Matsuda-Martínez, Verónica

OUR SYNOPSIS: Verónica Matsuda-Martínez foregrounds farmworkers in the New Deal welfare state, showing how they converted the Farm Security Administration (FSA) labor camp program into socioeconomic empowerment and claims to citizenship from 1935 to 1946. Farmworkers leveraged the FSA camp program to gain access to New Deal policies while demanding better wages, medical care, education, housing and more. FSA officials responded to these demands by defending farmworker rights and strengthening communities. She argues that “the camps became important symbols of America’s commitment to social justice and wartime democracy.” (9) Especially in Texas, farmworkers seized federal policy benefits to make the welfare state more inclusive and reshape American agribusiness. Despite popular efforts by John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange, and other influencers to spotlight white laborers, most migrant farmworkers were people of color. In FSA camps, they combined life necessities with mutual economic production to forge state-sponsored community growth across lines of race and gender. During World War II, FSA officials cited war production needs to expand labor camps just as the FSA also moved to incarcerate Japanese Americans. Through oral histories, she also shows how farmworker families made FSA camps their own by claiming and adapting shared spaces to serve their needs. They also firmly maintained identity and community ties outside of the camps, refusing to allow federal programs to stifle cultural associations. FSA medical services exemplify how farmworkers demanded inclusion in government programs while also negotiating how to best use them for their benefit.