Book Review

Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History ofCalifornia Farmworkers, 1769–1913

Richard S. Street. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press.

Reviewed by Peter Benson, Washington University in

St. Louis

Rarely does scholarly work appear that so pow-

erfully captures the history and ethnographic sense of

a place in time as Richard S. Street’s pair of landmark

books on California farmworkers. These two books—

and a second, forthcoming volume of narrative history

focused on the 20th century—make an indispensable

contribution to the fields of agricultural history, labor

history, and the history of the American West, as well as

California studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and

intellectual history. While Street’s work is necessary

reading for specialists in these areas of scholarship,

his writing is clear and compelling, his storytelling

abilities masterful, and appealing to a much wider

audience of people who want to know how Califor-

nia’s agricultural economy was made.

Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California

Farmworkers, 1769–1913 (2004a) is an 800-page narra-

tive history that documents the changing face of

California farm labor over the last several centuries.

It tracks dynamic processes of culture change and in-

tercultural social formation beginning in colonial

California, when Spanish missionaries began to colo-

nize indigenous groups and recruit them into mission

plantations, culminating with early efforts to organize

farmworkers during the Progressive era and the emer-

gent Latinization of farm labor. This is a work of social

and cultural history that attends closely to identity and

community processes among multiple ethnic groups—

indigenous groups, Spanish colonial administrators

and subjects, Mexican mestizos, Chinese and Japanese

immigrants, and poor white and black farmhands.

Photographing Farmworkers in California

Richard S. Street. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press.

Reviewed by Peter Benson, Washington University in

St. Louis

The other book, Photographing Farmworkers in Cal-

ifornia (2004b), is much shorter, combines photographs

and textual commentary, and provides a complimen-

tary visual account of life and work among California

farmworkers. Like the mix of narrative and photogra-

phy in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the 1941 classic

by James Agee and Walker Evans, the photo archive

that Street has assembled and annotated infuses his-

tory and historiography with the added burden of

moral commentary. The photographs—powerful im-

ages of California farmhands from the past several

centuries, images of farmhands at work, immersed

in ordinary life in labor camps and rural towns, or

involved in farm labor organizing and direct action—

have moral meaning, Street insists. The images cap-

Culture & Agriculture Vol. 30, Numbers 1 & 2 pp. 59–62, ISSN 1048-4876, eISSN 1556-486X. r 2008 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1556-486X.2008.00008.x.

ture the lived effects of economic exploitation, social

marginalization, and political disenfranchisement—

as well as what farmhands have made of the various

forms of domination that have historically shaped

farm labor as among the most excluded classes in the

United States. In Street’s own words, the images cap-

ture ‘‘people sliding into chaos or living a life so

hazardous and marginal as to defy belief.’’ The images

‘‘evoke feelings of pity and depict nobility within

tragedy. [. . .] Countless others comprise a litany of

grief and terror, murder and violence, humiliation and

inhumanity, making their cumulative case against the

farm labor system as an instrument of poverty, re-

pression, and exploitation’’ (2004b:xviii).

Yet the power of Street’s historical prose and the

depth and detail of his archival research means that

these same moral meanings come through in the

mammoth Beasts of the Field. Street’s narration of the

history of farm labor in colonial and postcolonial

California brings to life the structures of economic

exploitation, social marginalization, racialized labor

subordination, and material deprivation that affected

successive waves of multiethnic workers. The book

begins with a campaign in Baja California in 1769,

organized by Padre Junıpero Serra, ‘‘a missionary in

the service of God,’’ and Jose de Galvez, a Spanish

official ‘‘who at times thought he was God’’ (p. 3). The

campaign involved Spanish soldiers, missionaries,

and Mexican mestizos who moved northward with

the aim of colonizing and Christianizing the indige-

nous groups of Alta California. Mestizo farmers died

along the route and indigenous workers were re-

cruited onto Franciscan missions, self-sustaining

plantation communities established up and down Cal-

ifornia, from San Diego to San Jose. For indigenous

laborers, there were squalid living and working con-

ditions, high death rates owing to population density

and disease contagion, sometimes authoritarian over-

seers, and, as with slave systems elsewhere in the

Americas, forms of violent punishment and workplace

control. This labor system was culturally and morally

justified within a Spanish geographic imaginary that

portrayed colonial settlements with civilization and

surrounding lands—and the indigenous groups who

lived there—with the wilderness. And, as Street em-

phasizes, this was only the beginning of the historical

development of a structure of labor subordination in

which racial and social distinctions placed farm ad-

ministrators over and above multiethnic farm labor

and justified patterns of economic exploitation.

