Teaching about Race and Racism Across the Disciplines

Part II: Farm Workers

Content: Fruit labels and the California imagination

At the turn of the century, citrus crates contained fully color 10x11” labels used on box-ends. The first label was created in 1977, branded on the box-ends, when William Wolfskill experimentally shipped a car-load of oranges to St. Louis. Many small printing companies had been dormant since the Gold Rush so were enthusiastic to revive operations. San Francisco printing companies soon gained expertise and provided printing services to print crate labels for farmers all over California.  One such printer, German immigrant Max Schmidt, worked closely with his salesmen and artist team to publish a catalog of ‘stock label’ designs printed without grower names. The company traveled into citrus-growing towns selling designs and providing crate label printing services to growers. “The ‘scissormen,’ as they became known, created paper symbols of the pride and vanity that perpetuated the California Dream.”³⁷ The stock label designs included beautiful women, flowers, mountain and field scenery. Typically, designs were created with sixty separate colors and printed by hand using limestone printing blocks. Bronze metallic ink and varnish were added to the design to create an eye-catching glow. Many of the designs were inspired by the romantic imagery of the Art Noveau movement in Paris.

To explore these label designs with students, labels can be printed from the Corona Public Library Archives in full color.³⁸ Seventy five citrus labels collected from the town of Corona and Riverside specifically reside there, though there are numerous California-based online archives that are more location specific. In gathering only twenty five images, I was able to categorize them into three groups. Seven labels contain imagery of an ethereal or regal woman: Aurelia, Royal, Royal Lemons, Princess, Minerva, Corona Belle, The Princess Brand. Ten labels contained decorative flowers: Sunset Brand Oranges, Maduro, Glen Ranch, Passport, Pride of Corona Lemons, Progressive, Leader, Sunset, Justrite, Laurel. Ten labels feature an image of worker-less fields under picturesque mountains: Queen Bee, Glen Ranch, Red Mountain, Grove, Corona Health, Leader, Flavor, Corona Cooler, O. I. C. Brand, Sunset. Some labels fall in two or more categories.

Such brand names provide a private coding of quality. Orange growers could not advocate much other than method and taste. Advertisers could not really add value to crops because most of the value was added in the labor process. California had to keep up with Florida’s fame of citrus-growing and wished to outperform their rival temperate state. “Florida complained that California citrus could command a higher market value because of the advertising. Upon acceptance of this, the labor theory of value vanishes, and advertising is understood as creating value in excess of both what labor and nature had put in.”³⁹ Economists describe Solar Theory of Value as a narrative of labor involved would actually devalue goods. “The more hands the orange passes through, the more mediated the relationship becomes between the consumer and the natural orange. This neat trick of absenting the grower and the other laborers does more than heighten the consumer’s sense communing with nature. It hides the political and social situation in which that fruit is brought to the consumer’s lips. In other words, it hides the worker. California thus becomes a mythical landscape, a biblical garden, in which fruits naturally materialize for the pleasure of people.”⁴⁰ Advertisers had to appeal to supermarket chains and suburbanites. While surrounded by uniform homes, paved sidewalks, and trimmed lawns, suburbanites sought a connection to nature in the products they purchased in the supermarket. Advertisers directly appealed to this desire, using imagery to “fix” suburbanites. “With urban populations swelling and the frontier officially closed, some progressives worried that Americans, deprived of sunlight, open land, and the soothing or challenging qualities of conquering raw nature, might become culturally weakened. Indeed, eating oranges would provide urban-bound populations with a vital link to nature and health. The orange, as a little package of the sunshine and healthful qualities that attracted so many people to southern California in the first place, would thus fortify and invigorate an American culture that many observers felt was suffering from degeneration, decadence, and depletion.”⁴¹ Advertisers praised the health qualities of oranges, from citing their necessity in a balanced breakfast, use in preventing ailments such as acidosis and infant malnourishment, and convinced many that human survival depended on the Vitamin C found only in oranges. Athletes as ambassadors cited oranges for their  extraordinary ability. Agro-scientsts in the field claimed oranges addressed the newly awakened post-war fear of ill-prepared and impure foods. All that was actually known about Vitamin C at the time was the ability to prevent scurvy.

