Table of Contents for Beasts of the Field
List
of Illustrations xiii
Preface xv
book one
foundations in conquest
Chapter One
In the Nets of
Heaven: The Campesino on the Spanish
Frontier 3
California’s first
farmworkers are transplanted north from Baja California in 1769, a movement
instigated by the grand imperial plans of two remarkable men: Padre Junípero
Serra, a Franciscan missionary in the service of God; and José de Gálvez, a
powerful Spanish official bent on empire. The journey is long, treacherous, and
deadly.
Chapter Two
Bird Herders, Stirrup
Boys, and Naked Winemakers: Assembling
a Labor Force 21
Gathered on
twenty-one self-contained, plantation-like outposts, thousands of native
Californians merge field labor and survival skills in the service of religion
and colonization. Padre Junípero Serra and his Franciscan brothers insist they
are preparing natives for an independent life. They ultimately exert an
opposite effect.
Chapter Three
Always Trembling With
Fear: Controlling Mission
Farmworkers 38
Unable to leave and
with few individual rights, mission field hands are directed by an integrated
system of control ranging from imprisonment and leg irons to whipping and
public humiliation. Though not slaves, neither are they free.
Chapter Four
No Longer Keep Us By
Force: Accommodation and Resistance
Among Mission Field Hands 60
Field hands wage
full-scale revolts at Santa Inéz, La Purísma, and Santa Barbara missions.
Gardeners at Santa Cruz mission hate Padre Andrés Quintana so passionately that
they murder him. Most natives resist by fleeing; so many run away that the
padres must constantly send armed expeditions to hunt them down.
book two the
meaning of free labor
Chapter Five
Not Free to Be
Idle: Life and Labor on the Mexican
Ranchos and American Farms 89
Free of Franciscan
domination, field hands in the 1830s and 1840s find themselves trading labor
for a blanket, a bowl of gruel, or less. At Sutter’s Fort, farmhands are kept
in line by the macabre sight of the severed and rotting head of a native boss
tacked above the fort entrance. American military rule ensures compliance and
keeps them at work.
Chapter Six
To the Highest
Bidder: Native Field Hands and Gold
Rush Agriculture 115
With failed gold
miners refusing to work in the fields, native field hands save commercial
farmers from the first of many “labor shortages.” So desperate are growers to
maintain control that they institute an odious law compelling natives to work as
indentured servants.
Chapter Seven
They Have Filled Our
Jails and Graveyards: The Decline of
Indian Labor 35
Arrested and
auctioned off in an alcoholic stupor, native field hands descend into a life of
vice, violence, and depression. But even as their survival grows tenuous, they
are absolutely essential to the success of commercial farming in the Golden
State.
book three golden
harvest
Chapter Eight
Between the Teeth of
the Cylinder: The Emergence of
Migratory Labor and Farm Technology 161
As natives die out, a
new class of field hands proliferates in the interior valleys. Known as
“bindlemen,” or “bindlestiffs,” they take their names from the tightly wrapped
blankets or “bindles” containing their worldly possessions, which they pack
everywhere they go.
Chapter Nine
Open-Air
Factories: Industrialization of Labor
on the Bonanza Wheat Farms 178
On Hugh Glenn’s
sixty-six-thousand-acre Sacramento Valley wheat farm, bindlemen work almost
nonstop from June to October. Surrounded by machines, gears, pulleys, dust,
steam, fire, smoke, heat, and noise, they are essentially factory laborers in
the countryside.
Chapter Ten
Hell’s Fury and
Liquid Fire: The Coarse Culture of
Wheat Harvesters and Threshers
205
Maimed and killed by
countless agricultural accidents, the torrid pace of work, and the harsh
environment, wheat harvesters and threshers craft a coarse survival culture.
book four
immigrants from the east
Chapter Eleven
Trustworthy
Laborers: Chinese Infiltration into Irrigated
Agriculture 235
As bindlemen carouse,
Chinese immigrants lay the foundations of commercial winemaking in Sonoma
County. From this beginning, the Chinese work their way into the state’s
agricultural districts in the 1860s, exerting an influence disproportionate to
their relatively small numbers.
Chapter Twelve
Bought Like Any Other
Commodity: China Bosses and Gang
Labor 258
Following completion
of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, thousands of unemployed Chinese are
put to work under bosses reclaiming swampland in the Sacramento–San Joaquin
Delta. Boarding and feeding their men, bosses then offer them to farmers as a
cheap and reliable workforce, just as irrigated fruit and vegetable growing
undergoes a spurt of rapid growth.
