America's Asia by Colleen Lye

Author:Colleen Lye [Lye, Colleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

A few migratory workers went back to the land after lean years of wandering and seasonal work. Near Bakersfield Doil Ash, whose Oklahoma “dust bowl” living blew away in 1935, leased a 26-acre farm from Hido Miwa. If any questions arise, Miwa said, Ash can always write to him.76

In such cases, farm transfer could not be expected to lead to an increase, or to even to the maintenance, of productive efficiency. As an editor at the Nation, Robert Bendiner, observed: “Trained in a tradition of intensive cultivation, [Japanese farmers] have learned to make their few acres yield down to the last square foot. As a rule, moreover, an entire family works a farm, so that even on a strictly numerical basis it would take more than one Okie to replace a Japanese farmer.”77 The competing narratives of evacuee farm transfer as the acceleration of corporate consolidation and as the recreation of small farming opportunities reflect, in a sense, the broader contradictions between the modernizing and nostalgic—as well as the rationalizing and redistributive—tendencies in the New Deal’s overall farm program.

Furthermore, the FSA’s showcase anecdote of Miwa and Ash points to an unlikely intersection between the Okie and the evacuee, a symbolic relationship that was complexly opposite and parallel. The anecdote allegorizes a point of contact between the New Deal’s modes of address to agricultural crisis and wartime evacuation policy, between Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s emblematic diagnosis of rural displacement, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1941) and the social remedies proposed by the WRA’s A Story of Human Conservation (1945). In the figural intersection between Okie and evacuee, was it the perpetual migrant, then, who was the ultimate imaginary subject of wartime human conservation? We are reminded of McWilliams’s excitement at evacuation’s potential for leading to permanent rural communities that seemed oddly blind to the fact that the West Coast Japanese were already settled. Spatially, the orchestrated movement of 110, 000 people east provided an inverse image—both directionally and in style—to the chaotic displacement of hundreds of thousands west over the previous decade. The transportation of an entire population over the matter of a few months was, as McWilliams’s sense of marvel communicated, more efficient an exercise of governmental machinery than had been witnessed in earlier 1930s examples of planned resettlement.

Assumptions that such a strategy for addressing the broader Depression- era theme of “human erosion” was also in the interest of Californian soil conservation, however, could not be taken for granted, given the doubtful reputation of the lands’ new occupants, whose agricultural know-how—as even the FSA press release acknowledged—was clearly subordinate to the Japanese farmer’s. Though the farm transaction may have been partly evocative of a comforting agrarian solution to the state of perpetual migrancy, installing the Okie as an antidote to the Asiatic, Asiatic and Okie were unavoidably united by a shared association with the predicament of soil erosion. In the 1930s, the disasters incurred by soil erosion throughout the United States, but particularly in Oklahoma and

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