Content: Mexican-American Farm Workers

Even before California succession, farm workers lived all across California. Spanish missions enslaved indigenous farm workers for the main purpose of reeducating and converting, followed by a short period of transition to Mexican-owned, nationalized ranchos that employed the same workers while keeping white Hispanics, called Californios, in charge. The Americanization of California after the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 meant rapid changes to land-ownership, often achieved by fraudulent means. Hispanic families were displaced by Anglo newcomers with pastoral intended use of the land.

The dominant idea of an American farm by the late 19^th century was that it was small enough scale to only require the labor that the farm family could supply. Necessary expansion to keep up with rival farms and nationwide demand for fresh food, forced the farm family to hire seasonal farm laborers. Agriculture was California’s main industry and auxiliary industries such as packing, canning, railroads, trucking, and finance depended on farms’ commercial success.⁴² Despite rapid commercialization at the beginning of the 20^th century, farms still maintained family names, despite sometimes requiring over a hundred laborers. Farmers at the bottom of the social rung felt like they had to distinguish themselves from the migratory farm laborers, who were categorized as “land-workers,” so they self-identified as  “farmers” and “growers.”⁴³ Less successful farmers were also likely to follow practices that large farms had in place, as large farms were producing the most crops and profit, and setting the standards for how migrant workers were paid and treated.

Since farm work was seasonal, white farmers believed “employers could not be reasonably expected to make the large expenditures to improve conditions given the relatively brief periods that their farms were homes to workers.”⁴⁴ Farmers believed that newly arrived white European immigrants would not come to California to continue the peasant life they lived in over-populous Europe, themselves descendants of European settlers just generations prior. That stereotype contributed to the poor conditions of nonwhite immigrant workers that included Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Hindustanis, Filipinos, and Mexicans. “Since each group was stigmatized as foreign and despised as inferior, their low wages and barely tenable working conditions were rationalized: they were foreigners who, growers claimed, neither wanted nor deserved an ‘American’ standard of living.”⁴⁵ Farmers thought that all the Mexican laborer came from Mexico, when in reality many were native to California. 

Farm workers frequently experienced accidents on the job⁴⁶ and became ill from long-term exposure to pesticide application.⁴⁷ “Convenient” company stores had predatory lending practices, allowing workers to purchase food, clothes, and supplies at inflated prices, keeping workers in perpetual debt. Makeshift schools were created near labor camps, as neighborhood schools did not want migrant children at their schools. Some farmers would withhold twenty percent of wages until the end of harvest, ensuring that workers would stay on.⁴⁸ “Large scale, specialized, and integrated agricultural emprises required large numbers of seasonal workers to be available whenever and wherever they were needed… Growers protected themselves – and held labor costs down - by recruiting a particularly powerless workforce of impoverished new immigrants who lacked the political rights of other Americans and who, as people of color, faced racial barriers in all spheres of life.”⁴⁹ Farmers selected Spanish-speaking contractors and foremen to constantly surveille and advise workers not to risk their jobs by complaining. This stratified hierarchical system kept many powerless.

At first, workers confronted workplace abuse with wildcat strikes: stoppages, walkouts, sabotage, and personal violence. The first unionization efforts was in March 1928 with the Federation of Labor Unions with twenty-one chapters and Imperial Valley Workers’ Union supported by local Mexican consul, which led a cantaloupe workers strike that resulted in a contract that addressed contractor abuses. Between 1931 and 1941 Mexican farm workers in California struck at least thirty-two times, walking out from harvests of peas, berries, beets, cantaloupes, cotton, citrus fruits, beans, lettuce, celery, and canneries.⁵⁰ Trained in community organizing, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Gil Padilla drew up maps of all 86 farming communities, canvassed small groups of farm workers, and collected over eighty thousand pledge cards from the first members in 1960. Under the name, National Farm Workers Association, their first collective victory was in 1965. Flower growers promised farm workers nine dollars for every thousand roses grafted, but cutters only received seven dollars. Together they struck for two days and the company negotiated a one hundred twenty percent pay increase.

Farm workers organized marches, boycotts, hunger strikes, and events all over the US that earned public “sympathy among Americans who associated repressive treatment of blacks with the plight of Mexican farm workers.”⁵¹ Most notable was the lengthy battle involving grape farm workers that persuaded millions around the world not to eat grapes for over four years. When workers revolted, they gained control – together. In 1975, Congress passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which some consider a victory for the people.

