They Saved the Crops

'They Saved the Crops is a tremendous book. It is extremely well written, and it organizes an astonishing amount of material in an innovative way, all the time avoiding the easy simplification so tempting with multi-layered material. Even more important, it couldn't be more timely, insofar as renewed assaults on immigrant workers remind us that 'guest worker' politics is a pot always on the boil.

Anyone interested in the bracero program, agricultural history in the United States, and the history of California will find this important and often fascinating book well worth the time.

Ernesto Galarza, Karl Marx, and Carey McWilliams come together in the industrial agricultural establishments of California in Don Mitchell's extraordinary exploration of the bracero program. In a book that both illuminates and infuriates, Mitchell deftly draws on the insights of geography and political economy to bring to life a rich archival record of exploitation, abuse, class struggle, and the ugly pursuit of profit at any cost. In doing so, Mitchell powerfully shows how the multifaceted violence of the bracero program lives on in the land and bodies that make up California's contemporary agricultural landscape.

Few people know the social and economic contours of California's industrial agriculture landscape better than geographer Don Mitchell. And no one has written a more thorough, passionate, and critical history of the landscape's "morphology" during the bracero era than Mitchell in his new book.

Mitchell achieves more than enough in They Saved The Crops to distinguish this book as the history of record for the Bracero program. As with his previous work, he focuses on our societal tendencies to conceal exploitation in our food system, and how these exploitative acts bleed into the relationship between labor and capital throughout the US economy.

Mitchell has made an important contribution to both our understanding of landscape as well as California agricultural history.

The bracero program was the ideal business recipe for cheap immigrant labor, cooked up by growers and stamped 'Government Approved.' Mitchell has written the definitive history of the era, which all future studies of California farming and Mexican immigration must build upon. By its archival depth and trenchant analysis, it sets a new standard in the study of farm labor and provides an unassailable indictment of grower power and abuse of workers--all the while expanding the theoretical envelopes of geography, political economy, and labor studies.

The author's research is extraordinarily thorough and well-documented, making the volume indispensable for scholars of agriculture, immigration, and labor.