Empire.
10

The Lewis developments of the post-WWII era defied the logic of overt racial
segregation that predated their entry into real estate. When the Lewises first entered the market,
massive tracts of sub-divided houses had largely been defined by strict racial segregation. As
described by historian Robert Self (2003), home owners, real estate brokers, and the federal
government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle
centered on property ownership during postwar economic growth.
11
Americanist George
Sanchez (2004) has noted that older sites of racial heterogeneity, formed by urban density and
social inequality, were slated for government social engineering. Urban renewal and red lining
reinforced racial and spatial lines of difference at the same time that newcomers bypassed mixed
neighborhoods for ethnic enclaves.
12
Older heterogeneous community spaces were divided by
extensive freeway systems that both exacerbated apathy towards social inequality and privatized

9
“Goldy’s Vision: A Better Suburbia,” Daily Bulletin, June 24, 2004, A-6; Wendy Leung, “Goldy Lewis, Mother of
Inland Empire Suburbia, Dies at 84,” Daily Bulletin, March 14, 2006); Leslie Berkman, “Lewis Family: Inland
Home-Building Icons// Master Planned// After Building a Housing Empire, the Next Generation Focuses on
Communities,” Press-Enterprise, December 5, 2004.

10
Shortly before her death, the Daily Bulletin dubbed Mrs. Lewis “the mother of suburbia” for her role in shaping
the Lewis legacy. “Goldy’s Vision: A Better Suburbia,” Daily Bulletin, June 24, 2004, A-6.

11
Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton University Press,
2003).

12
George J. Sánchez, "What's Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews: Creating Multiracialism on the
Eastside during the 1950s,” American Quarterly, 56 (no. 3, 2004), 633-661
214
movement through the city. As whites fled “chocolate cities,” explains historian Eric Avila
(2004), suburban development privileged white homogeny, ordered space, and fragmented
metropolitan inequality.
13

The Lewis strategy of residential development bypassed racial restrictions. As recalled by
son Randall, “[Ralph] was a very strong advocate of fair housing and affordable housing at a
time in California when those were not popular positions…He was a visionary in that regard and
very brave.”
14
The Lewis family came from a Reform Jewish background with a firm
commitment to principles of inclusion. Active members of Temple Beth Israel in Pomona, the
Lewis family brought an ethos of equal access that drew a multiracial clientele to the inland
valley. Contrarily, the Los Angeles basin became increasingly stratified and sites of
multiculturalism such as the largely Jewish and Mexican American Boyle Heights became linked
with communist sympathies. When the new color line of the postwar era placed Jews in the
category of whiteness, Jewish newcomers settled proximate the synagogues of West Los
Angeles.
15
The Lewis family, however, represents a yet unstudied migration eastward into the
inland valleys of southern California that helped generate the region’s multiracial tapestry.
The Lewis brand of inclusive housing challenged earlier constructions of the citriscape
that bifurcated whites household from non-white labor. Unprecedented racial and class diversity
characterized these new tracts. As written by Mayor Benjamin Lawing of Pomona (1971) to Otis
Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, “Are your readers not interested un the fact that the City of
Pomona has for years opened wide its doors to people of all color and ethnic backgrounds, while

13
Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight; Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley,
CA, 2004).

14
Kass, 1999, 7.

15
George J. Sánchez, "What's Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews: Creating Multiracialism on the
Eastside during the 1950s,” American Quarterly, 56 (no. 3 2004), 633-661.

215
many other cities have remained almost totally white by subtle means of discrimination?”
16
The
availability of affordable housing at the urban periphery provided a new opportunity for middle-
class people of color who were willing to commute to work in Los Angeles and Orange counties
in exchange for a bigger home.
17
Developers like the Lewises created a pull effect that generated
a local labor pool preceding regional job creation. The concentration of a racially and
economically diverse population contributed to the development of a new economy in the post-
World War II era.
Residential expansion quickly transformed a landscape of industrial agriculture to a
landscape of stucco. Although initially concentrating on single-family homes, by the 1960s the
Lewises found themselves seeking to diversify the company. It was at this time that Lewis
Homes underwent a major transformation. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis expanded the business
throughout California, Nevada, and Utah. Symbolic of this transition, the headquarters of Lewis
Homes moved from their Claremont garage, to a model home, to a satellite office in Pomona, to
a consolidated office in Upland. Now based in San Bernardino County, the Lewises were
increasingly recognized for their achievements within real estate. Their efforts to expand the Los
Angeles residential market to the Inland Empire earned them recognition as Builder of the Year
from Professional Builder magazine, the inaugural Entrepreneur of the Year award from Ernst &
Young, and the Arrowhead Distinguished Chief Executive Lecture at California State University
San Bernardino. By 1980, the company was consistently ranked within the top three private

16
Benjamin Lawing to Otis Chandler, January 27, 1971, personal collection of Albert Castro.

17
In her recent dissertation, Deirdre Pfeiffer found that 130,000 African Americans migration to Riverside and San
Bernardino counties between 1980 and 2007. She found that new residential development combined with color-
blind sales made the Inland Empire a new frontier for African Americans. Deirdre Pfeiffer, “Sprawling to
Opportunity: Los Angeles African Americans on the Exurban Fringe” (Ph.D. diss., University of California Los
Angeles, 2012).

216
home builders in the country. With 50,000 homes to the company’s credit, Lewis Homes had a
profound impact on the landscape of the former Citrus Belt.
18

Figure 24 Stucco quickly replaced orange groves in the changing economy of the postwar Inland Empire.
19

In retirement, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis increasingly handed responsibility to financier John
Goodman and their children. Richard Lewis oversaw California, Robert Lewis managed projects
in Nevada, Roger Lewis handled construction, and Randall Lewis managed sales and
marketing.
20
As a result of their parents having gained the ground floor in the Inland Empire real

18
“About,” Lewis Apartment Communities, 2013, http://www.lewisapartments.com/aboutus.aspx

19
“Home Brand” artist unknown, undated, on exhibition at the Claremont Packinghouse, Claremont, CA). Author
unidentified. Photograph by author.

20
Kass 1992; Andy McCue, “Lewises Made Home Building a Family Affair: Ralph and Goldy Lewis Started the
Upland Company in 1957,” Press-Enterprise, October 21, 1998.

217
estate market, the Lewis sons were ideally positioned for rapid growth in the region. Under their
management, Lewis Homes expanded their operations from the construction of single-family
homes to master-planned communities.
21
Throughout the 1980s it was this type of development
that would shape the growth and economy of inland southern California as it transitioned from
an agricultural Citrus Belt to a critical nexus of global trade: the Inland Empire.
The Inland Empire
If the Citrus Belt was positioned as the economic frontier of the modern American West,
then the Inland Empire was the economic frontier of the Pacific Rim. As noted in an
advertisement for one business park:
Within this megaplex [of southern California], only one region remains which offers all
the opportunities which brought dynamic growth in earlier years to Los Angeles and its
suburbs, to the San Fernando Valley Orange County and San Diego County. This is the
Inland Empire, stretching eastward from the border of Los Angeles County to
California’s boundaries with Nevada and Arizona…a long, long way.
22

Though located 60 miles from any major seaport, the competitive advantage created when
accessible transportation, reduced costs, and the availability of land combined positioned Ontario
to become a critical nexus in the global economy. As the region came to depend heavily on
warehouse related employment in the 1990s, commercial agriculture transitioned to a real estate
and logistics based-economy. Stimulated by mixed-use developments, the agricultural
development that had given birth to an Anglo fantasy past adapted to the emergence of a new
economy. Logistics created the conditions from which a revised regional myth would emerge.

21
Bruce Kelley, “Eastward , Ho: Southern Californians Are Headed Inland, to the Area Around the Ontario
Airport—the Newest Edge City in a Region that Invented the Concept.” Los Angeles Times. March 15, 1992.

22
“California Commerce Center at Ontario,” pamphlet, circa 1986, Ontario Center Vertical File (Ontario Library,
Model Colony Room, Ontario, CA).

218
Alongside agrarian heritage, automotive heritage took on growing importance in the Inland
Empire.

Figure 25 The shift to containerization in the 1970s led to the mass adoption of intermodal transportation of goods,
making the Inland Empire a crucial distribution point between the Port of Los Angeles and inland destinations.
23

The Los Angeles and Long Beach ports have long played a powerful role in the
development of southern California. Early on, Phineas Banning, a driving force behind their
expansion, operated a freighting business that connected the port cities of San Pedro and
Wilmington to the distribution centers of San Bernardino, California.
24
The Southern Pacific
Railroad connected Ontario to Los Angeles in 1876 and just over ten years later the Santa Fe
Railroad reached Ontario and further connected its aspiring farmers to regional hubs and national
markets.
25
Although Banning contributed to a palimpsest of goods movement through inland
southern California, logistic operations were largely concentrated in port-adjacent cities until the

23
Still image from Port of Los Angeles, “The Port of Los Angeles: A History,” documentary (Los Angeles, 2009);
Port of Los Angeles, “Strategic Plan, 2012-2017” (Los Angeles, 2012) 4.

24
Observation based on analysis of General Land and Business Papers 1887-1920, Banning Co Collection
(Huntington Library, San Marino, CA); See also Ernest Marquez, Port Los Angeles: A Phenomenon of the Railroad
Era (San Marino, CA: Golden West Books, 1975); For a broad history of port development, see “The Port of Los
Angeles: A History,” documentary (Los Angeles: Port of Los Angeles, 2009).

