Garden of the World: Asian Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture in California's Santa Clara Valley by Cecilia M. Tsu (review)

Asian American farmers from 1850 to the 1940s were one of the most nearly invisible groups living in the United States. Much of our knowledge about their lives comes from interviews in newspapers, writings of white farmers and politicians, academic surveys, court records, census records, immigration papers, some oral histories, and other documents of this genre. Cecilia M. Tsu has expertly woven these sources into a fascinating study of Asian American farmers in the Santa Clara Valley, California (an area that has since become famous as Silicon Valley), providing some insight into Asian American experiences and anti-Asian movements of the time. The book title, Garden of the World, reflects the fact that in census records, Asian Americans who owned or worked small plots of land were called gardeners rather than farmers, and that Santa Clara Valley was a major producer of agricultural products for the world.

Tsu examines economic and race relations among Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and whites in the Santa Clara Valley, especially when they differ from regional and national trends. She analyzes changes in economic status, both affluence and destitution, among these "gardeners," as well as class differences in Asian communities. She explores gender relationships within and outside of various social and cultural groups. Finally, she looks closely at several anti-Asian movements, noting what appear to be inconsistencies in terms of how people spoke and thought about Asian Americans over time; for example, she describes both the open hostility toward what people called Chinese "bachelor" society, as well as the reliance on the labor of single Filipino men, the acceptance of Japanese farmers with their "picture" brides, and the response towards young male Filipinos who interacted with white women.

Tsu begins by looking at the "single" Chinese men (many of whom had wives and families in China) who started to work for white men in Santa Clara County in the 1850s. The diligence and skills acquired in their homeland enabled some to become prosperous farmers, especially in berry and seed farming. T. F. Chew, for example, branched out into the food processing industry, founding the famous Bayside Canning Company. But the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and subsequent discriminatory legislation created a void in the agricultural labor force that Japanese Issei (first generation) farmers then filled, bringing their brides and having children (the children were thus Nisei, or second generation). This is where the strength of Tsu's study lies: her recounting of the experiences of Japanese Americans, who began as cheap, reliable workers for white farmers and then experienced upward mobility, including the right to lease or own land.

Nationally, white people criticized the Japanese for their large families and their success in farming; whites' attitudes resulted in the 1913 Alien Land Law, the 1920 law to close the loopholes in the earlier law, and the 1924 Immigration Act that closed the door to Chinese and Japanese immigrants. So, initially, Japanese Americans' economic improvement came with a backlash (the 1913 Alien Land Law) that prevented them from owning land—although Japanese families circumvented this law by having their American-born children own the land. On a local level, though, in Santa Clara, white farmers generally ignored the 1913 law because they valued their Japanese workers, but the 1920 law did cause some anti-Japanese movements, as detailed in memoirs, interviews, surveys, court documents, local Japanese-language newspapers. As the decade progressed, attitudes towards Japanese Americans began to change positively, both locally and nationally, as is clear in the Commission on Interracial Cooperation's 1923-24 Race Relations Survey, which was primarily based on interviews with hundreds of people. The published results of this survey also clearly showed influences from Chicago's Robert Park School that highly favored earlier Asian Americans'—especially Japanese Americans'—acculturation (liberal white Southerners were the ones who formed the commission). By...