APPROACHING MIGRANT LABOR THROUGH ARCHAEOLOGY

Mark Walker
Anthropological Studies Center
Sonoma State University

ABSTRACT

Migrant labor has played a central role in California's rural economy and history for
well over a century. The demographic makeup of California today is largely a product
of California agriculturalists' search for a cheap labor force that would appear when
needed and disappear when not. Yet for a number of reasons migrant labor is a topic
that has received little study. Using an example from the Lake Oroville Relicensing
Project in Butte County, California, this paper discusses the need for archaeological
study of migrant labor, as well as some of these issues in approaching a labor force
whose existence is predicated upon being mobile, impoverished, and undocumented.

Submitted for the session, "Archaeologies of Industrializing California," 2006 Society for
Historical Archaeology Meetings, Sacramento California.
BACKGROUND
Dorothea Lange took this photo in 1938 (Figure 1). She wrote on the back, “Napa
Valley, California. More than twenty-five years a bindle-stiff. Walks from the mines to
the lumber camps to the farms. The type that formed the backbone of the Industrial
Workers of the World in California before the war”. The tramp in Napa does not fit
with the popular image of the gold miner, any more than the industrial farmer fits with
the popular notion of farmer. This photo, and its caption, encompasses so much of the
sweep of California labor history, and so many of the problems in trying to approach
this history, especially through archaeology. One of the main economic engines of
California has been, and still is, transient migrant labor.

California’s economic bedrock is agriculture, an agriculture dominated by the industrial

plantations of the Central Valley. This industry derives its profits from a low paid labor
force that appears when needed and disappears when it is not, an agricultural labor
force that can only aspire to be a peasantry. A workforce such as this requires a
compliancy borne of desperation and alienation from US society. The Chinese were the
workforce that really opened agriculturalists eyes to the potential of a desperate and
alienated population. Forced out of the gold mining regions, many Chinese ended up
as agricultural laborers, with many more entering with the completion of the
transcontinental railroad. The Chinese were a numerous workforce, economically
desperate, and often without legal defence or recourse. For decades after the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882 agriculturalists would write of Chinese labor with a longing that
was almost erotic (McWilliams 1971; Daniel 1981; Mitchell 1996; Street 2004).

Failing to get the Exclusion Act repealed, California agriculturalists encouraged the
hopefully temporary emigration of numerous nationalities; Filipinos, Indians, [5]
Japanese, Mexicans, and Americans—farming families from the Southwest displaced by
mechanized farming, drought, and the Depression.

Here is another of Lange’s photos (Figure 2). I am sure you all recognize it—“The
Migrant Mother.” Taken at a pea picker camp in San Luis Obispo County, this photo
came to be an icon not only of California, but of the Great Depression as a whole. This
woman, Florence Owens Thompson, was a Cherokee from Oklahoma, but had been in
California for 10 years before the photo was taken, following jobs in sawmills, in
restaurants, and following the crops with her family from California to Arizona (Dunn
1995). She was an organizer in the farm worker strike of the 1930s (Prints and
Photographs Division n.d.).

The old tramp, the migrant mother, the Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese Mexicans, and
Okies appear briefly in these photos then disappear. A frozen second of their lives can

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bear an awful weight, standing in for not only their lives, but often countless others as
well. Florence Thompson came to loathe this photo, not only because it made another
famous at her expense, but also because of the image of passive helplessness she felt it
conveyed. In many of these photos (Figure 3), the workers in the fields acquire a
monotonous sameness, the same background, the same stooped posture, they often
distinguishable only by their headgear.

Yet there is a long and varied history here—about 130 years worth (Figure 4). The
episodes of labor struggle stand out, mainly because that is when migrant labor comes
to the attention of the media and government agencies, thus appearing in the historical
record. But the life of rural labor then is as mysterious, quite frankly, as it is now. What
was life like in migrant labor camps? There are basic questions such as diet and living
standards. How did these change in the aftermath of the upheavals of the 1910s and
1930s? How did different groups adapt and react? We know from the racist complaints
of the agriculturalists that different groups did react in different ways. These are all
questions that archaeology can speak to.

The historical and economic importance of transient and migrant labor, its centrality to
the story of California makes this topic an important research area for archaeology. All
the more so since this is a workforce that is, more often than not, undocumented. As a
defining feature of Californian society, migrant labor has featured prominently in
historical writing and literature, from John Steinbeck's novels to Dorothea Lange's
photos. The demographic makeup and cultures of California--Chicano, Okie, Japanese,
Chinese, and East Indian--are largely the product of an insatiable need for migrant
labor. Yet these workers seem to be as hard to approach archaeologically as they are
historically. There has been very little meaningful archaeological study of this topic.
Because of the nature of the topic and the sites, what has been done has been done, and
can be done, only through CRM.

