Known as “The Salad Bowl of the World,” California’s Salinas Valley became an agricultural empire due to the toil of diverse farmworkers, including Latinos. A sweeping critical history of how Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants organized for their rights in the decades leading up to the seminal strikes led by Cesar Chavez, this important work also looks closely at how different groups of Mexicans—U.S. born, bracero, and undocumented—confronted and interacted with one another during this period. An incisive study of labor, migration, race, gender, citizenship, and class, Lori Flores’s first book offers crucial insights for today’s ever-growing U.S. Latino demographic, the farmworker rights movement, and future immigration policy.
About the Author: Lori A. Flores
Lori A. Flores was born and raised in a small town in south Texas. Her parents both came from agricultural backgrounds and farm work but ultimately pursued careers in the sphere of public education. Lori was the first woman in her family to graduate from college (Yale University, 2005) and the first person in her family to earn a Ph.D. (Stanford University, 2011). She is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Stony Brook University, where she teaches courses on the history of Latinos, the U.S. West, the U.S. working class, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and other borderland regions around the world. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews/Quotes
|| REVIEWS: "The place long celebrated as America’s salad bowl reveals itself in Lori Flores’s eloquent and deeply researched account to be an unusually potent vantage point from which to assess not only the forces behind much of our food production but also the making of American ideas of race and community, and our capacity for reform and social justice. Grounds for Dreaming represents the debut of an important new voice in American history."—Karl Jacoby, Columbia University "A beautifully crafted community history that underscores the significance of rural lives, especially Mexican lives, to California and the nation. With a vibrant grace, Flores chronicles the people and events that made Salinas a crucible for farm labor relations."—Vicki L. Ruiz, University of California, Irvine "This terrific study of California's allimportant Salinas Valley is the first to capture that region’s history from the 1930s into the 1990s. Beautifully written and researched, it will be indispensable for general readers and for scholars interested in Western agriculture, civil rights movements, and Latino history."—Stephen Pitti, Yale University
Additional information
Book Author
Lori A. Flores
Publisher
Yale University Press
Language
English
ISBN
978-0300196962
Pages
304
Format
Hardcover
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