In June 1930, the Arizona State Federation of Labor (ASFL) called for new restrictions on Mexican immigration in order to protect the status of "white citizen workers of Arizona and other Southwestern states." (1) Arizona's trade unions had repeatedly pressed for anti-immigration legislation over

the previous two decades, and in so doing they often conflated national identity with race, using the terms white, American, and citizen interchangeably. The Great Depression amplified existing fears that Mexican workers were competing for jobs and degrading the economic, cultural, and racial status of the region's Anglo-American working class. Pressure from Arizona unions and politicians, and from other Southwestern states, soon compelled the U.S. Department of Labor to restrict immigration and initiate a nationwide "repatriation" campaign during which some half million Mexican immigrants, and thousands of Mexican Americans, were deported. (2)

Ironically, once Arizona agriculture began to rebound in 1933, the Anglos who had replaced deported Mexican workers faced questions about their own fitness for full citizenship. The ASFL theory that deportation would uphold or uplift the status of "white citizen workers" proved erroneous. As Anglo migrants from the Great Plains began working under the same substandard conditions as their Mexican and Indian antecedents, the boundaries of whiteness blurred. Incoming migrants were labeled with such derogatory terms as "Okie" and "white trash" and were shuttled into neighborhoods populated largely by nonwhites. Nevertheless, most of the newcomers refused to see ethnic Mexicans and Indians--or the growing number of black workers--as their equals. Many, if not most, viewed their own unfortunate circumstances as temporary, and they held on to their faith that they could work their way up the agricultural ladder, if not into new occupations altogether. (3)

For many, their expectations for upward mobility would prove well founded. Historian Marsha Weisiger has shown that, by the end of the Great Depression, the majority of the "Okies" found their way into better-paying, often unionized jobs, and, in many cases, into the middle class. Weisiger attributes this success to "gumption, hard work, perseverance, and a bit of luck," arguing that race had little to do with their experiences. (4) This essay, by contrast, contends that we cannot understand the concurrent success of the Anglo migrants and persistent subjugation of Mexican and Indian farmworkers without focusing squarely on race. While the Anglo workers certainly faced extremely difficult circumstances, ultimately, the boundaries of whiteness were not irrevocably damaged. Their successes in working their way out of poverty, when examined against the failure of most regional ethnic and Indian workers to do the same, can only be explained by understanding the central role that race played in defining the regional class structure in Arizona cotton country.

This essay contributes in two ways to current scholarship about race, labor, and citizenship in the twentieth-century Southwest and, more broadly, to recent debates over how the concept of whiteness has evolved over time in the history of the United States. First, while many scholars have focused on how various groups of European immigrants "became white" in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the story of Okies in Arizona reveals how a population that had long been deemed white temporarily saw its privileged racial status threatened. (5) Second, however, I caution that this point should not be taken too far. Historian Neil Foley has argued that in Texas poor Anglos lost some of their whiteness in the 1930s, and that whiteness remained fractured even after the Great Depression due to the loss of status of yeomen farmers who had fallen off the agricultural ladder, becoming "semi-white" farmworkers. (6) This article draws some of the same conclusions, but with two important distinctions: In Arizona, there had never been a class of yeoman farmers comparable to what had existed in the south-central Plains states, and thus there was no comparable ladder from which to fall. Moreover, in Arizona the threat to the boundaries of white citizenship proved only temporary. Indeed, in the waning years of the Great Depression, the privileged status of "white citizen workers" would be reinforced as most Anglo migrant farmworkers found their way into higher-status jobs and as the Bracero Program reinforced the idea that migrant farmwork was nonwhite, noncitizen work. In short, the slip-page of many Anglos into a somewhat questionable racial status proved incomplete and temporary.

The deportations of Mexicans in the early years of the Great Depression were in large part responses to regional demands. In Arizona, much of the Anglo population, including labor union members and state officials, placed the blame for skyrocketing unemployment and low wages on "alien" Mexican workers. J. H. Francis, a member of the Arizona Legislature, expressed the feelings of many of his constituents in March 1930 when he complained about "the terrific drain imposed upon Arizona taxpayers through the admission of thousands of indigent Mexicans annually into this state." The Central Labor Council of the Globe-Miami mining district wrote to the president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) that the "industrial, social and educational standards of Americans" in Arizona's extractive industries had been dramatically undermined by the "Mexican influx." The ASFL and the national AFL agreed with this assessment and repeatedly called for a steep reduction in Mexican immigration in order to protect the status of "white citizen workers" in the Southwest. (7)

The rhetoric of deportation went beyond economic concerns to imply that Mexicans could not be assimilated and that nationality was determined not only by birthplace and political loyalty, but also by race and culture. In March 1930, the Arizona Labor Journal printed what it called a "splendid article" containing inflammatory rhetoric in support of restricting Mexican immigration. The article challenged the "alleged necessity for cheap labor" and suggested that Mexicans threatened to undermine "American standards of citizenship." It proposed further that white Americans in the Southwest were suffering due to "the permanent addition to our population of a great mass of the least intelligent and the least assimilable of all the alien groups which have settled among us," and it called for the curtailment of the "further Mexicanization of the Southwest." (8)

Arizona politicians who had previously supported temporary admittance of Mexican nationals had little choice but to respond to the growing cry for restrictions. Senator Carl Hayden initially replied by suggesting that Mexicans should be admitted into Arizona and the Southwest only temporarily for seasonal farmwork--an argument that he had been making since Mexican immigration dramatically increased in the late 1910s with the expansion of agriculture (particularly cotton) in the region. As the din against Mexican immigration became louder, however, his position changed, and his rhetoric became more emphatic and tinged with ethnocentrism, if not racism. "No large number of aliens," he suggested in April 1930, "should be permitted to become permanent residents of the United States, whose children will not look the same, act the same, and have the same ideals, as other Americans." In December, Hayden introduced a resolution in the U.S. Senate to appropriate funds for a full count of the illegal "aliens" who remained in the United States. He enthusiastically endorsed President Herbert Hoover's nomination of William Doak as Secretary of Labor, embracing Doak's promise to intensify restrictions against Mexican immigration and to initiate a concerted national repatriation campaign. (9)