Chapter Thirteen
The Chinese Must
Go! Community, Chinatowns, and the
Anti-Chinese Movement 286
By the mid-1870s,
most rural communities sport a Chinatown or China camp, where China bosses
establish crews and dominate the labor market. But as they take control of more
fieldwork, unemployed whites begin a campaign of terror.
Chapter Fourteen
More Manpower from a
Pint of Rice: Sugar Beets,
Short-Handled Hoes, and Chinese Exclusion 307
Tormented, harassed,
and banned from further immigration, Chinese field hands nonetheless continue
to earn the favor of agricultural elites, who defend the Chinese with racist
arguments.
Chapter Fifteen
Snapping Their
Fingers in Our Faces: Human Pesticides,
Labor Shortages, Child Labor, and the Response to Exclusion 334
Growers attempt to
counter the increasingly militant Chinese bosses by launching the so-called Boy
Experiment, one of several desperate schemes to bring schoolchildren and other
workers onto the farms. When the Scott Act further restricts immigration,
farmers conclude that loss of Chinese field hands constitutes the main
impediment to prosperity.
Chapter Sixteen
Worn out, Bent, and
Discouraged: Chinese Labor (Almost)
Disappears from the Fields 371
Following a series of
industrial depressions and mob actions, Chinese field hands remain on many
farms until, by the process of natural attrition, their numbers begin declining
after 1900. Old-timers cluster in small, rural communities where they live out
their last days, a society of men stranded in California without families.
book five
japanese farmworkers
Chapter Seventeen
Running From Vine to
Vine: Japanese Farmworkers and the
Beginning of Labor Militancy
407
Japanese immigrants
fill the void left by dwindling numbers of Chinese. Striking, raising wages,
and securing collective bargaining agreements under bosses known as
keiyaku-nin, they initiate the first successful farmworker unions.
Chapter Eighteen
Blood Spots on the
Moon: The 1903 Oxnard Sugar Beet
Workers Strike 440
A union of fifteen
hundred Japanese and Mexican sugar beet laborers walks out of the fields around
Oxnard, shuts down the industry, restores wages to previous levels, and
eliminates a company union. But when the American Federation of Labor refuses
to admit the Japanese contingent, the Mexicans drop plans to join the American
labor movement.
Chapter Nineteen
Exact Everything
Possible: Keiyaku-nin, Mexicans, Sikhs,
and the Quest for Labor Stability
470
As keiyaku-nin press
their advantages and win one wage demand after another, growers fight back with
tactics ranging from murder to intimidation.
Chapter Twenty
Handle the Fruit Like
Eggs! The Japanese Shift from
Field-Workers to Farmers 497
By pooling resources,
living frugally, working marginal land, farming labor-intensive crops, muscling
in on farmers, and taking over fields they had once handled as foremen, the
Japanese acquire land, and with it, the basis for family life.
book six
bindlemen
Chapter Twenty-One
Blinky Joe, Red Mike,
and Hobo Sam: Bindlemen on the
Move 527
As the Japanese fade
from the work pool, bindlemen take up the slack, holding down more than half of
all harvest jobs in 1910. With the possible exception of Indian field hands, no
group is more exploited or ill-treated.
Chapter Twenty-Two
As Rotten as
Ever: Jungle Camps, Slave Markets, and
the Main Stem 548
Riding trains between
harvests, living alongside the railroads in “jungle camps,” and holing up for
the winter in the cities, bindlemen survive the agricultural circuit by
devising and abiding by their own laws and institutions. Ordering life and
holding men together, these “rules of the road” mark a unique transient
culture.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Privilege of
Quitting:
Death, Discontent,
and Alienation 572
Possessing a rich and
inexhaustible storehouse of adaptive devices, bindlemen do not passively accept
their lot. While unable to sustain traditional organizing activities, they
avoid and resist regular labor and develop their own incipient form of
working-class radicalism.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I’ve Been
Robbed: The Struggle to Organize
Farmworkers 596
Establishing union
locals in the main stem and slave market areas of West Coast towns, soapboxers
for the Industrial Workers of the World move right in among bindlemen. After
winning a dramatic confrontation at Fresno, they are beaten so badly at San
Diego that they completely reassess their approach, devise new strategies, and
take the struggle into the fields.
Abbreviations 629
Notes 635
Acknowledgments 871
Index 877
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