Taste of the Nation by Camille Begin

Author:Camille Begin [Begin, Camille]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social History, Social Science, Agriculture & Food
ISBN: 9780252081705
Google: 90SLjgEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2016-04-22T00:17:28+00:00

Figure 4.1. Tortilla maker, Olvera Street, Los Angeles. Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of California, California: A Guide to the Golden State (New York: Hastings House, 1939), courtesy of Hastings House Publishing.

The ideological force of this photograph is both reinforced and sapped when considered in relation to the full iconographic program of the guidebook. If the region's past came alive in the image of the tortilla maker, its future was central to the upbeat, progressive, and patriotic mood that ran throughout the pages, which recorded the first effects of the increased federal investments in the defense industry. An illustration section titled “Industry, Commerce, Transportation” included pictures of a steel cargo ship, an airplane assembly line, and oil wells. Food was part of this optimistic agenda, and the section also included a photograph of a young worker in a spotless peach-canning factory (figure 4.2). The photograph, like a dozen in the guidebook, was by Horace Bristol, a young San Francisco photographer whose work with John Steinbeck was at the origin of the Grapes of Wrath and who would go on to be one of the first staff photographers of LIFE magazine.82 The migrant workforce was key to the region's industrial and agro-industrial rise and, presenting the state as a “polyglot conglomeration,” the guidebook composed a pluralist chronicle that did not shy away from exposing the labor conditions of the Mexican, Filipino, “Oriental contract labor,” and migrant workers who made possible the production of “modern” and “American” agricultural commodities in the region.83 The guidebook illustration set comprised a two-page spread that offered a stark commentary on the life of migrant agricultural workers: one of the images showed a female bean picker hanging on to her toddler (figure 4.3).84 The links from the field to the factory and from the bodies of the migrant workers to the tortillas that might feed them were left for the reader to connect, however.

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