Complaints in Arizona were part of a growing national groundswell for federal action. In the latter 1920s the U.S. State Department had begun to enforce more diligently the $8 head tax imposed under the 1917 Immigration Act, which, combined with the $9 visa fee introduced in the Immigration Act of 1924, made legal immigration prohibitively expensive for many Mexicans. After March 1930 the government stopped issuing visas altogether to "common laborers" from Mexico, and the U.S. Congress made illegal entry a misdemeanor punishable by jail time. Beyond the enforcement of immigration laws, the federal government began an active campaign to deport undocumented immigrants, while city and state officials took it upon themselves to encourage and intimidate even legal immigrants to return to Mexico. Under Secretary of Labor William Doak, immigration agents and local officials carried out raids in cities across the country, entering into communities and workplaces to arrest and deport those without proper documentation. (10)

In Arizona, thousands of Mexican immigrants were either forcefully deported or chose to leave "voluntarily," often as the result of active intimidation or discriminatory treatment by employers. The Depression, of course, affected all Arizona residents. Employers, however, often fired ethnic Mexicans first. In Tucson, in 1930, the Southern Pacific Railroad laid off more than one hundred workers, most of whom were Mexicans who worked in the blacksmith and car repair shops. Moreover, by 1933 copper mining at primarily Mexican camps such as Ray and Ajo had shut down entirely. Maximo Solarez, who lived in the mining town of Miami in 1931, remembered the "repatriations" well. In his words, "There was no work, no nothing here. The government brought trains to haul people away--at that time there was mainly Mexican people here--and they were loading them in box cars and trains, putting them back out to El Paso to the frontier." Solarez acknowledged that mining employers and government officials did not force Mexicans onto the trains, but the unfriendly atmosphere and the lack of work gave Mexicans little choice but to return. "They weren't forcing people to go--but there was nothing to survive with here so they had to go some place. Most of the Mexican people had come here to work." (11) All told, between 1930 and 1932, sociologist Paul Taylor calculated that 18,520 Mexicans were repatriated or deported from Arizona. (12)

Just as many of the proponents of Mexican repatriation had hoped, the deportation of Mexican immigrants increased the demand for Anglo workers, but employment was mostly restricted to nonunionized, low-wage agricultural jobs. In fact, since the mid-1920s, Arizona cotton growers had increasingly recruited workers from the southern Plains states. Arizona growers had become interested in workers in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas as early as 1924, when new highways linked the two regions for the first time. When the federal government began cracking down on the recruitment of Mexican workers in 1928, the growers intensified their efforts. Initially, the growers, with the help of the U.S. Department of Labor, distributed reimbursable gasoline receipt booklets and chartered trains to transport the workers. After the onset of the Depression, growers found that such measures were unnecessary, and instead wrote letters, posted signs, distributed fliers, and inserted notices in regional newspapers. Most of the migrants ended up in Pinal and Maricopa counties, where four-fifths of the state's cotton crop was produced. There was little work available in the mining towns, since many of the mines did not reopen until the late 1930s. (13)

Even during the Depression, the relative health of Arizona's agricultural economy, when compared to that of the south-central states, encouraged the movement of migrants into the state. In the southern Plains, drought, the environmental catastrophe of the Dust Bowl storms, economic depression, and the federally subsidized crop-reduction measures under the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) resulted in a sharp decline in cotton production. In Texas, for example, the New Deal crop-reduction measures contributed to a 60 percent decline in cotton acreage. As landlords decreased their acreage, they also expelled their tenants. (14) Conversely, by 1933 Arizona's agricultural industry had already begun to climb out of the nadir of the early Depression, once again requiring a large body of seasonal migrant labor. In part, this was a consequence of the AAA. Because the federal programs resulted in higher prices for cotton, the AAA led to an increase, rather than a decrease in cotton acreage in Arizona. Moreover, in Pima County, the 1930 completion of the Coolidge Dam combined with a proliferation of groundwater pumps led to an expansion of irrigated farmland in the Casa Grande Valley from about 55,000 acres in the late 1920s to 80,000 by the end of the decade. In 1937, Arizona growers--mostly in Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima counties--planted almost 300,000 acres of cotton, breaking the state's record. Because the 132,000 acres of farmland in the newest farming regions in Pinal County were divided into only 419 operating units, two-thirds of which were 430 acres or larger, both tenants and owner-operators alike hired migrant labor to do most of the fieldwork. (15)

Over the course of the decade, while Indian and ethnic Mexican workers from Arizona's reservations, towns, and barrios still filled some of the seasonal jobs, Anglos came to make up the largest farm labor force. In 1936-37, sociologist E. D. Tetreau estimated that about 2,000 O'odham migrated from their reservations into the cotton fields every picking season. In addition, 2,500 to 3,000 seasonal workers--largely Mexicans and Yaqui--came from towns and cities within Arizona. Another 2,000 workers traveled to Arizona from California, since the peak season occurred earlier in the latter state, ending by November. That same season, however, the greatest number of seasonal workers came from the states of Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, totaling some 18,000. In fact, a 1941 study found that 90 percent of those who migrated to Arizona in the 1930s and remained over the course of the decade were white, while only 6 percent were from Mexico, and 4 percent were black. (16)

Ironically, while repatriation had succeeded in opening up jobs for "white citizen workers," this type of employment represented a jolting decline in status for the workers themselves. Neil Foley has shown that as white tenants in Texas became wageworkers, their very whiteness came into question. (17) The process of moving out of the south-central states and into Arizona's farming region had a similar effect. A 1938 Works Progress Administration study of white migrant workers in Arizona noted the negative attitudes toward the newcomers. The authors of the study found that residents throughout southern Arizona "universally applied ... the term poor white trash" to the incoming migrants. Much as they had historically viewed Mexican immigrants as inherently degraded, many Arizona residents viewed the new migrants' downtrodden condition as a result of their natural inferiority. According to the report, "In the cotton towns where the pickers go on Saturdays to buy their supplies, the permanent residents--merchants, restaurant waiters, delivery boys, police officers, etc.--regard the cotton pickers with a feeling closely analogous to racial prejudice. Though there appears to be no overt social segregation in the cotton towns, the pickers are thought of as naturally inferior, particularly when they have no money to spend--as they frequently do not." (18)

