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" Becoming Native: "
Bilotte, Meggan L.
Johnson, Susan Lee
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1113642
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2375516827
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| Main Entry
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Bilotte, Meggan L.
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Johnson, Susan Lee
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| Title & Author
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Becoming Native:\ Bilotte, Meggan L.Johnson, Susan Lee
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| College
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The University of Wisconsin - Madison
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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235
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| Abstract
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This dissertation tells the story of women and children sugar beet workers and the role of family labor in the creation of and contestation over power, citizenship, and belonging in the twentieth-century North American West. Focusing on two groups of migrant farmworkers in Colorado—German Russian immigrant families, many of whom stopped first in Nebraska, and hispanos traveling northward from New Mexico and southern Colorado—I show how the agricultural, domestic, and reproductive labor of farmworkers built a vast sugar beet empire on the Great Plains. I argue that the fruits of that labor proved vastly different for the two groups. German Russian farmworkers capitalized on their large families and their ability to purchase farmland to transform themselves into powerful members of what I call the white agrarian middle class, eventually proclaiming themselves as the rightful "native" heirs to the land. The transformation of German Russians from racialized ethnic white farmworkers into American farm owners relied on the exploitation of another group of laborers—ethnic Mexican families, who remained locked in underpaid migratory farm labor, racialized as non-white, relegated to segregated neighborhoods and schools, and pushed to "Americanize," despite their legal status as American citizens. Nonetheless, even as white farmers and community members cast ethnic Mexican farmworkers as outsiders, these sugar beet workers carved a space for themselves and created their own narratives of belonging. Their assertions of self-determination came to a head in the summer of 1969, when ethnic Mexican farmworkers staged a movement to demand better living conditions, worker representation on the local housing board, and dignity for their families. Through examinations of reproductive and child labor, whiteness, segregation, Americanization, and pre- and post-World War II Mexican American activism, I argue that family labor in sugar beet communities, though understudied, was a crucial catalyst for social change in the Great Plains.
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| Subject
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American history
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Colorado
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Gender studies
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Sugar beet
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