From Citrus Belt to Inland Empire: race, place, and mobility in Southern California, 1880-2000

For over a century, narratives of mobility and settlement flourished in regional heritage campaigns and public policy throughout inland southern California. "From Citrus Belt to Inland Empire: Race, Place, and Mobility in Southern California, 1880-2000" pushes for analyses that recognize ideas, policies, and practices of mobility and settlement as agents in the production of racial difference, and by extension, the boundaries of citizenship. This work focuses on five periods of economic and demographic change between 1880 and 2000, including the citrus boom of the 1880s, Issei migration following the second Chinese Exclusion Act in 1892, Mexican immigration during World War I, Dust Bowl migration in the 1930s, and multiracial metropolitanization following World War II. In each of these moments, racial distinctions were debated according to the economic value ascribed to each groups' (im)mobility. During periods of prosperity, the mobility of migrant workers was criminalized and in times of recession it was promoted. In this context, identifications such as pioneer, bird of passage, tramp, and migrant worker signified a constellation of mobile-meanings that existed dialectically with racial ideologies. More so, a comparative process of racial formation tied to capital accumulation operated alongside technologies governing mobility that maintained the dominance of white territorial claims and reinforced control over the movement of labor. This recognition opens up questions regarding the terms by which people were included or excluded from the entitlements of citizenship. Though uniquely expressed in response to each locality and time, ideas of mobility and settlement consistently reinforced boundaries of racial exclusion and adapted to enforce those boundaries in times of demographic and economic change. "From Citrus Belt to Inland Empire" examines this process during a broad stretch of inland southern California history in an effort to untangle the relationship between race, place, and mobility.