25
Paul Sandul, “The Agriburb: Recalling the Suburban Side of Ontario, California’s Agricultural Colonization,”
Agricultural History, 84, (no. 2, 2010), 199.
219
advent of containerization—the change from bulk cargo to intermodal shipping containers—in
the 1950s. Rather than handling items between their points of origin and destination, cargo could
now be transported in stackable trailer boxes that significantly reduced the costs of shipping,
labor, and maintaining inventory.
The goods movement was revolutionized when containerization reached maturity in the
1970s. As described by sociologists Edna Bonacich and Jake Wilson, “It seems safe to say that
containerization was a prerequisite to global production.”
26
The importance of this shift cannot
be overstated. Suddenly, the typical path for goods from Asia, through the Panama Canal, and to
the east coast was diverted to southern California. Rather than moving by ship, goods were
transported at much greater speeds across the United States by truck and rail. The neighboring
Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach grew from adolescents serving the west coast to the largest
container load center in the United States. As the journey of shipments shifted from the Panama
Canal to southern California, the move from the port to distribution centers positioned the Inland
Empire as a critical node in a larger port-complex.
27

The inland warehousing boom has been credited to the Inland Empire’s strategic location
as a transportation gateway.
28
Indeed, the largest logistics concentration has occurred along the
traffic arteries of the I-10 and the CA-60.
29
As described by David Ariss, the managing director

26
Edna Bonacich and Jake Wilson, Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution (Cornell
University Press, 2008), 51; See also Carola Hein, ed., Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks
(Routledge, 2011).

27
Port of Los Angeles, “Key Performance Indicators” (Los Angeles, 2009); Port of Los Angeles, “Port of Los
Angeles Handbook and Business Directory, 2011-2012,” (Los Angeles, 2011); Port of Los Angeles, “The LA
Advantage (Los Angeles, 2011); Port of Los Angeles, “Strategic Plan, 2012-2017” (Los Angeles, 2012). See also
Edna Bonacich and Jake Wilson, Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution (Cornell University
Press, 2008); See also Carola Hein, ed., Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks (Routledge, 2011).

28
David Silver, “Gateway to Center to be Built: $27-million Project to Have 22 Buildings,” The Daily Report,
January 13, 1987.

29
University of Redlands, “Is Southern California Too Dependent on Logistics?,” Press Release (June 2011).
220
of a major development project, “There is no land parcel in western San Bernardino more in the
path of progress than this one.”
30
In his recent dissertation, geographer Juan De Lara contends
that increased financial capital for warehouse construction and the racialized geography of a low-
wage citrus workforce further accommodated this transformation.
31
His findings destabilize the
locational logic popularly alluded to by developers and suggests, instead, that growth in the
goods movement and housing industry cannot be explained by geography alone.
The City of Ontario California was central to the transformation of inland southern
California from a Citrus Belt to an Inland Empire. Ontario was incorporated in 1882 by brothers
George and William Chaffey with a vision for a “model colony” of homes and orchards rising
from a desert.
32
The goal of creating a master planned community that merged industrial, retail,
and service uses was resurrected by the announcement of a mixed-use development under the
management of the Chevron Land and Development Company.
33
Built on the ruins of the
bankrupt Ontario Motor Speedway, the Ontario Center was a billion dollar investment
envisioned as the future “urban center” of the Inland Empire. Chevron strategically chose the
abandoned parcel for its proximity to the Ontario International Airport, the third largest freight
airport in California.
34
Originally built as a flying club in 1923, ran as a municipal airport in

30
Cindy Yingst, “Commerce Center Has Found an ‘Excellent Climate’ for Growth,” The Sun, February 27, 1987.
See also Andrew Moore, “Not Exactly a Shopping Center: But Retailers are Thriving in Business Park,” The Daily
Report, May 10, 1987; T. A. Sunderland, “Moving on to the Next Phase: California Commerce Center,” Inland
Business, November 1987; Andrew Moore, “Filling Up: Commerce Center Ready for Phase III,” Daily Report,
September 27, 1987, E-1 and E-3; Barbara Taylor, “The Ontario Center: Building an Urban Center of the 21
st

Century,” Inland Business, April 1988.

31
See the recent work of Juan de Lara at the University of Southern California. Juan De Lara, “Goods Movement
and Metropolitan Inequality,” Cities, Regions and Flows (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).

32
Ontario Redevelopment Agency, “Ontario Vintage Industrial Park,” brochure, circa 1970, Ontario Center Vertical
File (Ontario Library, Model Colony Room, Ontario, CA).

33
“Ontario International Center: Fifteen Year Development Project Begins on Speedway Site,” clipping, fall 1982,
Foothill Views, Ontario Center Vertical File (Ontario Library, Model Colony Room, Ontario, CA).

221
1929, and used as a training base by the Army Air Corps in 1943, the airport was acquired by the
Los Angeles airport system in 1967. Virtually all growth in the logistics industry of inland
southern California revolved around the Ontario Airport, the only commercial airport in the
Inland Empire until the Norton Air Force Base and March Air Reserve Base were opened for
commercial purposes in 2000.
35
If Riverside was the heart of the Citrus Belt, Ontario was the
first site of the now extensive logistics industry.
36

Figure 26 The Ontario Center and California Commerce Center were two of the first master-planned mixed-use
developments in the City of Ontario. Both were located adjacent to major transportation arteries and planned
systematically for transportation flow.
37

34
“Ontario Center a Winner,” clipping, April 11, 1984, Ontario Center Vertical File (Ontario Library, Model Colony
Room, Ontario, CA).

35
R A Bluffstone and B Ouderkirk, “Warehouses, Trucks, and [PM.sub.2.5]: Human Health and Logistics Industry
Growth in the Aastern Inland Empire,” Contemporary Economic Policy, January 2007.

36
Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis. “Is Southern California Too Dependent on Logistics” (Redlands, CA:
University of Redlands, June 2011), http://www.redlands.edu/news/10062.aspx

37
Images from Ontario Center Vertical File (Ontario Library, Model Colony Room, Ontario, CA).
222
The California Commerce Center—a development by Ontario Industrial Partners, a
partnership of the Lusk Company, Cadillac Fairview/California, Inc., and Shaw and Talbot
Associates II—soon followed the Ontario Center. Immediate access to the Interstate 10,
Interstate 15, and California State Route 60, as well as its connections to the Santa Fe and Union
Pacific Railroads, served as an enticing draw to the many companies that would lease land from
the company over the proceeding decades, including Kipp Group health care products, Domino’s
Pizza, United Parcel Service, and BMW. Starting at $4 a square foot, land in the California
Commerce Center offered significant savings compared to the land adjoining John Wayne
Airport at $11 a square foot and Los Angeles International Airport at $25 a square foot. Where
Orange County and Los Angeles were reaching capacity, the business park opened 1,350 acres
for future development.
38
At 55% and 84% savings, respectively, the Inland Empire seemed a
new warehousing frontier as private developers and government agencies adopted a
redevelopment strategy based on global neoliberalism and a return to speculative land
development in southern California.
39

The Citrus Belt was becoming an Inland Empire where economic relations between the
United States and the world were sorted, packed, and tested. A crucial component of this change
was the inclusion of Ontario in the Long Beach Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ). FTZs are sites where
foreign exporters store goods and defer payment to customs until products are transferred to the
domestic market for public purchase. First created in 1934 by the Foreign-Trade Zones Act to
encourage foreign commerce, FTZs were expanded in the 1950s to allow manufacturing and

38
“Land Sales Hit Record Pace at California Commerce Center,” Insite. 37, Spring 1986, clipping, Ontario Center
Vertical File (Ontario Library, Model Colony Room, Ontario, CA).

39
For more on redevelopment and urban frontiers see Neil Smith, New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the
Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996).

223
special purpose zones for U.S. exports. The program grew in popularity during the 1980s when
profit added—that is value added when using U.S. labor or materials within the FTZ—was
removed from dutiable fees. It was just prior to this decision that FTZ-50 was established in
Long Beach. Placing the port and adjacent properties outside of U.S. Customs territory, the Long
Beach FTZ offered advantages that stimulated foreign commerce. These included increasing
cash flow based on the deferred payment of duties, averting duty payment on unusable
merchandise and goods sold outside of the United States, and offering the opportunity to store
foreign goods in the United States while waiting for a rise in market demand.
40

In November of 1984, Robert Townsend requested that the Ontario City Council adopt a
resolution endorsing the establishment of a FTZ. Doing so coalesced with the city’s vision of a
master planned community. Developers had already recruited of a diverse workforce. Now, they
needed the industry to sustain it. By December of that year, the City of Ontario passed the
resolution endorsing the FTZ’s “ability to further expand the tax base and create additional job
opportunities” in a city already making a concerted effort to expand business and job growth
through cooperation with the private sector.
41
With the support of the city government, the FTZ
request was well positioned to become the first expansion of the Long Beach FTZ, the only site
in southern California in which land within an FTZ could be held by private business rather than
the state. As a result, FTZ-50 became the largest privately owned FTZ in the United States.
42

40
“Foreign Trade Zones.” Journal of Commerce, United States Importers and Exporters Directory. Volume 1. NY:
1989; Patti Davis Loya, “Ontario’s Foreign Trade Zone: Beating the Butter Quota,” Inland Empire Business
Journal, September 28- October 27, 1990; United States International Trade Commission. “The Implications of
Foreign –Trade Zones for U.S. Industries and for Competitive Conditions Between U.S. and Foreign Firms,” report
to the Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives on Investigation No. 332-248 Under Section
332 (g) of the Tariff Act of 1930 (Washington, February 1988).