Content: Juana Alicia, Judy Baca, and Chicano Murals in communities

To combat the erasure of farm workers in fruit crate labels, I would present students with two  muralists’ work: Juana Alicia and Judy Baca. Both are local to California, considered pillars in the Chicano Mural tradition, and choose to document the universality of life in the Mexican-American experience with motifs inclusive of collective farm worker struggle. Chicano muralism is linked to art practices of “pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas, who recorded their rituals and history on the walls of their pyramids” and was revitalized in the Southwest in the 1960’s and 1970’s as an “effort of Latinos to reinvigorate their cultural heritage, affirm cultural identity, and challenge racism.”⁵²  Both Alicia and Baca are still practicing artists with websites students can access. Both muralists currently work with students in creating public art, with projects that students can actively follow on social media. Due to their contemporary and community presence, there are countless high-definition photos, for the purpose of instruction, but also, selfies taken with the murals, a new trend of youth seeing themselves in art and making conscious decisions to portray themselves as art pieces themselves.

Juana Alicia Araiza, known as Juana Alicia, is a Chicana artist recruited by Cesar Chavez as an artist for the United Farmworkers union. She worked in the fields as a organizer, but had to stop when she was seven months pregnant due to pesticide poisoning, which caused countless health problems. Since then, she has worked as an educator at several institutions in California and founded the San Francisco Early Childhood School of the Creative Arts, East Bay Center for Urban Arts, and True Colors Mural Project – all youth-centered initiatives to bring street art and culture to the forefront of education. Alicia’s artwork “contradicts the notion of the artist as this isolated genius in an ivory tower. (It) is a process of ancestral wealth, community learning, collaboration (and) the personal and social developments that happen when people work together for a positive end.”⁵³ Judith Francisca Baca, known as Judy Baca, is a an artist, Chicano studies and art professor. She founded the Social and Public Art Resource Center, originally the first city of Los Angeles Mural Program. Baca directed The Great Wall of Los Angeles, “one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony.”⁵⁴

Las Lechugueras (1983) is a 1500 square foot Politec acrylic mural completed by Juana Alicia, in the San Francisco Mission District.⁵⁵ It depicts six Mexican-Americans in various stages of harvesting lettuce. Tools, large machinery, and various processes of the lettuce harvest are depicted. A plane sprays pesticides overhead. The mural is busy and open to numerous interpretations, forming an “overall narrative of the simultaneous abuse and resistance, beauty and destruction, that goes on in the production of… one of the United States’ staple food crops.”⁵⁶

Santuario (1999) is a 437 square foot 3D fresco mural by Juana Alicia and Emmanuel Montoya located in the San Francisco International Airport with relief balsawood sculpted cranes on the border.⁵⁷ It depicts over twenty two adults and children in multiple joyful interactions. Curved lines outline much of the humans, indicating movement and a spiritual consciousness between everyone pictured. In the background of the mural are windows showing neat rows of yellow fields and green mountains, typical of depictions of California as seen on citrus labels.

Gente del Maíz (2012) is a 504 square foot Dibond print at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex Cafeteria in Los Angeles. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and the UCLA Labor Center collaborated to support UCLA and Miguel Contreras Learning Complex high school students in a twenty week project to commemorate “the legacy of labor leader Miguel Contreras while visually representing the issues affecting the students of the Center, who come from neighborhood with many conditions that impede high school graduation,”⁵⁸ a project led by Judy Baca. The mural is divided in half with three people as a stalk of corn, the central figure a woman in graduation dress, hands outstretched, pouring corn seeds out at the viewer. The left side of the mural depicts farm workers marching in a line in the fields and the right side of the mural depicts symbols of modernity with masses of protesters supporting unions, demanding the passage of the Dream Act, all led by moms in a line, pushing children in strollers. 

