Migrant Citizenship by Veronica Martinez-Matsuda

Author:Veronica Martinez-Matsuda [Martínez-Matsuda, Verónica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812297157
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Contested Meaning of Migrant Citizenship

Farmworkers’ Education, Politicization, and Civil Rights Claims

In 1941 farmworkers Jose Flores and Augustus Martinez sat with two ethnographers from the City College of New York to address the problem of racial discrimination against Mexicans in the United States. Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin were conducting field research on migrants’ lives inside California’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps. Whereas most of their interviews featured the experiences of Dust Bowl refugees, the situation in El Rio’s “FSA camp for Mexicans” in Ventura County, California, disclosed a different reality. Martinez explained that nearly all of the families in the camp had worked as migrant farmworkers in the region for, on average, at least fifteen years. They also knew each other well before arriving at the camp. Most of them had moved to the camp together from a nearby grower-owned settlement where the employer had evicted them because of a strike. In a revealing exchange, Flores and the ethnographers discussed the specific topic of civil rights and the FSA’s role in promoting full citizenship:

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