The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945
Author: Hahamovitch, Cindy
Date Published: 1997
Cindy Hahamovitch has put together a masterful history of the relationship between Atlantic Coast farmworkers, the growers for whom they labored, and the state. This study is valuable not only for its synthesis of extensive primary source material, but also for its lessons regarding the relationship between capital and the state. This work is a response to the challenge of Linda Gordon's Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1994), "to look beyond the surface of federal policy, to consider the ways in which state structures were shaped by state managers' unspoken beliefs . . . by the values and prejudices of people in positions of power" (9). In other words, Hahamovitch seeks to add a layer of complexity to the very notion of autonomy. The Fruits of Their Labor succeeds at that task quite admirably.
Date Published: 1997
Cindy Hahamovitch has put together a masterful history of the relationship between Atlantic Coast farmworkers, the growers for whom they labored, and the state. This study is valuable not only for its synthesis of extensive primary source material, but also for its lessons regarding the relationship between capital and the state. This work is a response to the challenge of Linda Gordon's Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1994), "to look beyond the surface of federal policy, to consider the ways in which state structures were shaped by state managers' unspoken beliefs . . . by the values and prejudices of people in positions of power" (9). In other words, Hahamovitch seeks to add a layer of complexity to the very notion of autonomy. The Fruits of Their Labor succeeds at that task quite admirably.