A few formal camps have been recorded, but what of the vast majority of migrant labor
sites—the sites left by a workforce whose very existence is predicated on being mobile,
impoverished, and undocumented? Right there you have a problem. Migrant labor
sites are often transient campsites. There is generally nothing about these sites that
jumps up and announces itself as a migrant labor site. How do we recognize them?

Migrant labor tends to be undocumented labor, and identifying these sites through
historical research is often out of the question. Migrant labor re-uses and reinterprets
whole landscapes. What are wastelands to those who live off migrant labor become
places of shelter, warmth, and companionship to migrant labor, precisely because these

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areas are wastelands. These sites will show up in the historical record only incidentally
if at all. It is their purpose not to show up in the historical record.

A mobile and impoverished population--First off, the artifacts are not fun. From a
strictly antiquarian point of view this is not someone who is going to leave a
particularly appetizing or “cool” assemblage. Putting it bluntly, the first thing an
archaeology of rural labor requires is a willingness to deal with the stereotypical eye-
rolling feature of historical archaeology in the Western U.S.—the can dump.

If CRM has a dominant theoretical and practical worldview, it can best be described as a
red-blooded empiricism. The archaeological record arrives before us neatly divided
into precise categories--categories that, through common usage and regulatory weight,
have the nature of pure Platonic forms. Unfortunately "migrant labor" is generally not
one of the categories with which we think. "Can dump," however, is, and we all know
how we love those.

But cookie-cutter labels do tend to hide more than they reveal. Historically, reliance by
a group of people on canned and preserved foods does not have the same social and
economic meaning in the middle of the 20th century as it did during the Gold Rush.
Culturally, what we gloss as a "can dump" may also cover many meanings. It is worth
quoting at length here from a remarkable description of a 1914 long-term transient
camp (or "hobo jungle") between the Western Pacific tracks and the Feather River at
Marysville, CA. Hoboes and tramps, by the way, regardless of how we think of them
now, were the dominant migrant labor force of the late 19th and early 20th century
(Street 2004).

The implements of war—the pots, pans, kettles, etc., are a fixed and stationary part of the jungle.
They consist of lard cans, pails, perhaps now and then a real pan or kettle, with patched bottom and
sides. The drinking cups are of similar manufacture, but smaller, bean cans, etc., often still with their
rough or ragged edges at the top being used. Forks and spoons are seldom present; knives are
represented by the occasional pocket knife. Food is usually conveyed to the mouth by means of
fingers or by the use of small bits of wood. A table is a luxury. The ever-essential “boiling-up” can
must not be forgotten—a large coal-oil can or drum, used to remove debris of vegetable, mineral, or
animal origin from shirts and other clothes of all sorts.

All these pots, cups, etc. are parts of the jungle. To remove or destroy them, to appropriate them for
continued individual use is a violation of the code of hobo ethics. You come, you use them, you go,
leaving them in as good a shape as you found them.
(Woirol 1992:79-80)

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OROVILLE SITES
This paper takes some hesitant steps towards an archaeology of migrant labor. In it, I
will be looking at three of sites that the Anthropological Studies Center of Sonoma State
University evaluated for the relicensing of the Oroville Dam and reservoir in Butte
County California (Figure 5). This work was conducted under the auspices of the
California Department of Water Resources. The main site I will be looking is BUT-
2563/H, henceforth the Orchard Site. This is a multi-component site with evidence of
prehistoric, 19th and 20th century occupations, including the remnants of a plum
orchard. What is most interesting about this site is probably what is least interesting
about it, a largish 20th-century dump just off a cleared area at the edge of the orchard.
It is this feature that will be the focus of this paper. There was some overlap with a 19th
century scatter, but not enough to matter. For a number of reasons it seems likely this is
the remains of a seasonally occupied fruit pickers' camp.

This site certainly dates to after 1904. As you can see from the artifacts that have
manufacture end-dates (Figure 6), it seems there is either continual occupation, or more
likely, seasonal reoccupation sometime after around 1925. Surface sites can be difficult
to date firmly especially long-term ones. This site was certainly occupied in the 1930s
and 1940s, and possibly up to a decade later.

The second site is BUT-2395H, the Logging Site. This site consists of two small roughly
contemporary dumps dating to the late 1940s--50s. It is probably the remnants of a
temporary logging camp. For purposes of this discussion I have lumped the two
dumps together. When we think of migrant labor we tend to think of farm labor, but
that is not always the case. The work, as Lange noted on the photo of the old tramp,
varied seasonally. "Walks from the mines to the lumber camps to the farms." We, as
archaeologists, like to think of mining sites as mining sites, logging sites as logging
sites, and so on, each category self-contained and only comparable to itself. But when
we consider different site types as part of the seasonal ebb and flow of workers' lives,
they acquire a different cast. We need to start thinking across categories.