While the WPA study suggested that there was no "overt social segregation in the cotton towns," de facto segregation of poor whites did occur. Having little money, many migrants had no choice but to move into the poor areas of the small towns and cities. Father Emmett McLoughlin, a Catholic priest at Saint Mary's Church in Phoenix, suggested that residents encouraged this pattern of social segregation in order to promote an image of Phoenix as a modern, clean city and to shake off its image as a "cow-town." Phoenix, he explained, "was trying to bolster the social status of its citizens by shunting across the tracks the immigrants from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas and by veneering itself with the gloss of a symphony orchestra, a Little Theater, and necklace of resort hotels." While the newcomers moved into shoddy neighborhoods filled with "shacks ... without electricity, most without plumbing and heat," most Phoenix residents chose to ignore the problem. "Phoenix did not know--or pretended not to know--that it had slums. But in them lived the Negroes, the Mexicans, and the 'white trash.'" (19)

Still, it would be a mistake to overstate the extent to which the racial boundaries between the incoming Anglo migrants and the Mexican, Indian, and growing black populations were dissolving. In fact, the depressed status of the incoming workers proved disturbing to many Anglo-Americans at both the federal and local levels. In Arizona, this was due in part to the fact that many of the farm operators had origins in the south-central states, and many Arizonans even had relatives among the Depression-era migrants. (20) Of at least equal importance, however, was the ideological imperative Anglos had to ensure that the "white citizen worker" did not sink to the degraded level of nonwhite workers. Deportation, it turned out, had failed to secure the status of Arizona's white, resident population, and in fact it had the opposite effect once the cotton market rebounded, resulting in a new demand for a supply of cheap labor. In the process, the perceived line between the respectable white citizen and degraded nonwhite workers seemed at risk of dissolving--a risk that prompted much of Arizona's native Anglo population into action.

Stanley Rider, a member of the Citizens' Civil Liberties Committee of Arizona, expressed the views of many Arizonans when he commented on the degraded socioeconomic status of the Anglo farmworkers. During a Tucson radio address toward the end of the decade, he exclaimed, "Now the foreign racial groups are gone, or rapidly going. In their places have come the people from the 'Dust Bowl,' native white Americans, who trace their ancestry back to the patriots of revolutionary days." Their poverty, he insisted, was not the result of natural inadequacy, but of economics and technology. He elaborated, "'Tractored off their places at home, as Steinbeck so graphically describes it in Grapes of Wrath, they faced destitution, when, lo, they were offered manna in the promised land." While Rider exaggerated the degree to which "foreign racial groups" had disappeared, his point was clear: Mexicans were "foreign" not simply because they were from another country, but because they were, in his view, racially different. On the other hand, the newcomers from the Plains states were, due to their whiteness, true Americans. As such, they did not deserve to withstand the poor treatment that had been acceptable when it primarily affected the nonwhite and noncitizen population. (21)

Mexican Americans in Arizona were well aware of such views, and some pointed out that not only the Okies, but also immigrants from Europe were more readily accepted as white and as American than Mexican American citizens were. Rosalio Frolian Munoz, a student at Arizona State Teacher's College, noted in 1938 that "the attitude toward Mexicans changed very decidedly after 1929, and repeatedly one hears politicians, miners and farmers who previously justified the contracting of Mexican labor at starvation wages denouncing the children or grandchildren of those immigrants and demanding that they be sent back to Mexico 'where they belong.'" Munoz contrasted this anti-Mexican sentiment to attitudes towards European immigrants and their children, observing that "members of other nationalities are considered Americans after the second generation, but the Mexicans seem to be discriminated against and labeled with derogatory terms on all occasions." (22) In fact, in some cases Mexican Americans attempted to pass as eastern or southern Europeans to avoid being subjected to discriminatory policies. Carlos Contreras, who grew up in the rural town of Tempe in the heart of Arizona's cotton country, recalled that in the 1930s, he and his family almost managed to enter a public swimming pool by claiming to be southern European. "Our parents told us we couldn't go swimming because we were Mexicans but if we tried we might pass for Italians or Greeks. Well we almost made it. Two or three of the family had gone thru when I came up to pay. The man asked me if I was Mexican and I answered no, then he said 'como te llamas?' I answered immediately without thinking, 'Carlos.' You can imagine how low my heart sank." Contreras's mistake marked itself indelibly in his consciousness, clarifying for him where the boundary between white and nonwhite fell. (23)

A brief look at the treatment of black migrants in Arizona helps to illustrate the point that whiteness still held significant capital for migrants from the southern Plains states, even if the quality of their whiteness was in question. Along with tens of thousands of Anglo migrants, several thousand blacks moved to Arizona during the decade. Most made their way into central Arizona to work in Phoenix or in the fields of Pinal and Maricopa counties. In 1920, there were fewer than 2,000 blacks in Maricopa, Pima, and Pinal counties combined. By 1930, however, the total number of blacks in these three counties rose to 6,364, and by 1940, to 10,402. Most of these newcomers came to Arizona for similar reasons as white migrants--because they, too, had lost their position as tenants or sharecroppers and were in search of a better life in the West. (24)

The status of black workers, when compared to the incoming whites, says much about where the boundaries of whiteness lay in the interwar years. Most egregiously, while poor whites often found themselves with no choice but to move into previously nonwhite neighborhoods, for blacks, such segregation was de jure. Incoming black migrants had no choice but to move into completely segregated communities, such as South Phoenix, Mobile, and Randolph. In 1924, the Phoenix Real Estate Board had ordered all Realtors to refrain from "introducing into a neighborhood members of any race or nationality, or any individuals detrimental to property values in that neighborhood"--a clause that was applied to black, ethnic Mexican, and Indian residents alike. (25) In 1938, the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) reinforced such restrictions by developing an underwriter's manual encouraging builders to segregate nonwhite residents. Shortly thereafter, the Phoenix Housing Authority (PHA), under the directives and financing of the FHA, constructed three racially segregated housing projects, including the Frank Luke project for poor whites, the Marcos de Niza project for ethnic Mexicans, and the Mathew Henson Homes project for blacks. (26) Similarly, in Randolph, a cotton town in the Casa Grande Valley, deed restrictions explicitly reserved all of the lots on the west side of Highway 87 for whites, and lots on the east side of the highway for nonwhites. Intriguingly, one resident of Randolph suggested that the black side of town was "just like an Indian Reservation," revealing that, because the presence of blacks in the area was relatively new, Indian-white segregation served as a reference point for understanding black-white segregation. In any case, Anglo-Arizonans made ample distinction between "black" and "white" migrants, a fact that suggests that even "Okies" remained white, despite their decline in economic and social status. (27)