Street is clearly thinking of the endurance of this

sociopolitical order and what it means in California

today. He tells of a detailed report (or Representacion)

presented to authorities in Mexico City in 1773 by

Serra, what Street calls ‘‘the first piece of farmworker

legislation.’’ Serra claimed that there was a labor

shortage and demanded that extra manpower be im-

ported onto missions, such as peasants from the

mission vicinities, entire families of campesinos, even

campesino children. Street says that these ‘‘argu-

ments,’’ urging imported labor, ‘‘have since become

standard for those lobbying for foreign farmworkers’’

(p. 15). Street makes explicit comparisons with the

political economy of agriculture, then and now.

A farm labor ‘‘slot’’ has existed in California for

more than three centuries, a structural opening filled

in with variously raced bodies, who have supplied the

bulk of the farm labor. Street describes the complicated

social and cultural changes that occurred in Califor-

nia into the mid-1800s, as indigenous peoples and

mestizos comprised the majority of the farm labor

workforce. They worked on church holdings re-

distributed after Mexico’s independence in 1821, on

American farm operations and ranches increasingly

established after the Mexican War in the late-1840s,

and on Russian colonial farm operations that extended

out from coastal settlements. Street vividly describes

the socioeconomic relationship of farm and gold min-

ing interests. Although gold mining temporarily

disrupted farming activities, creating a more compet-

itive labor environment, the gold rush was ultimately

a boon for farm businesses because of the rapidly

escalating population. Intensified reliance on cheap

indigenous labor increased practices of forced recruit-

ment, including the use of violence, as well as va-

grancy laws and other forms of social control, whereby

indigenous people could be arrested and fined for not

working, thereby becoming indebted to ranches.

Several chapters of Street’s tome contribute to a

body of scholarship that might be regarded as a critical

medical anthropology of farm labor. Researchers

working on farm labor today are concerned with

issues of health and safety, including exposure to pes-

ticides, dangerous working and living conditions, and

access to health care. Street’s story touches on all of

these aspects and the changing dimensions of poor

health and limited access to medicine that character-

ized California farm labor. Consider Chapter Seven, an

alarming account of alcohol abuse among indigenous

people who worked on farms. Dismal living condi-

Culture & Agriculture 60 Volume 30, Numbers 1 and 2 2008

tions, the disruption and dispersal of family units, and

abject poverty gave rise to high rates of alcohol use

and endemic violence, including violent crime and

murder, among indigenous farmhands. Street’s con-

textual descriptions make alcohol part of a larger

world of social suffering in which death and disease

were ordinary parts of the farmworker experience,

poor health compounded by desperate living condi-

tions and economic exploitation.

According to Street, alcoholism was a primary

cause of the decline of indigenous farm labor by the

1860s. Indians were replaced by several different eth-

nic groups. Chinese labor had contributed to economic

growth in California since the 1840s and, following

the construction of major railways, workers were re-

leased into agricultural sectors. Chinese farm labor

was distinguished from other ethnic groups by its

level of organization. Contractors organized and

sourced workers to ensure a steady supply for grow-

ers. There were organized work gangs and self-

administered labor camps. And there were also

various forms of racial antagonism among agricul-

tural and industrial workers of European descent, who

competed with this organized labor system. In the

1870s, there were riots in California’s largest cities,

Chinese field hands were lynched, and Chinese labor

camps and neighborhoods were destroyed. Playing to

these antagonisms within the farm labor class, the U.S.

Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882,

which banned Chinese immigration for 10 years. Ad-

ditional laws extended this prohibition. Consequently,

the Chinese share of the farm labor workforce steadily

diminished.