41
See City of Ontario. Resolution No. 10, 075. City Council Minutes. Ontario, CA, December 4, 1984.

42
“Land Sales Hit Record Pace at California Commerce Center,” Insite. Special Collections Ontario Developments.
Spring 1986.
224
Approved by the Foreign Trade Zones Board, the FTZ now stretched to include the California
Commerce Center located about 60 miles inland. As described by Long Beach Harbor
Commission President Jim Gray:
This expansion of the foreign trade zone program to include a major commercial-
industrial park is a necessary step in the ports plan to insure large-scale zone operations.
It further reflects the joint cooperation of the Port of Long Beach, local governments and
private industry in facilitating commerce and trade.
43

What originated as private business between shippers and logistics companies was now
cemented in public policy.
Ontario was situated to become a central part of the southern California port-complex, as
well as global commerce, in a partnership that literally placed portions of the city outside the
jurisdiction of U.S. Customs. In supporting the FTZ proposal, city officials sought to connect the
already substantial residential development in the region to localized employment opportunities.
Doing so ideally positioned the city for mixed-use developments, such as the Ontario Center and
the California Commerce Center.
Mixed-use developments were part of a larger trend towards modern community
planning. Historian Greg Hise (1997) has contended that builders combined rational house
construction with planning principles in his analysis of Kaiser Homes in Fontana.
44
The Lewis
family similarly engaged in mixed-use development. In 1984, the company broke ground on
their inaugural master-planned development, the 1,300-acre Terra Vista Apartments in Rancho

43
Terrence M. Green, “Ontario Center Part of Long Beach Trade Zone,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1985;
“Ontario’s Free Trade Zone Attracting More Business,” Inland Empire Business Journal, October 30- November 27,
1985, 10.

44
Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth Century Metropolis (John Hopkins, 1997), 153-185,
213

225
Cucamonga.
45
Still inclusive of significant residential construction, the development integrated a
medical center, schools, green space, an office park, and five shopping centers.
46

Figure 27 The Specific Plan for the California Commerce Center integrated multiple land uses including retail,
office, light industrial, rail industrial and SCE easement. Notice that light industrial and rail industrial form the cast
majority of the project.
47

Where Kaiser Homes and Terra Vista privileged residential development, the mixed-use
developments that emerged around the central transportation corridors of Ontario privileged
industrial uses. One of the most influential people behind the shape of the California Commerce
Center was David Ariss, managing director for the project beginning in 1984.
48
A Canadian

45
Bruce Kelley, “Eastward , Ho: Southern Californians Are Headed Inland, to the Area Around the Ontario
Airport—the Newest Edge City in a Region that Invented the Concept,” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 1992.

46
Jennifer Oldham, “Obituaries; Ralph M. Lewis; Home Building Industry Titan, Philanthropist,” Los Angeles
Times, Home Edition, January 13, 2001, B6.

47
City of Ontario, California Commerce Center Specific Plan (Ontario January 1983).

48
T. A. Sunderland, “Moving on to the Next Phase: California Commerce Center,” Inland Business, November
1987.
226
native who attended Claremont Men’s College and served in the Marine Corps during the
Vietnam War, Ariss has been characterized as a man with “no patience for complacency,” “a
very no-nonsense type of person,” and “a hard-driving visionary.”
49
Described by Richard Lewis
as “the pit bull” and by regional economist John Husing as a “ferocious advocate,” Ariss was the
driving force behind executing Lusk’s vision for the $1 billion mixed-use California Commerce
Center.
50
Lusk is credited as one of the first home builders to invest in commercial development
as a means to diversify and spread risks during lean times.
51
This lesson was adopted widely,
most notable by Ariss in his work within the Inland Empire. As managing director of the Center,
Ariss was a staunch advocate of flexible designs that could be used for manufacturing,
distribution, and offices.
52
At the same time, developers sought to attract a quality base of
employees. If rain was to follow the plow to the western frontier of American empire, jobs were
to follow the people to the inland empire of global trade.
53

What Ariss was for the California Commerce Center, Willard “Skip” Morris was to the
Ontario Center. Succeeding William Wren as senior project manager for the Ontario Center,
Morris was a diversified manager with projects in Montebello, Mission Viejo, and Tucson. The
navy veteran later moved to Santa Cruz, where he served on the City Planning Commission and

49
Naomi Kresge, “Local Leading Architect David Ariss Dies at 65,” Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, February 3, 2005;
See also Rob Messinger, “David Ariss—Ontario’s Surly but Successful Power Broker,” The Business Press, June 3,
1996.

50
Naomi Kresge, “Local Leading Architect David Ariss Dies at 65,” Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, February 3, 2005.

51
John O’Dell and Daryl Strickland, “Pioneering O.C. Builder John D. Lusk Dead at 91,” Los Angeles Times,
March 2, 1999.

52
Naomi Kresge, “Local Leading Architect David Ariss Dies at 65,” Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, February 3, 2005.

53
T.A. Sunderland, “Moving on to the Next Phase: California Commerce Center,” November 1987.

227
as president of the local Historical Society.
54
Like Ariss’s California Commerce Center, Morris’s
Ontario Center was to be a balanced “urban center.” He explained, “to us that means carefully
planning a balance of housing, schools, parks, recreation, theaters, job opportunities and an
overall ambience that will serve the future well.”
55
“A City in Itself,” the Ontario Center was to
be a carefully designed community where labor, leisure, and daily life were closely stitched
together.
56
Symbolic of this transition from the suburban edge of Los Angeles to an urban center
in its own right, the Ontario Center literally put the Inland Empire on the map by renaming its
east-west corridor from G Street to Inland Empire Boulevard.
57
By trading the work-home split
of suburbia for a new urbanist vision—an urban design movement based on mixed-uses,
walkability, and environmentalism—the design of the Ontario Center promised to trade
“spectacular sunsets” for “breathing space on our freeways,” while at the same time placing
Ontario at the center of global commerce.
58

Developers claimed that planned communities promoted a sustainable lifestyle that
reduced work related travel and smog. The Ontario Center was to be laid out concentrically in
order to encourage smooth traffic flow. By increasing the density of new developments and
providing pedestrian-friendly pathways and sidewalks, the company claimed to encourage

54
“Senior Project Manager Appointed for Chevron’s Ontario Center Facility,” Los Angeles Times, September 15,
1985.

55
Barbara Taylor, “The Ontario Center: Building an Urban Center for the 21
st
Century,” Inland Business, April
1988, 16.

56
“Billion $$ Project Takes Shape: Ontario Center—A City in Itself,” Business Empire, May 1986, 4-5.

57
Taylor, 1988, 84

58
“You Can Get There for Here. Try Telecommuting,” Inland Business, December 1990; Jane Jacobs, The Death
and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).

228
walking and biking as a substitute for driving.
59
Retail was to be the focus of pedestrian life.
Ontario residents were encouraged to meander through the Ontario Center’s shopping centers,
first Plaza Continental, an entertainment and shopping center anchored by an El Torito, and later
the “power center” of Ontario Mills, a 100 acre retail center of factory brand outlets.
60
At the
California Commerce Center, developers suggested that the 1,400-acre industrial-office park
inherently contributed to regional air quality goals, generating employment near existing
housing. Doing so, the company explained, would cut vehicle emissions and reduce congestion
on area highways. The internal design of the center was said to facilitate circulation through
development. Internal streets provided a non-obtrusive site for on-street parking and major
corridors were spaced out to minimize congestion during peak hours. Pedestrian sidewalks and
bicycle lanes where included, as were measures encouraging local transit, employee van pools,
and preferential parking spaces for participants.
61

By focusing on new urbanism and smog reduction, the so-called “Back-of-the-Book
Items,” such as cumulative and growth-inducing impacts, were overshadowed.
62
Hazards related
to habitat destruction, warehouse conditions, diesel emissions, and economic risk were subverted
for ‘smart growth.’ It was a diverse group of government agencies, warehouse workers,
academics, students, and local residents who came together, though in often separate efforts, to

59
Jim McConnell, “Ontario Center Looks for a Busy 1989,” The Daily Report, clipping, November 11, 1988, p. B-
5, Ontario Center Vertical File (Ontario Library, Model Colony Room, Ontario, CA); “Ontario ‘Power Center’ Plans
Unveiled,” The Daily Report, clipping, January 5, 1989, p. B-5, Ontario Center Vertical File (Ontario Library,
Model Colony Room, Ontario, CA).

60
Jim McConnell, “Ontario Center Looks for a Busy 1989,” The Daily Report, November 11, 1988, clipping, p. B-
5. Ontario Center Vertical File (Ontario Library, Model Colony Room, Ontario, CA); “Ontario ‘Power Center’ Plans
Unveiled.” The Daily Report, January 5, 1989, clipping, p. CA. B-5, Ontario Center Vertical File (Ontario Library,
Model Colony Room, Ontario, CA).

61
City of Ontario, California Commerce Center Specific Plan, October 6, 1992, II-2, VII-11-12, and VIII-4.

62
See William Fulton and Paul Shigley, “Chapter 9: The California Environmental Quality Act.” Guide to
California Planning. 3
rd
edition (Solano Press, 2005).