As the decade progressed, it became increasingly clear that race and culture worked to the benefit of the incoming Anglo workers. Historian Marsha Weisiger has found that many of the newcomers eventually worked their way into more permanent, well-paid positions. Weisiger accounts for this success by pointing to their "hard work" and "perseverance," which undoubtedly was an important factor; yet she overlooks the fact that Mexicans, blacks, and Indians worked just as hard, and yet most failed to achieve the same results. The best explanation for this discrepancy is race. Close scrutiny of the original tapes and transcripts from Weisiger's interviews reveal that employers maintained a double standard in the treatment, hiring, and promotion of their workers. Growers often segregated Mexicans, Indians, and blacks from the white migrants and were less likely to promote the former into positions such as timekeeper or weigh boss. The son of one farm owner recalled that his family employed Mexicans, Indians, and whites alike, but they promoted only the last into better paying, year-round positions. He drew distinctions between those he judged to be responsible farmworkers and those he labeled as the "dregs of humanity," including the "Mexicans and Indians," as well as some transient "Okies." Over time, he explained, "the good ones integrated into the community and raised families, and they became part of us." The bad ones, implicitly, did not fulfill their manly responsibilities as citizens to settle down and provide for their families--due either to their limited capacities or simple lack of will. Yet, upon closer inspection, it is clear that they never had the same opportunities as the incoming white migrants. (28)

Some "Okies," such as Dennis Kirkland, spoke openly about the racial discrimination they witnessed in the camps. Kirkland later recalled that "there was a lot of segregation" in the cotton camp in which he first lived, and that there were a couple of rows of cabins "for the Mexicans ... in the backside." The "Indian workers," he added, "were treated the worst, in terms of working conditions." Conversely, Kirkland was promoted to weigh boss, while his father, with only a third-grade education, was soon promoted to the position of timekeeper. Such quick promotions were not unusual among the Anglo newcomers. Lloyd Hamilton, who arrived in 1937 to pick cotton, secured a job with Buckeye Irrigation Company within a year after his arrival and soon operated his own forty-acre farm. Sam Cambron, who moved to Arizona in 1936, was hired by C. O. Vosburgh as a weigh boss, and eventually became Vosburgh's superintendent. Vosburgh later granted Cambron 120 acres of his land, which the latter expanded to some 2,000 acres. (29)

As Arizona's economy began to improve, Anglo workers also received the most stable, skilled, and highest paying jobs on vegetable and fruit farms. In 1933, observers described the vast majority of the packing shed workers in south-central Arizona as "white." According to a contemporaneous U.S. Department of Labor study by Stuart Jamieson, "White shed workers ... generally refused to work beside members of a nonwhite race or even to allow them to work inside a packing shed." Jamieson explained that the shed workers feared that allowing "one or a few to work in a shed ... would be a 'thin edge of the wedge,'" thus jeopardizing their monopoly on such jobs, where they earned substantially higher wages than the largely nonwhite seasonal workers. Anglo agricultural workers resorted to racial stereotypes in their attempt to explain why Mexicans made up the majority of fieldworkers in the vegetable fields surrounding the sheds. According to one worker from Oklahoma, white workers shunned the lettuce fields because they "preferred long-handle hoes and different type hoeing." Mexicans and other nonwhites were racially better suited for vegetable-field work, he contended, because they "could stoop down better" and thus "go right through the field." (30)

Some Anglos managed to look beyond race and were willing to organize unions with the state's nonwhite population. Tendencies towards racial exclusion and separation, combined with a number of other factors, however, limited the effectiveness of Arizona's modest labor movement. As Arizona's packing-shed workers began to unionize in 1933, they did so separately from the fieldworkers, reflecting their own anxieties about their occupational and racial status. In part, this was due to the fact that the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) had excluded farmworkers from the right to engage in collective bargaining. Shed workers, as processors, were protected under the new law, and they feared that farmworkers would jeopardize their union. Stuart Jamieson, however, observed that this refusal reflected "racial as well as occupational differences." He continued, "The shed workers resisted any attempt, whether in unions or elsewhere, to classify them as agricultural workers." They did so not only because they would be subjected to the "lack of legal protection suffered by field workers," but also because they might be subjected to the same "discrimination" and "low social status" suffered by Indians and Mexicans. (31)

There were exceptions to this rule. Organizers from California's Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (C&AWIU) made inroads among the multiethnic fieldworkers during the 1933-34 season, when wages failed to reflect the rebound in the cotton market. That year, picking rates reached a nadir of fifty cents per hundredweight. The C&AWIU organizers made regular visits to the migrant camps around Maricopa and Pinal counties, and they established an office in the town of Coolidge. Since the union had organized a successful strike in Yuma in September, and there was little doubt that the fifty-cent wage was no longer justifiable, the state arbitration board was able to negotiate a ten-cent increase in the picking rate for the 1933 season. Since this wage was still far below what the union and the pickers felt was adequate, many pickers still refused to work. (32) Unfortunately, by the spring of 1934, the C&AWIU pulled out of Arizona to counter a campaign of violence and intimidation in California by the growers' association there. The ASFL attempted to continue the organization campaign in the absence of the C&AWIU, but aggressive recruiting by the Arizona Farm Labor Service in the southern Plains and the out-migration of thousands of workers to California, undermined the effort. (33)

Union organizers again made ephemeral progress in the 1937-38 season, but armed intimidation and the transience and lack of unity of the workers once again undermined the movement. That year, Arizona growers had recruited a surplus of workers, and flooding in California prevented them from moving to the West Coast to find work. Recognizing their chance to make inroads into Arizona, organizers from California's United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) signed up many of the stranded pickers on the union rolls, and organized a march in Phoenix to demand commodity aid. Without the support of Arizona's more stable, mostly Anglo shed workers, however, the unskilled, seasonal workforce could not maintain an effective movement. As Stuart Jamieson noted, "There was a strong sentiment among the packers ... to remain organized in a separate union which would be affiliated to, but not absorbed in, a central executive body." While the shed workers made some compromise gains in the following year, by the end of the decade, UCAPAWA lost its foothold altogether in Arizona. Into the postwar period, only the sheds would remain unionized, and the highest paying shed jobs would remain the exclusive domain of Anglo workers. Ammon Hennacy, who began working in the Arizona fields in the 1940s, verified Jamieson's earlier observations when he noted, "In the packing sheds here I never saw a Negro, Mexican or Indian have a good paying job." (34)

