Description
Book SynopsisNearly 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 fa
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ; Introduction ; Chapter 1. "Independent of the Unskilled Chinaman": Race, Labor, and Family Farming ; Chapter 2. Transplanted: The World of Early Issei Farmers ; Chapter 3. Pioneering Men and Women: Japanese Gender Relations in Rural California ; Chapter 4. "Defending the American Farm Home": Japanese Farm Families and the Anti-Japanese Movement ; Chapter 5. From Menace to Model: Reshaping the "Oriental Problem" ; Chapter 6. "Reds, communists, and fruit strikers": Filipinos and the Great Depression ; Epilogue ; Notes ; Bibliography ; Index