229
advocate for alternative ideas of environmental health.
63
The Department of Fish and Game was
at the forefront of defense from habitat destruction. It rallied behind the San Diego horned lizard,
a rare, sandy hued, scaled reptile that caused considerable ire among developers when it was first
seen on a parcel of the second phase of the California Commerce Center’s construction.
According to a recent study, one-sixth of the commercial development in the entire nation was
taking place in the Ontario area due to their rapid construction.
64

The plight of indigenous flora and fauna aside, local residents paid some of the greatest
costs related to warehouse-centered development. The demand for consumer goods contributed
to the constant movement of trucks and trains between seaports and distribution centers that
outweighed the smog mitigating efforts lauded within the master-planned business parks of
Ontario. This movement had an uneven impact on low-income communities, such as Mira Loma,

63
Conditions within the rapidly expanding warehouses—73,000 jobs were added in the logistics sector between
1990 and 200—have also emerged as a topic of concern in recent years. I have not included it in the main text
because warehouse managers and staffing agencies hold primary responsibility for mitigation, but it warrants
mention since developers provided the conditions and stage to make it possible. Warehouse workers and academic
allies have been among the most vocal in this chorus. For instance, Warehouse Workers United (WWU), in
collaboration with UCLA’s Labor Occupation Safety program, has brought attention to the health and safety
violations laborers encounter as a part of their routine workday. The WWU in partnership with Deogracia Cornelio,
the Associate Director for Education at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Labor Occupational Safety and
Health program, brings to life the hidden costs behind windowless warehouses in a report titled “Shattered Dreams
and Broken Bodies.” Exposure to chemical and air pollutants, ergonomic related injury, repetitive stress, straining as
a result of lifting and pulling, falls, dangerous machinery, extreme temperatures, and lack of heat are among the
most pervasive hazards reported in a survey of over 100 warehouse employees. Debilitating work injuries were
traced to systemic causes, such as lack of training and precautionary measures, time pressure, intimidation when
faced with an injury, and lack of enforcement of health and safety laws. See Steven Cuevas, “Inland Warehouse
Workers File Complaint Over Alleged Unsafe Working Conditions,” KPCC Southern California Public Radio. July
26, 2011. Last accessed July 26, 2012. http://www.scpr.org/news/2011/07/26/27895/inland-warehouse-workers-file-
complaint-over-alleg/; Steven Cuevas, “Judge Blocks Inland Empire Walmart Distribution Center from Laying Off
Workers,” KPCC Southern California Public Radio, February 1, 2012. Last accessed July 26, 2012.
http://www.scpr.org/news/2012/02/01/31078/judge-blocks-inland-empire-walmart-distribution-ce/; Warehouse
Workers United and Deogracia Cornelio, “Shattered Dreams and Broken Bodies: A Brief Review of the Inland
Empire Warehouse Industry,” Fontana, CA, 2011,
http://www.warehouseworkersunited.org/fileadmin/userfiles/Uploads/
Shattered_Dreams_and_Broken_Bodies718.pdf; See also Jason Struna, Kevin Curwin, Edwin Elias, Ellen Reese,
Tony Roberts, and Elizabeth Bingle, “Unsafe and Unfair: Labor Conditions in the Warehouse Industry,” Policy
Matters, 5, (no. 2, Summer 2012).

64
Sylvia Betancourt and Mark Vallianatos, “Storing Harm: The Health and Community Impacts of Goods
Movement, Warehousing, and Logistics.” THE Impact Project Policy Brief Series, January 2012.
230
which neighbors Ontario. Pollution has not respected the municipal boundaries of this largely
Latino town in Riverside County, where children exhibit the slowest lung growth and weakest
lung capacity in southern California. A longitudinal study of fourth graders reveals that long-
term exposure to ambient pollution, such as emissions of acid vapor and elemental carbon related
to diesel truck traffic, affects the development of small airways in the lung that may persist into
adulthood, thus causing increased risk of respiratory illness.
65
The trucks and trains that were
critical to the shift from overseas transportation and led to the intermodalism that has made
warehousing in inland southern California possible, emit particulate pollution that has been
linked to cardiovascular complications, cancer, asthma, decreased lung function, reproductive
health problems, and premature death among the people living and working near busy roads and
logistics facilities.
66
In addition to exposure to hazardous conditions, warehousing provided less
permanent employment and lower pay than manufacturing facilities or even agriculture.
67

In a partnership between government agencies and private developers, Ontario was
positioned as a critical nexus in the port-complex following the mass adoption of
containerization. The housing boom of the post-World War II era had provided a foundation of
employees that served as a lure for logistics based industries. In a strategic effort to connect
homeowners to industry, city officials promoted mixed-use development that clustered along
major transportation arteries. In the development that would follow, a discourse of life-work

65
W J Gauderman and R McConnell et al, “Association Between Air Pollution and Lung Function Growth in
Southern California Children,” American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 2007; W J
Guarderman, Frank Gilliland, et al. “Association between Air Pollution and Lung Function Growth in Southern
California Children: results from a Second Cohort,” American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine,
166 (no. 1, July 1, 2002), 76-84.

66
Sylvia Betancourt and Mark Vallianatos, “Storing Harm: The Health and Community Impacts of Goods
Movement, Warehousing, and Logistics,” THE Impact Project Policy Brief Series, January 2012.

67
Andrew Moore, “Filling Up: Commerce Center Ready for Phase III,” Daily Report, September 27, 1987, E-1 and
E-3; Andrew Moore, “Commerce Center Land Sales a Circus,” Daily Report, October 31, 1987, B-5.
231
balance obscured the economic and environmental costs paid by the largely Latino population in
the name of global trade.
Imagineering an Inland Empire
Just north of the Interstate 10 freeway, the landmark sign of the Ontario Center beckoned
glances by passing motorists. The dreams for a mixed-use site balancing office, industrial, and
retail were as depressed as this dilapidated monument. Peeling and cracked, the once proud
symbol of development in the Inland Empire was now an indicator of blight. That is until 1998
when, rather than tearing the sign down, the new owners of the site covered “its eyesore” with a
fresh blue and white canvas advertising a new master planned development. Now in the hands of
the Lewis Homes Management Corporation and Sares-Regis Group, developers hoped to revive
their dreams of a regional center.
68
This time they would draw inspiration from the original
orange magnates in a re-vision of the agriculturalist fantasy. The culmination of this vision was
the Victoria Gardens regional life-style center in Rancho Cucamonga.
Best known for its melodic name—made infamous as a Looney Tunes’ travel stop and
Foghorn Leghorn’s hometown—Rancho Cucamonga is now the third fastest growing city in the
Inland Empire, one of the fastest growing regions in the United States.
69
When incorporated in
1977, Rancho Cucamonga was largely a professional-class residential suburb.
70
The population
grew by 40% between 2000 and 2009 alone. While the Inland Empire as a whole experienced a
significant growth in its Latino population and a decrease in its white population, Rancho
Cucamonga maintained a smaller percentage of non-white residents than surrounding cities. In

68
Randyl Drummer, “New Owner of Ontario Center Covers its Eyesore,” The Business Press, March 30, 1998, 11.

69
Rancho Cucamonga Redevelopment Agency, Community and Economic Profile, Rancho Cucamonga, CA, 2010.

70
U.S. Census Bureau, 2006-2008 American Community Survey; Community and Economic Profile, (Washington,
2010).
232
2008, 43.5% of city residents were white compared to 37.5% in the region, while 36.9%
identified as Latino, compared to 42.7% in the region.
71
The combination of rapid growth and
demographic change throughout inland southern California led to a nascent nostalgia for a semi-
rural fantasy of white agriculturalists that disproportionately attracted white homebuyers. Rancho
Cucamonga was the new Riverside: a settler colony attempting to lay claim to a majority-
minority region through the erasure of prior multiracial migrations and a focused celebration of
white settlement.
City officials in Rancho Cucamonga adopted two strategies in their efforts to build the
city. The first was differentiating itself from less affluent, predominantly Latino suburbs. A
climate of escalated anti-immigrant sentiment was prevalent throughout San Bernardino County.
San Bernardino was the hometown of Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrest, the base of the anti-
immigration group Save Our State, and one of the first counties to enter a voluntary
Memorandum of Agreement with the Federal government that enabled local police to enforce
immigration law locally. The second strategy was adopting an agenda that promoted a sense of
place in a region largely comprised of newcomers. Rancho Cucamonga strategically pursued
both of these goals by celebrating its agricultural heritage. Through embedding agrarian
iconography into the built environment, city-planners and developers celebrated Anglo routes
and institutionalized the erasure of multiracial roots in inland southern California.
Beginning in the 1980s, Rancho Cucamonga city planners envisioned a regional
commercial center as a public-private venture that would generate revenue for the city and

71
U.S. Census Bureau, 2006-2008 American Community Survey; Community and Economic Profile, (Washington,
2010).

233
function as a civic plaza.
72
The Lewis family delivered this vision. In a $554 million deal made
during the fall of 1998, the Lewis brothers sold the family-operated Lewis Homes to Kaufman
and Broad (K&B). Where Lewis Homes built about 3,000 single-family homes in 1998, K&B
was estimated to have sold 5 to 6 times that amount. Mega-builders like K&B—who benefited
from an economy of scale, volume pricing on appliances and building materials, as well as lower
loan rates—outpaced medium-sized builders like the Lewis family.
73
In the midst of the Inland
Empire’s housing boom, even a top company like Lewis Homes needed a new development
approach if it hoped to compete with the expansion it had helped initiate. The opportunity to
invest in master planned communities provided the answer to their search.
Money in hand, as well as a share of K & B Home’s stock, the Lewis family embarked on
a career of mixed-use development. Adopting their parents’ concern with total livability and
drawing upon inspiration from the master-planned communities of the Lusk and the Irvine
Company, the Lewis Group of Companies rebranded itself as a master developer. In doing so,
they hoped to appeal to the growing population of retirees, professionals, and young singles in
search of affordable apartments with shared amenities. As a private builder, the company was
uniquely positioned to build these complexes, which required working relationships with local
government, liquid assets, and the ability to carry land on their books while arranging permits
and infrastructural connections that public companies were hesitant to carry.
74
Incredibly
successful, by 2004 their business assets exceeded $1 billion and as of 2012 they counted almost

72
The William Lyon Company, The Victoria Community Plan, Submitted to the City of Rancho Cucamonga July
1980; LSA Associates, Inc., Final Environmental Impact Report: Victoria Gardens Project, City of Rancho
Cucamonga, SCH # 20010301028, December 19, 2001.