The last site is the location of a boarding house for workers at the Edel Consolidated
Mine on the South Fork of the Feather River. The artifacts here date to the 1910s and
20s. If you want to look at working class history, this is the site. We even have a 1912
map showing the boarding house. It is a nice and unambiguous association. But the
fact it is nice and unambiguous means that it only represents a certain class of worker,
relatively speaking a more privileged group. We were unable to survey the entire site
due to a landowner dispute, but portions we completed suggests that there may be
more ephemeral housing situations further up the slope, can dumps and no visible
evidence of housing. I chose this site because it represents a relatively permanent

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workforce, and the first step to knowing what a migrant labor camp is, is to know what
it isn't—how are migrant labor camps different from other labor camps?

ARCHITECTURE
This graphic (Figure 7) compares gross functional artifact categories from the Edel Mine
deposit with those from the Orchard and Logging sites. The main difference here is the
Structural or architectural material from the Edel site. In some sense that's a no-brainer.
A migrant or transient camp is going to have less architecture than a site with a formal
building, but that is one of the main ways we can recognize such camps. And the
amount of architectural material on one of these sites is still important information.
There is variation between migrant labor camps and there is going to be change
through time as agricultural policies shifted, especially in response to labor struggles
such as those of 1914 and 1933 (Parker 1915; McWilliams 1971; Daniel 1981; Mitchell
1996; Barajas 2004). The amount and kind of architectural material will yield
information on the kind of camp and living conditions in the camp. In another case,
Thad Van Beuren noted architectural changes at the Yamamoto Farm Workers Camp in
San Diego County that reflected legislation resulting from the United Farm Workers
struggles of the 1960s (Van Bueren and Walter 1994).

At the Orchard Site we had nothing. We swept the areas surrounding the dump with a
metal detector, expecting some sort of nail concentration to identify tent or shelter
locations, but there was nothing. The shelters here were either very ephemeral or there
were none and the workers slept out-of-doors.

FOOD
Focusing on food-related artifacts (Figure 8) revealed another intuitively obvious
difference, but still worth considering. The food-related artifacts from the Orchard and
Logging Sites are each over 95% food and beverage containers—cans and bottles--while
those from the Edel Boarding House are 70% food and beverage storage and 30% food
service--ceramic and glass tablewares. Obviously something we call a "can dump" is
going to have a lot of cans. But this means something.

Other than some items that appear to be contamination from the nearby 19th century-
scatter, the assemblage from the Orchard Site has nothing in the way food serving
items. What. This indicates if such items were present they were highly curated or
people were just eating out of cans and modifying cans as needed. For example we
found one can that had been made into a sieve of some sort. Either way this appears to
be a group of people who came with very few personal possessions. This says
something about the nature of this camp and the people who resided here.

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It is difficult to say how typical this is of migrant labor during this period, or even what
typical means. The agricultural labor force ranged from itinerant single men to families
and the material culture of the sites is going to reflect this, and other factors. Probably
the best-documented rural laborers in 30s and 40s are the Southwestern migrants, the
Okies. For a number of reasons, such as their expectations, their backgrounds, and the
fact that they were generally families, they probably had a lot more stuff than your
average migrant laborer, at least in the early stages of their passage through the
machinery of California agriculture. So these photos may not reflect the material
culture of transnational migrant workers such as those from Mexico or Japan. And I
think there are plainly issues of gender and gendered labor to consider.

Focusing in on diet at the Orchard Site, at least diet as reflected in the original contents
of cans and bottles (Figure 9), we see the largest component was something along the
lines of vegetables, fruit, soup, or beans, as represented by standard can-opened
sanitary cans. After this comes evaporated milk. In two instances in the sample a
sanitary can was nested inside an evaporated milk can—meal remnants. The large
numbers of evaporated milk cans are a bit puzzling until you consider the use of
evaporated milk for preparing staple items such as flapjack or biscuits. One author,
Anne Duffield (1986), has observed that high proportions of these cans may reflect
Euro-American preferences for food made with wheat flour, as opposed to, for
example, corn flour.

Alcohol was the next group--17% of the assemblage. Three quarters of this was beer
cans, with the remainder being liquor and some wine bottles, Gallo in fact.

Coffee was another staple. I should note that the percentage of coffee at all three sites
was consistently 4-5%. The remaining items ranged from less than 1% to 2%--cans for
meat, fish, juice, and some dry powder item like tea, cocoa or spices. There are also
containers that indicate preserves and condiments. The rarity of these items in the
assemblage is difficult to interpret. Taking these numbers at their face value would
suggest that these are somewhat expensive luxuries, intended to add variety to a very
monotonous diet--potentially one of beans and flapjacks. I am inclined somewhat
towards this explanation, but there is also the distinct possibility that the fruit-pickers
had meat and we no longer have the bones since it is a surface deposit. They may also
have been able to supplement their diet through fruit gathered in the course of work.

