Required Reading

  • NYPL’s digital database of The Negro Traveler’s Green BookGo through and look at this annual directory that listed the safe and legal hotels, gas stations, stores, and restaurants black travelers could legally use during Jim Crow America while trying to travel to the North and West. Do you notice anything in particular about the routes that go to the American West?
  • Bracero Contract 

While Kanye West’s Bound2 video garnered significant media attention for its nudity, it makes very clear arguments about the American West and the black experience. What stands out to you?

Bracero Multimedia

Below is a federal propaganda film on the bracero program in California.

My father, Domingo Ruiz, Sr., was 12 when in 1915 he walked completely alone from San Luiz Potosi, Mexico, then a small village, and now the capital of a state in Mexico by the same name, to San Antonio, Texas. The trip was dangerous from many aspects: There was hardly any infrastructure to speak of at the time, the area was full of bandits robbing the various mines in the region, and the Mexican Revolution was in full force. My father inadvertently went northeast, instead of due north, and had to cross first the treacherous Panuco river that traverses a deep tropical valley at the edge of the plateau on which the state sits, and then the formidable Sierra Madre. He had no money on his journey, and he knew no one in San Antonio when he arrived. My father died in an automobile accident at a relatively young age, but not before leaving a family firmly established in this country.

Bracero Photographs

Belen Soto Moreno, "Family," in Bracero History Archive, Item #3052, http://braceroarchive.org/items/show/3052 (accessed March 26, 2017).
Belen Soto Moreno, “Family,” in Bracero History Archive, Item #3052.

 

Belen Soto Moreno, "Belen on a Bike," in Bracero History Archive, Item #3048
Belen Soto Moreno, “Belen on a Bike,” in Bracero History Archive, Item #3048
Belen Soto Moreno, "Belen's Holy Communion," in Bracero History Archive, Item #3047
Belen Soto Moreno, “Belen’s Holy Communion,” in Bracero History Archive, Item #3047
Plutarco Chavez-Ruiz, "Bracero in Field," in Bracero History Archive, Item #3019
Plutarco Chavez-Ruiz, “Bracero in Field,” in Bracero History Archive, Item #3019
Leonard Nadel, "An official distributes documents among braceros outside of the San Joaquin County Farm Production Association building in Stockton, California.," in Bracero History Archive, Item #2824
Leonard Nadel, “An official distributes documents among braceros outside of the San Joaquin County Farm Production Association building in Stockton, California.,” in Bracero History Archive, Item #2824
Leonard Nadel, "A bracero closes a full Toro lettuce box with a special tool in a field in the Salinas Valley, California.," in Bracero History Archive, Item #3007
Leonard Nadel, “A bracero closes a full Toro lettuce box with a special tool in a field in the Salinas Valley, California.,” in Bracero History Archive, Item #3007
Leonard Nadel, "Braceros ride, in the bed of a truck, through the city of Stockton, California. ," in Bracero History Archive, Item #2831
Leonard Nadel, “Braceros ride, in the bed of a truck, through the city of Stockton, California. ,” in Bracero History Archive, Item #2831
Leonard Nadel, "Braceros stand in line in front of a living quarter at the Gondo labor Camp near Watsonville, California.," in Bracero History Archive, Item #2902
Leonard Nadel, “Braceros stand in line in front of a living quarter at the Gondo labor Camp near Watsonville, California.,” in Bracero History Archive, Item #2902

 

Leonard Nadel, "Clothes hang over the fence behind the living quarters of the Gondo labor Camp near Watsonville, California. ," in Bracero History Archive, Item #2906
Leonard Nadel, “Clothes hang over the fence behind the living quarters of the Gondo labor Camp near Watsonville, California. ,” in Bracero History Archive, Item #2906
Leonard Nadel, "Braceros sit in a truck and wait to leave the Hidalgo Processing Center, Texas.," in Bracero History Archive, Item #3004
Leonard Nadel, “Braceros sit in a truck and wait to leave the Hidalgo Processing Center, Texas.,” in Bracero History Archive, Item #3004
Leonard Nadel, "A bracero cleans a head of lettuce from old leaves while smoking in a field in California. ," in Bracero History Archive, Item #2933
Leonard Nadel, “A bracero cleans a head of lettuce from old leaves while smoking in a field in California. ,” in Bracero History Archive, Item #2933

 

 

Leonard Nadel, "A bracero with a short-handled hoe over his shoulder stands in a Californian field. ," in Bracero History Archive, Item #2968
Leonard Nadel, “A bracero with a short-handled hoe over his shoulder stands in a Californian field. ,” in Bracero History Archive, Item #2968

braceros

Weekly Assignment

You do not have a weekly reading and response assignment this week. Your collaborative assignment is to work together in our Google Doc (where you made your collaborative bibliography) to write the introductory text for our Santa Anita project. We will discuss how we will do this on class Tuesday, March 28, 2018. As a reminder, the full rough draft of your project is due to a classmate for feedback on Friday April 7, 2017 by 5 PM. We will also select editing partners in class.

Suggested Secondary Source Reading on Great Migration and the American West For Those Interested: 

  • Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, New York City: Random House. [Note: This is a large but astoundingly beautiful & well-researched book that interweaves the lives of three people from the Great Migration. The narratives of Robert Joseph Pershing Foster and Ida Mae Brandon Gladney will be the most pertinent as they go to Chicago, IL and Los Angeles, CA, but I encourage you to read the entire book if you are interested in the Great Migration.]
  • Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America
  • Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland
  • Visual & Literary Options on the Great Migration

Los Angeles is not paradise, much as the sight of its lilies and roses might lead one at first to believe. The color line is there and sharply drawn.

–W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Negro in Los Angeles” The Crisis, 6 August 1913

Early Great Migration Music (remember when we briefly discussed migrations on trains? Here are the trains…)

Robert Johnson “Sweet Home Chicago”

“‘In Robert Johnson’s line, “I’m going to California, to my sweet home Chicago,’ Johnson’s conflation of the two destinations gives his declaration the character of fantasy. It makes something mythological of the idea of travel in the black experience of the Great Migration through the 1920s and 1930s, and in the blues records that accompanied the migrants and suffused their travels with the presence of fatefulness and the urgency of desire, with the loss and humor of the immigrant, with the poignancy of confusion and the sweetness of arrival. The differences and distance between California and Chicago had little meaning in Johnson’s psychic landscape; the distinction between them was overpowered by the overwhelming impulse to leave. That impulse—its causes and the migrants’ response to it—was so powerful that, along the Mississippi today, its echo still sounds.” –Louis Mazzari, “Key to the Highway: Blues Records & the Great Migration”

Henry Thomas – “Railroadin’ Some – Texas Ragtime”

Sister Rosetta Tharpe “This Train” (Notice the segregated audience)

 

Mississippi Fred McDowell “Freight Train Blues”


Lead Belly “Midnight Special”

The Staples Singers “Freedom Highway” (1965)

Elizabeth Cotten “Freight Train”

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rhae Lynn Barnes is an Assistant Professor of American Cultural History at Princeton University (2018-) and President of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. She is the co-founder and C.E.O. of U.S. History Scene and an Executive Advisor to the documentary series "Reconstruction: America After the Civil War" (now streaming PBS, 2019).

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