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For example, millions of years before the U.S.-Mexico War opened California to Anglo-American farmers, the Pacific Ocean and its many tributaries had washed across the alluvial plains of the San Joaquin Valley in central California, depositing a rich silt of minerals and organic matter. Several hundred miles to the south, much of the Imperial Valley ranked as one of the hottest and driest deserts in all of North America, but the long natural history of the region had buried enormous potential in the dust. The Gulf of California once stretched north and covered much of the Colorado Desert. In time the gulf receded, but the Colorado River spilled into the region and formed Lake Cahuilla, a massive lake a hundred miles long, thirty-five miles wide, and three hundred feet deep. Lake Cahuilla is estimated to have existed for several thousand years before drying up and leaving behind dry but fertile land. Similarly, natural migrations by the Rio Grande, its tributaries, and the Gulf of Mexico left rich silt deposits in the region later divided by the U.S.-Mexico border.11
Millions of years of geologic history may have enriched the land barons’ land and kindled dreams of agricultural empires in the American West, but water was uncontrolled in the region. Erratic climatic shifts from floods to droughts created unpredictable and thus unsustainable conditions for the development of capitalist agricultural production. The land barons’ dreams of industrial farming in the American West depended upon controlling the flow of water through the region.
Congress passed the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 to fund large irrigation projects in the West.12 As dams, canals, and reservoirs controlled the waters, landholders quickly transformed the rich but arid lands into fields of grains, fruits, vegetables, and cotton. By 1920, the southwest served as an orchard and winter garden to the world. With almost thirty-one million acres of crops valued at more than $1.7 billion in California and Texas alone, the southwest was the nation’s most productive and profitable agricultural region.13 During the 1920s, the fortunes reaped from the southwestern soil swelled to new heights as acres of crops boomed to a combined total of more than thirty-nine million in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.14
The rapid expansion of the factories in the fields depended upon an everincreasing number of migrant workers to seasonally plant and harvest the crops.15 In California, agribusinesses had once had access to various sources of labor. In the late nineteenth century, landholders had hired California Indians and Chinese immigrants to harvest everything from wheat to fruit and sugar beets.16 The near success of a genocidal campaign against California Indians, however, had reduced their total population to fewer than nineteen thousand by the turn of the twentieth century, and a violent wave of anti-Chinese politics pushed through the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which severely limited the availability of Chinese laborers. Some of the Chinese workers fled south into Mexico, where they worked on U.S.- and Mexican-owned farms in the Mexicali Valley just below the California-Mexico border, but the Chinese presence in California agriculture declined significantly in the following years.17
Some landowners attempted to replace Chinese immigrants and Indian workers with black migrants from the southern states, but there was significant popular resistance to black settlement in California, and the state’s agribusinessmen searched elsewhere for a labor supply.18 Next they experimented with Japanese laborers, encouraging slightly more than twenty-seven thousand Japanese nationals to enter the United States between 1891 and 1900.19 Japanese immigrants upset the expectations of agribusinessmen by quickly organizing themselves in the fields to demand higher wages and by making inroads into the business of farming as small landowners and tenants. As agribusinessmen negotiated in the fields, Anglo-American communities, primarily, San Francisco, strongly protested the arrival of Japanese immigrants and created an international incident between the U.S. and Japanese governments by prohibiting Japanese children from attending white schools.20 In 1907, the U.S. and Japanese governments addressed the mounting tensions between Anglo-Americans and Japanese immigrants in San Francisco by signing the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907, an international treaty by which the Japanese government agreed to significantly curtail Japanese immigration to the United States.21 Restrictions upon Japanese immigration effectively ended the experiment with Japanese field-workers, while the passage of California’s 1913 and 1920 Alien Land Laws significantly curtailed the remaining Japanese presence in California agriculture by prohibiting “aliens ineligible for citizenship”—that is, Asians—from owning or renting farmland.22 Pushed out of California farming, some of the Japanese followed the Chinese to Mexico and became tenant farmers on U.S.-owned farms in the Mexicali Valley. North of the border, however, labor unrest, immigration restrictions, international treaties, community prejudice, and state law effectively ended the short experiment with Japanese farm laborers.
The end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 launched an era of empire that established new migration corridors between the Philippines and California. Whereas only five Filipinos lived in California in 1900, an estimated thirty thousand Filipinos resided in the state by 1930.23 Most were male sojourners who came to work. They took jobs as farmworkers and domestic servants, but Filipino migrants proved to be skilled labor organizers who constantly upset the agribusinessmen’s search for a docile labor force.24 California’s agribusinessmen barely said a word when Congress effectively ended Filipino migration to the United States with the passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934.
All told, as California agribusiness developed, the California Indian population was plummeting to its nadir; Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino workers were prohibited from entering the United States, and black settlement was unwanted. A few experiments with white farm collectives had been tried throughout the state but, by and large, agribusinessmen were looking for temporary, cheap, and marginalized workers who would come and go with the harvests. It was within this context that California’s agribusinessmen developed a dependence upon Mexican laborers migrating across the U.S.-Mexico border. By the mid-1920s, Mexicans comprised the vast majority of agricultural workers in the Golden State. Of the estimated eighty thousand workers migrating across the state picking alfalfa, melons, and cotton in the Imperial Valley, peas, cotton and asparagus in the San Joaquin Valley, and citrus in Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire, between 80 and 95 percent were Mexicans by the mid 1920s.25
Some agribusinessmen described their turn to Mexican immigrant workers as a result of the “docile” nature of Mexican workers. Mexican workers, they argued, were quiet, diligent, docile, and therefore ideal farm workers. This characterization of Mexican workers disregarded the robust activity of Mexican labor organizing in the United States—the 1903 strike in Oxnard, California; the 1904 railroad strike in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas; and, the 1922 strike in Imperial, California, for example—and ignored the role of Mexican workers in the making of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, but it was a comforting thought for agribusinessmen, who realized that U.S. immigration restrictions had left them with few options by the 1920s.26 As one of California’s many agribusiness lobbyists admitted, “We have gone east, west, and north, and south and he is the only man power available to us.”27
In south Texas, the story of labor, migration, and agribusiness was different. With a history of black slavery, Texans had fewer hesitations about encouraging black settlement, but while cotton cultivation and fruit production expanded during the 1910s and 1920s, World War I had drawn black southerners north. Texans were unable to attract enough black farm laborers away from their northern destinations. Texans, particularly those in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, quickly turned to and depended upon Mexican labor.28 By the 1920s, local farmers estimated that Mexican workers comprised almost 98 percent of the agricultural workforce in south Texas and 80 percent of the state’s annual “army” of migrant laborers.29 They began their work, twenty-five thousand members strong, picking fruits, vegetables, sugarcane, and cotton in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and grew to a migrating army of three hundred thousand workers throughout the state of Texas at the height of the cotton-picking season.
To encourage Mexicans to cross into the United States, U.S. agribusinessmen sent labor contractors into Mexico.30 Disruptions in the Mexican countryside made their job relatively easy. Until the late nineteenth century, the majority of Mexican laborers were locked in debt peonage and isolated in rural areas that lacked the railroads or other transportation systems that facilitated