Such racial favoritism was not limited to agriculture. Employers in other industries were more likely to hire migrants from the south-central states than longtime Mexican and Indian residents. In Tucson, as early as 1931, BIA officials began to notice that local residents were hiring unemployed white workers for odd jobs such as lawn work instead of the Mexican and Indian workers who had held the majority of such jobs for decades. In February one official complained, "Four [Indian] men here for work, but I have no calls for them. There are about 1,800 men and women in Tucson and vicinity seeking employment, and many jobs that formerly went to Indians are now given to whites." (35) Throughout the Depression and into the war years, such favoritism was widespread. Tucson's Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen explicitly barred nonwhites in its 1941 constitution. The union rulebook stated that "Mexicans, Indians, or those of Indian or Spanish-American extraction are not eligible" for unionized positions. (36)

The federal government's New Deal programs were not immune to racial discrimination either. In the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), recruitment was disproportionately swayed toward Anglos. In Pima County, for example, the Pima County Welfare Board was given a quota of 1,000 CCC recruits in 1933. According to the Club Hispano-Americano, of those recruited, most were Anglos, while only one-fifth were people of Mexican descent. These figures were substantially out of proportion with the Mexican American population in the county. According to the newspaper, when the mutualista criticized the uneven figures, county officials responded that it would be socially disruptive to raise the standard of living of "Mexicans" while allowing that of whites to decline. (37) In the camps themselves, blacks and Mexican Americans were segregated into separate barracks. According to federal policy, Mexican Americans were not to be segregated, but local whites insisted that they live in separate quarters, and so segregation of Mexicans became standard in the CCC camps. (38)

The federal government rcsponded to the poor working conditions of the nation's farmworkers more directly in 1935 by establishing the Resettlement Administration, which within a year was renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA). To ameliorate the conditions of migrant farmworkers, the FSA began to construct and operate labor camps throughout the country. The new labor camps were not only intended to improve living conditions for workers, but also, in the words of one historian, to "chang[e] their behavior" through lessons of "personal hygiene, self-government, thrift, and parenting." (39) In 1939 and 1940, two government camps opened in Arizona, in the Buckeye area and the Casa Grande Valley. The camps offered housing, laundry facilities, showers and toilets, community buildings for social activities, libraries, nurseries, and, beginning in 1941, cooperative stores. Believing that the migrant workers could lift themselves out of poverty through education and self-improvement, the camp staff also offered lectures on hygiene and family planning, classes in arts and crafts, and dances and movies. FSA officials hoped that the camps would restore order to the nation's industrial farming areas and resolve conflicts between growers and organized workers. To this end, it instructed its camp managers to discourage union activity. (40)

Anglo responses to the FSA camps reveal much about how the boundaries of whiteness functioned. Indeed, the new level of federal aid made Anglo men in the camps especially sensitive to charges that they were not acting as good citizens--that, like Mexican and Indian workers, they had become lazy, dependent, and incapable of caring for their own families. Anxieties about race, class, and proper gender roles led many Anglos to stridently assert their independence, industriousness, and manhood. Federal guardianship might be appropriate for nonwhites, but it was not an acceptable position for Arizona's white citizens. Decades later, many would deny that they ever received federal help. One man, who eventually established his own farm, insisted with pride, "I tell you, my folks never got any welfare, or any commodities. It was just against their principles, they wouldn't do it." Another explained that his family had little choice but to accept public assistance and to live in an FSA camp, but that they always felt "really, really bad" about their position. He explained further that despite the fact that "all of us at that time had to take it ... the minute we could all get off of it, we got off of it." Another former cotton-picker explained that he had never accepted public assistance, and he felt that most people who wanted to work could do so. Many, he argued, were simply lazy. "They preferred to stand in that line and get it," he explained, "and I'd rather work." (41) Each of these individuals was involved in defining what it meant to be a "white citizen worker." In essence, it meant that one was highly industrious, could provide for one's own family, and would avoid dependency at all costs, thus emulating, to the best of one's ability, the mythical ideal of the yeoman farmer or craftsman. Needless to say, Mexican, black, and Indian workers in reality had many of the same goals, but ironically, most Anglos chose to perceive these groups' low economic and social status as the result of their own shortcomings, rather than the circumstances in which they found themselves.

Indeed, aware of the stigma attached to cotton-picking, many of the newcomers drew distinctions between themselves and other workers, suggesting that because their condition was purely circumstantial, and because they planned either to settle permanently in Arizona or eventually to return to their homes, they did not fit the profile of the typical "Okie." One woman whose family had operated tenant farms in both Oklahoma and Texas before moving to Arizona to pick cotton explained that she and her family had never really been "Okies," because that term referred to "people that moved around from job to job; they never stayed anywhere any length of time." In contrast, her father was able to build a house for her, her siblings, and her husband, so that they could move out of the tents, and within two years her husband secured a job at a cotton gin, allowing her to quit picking cotton altogether. As another ex-farmworker would later explain, it was only the "transient laborers"--generally single men or married men incapable of caring for their families--and not those families who settled down to stake new roots, who were the true Okies. In his own words, "A lot of them, that's all they ever wanted, they wanted a job for a few days and then they wanted to move someplace else and they didn't want any responsibility. Those were really the Okies." (42)

Self-consciousness about accusations of dependency was an important cause of the ultimate failure of one particularly ambitious FSA project in Arizona initiated by the Resettlement Administration in 1935 and placed under the direction of the FSA in 1936. The 3,600-acre cooperative Casa Grande Valley Farms housed up to sixty families on contiguous two-acre tracts. Each family earned wages and split the year-end profits after deductions for capital, management, and nonmember employee expenses. The FSA revealed its own racial biases by selecting the first seventeen settlers from Arizona's resident Anglo population and selecting thirty-nine more families the following year--all of them Anglo migrants. Still, from the outset, residents of Pinal County expressed concern about the character of the migrants, about the government's overt role in establishing such a venture, and about its cooperative nature. Some Pinal County residents called the farm "Little Russia," and derided the settlers as "reds." The local press derisively described the settlers as "cotton pickers" who lived in "shacks," and the editor of the Casa Grande Dispatch asked the rhetorical question, "are these people Americans or do some of their names end in '-vitch' or '-insky?' (43)