73
Joseph Acenzi, “Focus// Development// Lewis: Shift to Commercial Projects Right Move// No Regrets about
Abandoning Hot Home Market,” The Business Press, November 22, 2004.

74
Leslie Berkman, “Lewis Family: Inland Home-Building Icons// Master Planned// After Building a Housing
Empire, the Next Generation Focuses on Communities,” The Press-Enterprise, December 5, 2004; Matt Wrye,
“Developer Reflects on Inland Empire Housing Market, Economy,” San Bernardino County Sun, January 24, 2009.
234
57,000 single-family homes, over 10,000 apartment units, and 14 million square feet of retail,
office, and industrial space to their credit.
75
Their crowning jewel, however, was Victoria
Gardens.

Figure 28 Initial architectural renderings of Victoria Gardens, pictured above, portrayed an open space mall with
balanced pedestrian and vehicular traffic, as well as a thriving commercial life.
76

With about 16 million visitors annually, the Victoria Gardens regional life-style center
opened to the public in 2004. Although originally imagined as a one-theme-design with
community-oriented retail, such as a locksmiths, grocery stores, and pharmacies, Victoria
Gardens was designed with sub-districts organized around a village green and differentiated by
architecture and landscaping reminiscent of the region’s citrus and viniculture. With higher-end
retailers such as Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn, Anthropologie, and White House Black Market,

75
Andy McCue, “Lewises Made Home Building a Family Affair: Ralph and Goldy Lewis Started the Upland
Company in 1957,” Press-Enterprise, October 21, 1998; Leslie Berkman, “Lewis Family: Inland Home-Building
Icons// Master Planned// After Building a Housing Empire, the Next Generation Focuses on Communities,” Press-
Enterprise, December 5, 2004; Jason Newell, “Building Influence,” Sun, April 8, 2007; Lewis Group of Companies,
“A History of Accomplishments from 1955,” June 25, 2012, http://www.lewisop.com.

76
“Developer Unveils Plans for Rancho Cucamonga Regional Shopping District,” Rancho Cucamonga Media
Packet, July 19, 2000, (Rancho Cucamonga Public Library, Rancho Cucamonga, CA).

235
mall developers targeted regional shoppers.
77
Still in operation today, the open-air nature of the
mall connects it to similar high-end landscapes in southern California, such as those in Old Town
Pasadena, the Grove in Los Angeles, and the Americana in Glendale. It includes a town center
with a public library, police substation, and playhouse operated by the City. Located north of the
“main street retail district” is a joint townhouse project, which is a venture between the Lewis
Investment Company, the City of Rancho Cucamonga, and Forest City Development.
78
Forest
City Development has worked on many similar projects throughout the United States, including
the well-known Showcase Mall on the Las Vegas Strip. While Victoria Gardens is distinct for its
focus on agricultural heritage, the combination of regional heritage and consumption can be
viewed in developments throughout the county. And as an Urban Land Institute's recipient of
their Award for Excellence in the America’s (2006), its approach has become a model for similar
commercial developments throughout the nation.
79

A central goal of the mall’s development plan was to create a sense of local heritage. As
stated by Forest City President Brian Jones “We realized there was no sense of place here—no
essence of any identifiable downtown.”
80
Jones observation reflects a long-standing issue in
metropolitan Los Angeles. As infamously attributed to poet Dorothy Parker, “Los Angeles is 72

77
In an edited volume, Michael Sorkin joins with Neil Smith, Edward Soja, Langdon Winner, and Christine Boyer
to explore what Sorkin describes as the “the new city.” He describes the new city as a “city of simulations” similar
to that of a theme park. He explains, “This is the meaning of the theme park, the place that embodies it all, the
ageographia, the surveillance and control, the simulations without end. The theme park presents its happy regulated
vision of pleasure—all those artfully hoodwinking forms—as a substitute for the democratic political realm, and it
does so appealingly by stripping troubled urbanity of its sting, of the presence of the poor, of crime, of dirt, of
work.” See Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (Hill
and Wang, 1992).

78
“Developer Unveils Plans for Rancho Cucamonga Regional Shopping District,” Rancho Cucamonga Media
Packet, July 19, 2000, (Rancho Cucamonga Public Library, Rancho Cucamonga, CA).

79
“Forest City Honored with Two Urban Land Institute Awards for Excellence,” Forest City, May 18, 2006,
http://ir.forestcity.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=88464&p=RssLanding&cat=news&id=858932

80
Brad Berton, “Instant Roots: A Southern California City is Seeing Development of a New Downtown Commercial
District,” Urban Land, March 2003.
236
suburbs in search of a city.”
81
In order to evoke a sense of change over time, like one would see
in a traditional downtown, multiple design teams were hired to work on the four sub-districts that
frame the mall. Each followed a fictive history written by developers that provided “some instant
heritage.”
82
As described by the ULI’s senior resident fellow, Robert Dunphy:
The project’s detailed, historically inspired design is based on a postmodern storyboard
for how a southern California downtown might have [emphasis my own] organically
evolved from a modest grouping of agricultural structures along a farm road to Main
Street buildings designed art deco, modern, and contemporary styles.
83

Victoria Gardens provided a storyboard for a fictive city that has come to serve as an origin tale
in-situ for the growing community.
The term “Imagineering” is particularly helpful in understanding how heritage and the
built environment come together. Imagineering comes from the Disney Company and refers to
the interplay between imagination and engineering. The goal of the “Imagineer” is to create a
themed environment where the elements of place tell a visual story. Not only do they seek to
design a place, but the guest’s experience of that place. As stated by the Imagineers themselves,
“As designers, we Imagineers create spaces- guided experiences that take place in carefully
structured environments, allowing our guests to hear, see, even smell, touch, and taste in new
ways.”
84
While an imagineered space requires careful and intense planning, it is only successful
when it appears effortless. In this manner, Imagineers use concepts of space that most people
take for granted: such as color schemes, walkways, and music, each strategically chosen to

81
The wide circulation of this quote attests to the prevalence of this reasoning. Nevertheless, it is uncertain whether
or not Parker actually said this quote. Jaak Treiman, A Diplomatic Guide to Los Angeles: Discovering Its Sites and
Character (Woodland Hills, CA: Velak Publishing, 2011).

82
Brad Berton, “Instant Roots: A Southern California City is Seeing Development of a New Downtown Commercial
District,” Urban Land, (March 2003).

83
Robert Dunphy, “TOD without Transit?: Newer Town Centers in the United States Now have Pedestrian Appeal,
but One aspect of Mobility that Seems to be Missing is Transit,” Urban Land (August 2007).

84
John Hench, Designing Disney: Imagineering and the Art of Show (Disney Enterprises, 2003), 2.
237
promote consumption. In imagineered environments, alternative notions of “the guest” and space
are buried in the reinvented landscape.
The Victoria Gardens visitor subliminally consumes a history of the Inland Empire that
begins at a rural packinghouse and ends in a modern Main Street. Like the Imagineering of
Disneyland, and preceding that of Disney’s California Adventure, the story of Victoria Gardens
was embedded in the built environment. Spanish place names, bronze plaques, and historic
signage all created a sense of roots in a 20-year-old city. Super imposed signage also contributed
an aged quality to the site and lent a sense of authenticity to the heritage portrayed. For instance,
in the packinghouse style food court, the visitor consumed easily recognizable images of
agricultural heritage. Orange crates, picnic tables, ladders, and images of groves and vineyards
visually bombarded the visitor walking from one end of the food court to the other. The building
itself was reminiscent of an adaptively reused packing house and shared character defining
features such as a high ceiling, natural light, exposed beams, and a large narrow corridor.

Figure 29 The Victoria Gardens Food Hall was designed to appear like a citrus packing house. It is adorned with a
series of murals, all of which feature white men in the citrus industry.
85

85
Artist unknown, undated, on display at food hall at Victoria Gardens (Claremont, CA). Photograph by author.

238
Although drawing upon citrus heritage, connections to local history were selectively
featured. Large mural-like images of white men connote an ideal of small farms and enterprising
farmers to the erasure of the multicultural work force and industrialized agriculture that
characterized the region. Furthermore, the contribution of women’s labor particular to
packinghouses was displaced in favor of male labor in the fields. Although Victoria Gardens
suggested a direct link to the industry through its own Rancho Victoria label, a Rancho Victoria
packinghouse never existed. Facsimiles, such as this, were integrated into a mix of images
created by the original orange aristocracy, leading to a seamless integration of fact and fiction.
The built environment at Victoria Gardens suggested a linear progression from an agricultural
community to a modern Main Street that, because of its popularity, replaced historical reality
with nostalgic fiction.