Uprising of the Mujeres (1979) is a 192 square foot acrylic on wood mural Judy Baca created at El Taller Siquerios, a workshop for training Mexican muralists.⁵⁹ Like Gente del Maiz, the mural also appears to be divided in half, the left grimly depicting symbols of an exhausting, depersonalized modern work force, money and weapons a main outcome, with a human, collapsed, face-down, on the floor. On the right side are faceless workers bent over in a yellow field, “coming back” as a group, with faces of determination defined, led by a woman with braids, eerie skeletal foot, one hand accusatorily pointing at the systems of depersonalization and discoloration, and in another hand an outstretched palm with two silver coins. Stark is the difference between collective determination and faceless lack of autonomy.

All four murals combat erasure in citrus labels, because they are a celebration of identity, reclaim history and reframe genealogy. Alicia’s murals give value to the texture of worker clothing and muscle tone, indicating depth and beauty in their existence. Gente del Maiz celebrates college graduation and place working moms at the forefront of liberation. Graduation rates are not a grim statistic, working moms are not a burden. Farm workers are not just history, the work still happens and their labor is still necessary. Mexican-Americans didn’t just “arrive” to work, but have been shaping industries embedded in society and creating a safer and more collaborative work environments ever since… All four murals “reinvoke[e] a historical script and repositio[n] difference from the dominant culture within the realm of the social and political.”⁶⁰

Instruction: Fruit crate labels and advertising

A written art critique can be made about individual labels in the same format Hockney’s work was introduced. After the art critique, a discussion about the imagery can be conducted in a round-table format. Ensure equity of voice with structured student talk strategies and different groupings, focusing on the voices of students that often go unheard:

1. Why did advertisers want to use pictures of fields with no workers or tools to advertise the oranges?
2. Why do fruit labels show a white lady when most fruit pickers were families of color (Indigenous, Chinese, Mexican, etc.)?
3. How can we make these fruit labels more representative of “real life”?
4. If you had to illustrate an ad for a fruit you like and want other people to try, what would you put in it and why?
5. How can eating a fruit bring a memory back to you? Or create a new memory?

Instruction: Chicano murals and their endless possibilities

Using four of Juana Alicia and Judy Baca’s murals, there is plentiful imagery and possibilities open for discussion. Students are encouraged to explore these murals as a wimmelbilder in the same manner they would informally observe “I Spy” or “Where’s Waldo” books. Letting students simply explore them and recording their observations verbally or through writing is one way to honor their initial remarks. Questions I would ask are:

1. What do you notice first about each mural? Last? What is an optical illusion?
2. Why do you think the teacher wanted you to see murals after we looked at citrus labels?
3. What attitudes do you think the artists have about farm workers?
4. How were farm workers unfairly “trapped”? If they were “trapped,” how did they resist?
5. Why do you think the artists choose to show so many people in each mural?

Student project: Rehumanizing images of pastoral beauty

Finally, students create a diptych with one side showing the dominant, uncontested narrative, and the other side featuring the human worker involvement. Students can create this with actual photos, collage, or through painting and drawing. The purpose is to reiterate that there are often two or more sides of the same story. A teacher example that features one side as an image of a farm worker in an action-pose and the other side as a fruit ad can be used to prompt student thinking. Students do not have to focus on farm workers for this depiction. Experimenting with mixed media and other multi-faceted narratives should be encouraged among students.

Magazine cut outs would allow students to easily recreate the dominant narrative, as they are readily available. Photos would allow students to bring their family history. Having use of a color printer on-site helps those who have only digitalized versions and ensure equity, that all artistic choices can be honored in the classroom Students are encouraged to make fantastical images, much like Alicia and Baca do – real life with elements of magical realism.

As “murals” take days to plan and complete that students may not be used to, students are encouraged to track their progress. In my classroom, students are allowed to use their own cell phones to take pictures of their work at the end of every class. Students without phones have the teacher track their progress. Once this becomes a routine, students actually prefer the teacher to photograph their art. I typically have students answer questions as part of daily work and recall that data to plug into a “Project Progress” Google document at the end of the project. All photos that the teacher has taken is stored publicly on Google drive for students to access.

Possible sentence stems for assessment to support students in explaining their compositions include:

1. My diptych contains two sides. The “dominant” side is about ______. The “behind the scenes” side is about _____.
2. Most people see the first side because ______.
3. Less people see the second side because ______.
4. It is important to have a second story because ______.
5. The second side has people _______ because ______.