Sensitivity about their status bred a deep resentment among many of the settlers, which in turn led to factionalism and a defensive expression of their own whiteness, ultimately contributing to the long-term failure of the project. While the farm was initially conceived as a self-contained venture in which women and children would aid the male household heads in certain tasks such as the cotton harvest, by the third or fourth year, many of the men refused to allow their wives and children to engage in manual labor. For many men, to be white meant to be able to earn sufficient income to protect one's family from having to engage in manual labor (unless such labor was of the domestic kind, within the home). According to Ed Banfield, who directly participated in the project and personally interviewed many of its participants, "cotton-picking was associated with a class status which the settlers wished to escape," and so the settlers "used Indians, Mexicans and other 'Okies' for low-caste jobs almost exclusively [by] 1942." Banfield also found that the settlers preferred to keep a social distance between themselves and resident Mexicans, Indians, and "Okies" who still worked as cotton-pickers. Instead, they preferred to associate with the more stable class of resident Anglos, thus reinforcing the ideological boundaries around whiteness. For this reason, he suggested, they were most comfortable in the town of Florence, where "the underlying population of farm laborers ... was Mexican," while the "Anglo-Saxons" were "teachers, prison guards, highway employees, and county office clerks." Growing increasingly dissatisfied with government interference with the farm's management and the social stigma attached to manual labor, by 1943 most abandoned the farm altogether. With little support from the residents, the FSA put the land up for sale in 1944. While race was not the only factor in the abandonment of the project, the anxiety that many of the Anglo residents felt about their interrelated economic and racial status played a large role in dooming the farm to failure. (44)

As Arizona's economy rebounded due to the economic boom brought about by World War II, the state's strictly racialized class structure reemerged largely unscathed. In 1944, Carlos Castaneda, sitting before the Senate Committee on Labor and Education, noted that Mexican Americans in Arizona remained "restricted, very largely to common labor and semi-skilled jobs; and even the urgent need of manpower as the result of the war has not broken down the prejudice which bars large numbers of skilled laborers from promotion in order that they might be utilized at their highest skill and thus contribute more fully and more efficiently to the total war effort." (45) As Castaneda's statement suggests, segregation and discriminatory practices toward ethnic Mexicans continued during and after the war. In the minds of many Anglos, the distinction between "white citizen workers" and Mexican noncitizen workers, Indians, and blacks, was as clear as it had ever been.

The initiation of the Emergency Farm Labor Program, or Bracero Program, in 1942, reinforced this distinction. That year, as many Arizonans left to fight overseas or found new war-industry jobs, the farm labor force reached its smallest number in decades. Inmates from the state prisons and Japanese prisoners of war filled some of the gap. By 1943, however, between 20,000 and 30,000 bales of cotton had been lost due to the labor shortage, and once again growers turned to Mexico. In 1943-44, Arizona growers imported about 2,700 Mexican nationals. (46) The rules of the Bracero Program officially restricted Mexican nationals to manual labor. Richard H. Salter, the chief of the Farm Placement Bureau with the Arizona State Employment Service, made this clear when defending the Bracero Program before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. As he put it, "These Mexican workers are prohibited from working on machines or operating machinery. They are to be used only for stoop labor, or seasonal activities." Salter assured the commission, in order to protect the program from criticism, that the rule was designed to preserve well-paid, skilled jobs for "Americans." Ideologically, the program thus reaffirmed the equation of skilled labor with white American citizens and "stoop labor" with noncitizen, nonwhite workers. (47)

Even those Mexican Americans who worked in war-related industries or fought overseas often found themselves relegated to jobs in mining and agriculture once the war ended. In the late 1940s, the department head at Tucson's Southern Pacific Railway office explained to University of Arizona researcher Harry T. Getty, "I haven't hired any Mexicans, not because I'm prejudiced, but because ... I think our own boys should have a chance first." Getty also found that the telephone companies would not generally hire Mexican women, purportedly because of "their accent in speaking English." A local cab driver explained, in no uncertain terms, "Why, those damn, dirty Mexicans, I wouldn't have them around me at all. We just don't like them. We wouldn't have a Mexican driver." (48) Carlos Contreras was among those veterans who faced such discriminatory treatment. Contreras recalled, "I was a ship fitter in the Navy, and when I got out I couldn't comprehend why I couldn't get a job here in Phoenix ... I was so dumb about everything that I didn't really realize they didn't want me!" Exasperated, Contreras found that he had little choice but to take up mining work. In his words, "I finally had to leave Phoenix to get a job. I was married with one child and unemployed. I got one at Ajo, Arizona, at the Phelps-Dodge mines." In the mining towns, which the war itself had revitalized, a Mexican American unionization drive challenged the old duel-wage structure in the years following the war, but discriminatory hiring practices remained common. At Ajo, Contreras recalled, "There weren't any Mexican foremen or Mexican supervisors. I was put on the railroad crew. Four Mexicans and two Indians--no Anglo of any sort, except the foreman." (49)

As these stories suggest, while the boundaries of whiteness had been shaken during the Great Depression, they were largely restored in the years during and immediately following the war. Mexican Americans who struggled for political rights through voter registration drives and other means, sometimes basing their arguments on the notion that they, too, were "white," had limited success in the immediate postwar years. At the same time, the number of braceros in Arizona increased every year, and Mexican Americans had a difficult time challenging stereotypes that painted them as nonwhite, second-class citizens. Meanwhile, most migrants from the Great Plains managed to work their way into higher paying positions, usually outside of farmwork altogether. Ironically, then, it seemed to be the very presence of Mexican seasonal workers, rather than restrictive immigration policies or deportation, that helped to bolster the status of the "white citizen worker."