Figure 30 The developers of Victoria Garden’s created a Rancho Victoria “brand” which is repeated throughout the
design schema of the mall. The image above is located on the side of the food hall.
86

The story told at Victoria Gardens erased the contributions of women, the continuing role of
agriculture in the Inland Empire, and the historical and contemporary presence of non-whites in the
region. Developers’ efforts to construct a believable but fictive heritage statement were completely
consistent with efforts adopted by the City itself. A key part of the development strategy in Rancho

86
Photograph by author.

239
Cucamonga was “creating a ‘heritage’ statement for Foothill Boulevard.”
87
Much thought was put
into defining “community character elements,” which included California Barn, winery, mission,
agricultural character and features such as “arbors, vines, wood, and river-wash cobble.”
88
Several
design elements were rejected in favor of “ranch elements.”
89
Art-deco and modern styles, in
particular, were prohibited on the Foothill Corridor, as were the use of industrial materials such as
steel, metal sidings, plastic sidings, reflective glass, and modernist window shapes. This corridor
cumulated at Victoria Gardens, located at the intersection of Route 66 and the Interstate 15
freeway. A “less urbanized” area without “strong architectural style,” this area offered a prime site
to recreate an ideal community design and a sense of place meant to integrate the growing
population into the nascent city.
90

Popular images from Route 66 distinguished the corridor project on Foothill Boulevard (the
modern day Route 66). As noted in the Foothill Boulevard Specific Plan:
Remember the vagabond Corvette cruising along Route 66 on TV in the early 60’s and even
further back when your Aunt and Uncle made the ‘big move’ from the Midwest to Southern
California along that same road. Well, a part of that memorable highway is alive and well as
it passes through Rancho Cucamonga’s history.
91

87
City of Rancho Cucamonga. Foothill Boulevard Specific Plan, September 1987, (Rancho Cucamonga Public
Library, Rancho Cucamonga, CA).

88
City of Rancho Cucamonga. Foothill Boulevard Specific Plan, September 1987, (Rancho Cucamonga Public
Library, Rancho Cucamonga, CA).

89
City of Rancho Cucamonga. Foothill Boulevard Specific Plan, September 1987, (Rancho Cucamonga Public
Library, Rancho Cucamonga, CA); See also The William Lyon Company, The Victoria Community Plan, Submitted
to the City of Rancho Cucamonga July 1980; LSA Associates, Inc., Final Environmental Impact Report: Victoria
Gardens Project, City of Rancho Cucamonga, SCH # 20010301028, December 19, 2001.

90
City of Rancho Cucamonga. Foothill Boulevard Specific Plan, September 1987, (Rancho Cucamonga Public
Library, Rancho Cucamonga, CA).

91
City of Rancho Cucamonga. Foothill Boulevard Specific Plan, September 1987, (Rancho Cucamonga Public
Library, Rancho Cucamonga, CA).

240
The narrative above symbolically affiliated Rancho Cucamonga with whiteness by utilizing a
story of Midwestern arrival to the region. Reminiscent of the frontier myth, it privileged the east
to west migration of white immigrants. Route 66 heritage served to deemphasize already present
populations, as well as previous immigration from the Pacific Rim, Latin America, and the
American South. The iconography of Route 66, divorced from its multiracial history, was
utilized in an effort to create a unifying community heritage statement. Through design, city
planners sought to promote “a balanced mixture of commercial and residential uses with safe,
efficient, circulation and access” that reflected community identity.
92

Route 66 was to agricultural heritage what El Camino Real was to the Spanish Fantasy
Past: a pilgrimage in which travelers retraced the steps of the pioneers, and by doing so,
reenacted an origin myth in which they were the rightful inheritors of the region. Numerous
films, travel books, and small museums appeared to commemorate the historic highway.
93
In
recent years, the release of the popular Pixar movie Cars and the opening of Cars Land at
Disney’s California Adventure theme park have introduced Route 66 nostalgia to a new
generation. At the regional level, foremost among these efforts was the annual San Bernardino
Rendezvous festival.
Drawing 100,000 participants from across the Southwest, the Rendezvous celebrated both
classic cars and San Bernardino’s location on Route 66. It featured local bands, carnival rides, a

92
City of Rancho Cucamonga. Foothill Boulevard Specific Plan, September 1987, (Rancho Cucamonga Public
Library, Rancho Cucamonga, CA).

93
Route 66 was a popular American television series following the fictional travels of Tod Stiles and Buz Murdock.
The are two museums dedicated to Route 66 in California, including one in Victorville and the other in Barstow.
There are numerous books on Route 66. Just a few include Michael Wallis, Route 66: The Mother Road (New
York: Macmillan, 1992); Quinta Scott, Along Route 66 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); Jim Hickley, The
Route 66 Encyclopedia (Voyageur Press, 2012); Michael Karl Witzer, Route 66 Remembered (St. Paul, MN,
Motorbooks).
241
cruise through downtown, and thousands of spectators admiring custom hot rods.
94
The tensions
resulting from the veneer of a seemingly homogenous community implicit in the Rendezvous and
the contradiction of an increasingly Latino demographic intensified when the San Bernardino
Convention and Visitors Bureau banned lowriders from the show in 1994. This change
effectively banned their owners and families from participating in the festival, one that claimed
to celebrate classic Americana. While for city officials lowriders were associated with gang
culture and violence, lowriders signified community, family, and ethnic pride to their owners.
The protest of Danny Flores, recounted in the introduction, underscored the contradictory
exclusion of Mexican American lowrider culture from this symbolic landscape.
95
The lowrider
ban effectively excluded their owners and families from celebration as part of Route 66 heritage.
The Rendezvous erasure reinforced a fictive history that marked certain types of mobility
as suspect and certain types of drivers as questionable that reaches back to the broad enforcement
of the Geary Act by Chinese Inspectors, discourses surround company housing on citrus ranchers
during World War I, immigration debates concerning Puerto Ricans and Filipinos, and depictions
of Mexican automobility during the Depression. Victoria Gardens, the Foothill Corridor Project,
and the Rendezvous represent failed opportunities to create an inclusive narrative in the Inland
Empire. Instead, they reinforced a selective history that celebrated white arrival and portrayed
Latinos as foreign to the region. This popular memory was easily consumable by the recently
settled residents with no memories of the early agricultural economy.
When viewed within the context of Latino growth and white decline in the region as a
whole, narratives denaturalizing Latino mobility take on an added significance. No longer restricted

94
Mark Muckerfuss, “Let the Good Times Roll,” Sun, September 17, 1993

95
Although many participate in lowrider culture, it is largely a practice associated with Mexican American
subculture in the 1970s. See Denise Sandoval, “Bajito y Suavecito/Low and Slow: Cruising Through Lowrider
Culture” (Ph.D. diss., Claremont Graduate School, 2003).
242
to living in the redlined district, nostalgia has assumed a more prominent role in erasing the
majority Latino population from the Inland Empire. Enforced by city planning and design review,
places like Victoria Gardens and events such as the Rendezvous erase the historical presence of
Latinos and flows of people that moved between the Inland Empire and Latin America. By erasing
these flows, agricultural heritage denaturalizes modern Latino immigration in the region. Where
Spanish fantasy heritage celebrated docile natives and festive Latinos, agricultural heritage
bypassed people of color altogether and reestablished Anglos as pioneers in an increasingly Latino
region through an origin myth of Midwestern migration on Route 66.
Salute to the Route existed as a counter-narrative to the Rendezvous. The annual car show,
which featured lowriders and occurred the same weekend as the Rendezvous festival, announced
the presence of an alternative historical narrative. Over the six years following the first counter-
protest in Plaza Park, it drew hundreds of cars and thousands of spectators.
96
On the seventh year,
the “No Lowrider Clause” was dropped from the Rendezvous application. From four devoted
lowriders and their families, to 5,000 people in the Westside, Salute to the Route became the
vehicle through which lowriders—as a symbolic extension of Mexican Americans—would be
included in the downtown festival. Riding low and slow with its chrome, elaborate murals, and
hydraulics, the lowrider is meant to be seen.
97
And simply being seen can be a significant act when
performed by a group whose presence and value has repeatedly been erased or criminalized within
spaces of mobility. Ruptures, such as those caused by Salute to the Route, allow spaces to challenge
exclusionary geographies and promote mobilization, not just around a festival, but around the right
to place and the right to be mobile.

96
Danny Flores interviewed by Robert Gonzalez and Matt Garcia, June 15, 2004, transcript, Inland Mexican
Heritage Oral History Project. (Inland Mexican Heritage, Redlands).

