Nearly a century before it became known as Silicon Valley, the
Santa Clara Valley was world-renowned for something else: the
succulent fruits and vegetables grown in its fertile soil.
Virtually all farms were owned by whites, but the soil was largely
worked by Asian immigrants. In Harvesting the American Dream,
Cecilia Tsu tells the overlooked and intertwined histories of the
land of the Santa Clara Valley and the Asian immigrants who
cultivated it. Weaving together the story of the three overlapping
waves of Asian migration from China, Japan, and the Philippines in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Tsu offers a comparative
history that sheds light on white and Asian Californians'
understandings of race, gender, and national identity. From the
mid-nineteenth century on, white farmers had an increased need for
labor, and Chinese immigrants willingly and disproportionately
filled it. Despite this common labor arrangement, the idea of the
independent family farm, worked solely by family members, became
even more deeply entrenched, particularly in the West. Farm owners
justified the labor of Chinese men as sojourning immigrants
disconnected from family, capable of only menial agricultural work.
They also viewed Asian crops as marginal, which justified their
increasing reliance on foreign workers. Popular belief that the
Chinese lacked a coherent family structure was later extended to
the Japanese, even though immigrant families began settling in the
Valley in the late 1910s. As the earlier family farm framework
divided along crop and family lines fell apart, it was adapted,
this time barring women from field work. The direct threat of
Japanese family farming to the white family farm ideal, Tsu argues,
played a significant role in the rise of discrimination against
Asians through immigrant exclusion, denial of citizenship, and
alien land laws. However, the mutual dependence that characterized
Asian-white relations in the Santa Clara Valley prevented the area
from becoming a hotbed of racial tension. Efforts to hold on to the
white family farm ideal during the Depression led nonwhite
laborers, primarily Filipino and Mexican, to be eyed suspiciously,
as red-sympathizing foreigners whose involvement in labor militancy
revealed a dormant anti-Americanism. Tsu simultaneously tells the
story of this agricultural world from the perspectives of the Asian
workers who sought to create their own American dream. They saw
farming as not just a source of income, but also a way to bolster
their community standing. Although they did not share a common
heritage, the groups interacted with each other constantly and
peacefully, patronizing each others' shops, working for the same
landowners, sometimes living in the same area, and encountering
many of the same stereotypes.
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