Many years later, a farmer in the Buckeye area outside of Phoenix recalled that when he had first arrived in Arizona in the 1930s "it was mostly people from Oklahoma and Texas and Arkansas. Then, as things began to get better after the Depression, and those people that had any ambition went on to better things, why they started using more coloreds and Mexican laborers." Implicit in his narrative was the assumption that those with "any ambition" were white, while the blacks and Mexicans who filled their shoes were to blame for their own failure to achieve upward mobility. This racial logic, as it turned out, had only temporarily been threatened in the 1930s. White workers, so the myth went, had demonstrated their superior worthiness for better jobs and for first-class citizenship by independently working their way out of poverty. It was precisely this myth that would remain at the heart of the racially ordered class system in Arizona well into the postwar period. (50)

NOTES

(1.) "Johnson Introduces New Immigration Bill," Arizona Labor Journal, 5 July 1930, 4.

(2.) Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929-1939 (Tucson, 1974). On Mexican American responses to deportation in Texas and California, see David Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley, 1995), 69-116.

(3.) For an account that addresses how Spanish, Italian, and other "Euro-Latin" immigrants initially became "white" in Arizona, see Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 101-4, 166, 205, 223-26, 242, 311. On the migration of farmworkers from the south-central Plains states into Arizona, see Marsha L. Weisiger, Land of Plenty: Oklahomans in the Cotton Fields of Arizona, 1933-1942 (Norman, 1995).

(4.) Weisiger, Land of Plenty, 145.

(5.) Some examples of this literature on European immigrants becoming white are Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish became White (New York, 1995); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1999); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); and Gordon, Great Arizona Orphan Abduction.

(6.) Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, 1997), 167, 183-201.

(7.) The quotations are from a letter from J. H. Francis to Albert Johnson and a telegram from Globe-Miami, both of which appeared in the Arizona Labor Journal, 1 March 1930, 1. On the eve of the Great Depression, most of the working class in Arizona worked in extractive industries, especially in the production of copper and farm products, particularly cotton. In 1929, copper production brought in more than $155 million and supplied 50 percent of the entire copper demand in the United States. In agriculture, cotton was the most important crop, with 220,000 acres planted in short- and long-staple varieties, bringing in about $64 million per year. By 1933, however, both industries were in crisis. Copper sales declined to only about $10 million, and many copper mines shut down. Only 3,300 workers remained employed in the industry. At the same time, cotton prices fell to 4 cents per pound, and the acreage planted to cotton fell to about 113,000. As prices plummeted, standard picking rates declined from $1.50 to 50 cents per hundredweight. These aggregate economic figures are from Thomas Sheridan, Arizona: A History (Tucson, 1995), 253. Picking rates are from Weisiger, 47.

(8.) "Glamour of Mexico Deceives Pilgrims," Arizona Labor Journal, 1 March 1930, 3.

(9.) "Restriction of Immigration: Speech of Hon. Carl Hayden, of Arizona, in the House of Representatives, Thursday, Feb. 4, 1915," 6, box 653, folder 16, Carl Hayden Papers, Arizona Collection, Arizona State University, Tempe (hereafter cited as Hayden Papers); "Statement of Hon. Carl Hayden, a Representative in Congress from the State of Arizona," 262, 275, box 653, folder 15, Hayden Papers; "Hayden Opposes Harris Bill," Arizona Labor Journal, 26 April 1930, 1, 4; "Senator Hayden Seeks Deportation of Aliens," Arizona Labor Journal, 20 December 1930, 4.

(10.) Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans, 30-41; Mark Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Mexican Immigrant Labor in the United States: 1900-1940 (Westport, Conn., 1976), 59; George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York, 1993), 57, 209-26; Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors, 52-56, 71-74; Mae M. Ngai, "The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien: Immigration Restriction and Deportation Policy in the United States, 1921-1965," Law and History Review Spring 2003 <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/21.1/ngai.html> (15 Feb. 2006), pars. 38-49; Immigration Act of 1924, U.S. Statues at Large 42 (1925): 153-69.

(11.) Maximo Alonzo, interview by Rita Magdaleno, transcript, 18 March 1995, pp. 4-5, box 1, folder 9, MSS-168, Cuentos y memorias Oral Histories, Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University, Tempe.

(12.) Paul S. Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Migration Statistics University of California Publications in Economics 12, No. 3 (Berkeley, 1934). For general descriptions of repatriation in Arizona in the 1930s, see Thomas Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941 (1986; reprint Tucson, 1997), 208, 211; Sheridan, Arizona, 253; and Bradford Luckingham, Minorities in Phoenix: A Profile of Mexican American, Chinese American, and African American Communities, 1860-1992 (Tucson, 1994), 39.

(13.) Malcolm Brown and Orin Cassmore, Migratory Cotton Pickers in Arizona (Washington, D.C., 1939), 67-68. This was a study sponsored by the Works Progress Administration.

(14.) Weisiger, Land of Plenty, 16-27; Foley, White Scourge, 183-201.

(15.) Philip Greisinger and George W. Barr, Agricultural Land Ownership and Operating Tenures in Casa Grande Valley, Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 175 (Tucson, 1941), 281, 284-88; E. D. Tetreau, Arizona Farm Leases, Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 179 (Tucson, 1942). For aggregate Pinal County and Arizona figures, see Sheridan, Arizona, 219, 255.

(16.) E.D. Tetreau, Arizona's Farm Laborers, Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 163 (Tucson, 1939), 334; Varden Fuller and E. D. Tetreau, Volume and Characteristics of Migration to Arizona, 1930-1939, Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 176 (Tucson, 1941), 300. On African American migrant workers in Arizona, see Geta LeSeur, Not All Okies Are White: The Lives of Black Cotton Pickers in Arizona (Columbia, Mo., 2000). On Tohono O'odham workers, see Eric V. Meeks, "The Tohono O'odham, Wage Labor, and Resistant Adaptation, 1900-1930," Western Historical Quarterly 34 (Winter 2003).

(17.) Foley argues that the decline of tenant farming "eroded their status from semi-independent white tenant farmers to semi-white farm workers." Foley, White Scourge, 167.

(18.) Brown and Cassmore, Migratory Cotton Pickers in Arizona, 7-8.

(19.) Emmett McLoughlin, People's Padre: An Autobiography (Boston, 1954), 40-41.

(20.) Weisiger, Land of Plenty, 143.

(21.) The radio address is reprinted in full in the Arizona Labor Journal, 14 December 1939, 4.

(22.) Munoz is quoted by Raymond Johnson Flores, "The Socio-Economic Status Trends of the Mexican People Residing in Arizona" (master's thesis, Arizona State University, 1951), 10-11.

(23.) Carlos Contreras, "Carlos Contreras," unpublished autobiographical paper, 1972, 3, Chicano Research Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Arizona State University, Tempe.

