Border citizens : race, labor, and identity in south-central Arizona, 1910-1965
Abstract
This dissertation explores the relationship between race, ethnic identity,
and state formation as south-central Arizona (encompassing Maricopa, Pima,
Pinal, and Santa Cruz counties) was incorporated into the national political
economy between 1910 and 1965. In 1910, the opening of the Roosevelt Dam –
the first major federal project under the National Reclamation Act of 1902 –
began the dramatic transformation of this sparsely settled mining and agricultural
frontier into the most important center of industrial agriculture in the desert
Southwest. Over the following decades, federal agencies such as the Indian
Bureau and the Labor Department helped to recruit local Indians, Mexican
immigrants, Mexican Americans, and, beginning in the 1930s, Euro-Americans
from the south-central states to work on the region’s industrial farms. This
dissertation explores how, in this context, race became a justification for the
denial of full citizenship to Indian and Mexican workers, and how it thus served
to reconcile contradictions between employers’ insatiable demands for cheap
labor and the nation-state’s concern with maintaining cultural and racial
homogeneity. At the same time, it explores how the workers themselves
attempted to shape their own positions within the political economy. The Tohono
O’odham, for example, retained relatively autonomous cultural spaces by moving
seasonally between their desert villages and the cotton fields; Mexicans and
Mexican Americans joined mutualistas and labor unions, or simultaneously
demanded acceptance as both “white” American citizens and members of la raza;
and Yaqui Indians, who were immigrants from Mexico, challenged the racial
categories of “Indian” and “Mexican” by seeking federal recognition as an
American Indian tribe. Finally, the dissertation explores how Indian and Mexican
workers, through the shared experience of wage work on commercial farms and
gradual incorporation into multi-ethnic barrios, formulated new identities that
served as the foundation for cultural resistance and political mobilization. As
each of these groups negotiated the shifting contours of the regional political
economy, they redefined the meaning of citizenship and thus played an integral
role in the very process of state formation.
Department
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