European immigrants, poor whites, displaced

southern blacks, Mexicans, and Japanese immigrants

now increasingly worked in California’s fields. Japa-

nese immigration was driven by the annexation of

Hawaii in 1898. The rapid socioeconomic ascent of Jap-

anese farmworkers was facilitated by well-organized

ethnic labor associations, which, like the Chinese or-

ganizations, worked to ensure full-time agricultural

and industrial employment for Japanese workers. Jap-

anese labor associations also successfully utilized

strikes to raise wages. During the citrus boom in

Southern California in the early 1900s, entrepreneurial

Japanese immigrants pooled resources, relied upon

established associations and social networks, leased

land, and became farm operators—a case of ethnic

class mobility that represents one of the most impor-

tant aspects of California farm labor history and

speaks to the variability of the farmworker experience

across ethnic groups. Amidst this social mobility, anti-

Japanese sentiment became common and in 1913 the

U.S. Congress passed the federal Alien Land Act, pro-

hibiting immigrants from landownership.

One of the most compelling and interesting as-

pects of Street’s history is the narrative account of

migratory, more or less unorganized, farmworkers of

European descent who followed the ripening of crops

up and down California from the Civil War until the

mid-20th century. They were known as ‘‘tramps’’ or

‘‘bindlestiffs’’ (they carried thirty-pound ‘‘bindles,’’

or sacks, and ‘‘bummed’’ rides on trains). Street’s

description of bindlestiff culture is a thick anthropo-

logical description of what life on the road was like,

including the physical dangers of riding trains (ampu-

tation, decapitation, refrigerator cars, etc.), everyday

community life in hobo settlements, the commonness

of petty and violent crime, antagonism with police

and railroad personnel, homosexual and masculine

subcultures, prostitution and flophouse life, and skid

row society in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the

off-season. Street carefully distinguishes bindlestiffs

from other kinds of social outcasts, such as hobos,

tramps, and bums, and he provides a detailed account

of the local moral world of white migrant farm labor,

including the local contours of such values as pride,

hard work, cleanliness, frugality, and companionship.

The two chapters that focus on bindlestiff life are

outstanding examples of American narrative history

and a kind of historical description that is deeply in-

formed by an anthropological concept of culture and

an appreciation for those aspects of life that are most

ordinary.

Beasts of the Field is one of the most impressive and

just plain interesting books written about the history of

North America. It is a narrative history that is espe-

cially compelling for anthropologists because large-

scale historical forces are set within thickly described

contexts of everyday life, including such events as

labor camp card games, work routines, disputes over

pay ledgers, and the gruesome deaths of bindlestiffs

on the railroad. More than a historical narrative, this

is ultimately an existential account of farm labor

as a concrete and ever-shifting form of life. As with

all books, this one has its shortcomings. The sheer

breadth of what is covered means that Street is not

able to provide the kind of multifaceted account

of farm labor and community life as one finds in a

more focused book like Jose M. Alamillo’s Making

Culture & Agriculture 61 Volume 30, Numbers 1 and 2 2008

Lemonade out of Lemons: Labor and Leisure in a California

Town, 1880–1960. But what sets Street’s book apart

from other histories of farm labor is an exceptional

ability to tack between concrete details of everyday

life among farmworkers and a larger sense of com-

mon experience—including subordination and social

marginalization—that has affected successive gen-

erations of farmworkers. And readers get a sense of

what experiential and sociopolitical links obtain

among Chinese, Japanese, and poor white farmwork-

ers as much as the specific forms of cultural,

linguistic, and ethnic difference that divide these so-

cial groups.

Because of its size, Beasts of the Field may have

difficulty finding its way onto the syllabi of classes

other than focused courses on farm labor history or

California history. In fact, this book belongs in the ar-

chive. It is a truly scholarly work that will be

indispensable for scholars working on labor history

issues for generations to come. Unlike most academic

books, often written for the moment, this one was

printed with the assured longevity that comes from

having been written over the course of decades and so

powerfully bringing together primary and secondary

historical materials. It sets the standard for how labor

histories will be written and read in the future.

Culture & Agriculture 62 Volume 30, Numbers 1 and 2 2008