IsisCB Explore

Book ID: CBB044049827

Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest (2016)

Mario Jimenez Sifuentez (Author)

Rutgers University Press
Publication date: 2016
Language: English

ISBN: 9780813576909

Publication Date: 2016
Physical Details: 186

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

Google Books

Hispanic Americans Labor unions Forests and forestry Agriculture Immigrants Labor and laborers 20th century Pacific Northwest (North America) United States Mexico

Just looking at the Pacific Northwest’s many verdant forests and fields, it may be hard to imagine the intense work it took to transform the region into the agricultural powerhouse it is today. Much of this labor was provided by Mexican guest workers, Tejano migrants, and undocumented immigrants, who converged on the region beginning in the mid-1940s. Of Forests and Fields tells the story of these workers, who toiled in the fields, canneries, packing sheds, and forests, turning the Pacific Northwest into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country. Employing an innovative approach that traces the intersections between Chicana/o labor and environmental history, Mario Sifuentez shows how ethnic Mexican workers responded to white communities that only welcomed them when they were economically useful, then quickly shunned them. He vividly renders the feelings of isolation and desperation that led to the formation of ethnic Mexican labor organizations like the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos Noroeste (PCUN) farm workers union, which fought back against discrimination and exploitation. Of Forests and Fields not only extends the scope of Mexican labor history beyond the Southwest, it offers valuable historical precedents for understanding the struggles of immigrant and migrant laborers in our own era. Sifuentez supplements his extensive archival research with a unique set of first-hand interviews, offering new perspectives on events covered in the printed historical record. A descendent of ethnic Mexican immigrant laborers in Oregon, Sifuentez also poignantly demonstrates the links between the personal and political, as his research leads him to amazing discoveries about his own family history...

...More

Reviewed By

Review Don Mitchell (2017) Review of "Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest". American Historical Review (pp. 540-541). unapi

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB044049827

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Erik Loomis; (2015)
Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (/p/isis/citation/CBB916037205/)

Book Lori A. Flores; (2016)
Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (/p/isis/citation/CBB947941237/)

Book Steven C. Beda; (2022)
Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country (/p/isis/citation/CBB695143197/)

Book Cristina Salinas; (2018)
Managed Migrations: Growers, Farmworkers, and Border Enforcement in the Twentieth Century (/p/isis/citation/CBB283180505/)

Book Zaragosa Vargas; (1999)
Proletarians of the North : Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917-1933 (/p/isis/citation/CBB136276073/)

Article Lansing, Michael J.; (2009)
“Salvaging the Man Power of America”: Conservation, Manhood, and Disabled Veterans during World War I (/p/isis/citation/CBB000932187/)

Book Benny J. Andres; (2015)
Power and Control in the Imperial Valley: Nature, Agribusiness, and Workers on the California Borderland, 1900-1940 (/p/isis/citation/CBB020950855/)

Article Smith, Cameron McPherson; (2015)
Use-Wear, Chaîne Opératoire and Labour Organisation among Pacific Northwest Coast Sedentary Foragers (/p/isis/citation/CBB001422598/)

Book Joshua Benjamin Freeman; (2019)
City of workers, city of struggle: how labor movements changed New York (/p/isis/citation/CBB618026891/)

Book Marc Dixon; (2020)
Heartland Blues: labor rights in the industrial Midwest (/p/isis/citation/CBB179570863/)

Book Boyer, Christopher R.; (2012)
A Land between Waters: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico (/p/isis/citation/CBB001421939/)

Article Miriam E. Sweeney; Melissa Villa-Nicholas; (2022)
Digitizing the “Ideal” Latina Information Worker (/p/isis/citation/CBB432615973/)

Article Sareeta Amrute; (2020)
Bored Techies Being Casually Racist: Race as Algorithm (/p/isis/citation/CBB580680524/)

Article Joe Regan; (2022)
Irish Canallers and the Second Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley (/p/isis/citation/CBB051588207/)

Book Marez, Curtis; (2016)
Farm worker futurism: speculative technologies of resistance (/p/isis/citation/CBB095155438/)

Book Jack Kelly; (2018)
The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America (/p/isis/citation/CBB381016334/)

Book Rosemary Feurer; Chad Pearson; (2017)
Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism (/p/isis/citation/CBB377818286/)

Chapter Molina, Natalia; (2014)
Borders, Laborers, and Racialized Medicalization: Mexican Immigration and U.S. Public Health Practices in the Twentieth Century (/p/isis/citation/CBB001553451/)

Article Craig Morris; David Bolingbroke; (2022)
From Bread to Cake: A Global History of Pacific Northwest Wheat during the Cold War (/p/isis/citation/CBB087656921/)

Article Shana Bernstein; (2021)
“True Sustainability”: An Environmental, Worker, and Consumer History of Organic Strawberry Farming in 1990s California (/p/isis/citation/CBB893850274/)