Recommendations for Further Reading

This page provides a curated list of readings for those wishing to learn more about particular areas and fields discussed in the book. Rather than repeating the bibliography for The Nature of California, this page provides a small selection of some of my favorite books. It also includes books released after my book was in production. This list is where I recommend you begin if you would like to learn more about these topics.

Farm Labor

Chan, Sucheng. This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860-1910. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Flores, Lori. Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworkers Movement. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

Garcia, Matthew. From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Harrison, Jill. Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice. Boston: MIT Press, 2011.

Holmes, Seth. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

Loza, Mireya. Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political    Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

McWilliams, Carey. Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California. Boston: Little, Brown, 1939.

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

Pawel, Miriam. The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farmworker Movement. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

Sackman, Douglas Cazaux. Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Sifuentez, Mario Jimenez. Of Forests and Fields: Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015.

Tsu, Cecila M. Garden of the World: Asian Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture in California’s Santa Clara Valley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Vargas, Zaragosa. Labor Rights are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Weber, Devra. Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers Cotton and the New Deal. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

American Agrarianism

Conlogue, William. Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Lye, Colleen. America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Sarver, Stephanie L. Uneven Land: Nature and Agriculture in American Writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Writers on the Left

Battat, Erin Royston. Ain’t Got No Home: America’s Great Migrations and the Making of an Interracial Left. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Denning, Michael.  The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1997.

Keith, Joseph. Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

Vials, Chris. Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and U.S. Culture, 1935-1947. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009.

Wald, Alan M. Exiles From a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 2002.

_____. Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007),

_____. American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 2012.

Race and the Environment

Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds. The Environmental Jsutice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002.

Finney, Carolyn. Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Finseth, Ian Frederick. Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770-1860. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009.

Gamber, John. Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins: Waste and Contamination in Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Literatures. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

Kosek, Jake. Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Myers, Jeffrey. Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005.

Murphy, Patrick D. Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000.

Outka, Paul. Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Park, Lisa and David Pellow. The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Pulido, Laura. Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996.

Ray, Sarah Jaquette. The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013.

Ruffin, Kimberly N. Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010.

Schweninger, Lee. Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008.

Smith, Kimberly K. African American Environmental Thought: Foundations. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007.

Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Stern, Alexandra Minna. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Sturgeon, Noël.  Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008.

Tsing, Anna L. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Ybarra, Priscilla Solis. Writing the Good Life: Mexican American Literature and the Environment. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016.

The Alternative Food Movement

Allen, Patricia. Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

Biltekoff, Charlotte. Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Gray, Margaret. Labor and the Locavore. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

Guthman, Julie. Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Citizenship

Brandzel, Amy. Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016.

Bosniak, Linda. The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Creef, Elena Tajima. Imagining Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and Body. New York: New York University Press, 2004.

Lopez, Ian Haney. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Molina, Natalia. How Race is Made in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Political Belonging

Buff, Rachel. Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945-1992. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Schmidt Camacho, Alicia.  Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Property

Harris, Cheryl L. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707-91.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.