Affirming Whiteness: Visualizing California Agriculture

Figure 1.

The Guardian of the Waters, San Diego, California

The Guardian of the Waters (Figure 1) looks down over the citizens of San Diego.¹ As a fountain, she signifies the importance of water in the development of culture and community in the otherwise hot, dry climate of California's southernmost metropolitan center. Sculptor Donal Hord, raised in this dry southern California climate, understood the vagaries of what geobotanists call the "Sonora Zone." In an essay written for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, Hord acknowledged the dynamics of water —its availability, its conservation— as the essential issue of the region.² For Hord, the vagaries of nature rather than personalities determined the development of his Southern California community. But Donal Hord's Guardian, completed for the Works Projects Administration Federal Art Project in 1939, is more than a symbol of the forces of nature in the Southland. She also signifies the growing nativism of the Depression years and the need to reaffirm traditional American values within a population displaced by unemployment and failed farms.

Although Guardian of the Waters appears to us today as a rather cumbersome, if not benign, figure, unenthusiastically viewed by those who espouse the power of modernism over regionalism, her appearance in 1939 sparked a controversy that cut to the core of the American-ness of the Federal Projects themselves.

Guardian of the Waters is a twelve-foot tall silver-grey granite figure standing on an eight-foot drum embellished by a stylized landscape and anthropomorphized clouds. She looks out over the federal plaza with downcast eyes while lifting to her left shoulder a Yuma (Indian)—style water jug from which life-giving water symbolically flows over the arid southern California land. Her skirt, emphasizing her compact nature, is composed of stylized pleats and folds inspired by the thick, fluted, columnar stem of the native Saguaro cactus. A shawl wraps around her upper torso and covers her head. Who is this guardian lifting the jug of water in silent prayer? To some, she was the archetypal American pioneer woman—strong, valiant, self-reliant, and capable of dominating an inhospitable environment. For others, her broad facial features, shawl and jug all pointed to one ethnicity — Mexican. And, in the race-conscious environment of the 1930s, they were outraged. Hord and his supporters from the San Diego Fine Arts Society successfully defended the commission, and Guardian of the Waters was completed as proposed. The heated controversy surrounding her features, the disdain for an image that looked Mexican and was therefore "deviant," (un-American) would be played out in the 1930s on many stages throughout California.

Figure 2.

Mural in U.S. Post Office, Modesto, California

By contrast, in the California Central Valley city of Modesto (Figure 2), white farmers look down from the walls over citizens as they enter the main post office. Grain in the field waves in an unseen breeze; tractors plow across the fertile fields; conveyor belts hum as they move the crop to waiting market trucks; women stand with baskets laden with the succulent fruits of the harvest. No Dust Bowl here; no trace of migrant laborers; no sense of the poverty and displaced field workers who made these crops possible— who made this farm successful.

This benign farmer and his wife give little evidence of the underlying alienation of the Depression years in California — the potent nativism; the fear of legal and illegal aliens in the fields; the need to reaffirm American-ness in a state with a large Mexican and Mexican-American population and a burgeoning population of migrants displaced by the Dustbowl of the American Midwest. Nor does this mural speak to the decimated farms in the heartland of the United States.

The stock market collapse in October 1929 was not the first signal that the American economy was in trouble, but few people paid much attention to the American heartland. Landowners in the Midwestern or Plains states had financially over-extended themselves during World...