Immigration’s Dual Outcomes

Abstract

The appearance and rapid growth of a foreign immigrant population after the mid-1960s in the small, rural town of Shandon, California, clearly resulted from the creation of grape vineyards in the area and heir need for labor. There was no reasonable alternative labor source in the region. The preexisting local population was insufficient even for a regime based on labor-saving grape harvest technology, and was disinclined to such poorly remunerated, demanding work, anyway. No large pool of rural labor existed within the national population of the United States as had been the case in the 1930s, when the states of the western South provided the workers who became known as Okies after they came west to serve as farm workers. From the outset, rural Mexico could and did supply the labor needed in building and maintaining the new vineyards. The timing of the immigrants’ arrival in Shandon closely tracked the development of grape vineyards, and the immigrants themselves confirmed that vineyard work was why they came to this rural locale. Native residents were aware of this and of the long-standing dependency of labor-intensive commercial crops on workers who they did not consider to be part of their community. So there was a history of begrudging acquiescence to the presence of at least a few such outsiders in the community, and with that were well-established ideas about how such people should be characterized and classified.