ASSOCIATION
The dump appears to be the result of continual deposition over a couple of decades, if
not longer. Based on our sample, we are looking at around 750 cans in the deposit.
Assuming 20 years of occupation, that's around 38 cans a year. Assuming 2 cans being

6
discarded per person per day, which may be on the high end, gives us an average 19
person/days spent on the site each year. That's a string of assumptions, but however the
numbers are tweaked, if this is long-term deposit, it was not being deposited by a lot of
people.

Based on this we are looking at a small seasonally occupied camp. Shelters were either
flimsy or non-existent. The assemblage is minimal and barebones. Nearly everything
in it held food or drink. Materially speaking, the people here lived a stripped-down
life. This does not appear to have been a family setup, although that is certainly
possible. Tentatively I would say this is a fruit-tramp or itinerant worker camp. Small
groups of men each year, either working on or hoping for work on, surrounding
harvests (Figure 10).

CONCLUSION
In conclusion, a passive empiricism does not serve an archaeology of migrant labor
well. These are one of those classes of sites that even looking at is a political statement.
To do justice to this history, and it is an important history, we have to be alert to the
possibility of these sites, and be relatively familiar with what is, for most people, an
unfamiliar history.

The continuities between past and present are so dense that the politics of
archaeological interpretation cannot be swept under the rug. Migrant labor is redolent
of illegal immigration and long-terms patterns of exploitation. To argue that such sites
are important to "our history" and "our past" is to make an embarrassing
acknowledgement that they are important to our present.

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References

Barajas, Frank P.
2004 Resistance, Radicalism, and Repression on the Oxnard Plain: the Social Context of the Betabelero
Strike of 1933. Western Historical Quarterly 35:29-51.

Daniel, Cletus E
1981 Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1941. University of California Press, Berke-
ley.

Duffield, Anne Q.
1986 Tin Cans and their Potential: Historical Archaeology's Tin Lining. Pacific Coast Archaeological Soci-
ety Quarterly 22(2):31-38.

Dunn, Geoffrey
1995 Photographic License. The San Jose Metro, January 19-25, 1995, pp. 22. <http://www.newtimes-slo.-
com/archives/cov_stories_2002/cov_01172002.html>

McWilliams, Carey
1971 Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California. Peregrine Press, Salt Lake City.
Originally printed 1936.

Mitchell, Don
1996 The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. University of Minnesota Press, Min-
neapolis.

Parker, Carleton H.
1915 The California Casual and His Revolt. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 30(1):110-126.

Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

n.d. Exploring Contexts: Migrant Mother. <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awpnp6/mi-
grant_mother.html>

Street, Richard Steven

2004 Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913, Stanford
University Press, Stanford, California

Van Bueren, Thad M. , and Susan D. Walter

1994 Historical Study Report for the Root Homestead (CA-SDI-9258H) and Yamamoto Farm Workers Camp,
Interstate 125 South Project. Prepared for California Department of Transportation, Sacramento.

Woirel, Gregory R.
1992 In the Floating Army: F.C. Mills on Itinerant Life in California, 1914. University of Illinois Press,
Chicago.

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 Figures
Note
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs were obtained from The Library of
Congress, American Memory website <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/>

The Bancroft photographs were obtained from the Online Archive of California website,
"Agricultural Laborers in California, ca. 1906-1911 - Photographs"
<http://findaid.oac.cdlib.org/images/ark:/13030/tf200007qw;start=0>
The Bancroft Library was the contributing institution.

9
Figure 1. Napa Valley, CA, 1938 ((Dorothea Lange, FSA)

Figure 2. Pea picker camp, Nipomo, CA 1936 (Dorothea Lange FSA)

10
Figure 3. Japanese beet workers, California, 1906-1911

Figure 4. Mexican strikers, Corcoran, California,1933 (Powell Studio, FSA)

11
Figure 5. Lake Oroville relicensing project location

Figure 6. Orchard Site camp, artifact date ranges

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 100%
90% Unidentifiable Glass
Vessel
80% Structural
70%
60% Personal

50%
Labor
40%
30% Food
20%
Electrical
10%
0%
Logging Site Orchard Site Edel Boarding
House

Figure 7. Functional groups (Logging Site N=94; Orchard Site N=396; Edel N=105)

100%
90%
80%
70% Unidentifiable Glass
60% Vessel
50% Food/Beverage Storage

40%
Food Service
30%
20%
10%
0%
Logging Site Orchard Site Edel
Boarding
House

Figure 8. Functional classes of food-related artifacts (Logging Site N=83; Orchard Site
N=370; Edel N=56)

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Figure 9. Orchard Site, food and drink container contents (N=364)

Figure 10. Transient workers, Nipomo, California,1935

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15