Why are California farm workers in such a dire situation? An analysis of the reasons for this situation helps to understand the difficulties faced by the farmworker movement and to gain a deeper understanding of the changes brought about by the farmworkers' movement in the situation of workers.
California's geography was not suitable for large-scale intensive agricultural cultivation from the beginning, the terrain is diverse and complex, plate movements have shaped two huge mountains for California, roaring rivers pounding hills, bringing epidermal soil to valleys, swamps, bays and deposits, deserts are the only way for Midwestern Americans to enter California, everything here seems to be very different from the current California geography, so before the 19th century and 60s, mining was the interest of Americans who came here.
Gold discoveries attracted gold prospectors from all over the world, and California's population and ethnic diversity increased like never before.
After the Mexican-American War, California, Arizona, New Mexico and other regions were included in the United States, and more whites migrated from the eastern and Midwestern United States, consolidating the overwhelming white dominance in California, and between 1850 and 1860, the state's population grew from 92,000 to 380,000.
Also during this period, California began its transition from mining to large-scale agricultural production.
American historian Paul Gates writes, "During the Civil War, an estimated 8 million acres of public land in California were transferred or in the process of being transferred to private ownership, representing a significant portion of the 160-acre farm that the original law planned to establish." As a result, in 1871, more than 2,000 people owned more than 500 acres, of which 122 owned an average of 71,983 acres.
The agglomeration of land in California today is largely the result of the accumulation at that time.
This accumulated land was first used by large landowners to grow wheat, and then gradually gave way to more lucrative fruit and vegetable crops.
The accumulation of land supports California's agricultural development by many water conservancy projects under the leadership of the federal Bureau of Reclamation.
The government turned barren grasslands into fertile farmland and swamps with diverse flora and fauna into dry basins; Through diversions, damming and other projects, the government transformed the desert around the Colorado River into what is now the Impiril Valley, and through dams built in the Sierra Nevada, growers of grapes, cotton, tomatoes and other crops in the Central Valley also received water.
In the face of what Donald Vorster called "irrigation imperialism" type of capital expansion, the tenacity of the natural terrain is so insignificant, that large areas that were originally unsuitable for agricultural production have been transformed into green "field factories", and the appearance of California's agricultural society has been shaped accordingly.
Spurred on by the market, farmers continued to expand production, reclaimed new land, and small farmers were gradually annexed and turned to the cities.
The huge scale of the farm makes it impossible for even small farmers to complete agricultural production with their own labor alone, and some of the complex agricultural production steps of some crops cannot be completely completed by machines, so large-scale hired farm workers have gradually become one of the characteristics of California's agricultural production model.
参考文献：Dana Meachen Rau, Who Was Cesar Chavez? New York: Penguin Workshop, 2017, p. 22.