97
Denise Sandoval and Patrick A. Polk, Arte y Estilo: The Lowriding Tradition (Los Angeles: Peterson Automotive
Museum, 2000).
243
Conclusion
Developers such as the Lewis family made the Inland Empire an affordable alternative to
urban living. Their color-blind strategy of home sales attracted a multiracial population that
served as the foundation for the mixed-use developments of the post-WWII era. Though a legacy
of trade based on long-distance commerce, first developed during the citrus era, made this
transition possible, its maturation was enabled by capital, policy, and careful planning. Where
residential builders embarked on community planning, the expansion of FTZ status to Ontario
initiated an era of mixed-industrial developments. Cities such as Ontario embraced these
developments as a means to provide employment for the growing residential population. Private
developers and public policy makers alike imagined a period of affordable housing, metropolitan
expansion, and smart growth. In the years to follow, however, this vision would be deflated by
mass foreclosures, environmental devastation, and unwavering anti-immigrant policies,
prompting Mike Davis (1990) to describe the Inland Empire as “the regional antipode to the
sumptuary belts of West L.A. or Orange County.”
98

As commercial agriculture transitioned to a real estate and logistics based economy, the
southern California booster romance with citrus was reinvigorated with another myth, one that
coalesced with increased trucking and logistics based development. The core of this mythology
was the memorialization of white migration and the denaturalization of Latino migration within
the celebratory rhetoric of Route 66. The combination of nostalgia and erasure sought to attract a
white-collar population in a revitalization campaign that cast logistics-based development as
smart growth, promised cheap housing and high-end shopping, and placed the Inland Empire at
the center of a global economy. Victoria Gardens, the Foothill Corridor Project, and San

98
Mike Davis, City of Quartz. New York: Vintage Books, 1992 (First Edition Verso 1990), 375.
244
Bernardino Rendezvous each drew upon the iconography of the Route, as well as its affiliations
with white migration, to create an origin tale that newcomers could embrace.
Route 66 narratives created a fictive history of development that followed a steady
progression from farmland to Main Street. By focusing on dust bowl migration and postwar
cruising culture, these portrayals uniformly erased earlier multiracial migrations and
denaturalized the contemporary immigration of non-whites—who comprised the majority of the
warehouse workforce—to the region. The absence of Latinos from popular accounts of the route
in local heritage rendered them invisible within a region of which they composed the majority.
Counter-narratives, such as that initiated by Danny Flores, rupture these narratives and have the
potential to draw attention to the historic presence of non-whites in the region. Doing so could
help destabilize policies and practices that seek to render Latino movements criminal, replacing
them instead with alternative interpretations of settlement and migration in inland southern
California.

245
CONCLUSION
In the spring of 2008, the Pomona Latino Chamber of Commerce hosted their annual
Cinco de Mayo festival. The event was a fitting reflection of the changing demographics of
Pomona, which like many suburbs in inland Southern California had become a gateway of
Latino immigration.
1
As residents ended a day celebrating music, food, and arts from Mexico,
drivers found themselves trapped by blue and red lights. They waited at a four-way checkpoint as
police officers stopped each car. When they approached the front of the line, drivers were
checked for sobriety, proof of insurance, and driver’s licenses. Anyone stopped without a license
was fined and had their car impounded for a mandatory 30-days. Dozens of families were left
stranded on the sidewalk with whatever possessions they could carry as they watched tow trucks
drag their cars to the impound lot by order of the Pomona Police Department.
2

The Cinco de Mayo checkpoint was just one of many that were erected throughout the
state of California that year. The National Highway Association had distributed grants providing
funding to police departments throughout the state in the name of public safety. Residents in
Pomona, however, argued that the deliberate planning of a checkpoint following the Mexican-
oriented festival was intended to terrorize immigrants in a majority Latino city.
3
Their protests

1
According to research at the Brookings Institute, after 1990, most immigrants have been settling in post-WWII
urban developments and suburbs. Audrey Singer, Susan W. Hardwick, and Caroline B. Brettell Editors. Twenty-
First Century Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America. Brookings Institute Press, 2008. Audrey
Singer, The Rise of New Immigrant Gateways. Metropolitan Policy Program. The Brookings Institution. February
2004.

2
City of Pomona, City Council, Council Report Number 08-140, April 7, 2008; “Talleres Informativos: Retenes,
Decomisos, Derechos Humanos y Derechos Civiles,” program sponsored by Alianza Nacional de Comunidades
Latinoamericanas y Caribenas, August 2010; Monica Rodriguez, “Federal Lawsuit Filed Against Pomona Police
Involving August 2008 Checkpoint Meeting,” Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, September 8, 2009; Pomona
Checkpoints: Saving Lives or Ruining Lives, panel delivered at Cal Poly Pomona, May 26, 2009.

3
In August 2008, Pomona Habla held a community forum to address the Cinco de Mayo checkpoints, as well as
subsequent checkpoints, in the city of Pomona. See footage of police conflict at the meeting on YouTube. “Pomona
PD: Officer Patrick O’Malley Freaks Out,” YouTube, September 17, 2012,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm94RiIvb1E.
246
joined a chorus of advocates joined under the name of Pomona Habla who claimed traffic
checkpoints discriminated against unauthorized immigrants prohibited from attaining a license in
the state of California.
4
Statistics revealing the dismal number of Driving Under the Influence
(DUI) violations in relation to all other infractions support their conclusion. For instance, in a
series of six checkpoints held at Valley Blvd in Pomona, only 0.04% of all resulting impounds
resulted from a DUI.
5
Sobriety checkpoints were a guise under which all residents were subject
to search and unauthorized immigrants were made vulnerable to seizure of their assets.
Traffic checkpoints are one manifestation of a larger history in which policies regulating
mobility function to sort, manage, and organize racialized bodies. Alongside these efforts have
been the strategic celebration and criminalization of non-white settlement in the interest of
maintaining stratified racial relationships to labor and land. “From Citrus Belt to Inland Empire”
has offered an analysis of this phenomenon over the broad stretch of regional heritage and racial
formation. Foremost, it has aimed to uncover the ways oscillating discourses and practices
attached to settlement and mobility have been used to manage various waves of racial change in
California.
The delineation of racial meaning that marked certain types of mobility suspect is neither
new nor unique to California. The Articles of Confederation (1781), precursor to the U.S.
Constitution, was the earliest guarantee of sovereign movement within the United States. The
Articles granted citizens the freedom to move between states and guaranteed equal protection
within the union: “the people of each State shall have free ingress and regress to and from any
other State, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same

4
Genevieve Carpio, Clara Irazábal, and Laura Pulido, “Right to the Suburb: Rethinking Lefebvre and Immigrant
Activism,” Journal of Urban Affairs, 33 (no. 2, May 2011).

5
Pomona Checkpoints: Saving Lives or Ruining Lives, panel delivered at Cal Poly Pomona, May 26, 2009.

247
duties, impositions, and restrictions, as the inhabitants thereof respectively.”
6
These protections
were not equally applied across citizens. The Articles’ universality towards “free inhabitants”
was tempered by exclusions based on poverty, criminality, and mobility. “Paupers, vagabonds,
and fugitives from justice” were each explicitly excluded from the privileges and immunities of
full citizenship.
7
Although this clause was dropped when the U.S. Constitution was adopted in
1787, the sentiment behind this prohibition would remain steadfast across the broad reach of
American history.
8

At the turn of the 20
th
century, white racial claims to southern California were rooted in
the mythology of pioneering migration across the frontier and the settlement of an
underdeveloped Mexican desert by entrepreneurial capitalists. The World’s Columbian
Exposition of 1893, a celebration of Columbian conquest over the Americas, marked the
dividing line between the frontier past and post-frontier future. Speaking at a special meeting of
the American Historical Association, historian Frederick Jackson Turner read the following
excerpt from the Bulletin of the 1890 Superintendent of the Census, "Up to and including 1880
the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into

6
Articles of Confederation. Congressional Research Service. The Constitution of the United States of America:
Analysis and Interpretation (Washington: 2004), 2016-2020. Geographer Tim Cresswell has noted that within the
early modern sense of mobility in Europe, as precedent to policy in the U.S., citizenship was accompanied by the
right to move within the bounds of the nation-state. Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western
World (New York: Routledge, 2006), 15.

7
Articles of Confederation. Congressional Research Service. The Constitution of the United States of America:
Analysis and Interpretation. U.S. Government Printing Office. Washington: 2004, 2016-2020. Geographer Tim
Cresswell has noted that within the early modern sense of mobility in Europe, as precedent to policy in the U.S.,
citizenship was accompanied by the right to move within the bounds of the nation-state. Tim Cresswell. On the
Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. Routledge, New York. 2006, 15. See also the Articles of
Confederation of the New England Constitution (1643) with provided for the return of fugitive criminals.

8
With precedent in Europe, geographer Tim Cresswell has explained that the right to move within the bounds of the
nation state accompanied the rise of the modern citizen. Cresswell, Tim. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern
Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006), 15.

248
by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.”
9
By Turnerian
logic, the process of movement across the open western continent had transformed a diverse
group of immigrants from Europeans into Americans. The loss of “unsettled territory,” however,
marked the end of the process that was credited with generating a composite American race.
The closing of the western frontier heightened concerns of American mobility within the
agricultural economy that dominated inland southern California from 1880 to 1980. As Chinese,
Korean, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants sought a place within the region, migration and
settlement were reimagined as a racial threat. It was within this context that regional identity
emerged as a means to delegate land claims along the manufactured lines of foreign migrants and
native settlers. The celebratory qualities of migration were placed neatly in the past and national
gates of entry closed. This shift prompts further consideration of the larger history of policies and
practices through which migration has been given meaning, particularly how the social values
attached to settlement and mobility have been used to identify, manage, celebrate, and
criminalize various waves of racial change.
When considering the Citrus Belt as a part of the American West, movement was
selectively celebrated as liberating. Mobility, in the Turnerian sense, was to release oneself from
the influence of Europe, to build an independent American character, and embrace opportunity.
10

One might consider John Gast’s painting American Progress. In his allegorical representation,
westward movement, changing forms of transportation, a stringing telegraph wire, and fleeing
native people defined the frontier line. Mobility was portrayed as white expansion, progress, and
modernity. Two decades after Gast finished his painting, Frederick Jackson Turner stood before

9
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893; London: Penguin, 2008).

10
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1920; Penguin Books, 2008).