(24.) University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, United States Historical Census Data Browser, ONLINE, 1998, University of Virginia. Available: <http://fisher.lib.virglnia.edu/census> (August 2004).

(25.) Mathew Whitaker, "Creative Conflict: Lincoln and Eleanor Ragsdale, Collaboration, and Community Activism in Phoenix, 1953-1965," Western Historical Quarterly 34 (Summer 2003): 165-90, quotation on 169; and Michael J. Kotlanger, "Phoenix, Arizona, 1920-1940" (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 1983), 445-46.

(26.) "Testimony of Lincoln J. Ragsdale" and "Testimony of Roy B. Yanez" (Executive Director of the Phoenix Housing Authority), U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Phoenix, Arizona, February 3, 1962 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), 47, 34-40.

(27.) LeSeur, Not All Okies Are White, 24-29. On the relationship between blacks and Indians, see LeSeur's transcribed interviews with Myrtle and Jeff Jordan, 72-93.

(28.) Weisiger, Land of Plenty, 145; Edward Hooper, interview by Marsha Weisiger, transcript, May 30, 1992, Oklahoma-Arizona Migration Project, Arizona Historical Society, Tempe (hereafter cited as OAMP).

(29.) Dennis Kirkland, interview by Marsha Weisiger, 20 May 1992, OAMP; Sam Cambron, interview by Marsha Weisiger, 21 May 1992, ibid.

(30.) Stuart Jamieson, Labor Unionism in American Agriculture (1945; reprint, New York, 1976), 199; Dewey Phares and Jewel Phares, interview by Marsha Weisiger, May 27, 1992, OAMP.

(31.) In the Arizona Labor Journal: "Vegetable Men Form Union," 16 December 1933, 1; "Chester Installs New Union," 30 December 1933, 1; Eli Follett, "From Vegetable Packers," 24 February 1934, 3. Jamieson, Labor Unionism, 198. The ambiguity of the National Industrial Recovery Act's definition of "agricultural labor" is discussed by Cindy Hahamovich, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 146-47.

(32.) Jamieson, Labor Unionism, 196-97; Weisiger, Land of Plenty, 47.

(33.) In the Arizona Labor Journal: "Coolidge Farmers Refuse Arbitration," 30 August 1934, 1; "Doane Deplores Coolidge Valley Relief Agencies," 13 September 1934, 1; "Casa Grande Farm Workers' Union Formed," 15 November 1934, 1. See also Jamieson, Labor Unionism, 197; Weisiger, Land of Plenty, 47.

(34.) In the Arizona Labor Journal: "Slaves Were Fed," 24 March 1938, 2; "Government Adds to Unemployment," 21 April 1938; "Who Are the Associated Farmers?" 14 December 1939, 4; "Senate Committee Probes 'Farmers,'" 1 February 1940, 1; Jamieson, Labor Unionism, 201-2; Weisiger, Land of Plenty 80-81; Ammon Hennacy, "Two Agitators: Peter Maurin-Ammon Hennacy" (Oct. 1959), 24, 28, 32. This is a pamphlet published by The Catholic Worker.

(35.) See weekly BIA field matron reports, January 3, February 16, February 24, 1931; March 21, March 28, and June 19, 1931, box 190, folder "052.1 G &S Statistical Rpts: Field Nurses and Matrons Monthly Reports--1928-31," Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG-75, National Archives, Pacific Southwest Region, Laguna Niguel, California.

(36.) Harry T. Getty, "Interethnic Relationships in the Community of Tucson" (New York: Arno Press, 1976; published PhD diss., Chicago, Department of Anthropology, 1950), 40-45.

(37.) According to the 1930 census, there were 30,679 "native white persons" in Pima County, and 21,699 persons of "other races." Of the latter, the vast majority were people of Mexican and Indian descent (blacks, who were separated into their own category, were concentrated into Pinal and Maricopa counties). University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, United States Historical Census Data Browser.

(38.) Peter MacMillan Booth, "Cactizonians: The Civilian Conservation Corps in Pima County, 1933-1942," Journal of Arizona History 32 (Autumn 1991)," 294-97.

(39.) Hahamovich, Fruits of Their Labor, 156.

(40.) For examples of FSA discouragement of union organization in the Arizona camps, see, in the Desert Sentinel, "Editorial," 3 January 1941, 3; "Editorial," 3 February 1941, 2; "Off the Manager's Desk," 6 October 1941, 2. See also Weisiger, Land of Plenty, 108-11,136.

(41.) Phares interview; Cambron interview; Murrell Harrisk, interview by Marsha Weisiger, transcript, May 23, 1992, all in OAMP.

(42.) Kirkland interview; Phares interview; Harrisk interview, all in OAMP.

(43.) Edward Banfield, Government Project (Glencoe, Ill., 1951), 147-156; quotations are from 151 and 153. See also Hooper Interview, OAMP.

(44.) Banfield, Government Project, 155-56, 186-88, 217.

(45.) Castaneda's statement is quoted by Flores, "Socio-economic Status Trends," 35.

(46.) E. D. Tetreau, Wanted--Man Power for Arizona Farms, Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 186 (Tucson, 1942). See also Weisiger, Land of Plenty, 149-53.

(47.) United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights: Phoenix, Arizona, February 3, 1962 (Washington, D.C., 1962), 69. As early as 1941, as Anglos left to take up war-industry jobs, ethnic Mexicans began to take their places. At the FSA camp at Agua Fria, for example, the camp paper, The Desert Sentinel, listed the names of new families in the camp in every edition. The first appearance in several years of a few Hispanic names among those moving into the camp was in the Feb. 24, 1941, issue, page 2. Among thirty-five new families, eight had Hispanic names: Jose Mosqueda, Antonio Soliz, Ben Ramirez, Benito Muniz, Manuel Ramon, Carlos Ferros, and Florencio Gonzales.

(48.) Getty, "Interethnic Relationships," 40-45.

(49.) Carlos Contreras, "Carlos Contreras," unpublished life history, 1972, 3, Chicano Studies Collection, Arizona State University, Tempe.

(50.) Lee and Flora Davis, interview by Marsha Weisiger, 19 May 1992, transcript, OAMP.

ERIC V. MEEKS is associate professor in the Department of History, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff: