33 pages • 1 hour read
John SteinbeckThe Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1936A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Article 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Article 6 Summary
Steinbeck’s next article painted a grim picture of the history of agricultural labor in California. An influx of Chinese workers immigrated to California during the 1800s seeking construction jobs in the booming railroad industry. After the railroad lines had been built, Chinese workers shifted to agricultural labor. These Chinese immigrants were able to work at lower wages and a lower standard of living, which Steinbeck said put white farm workers—accustomed to higher wages—out of work. Angry white workers rioted against Chinese immigrants; these riots, combined with new immigration restrictions, led to fewer Chinese workers in the fields. The Japanese followed the Chinese in working in the fields, and they faced the same fate as the Chinese. Thereafter, farmers imported large numbers of workers from Mexico whom they could garnish with cheap wages; about 80,000 Mexican immigrants resided in the state in 1920. When the idea surfaced for a quota system to restrict the number of Mexican workers, small farmers were in favor, but large-scale farmers opposed the measure; not only could they pay Mexican workers more cheaply, but they also could deport them if the workers put up any resistance to their low wages or lack of medical care. Mexican workers began to organize for better working conditions, but strong opposition by police and local Californians suppressed their efforts. Steinbeck believed that backlash to such organizing would result in the end of Mexican labor in California.
The newest immigrants to arrive in California’s agricultural industry were the Filipinos. More than 30,000 Filipino men arrived during the 1920s, but they came mostly alone; they were not allowed to bring wives. The State Relief Administration noted that the Filipino men were hardy and could “subsist for a week on a double handful of rice and a little bread” (55). Filipinos could not legally marry native Californians, and so, the men would form casual sexual arrangements with white women, a practice that led to resentment and riots on the part of the local population. The Philippines’ government began repatriating Filipino immigrants to their home country. As a result, the United States began relying on white, native-born workers once again to tend the fields. Steinbeck believed these native-born workers were less susceptible to exploitation than immigrant workers: “The old methods of intimidation and starvation perfected against the foreign peons are being used against the new white migrant workers. But they will not be successful” (56).
Article 6 Analysis
This article is striking for its continued relevance. The “yellow peril,” or xenophobia against East Asian immigrants in the 1930s, was a precursor to the racism that many immigrant farmworkers from Latin America face today in California and throughout the US. The desire of large corporations for cheap labor and maximum profits led to the employment of low-wage—and highly exploited—foreign workers. While agriculture has modernized greatly since the 1930s, its dependence on highly vulnerable migrant workers has not changed.
Steinbeck referred to such cheap, foreign-born labor as “peon labor” because Mexican and Asian immigrants were treated as disposable serfs by their large-scale agricultural employers. Big farms were happy to employ foreign-born workers—so long as they kept quiet and did their work, no matter how grueling the working conditions. Foreign-born workers fell prey to this exploitative system because they had few legal rights to defend themselves: “The right of free speech, the right of assembly, and the right of jury trial are not extended to Mexicans in the Imperial Valley” (54).
Despite his sympathy toward union organizing, Steinbeck was able to see how organizing would not end well for these workers, and he predicted that the Mexican and Filipino workers—like their Chinese and Japanese predecessors—would be driven away from the agricultural sector. “They were good workers, but like the earlier immigrants, they committed the unforgivable in trying to organize for their own protection” (56). The clash between the desire to organize for better working conditions and the might of powerful corporations is a recurring theme in Steinbeck’s articles.
The article illustrates how the demand for cheap, foreign-born labor was met with fierce backlash from local residents and small growers. There was a divide even within California’s agricultural sector, whose interests were dominated by the large-scale growers who sought ever-cheaper labor. Relations between the foreign-born migrant workers and the local population are another important issue this article addresses. Racial tension between foreign and native-born workers and the exploitation of foreign labor in the 1930s is still highly relevant today, when California’s agricultural population is largely composed of immigrant workers from Latin America—many of whom are undocumented and subjected to exploitation because of their lack of legal status.
Seeing the demographic change around them, white laborers complained that immigrants were taking their jobs. These attitudes were prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s, and they are prevalent in the present day. Twenty-first-century policies intended to restrict migrant workers through curbs on legal immigration (or mass deportation) mirror the same immigration restrictions placed on Asian and Mexican migrants during the first half of the twentieth century. If foreign-born immigrants are pushed out of agricultural work by immigration restrictions, it is unclear whether native-born Americans are willing to fill those low-wage jobs today, as the Okies did in the 1930s.
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