Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability

4. Race and Regulation: Asian Immigrants in California Agriculture

4 Race and Regulation Asian Immigrants in California Agriculture Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, Nancy Peluso, Jennifer Sowerwine, and Christy Getz Yang1 planted strawberries and a collection of “Asian” vegetables on his small, two-acre plot in Fresno County in California’s Central Valley. He and his wife handled the bulk of the labor, from time to time hiring in people to help. In the spring, as the strawberries began to fruit, family members from Fresno, Oakland, Richmond, and elsewhere showed up to help with the harvest—taking home small quantities of the fruit for their children and other family members in exchange for helping the Yangs get their strawberries to market. That is, they did until the day a Labor Standards Enforcement agent came to the roadside farm and asked Yang’s mother about the terms of her work. As the older woman did not have a thorough enough command of English to answer, the agent found Yang and asked to see proof of her worker’s compensation insurance, which unsurprisingly, he did not have. Reciprocal labor had been part of his family’s practices since they had farmed in the mountains of Laos, long before they were forced to leave in the wake of the American war. But new laws protecting family workers in California were about to change such practices. Facing a fine of several thousand dollars for the “offence” of hiring his mother and other extended family members as unpaid and uninsured labor to pick strawberries, it looked as if Yang would no longer be able to afford farming on his tiny rented plot of land. While the war2 had not stopped him from farming, U.S. labor laws might, even though these, in principle , are meant to protect and help workers. Yang and other Hmong farmers clearly did not fit the picture of the “average” farmer in California. How do state agricultural policies affect both access to material resources and the construction of racial identities? In this chapter, we trace the effects of such policies on three Asian immigrant groups. 66 Chapter 4 Working-class Chinese were the first to be barred from legal immigration through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The designation of immigrants from Asia as nonwhite and noncitizens set the stage for later enclosure laws in which Japanese immigrants, who had become well established in California as both farmworkers and small farm owners, were barred from owning land. Although for a time Japanese farmers succeeded in resisting such state practices, their gains were erased through the sentencing of both immigrant and American-born Japanese to internment camps during World War II. More recently, Hmong refugees, bringing agricultural experience from their native Southeast Asia, have begun to practice small-scale farming in California ’s San Joaquin Valley. However, U.S. labor regulations3 have defined many Hmong agricultural practices as illegal, contributing to some images of these refugees among regulators as “problematic.” These three examples demonstrate that as the state regulates agricultural resources, it creates racial categories that separate lawful members of society from “alien” outsiders. These designations then legitimate and are reinforced by everyday experiences of racial “othering” or racial exclusion. We refer to the combined effects of these processes as agricultural racial formations. The state historically created racial hierarchies through the restriction of landownership among those designated as “non-white,”4 and therefore ineligible for citizenship.5 Japanese immigrants succeeded in circumventing the alien land laws in the early twentieth century, however, their internment during World War II served as an explicit, state-sanctioned enclosure, stripping Japanese of property that could be expropriated by neighboring whites. In most cases, such land was never returned. Our research reveals that racial hierarchies still exist in complex and indirect ways, though often unintentionally. With regard to the Hmong, the application of labor laws protecting workers, which were primarily intended to regulate much larger farms, have dissuaded many Hmong from participating in agriculture, as they carry penalties disproportionate to Hmong farming incomes. At the extreme, they can be seen to serve as institutionalized enclosure laws, operating through seemingly neutral, and indeed even progressive legislation. Despite the protections afforded by their refugee status, Hmong and other Southeast Asian refugee farmers are obstructed from participating in agriculture due to California agricultural laws that continue to assume their agricultural subjects are white. Race and Regulation 67 The Law and Asian American Farmers What is the role...