249
a special meeting of the American Historical Association and declared the frontier closed.
11

Geographer Tim Cresswell notes that following this declaration the meanings associated with
mobility were increasingly muddied. His work on the social construction of the tramp illustrates
the resulting tension between mobility’s associations with, on the one hand, freedom and, on the
other hand, the threat of criminal vagrancy.
12
Clearly, some movements were more socially
acceptable than others.

Figure 31 In John Gast’s iconic painting, mobility was equated with white settlement, techonological advancement,
and American progress .
13

11
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1920; Penguin Books, 2008).

12
Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (Reaktion Books, London. 2001); Tim Cresswell. On the Move: Mobility
in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006).

13
John Gast, American Progress, oil on canvas, 1872, (Autry National Center, Los Angeles, CA).
250
This analysis of race, place, and mobility over the long-stretch of inland southern
California history suggests that meanings attached to mobility and settlement have often
reinforced boundaries of racial exclusion and have adapted to enforce those boundaries in times
of demographic and economic change. From the criminalization of Chinese mobility in the
Geary Act, to the naturalization of Mexican mobility in the immigration debates of the 1920, to
the denaturalization of Mexican mobility during the Depression, to the celebration white
mobility in Route 66 heritage campaigns, the social meanings of movement shifted within
various racial, geographical, and temporal boundaries. Throughout these shifts, the purpose
behind attributing meaning has remained constant. It has served to foster white territorial claims
in a multiracial landscape while maintaining control over the movement of non-white labor. In
this light, the sobriety checkpoints held in Pomona on Cinco de Mayo can be viewed as more
than an isolated incident responding to current debates over immigration and shifting suburban
demographics. The checkpoints become a common-sense extension of historical efforts to
identify, target, and regulate what might be called anti-social movements within the capitalist
landscape of southern California.
A Note on Regional Heritage
Regional heritage is rarely preserved for the sake of historical knowledge alone. Rather, it is
fundamentally concerned with the present, from economic development to celebrating some parts
of our past while condemning or erasing others. As explained by Dolores Hayden in The Power of
Place, urban landscapes have a powerful capacity to foster a sense of cultural belonging or
exclusion.
14
The articulation of cultural heritage is a reflection of our perceptions of self, the
present, and our hopes for the future. Population projections in which Latinos will become the
majority in California raise serious questions regarding the direction and role of heritage in the

14
Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes of Public History (Cambridge, 1997).
251
future of urban planning and historic preservation.
15

The efforts of Danny Flores point towards efforts taken to disrupt regional campaigns set
on popularizing a fictive past.
16
Organizers are increasingly seeking to destabilize these
narratives through advocacy and public education. For instance, at LA Conversacion, an
initiative of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Latino preservationists and public
historians from across the region met to discuss the challenges faced by those involved in this
work. The day was organized as a series of small-group conversations with breakout sessions
focused on questions related to self-identity, motivation, personal experiences with cultural
heritage preservation, goals, and needs-assessment. In a sense, LA Conversaciones serves as a
microcosm of many conversations taking place in homes, historical societies, and preservation
organizations across the LA basin.
17
When asked what motivated participants to advocate for the
preservation of Latino cultural history, many framed their involvement as attempts to create a
sense of roots, a desire to tell ones own story, efforts to build community, an attempt to connect
youth to their past, present, and future, the pursuit of justice, and revision of false histories which
were seen as either excluding or misrepresenting Latino history. Echoing the sentiment of
Dolores Hayden in the Power of Place, participants made a strong connection between historic
representation and a sense of belonging.

15
According to Sarah Bohn, the state will add 8 to 10 million new residents, Latinos will account for nearly half of
the population (currently Latinos comprise 37%), almost a third of the population will be foreign-born (currently
26%), and one in seven Californians will be over age 65. Sarah Bohn et al., CA 2025: Planning for a Better Future
(Public Policy Institute of California, 2013).

16
This can be viewed as one a contributing factor to a larger regional equity movement in metropolitan Los
Angeles, such as those detailed in Manuel Pastor, Chris Benner, Martha Matsuoka, This Could Be the Start of
Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity Are Reshaping Metropolitan America (Cornell
University Press, 2009).

17
“LA Conversacion,” summary delivered to participants, Los Angeles, September 30, 2010 (in author’s
possession).

252
Those seeking to create alternative regional narratives will continue to face roadblocks to
their efforts. Over the course of LA Conversaciones, participants reported a wide range of
obstacles related to their efforts to protect, enhance, and enjoy their cultural heritage. Many
parallel those experienced by historians in general, such as lack of funding, little political
support, and the institutional barriers of the bureaucratic process involved in designating historic
sites. Other obstacles were more concentrated among those interested in Latino preservation
efforts, such as language barriers, dismissal as an angry minority, the commercialization of
heritage in the interest of tourism, color-blind rhetoric that erases the legacy of racial
discrimination in California, and a feeling of isolation and exclusion from positions of power and
influence in preservation and urban planning. These differences point to the very real barriers
experienced by groups involved in expanding the meaning of the term “historic significance” to
include vernacular landscapes of Latino communities.
18

In the Inland Empire, creating an inclusive regional identity means challenging idealist
versions of heritage that erase multicultural and gendered faces from images narrating popular
spaces. Further, it necessitates replacing them with recognition of the policies, individual actions,
and migrant flows that have made the Inland Empire what it is today. This dissertation draws
inspiration from a 2010 forum at the Universalist Unitarian Church in Riverside, one titled The
Empire Strikes Back: Organizing Inland, in which a myriad of residents from across the region
met to advocate “for a just and sane economy in the Inland Empire and beyond.”
19
I was struck
by a comment made by one of the panelists when describing regional inequity, particularly as it

18
As explained in a recent article in the Forum Journal by Karina Muniz and Anthea Hartig, embracing diverse
perspectives on significance will be a crucial part of creating a truly democratizing and inclusive field of historic
preservation.Karina Muniz and Anthea M. Hartig, “Este Lugar es Importante: Embracing Diverse Perspectives on
Significance,” Forum Journal, 24 (no. 3, Spring 2010); See also Ned Kaufman, Place, Race, and Story: Essays on
the Past and Future of Historic Preservation (New York and London: Routledge, 2009).

19
Riverside Latino Voter Project, “The Empire Strikes Back: Organizing Inland,” Press Release (March 29, 2010).

253
applied to the warehouse employees who comprise a large share of the local workforce. He
firmly stated, “this is not an accident.”
20
I had heard a similar comment made in Los Angeles two
years earlier. In her discussion of inequality, gentrification, and the right to the city, public
intellectual Gilda Haas explained, "…once you know that it wasn’t the ‘market’ that it wasn’t a
‘natural cycle’ that it wasn’t inevitable, then you can believe in change. You can witness and
know and believe that other human decisions can make it right, take it back, and produce
justice."
21
Such an understanding, and the tensions they reveal, can help us uncover the means by
which race, place, and mobility have shaped the Inland Empire of today and point us towards a
more equitable future.

20
Riverside Latino Voter Project. “The Empire Strikes Back: Organizing Inland,” presentations delivered at The
Empire Strikes Back, Riverside, March 29, 2010 (personal recording in author’s possession).

21
Gilda Haas, “Inequality, Gentrification, and the Right to the City,” paper delivered at Soja Fest, University of
California, Los Angeles, 2008 (in author’s possession).
254
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract For over a century, narratives of mobility and settlement flourished in regional heritage campaigns and public policy throughout inland southern California. "From Citrus Belt to Inland Empire: Race, Place, and Mobility in Southern California, 1880-2000" pushes for analyses that recognize ideas, policies, and practices of mobility and settlement as agents in the production of racial difference, and by extension, the boundaries of citizenship. This work focuses on five periods of economic and demographic change between 1880 and 2000, including the citrus boom of the 1880s, Issei migration following the second Chinese Exclusion Act in 1892, Mexican immigration during World War I, Dust Bowl migration in the 1930s, and multiracial metropolitanization following World War II. In each of these moments, racial distinctions were debated according to the economic value ascribed to each groups' (im)mobility. During periods of prosperity, the mobility of migrant workers was criminalized and in times of recession it was promoted. In this context, identifications such as pioneer, bird of passage, tramp, and migrant worker signified a constellation of mobile-meanings that existed dialectically with racial ideologies. More so, a comparative process of racial formation tied to capital accumulation operated alongside technologies governing mobility that maintained the dominance of white territorial claims and reinforced control over the movement of labor. This recognition opens up questions regarding the terms by which people were included or excluded from the entitlements of citizenship. Though uniquely expressed in response to each locality and time, ideas of mobility and settlement consistently reinforced boundaries of racial exclusion and adapted to enforce those boundaries in times of demographic and economic change. "From Citrus Belt to Inland Empire" examines this process during a broad stretch of inland southern California history in an effort to untangle the relationship between race, place, and mobility.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Carpio, Genevieve T. (author)

Core Title From Citrus Belt to Inland Empire: race, place, and mobility in Southern California, 1880-2000

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 08/19/2015

Defense Date 04/25/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Inland Empire,mobility,OAI-PMH Harvest,place,racial formation,regional formation

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Sánchez, George J. (committee chair), Deverell, William F. (committee member), Hise, Greg (committee member), Pulido, Laura (committee member)

Creator Email genevieve.carpio@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-323141

Unique identifier UC11288091

Identifier etd-CarpioGene-2012.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-323141 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-CarpioGene-2012.pdf

Dmrecord 323141

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Carpio, Genevieve T.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA