Something about the migrant labor camp spooked my mother. Then she learned its dark history | Idaho

My mother, Nora Zavala Gallion, was 11 years old when she first set foot inside the farm labor camp in Caldwell, Idaho. It was 1968, and her family had traveled over 2,000 miles by car from Texas’s Rio Grande valley to harvest sugar beets as migrant laborers.

While my family had worked numerous crops across the country for decades, the girl who would become my mother sensed something very different about this location. The camp’s small, dilapidated wooden living quarters were called “barracks” and featured open, latrine-style bathrooms and showers. Somehow, my mother knew this place had a troubling past.

“In those years, segregation was very prevalent,” she remembered. “We were not allowed to live within the white city limits of Caldwell. We had to drive 10 miles out of the city limit, then take this gravel road … And at the top of that gravel road was this encampment. It was surrounded by barbed wire. There’s no way around it: I knew that at one point that this place had been a prison camp for someone, but now it was the only place that Mexicans were allowed to live.”

Other Mexican American farm workers who had been there longer soon told the family why the labor camp seemed like a prison. It had been a site of Japanese American incarceration during the second world war. It was part of a network of camps that warehoused more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent, rounded up and detained on racially motivated suspicions that they supported the enemy Axis powers of Japan, Germany and Italy. In Caldwell, they would have to prove their loyalty to the United States through work, producing sugar beets to fuel the American war machine.

My family had unknowingly become part of a long line of laborers – white Depression-era migrants; Japanese Americans brutally uprooted from their homes and lives; and later Mexican, Mexican American and Indigenous workers – to call Caldwell home. But most of them weren’t free to come and go as they pleased, even with legal labor contracts. As the case of Caldwell demonstrates, the line between a farm worked by migrant labor and a prison can be a very blurry one indeed.

Beets, captive labor and the war machine

My family’s experience is typical of 20th-century Mexican American migrant farm laborers. Relegated to labor camps on the nation’s farms, they were forced to forfeit education and stability to follow seasonal crops and meager wages. Crossing borders – geographic, cultural and linguistic – was just a way of life.

Though I’ve never worked the fields, I’ve frequently heard family stories about life on the road and the inherent violence of migrant farm work. The lesson I gleaned again and again was that to be a farm worker is essentially to be a prisoner and to live in constant fear of police and state violence. That lesson from my family’s long history in the fields set me on the path to become a scholar who studies how prisons and a deeply engrained culture of punishment shape migrant farm work.

And for me, one key to understanding that culture lies in Caldwell and its sugar beet industry.

The demand for migrant farm workers in Idaho steadily increased during the second world war, as the US military subsidized the production of several crops deemed essential to the war effort.

Chief among them were sugar beets. Refined sugar was an important product for the development of military weapons. It could be refined and transformed into synthetic rubber, and sugar alcohols proved to be powerful explosives that drove the US war effort in the Pacific – used in everything from grenades and bombs to large artillery. According to a fact often cited by the US military, an acre of sugarcane produced a single artillery salvo for a Pacific warship.

Hawaii – the center of American sugar production – was a battleground after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. That status limited the availability of its sugarcane on the mainland, and companies like Idaho’s Amalgamated Sugar cashed in.

Beet season normally lasts from early spring to fall and, during the mid-20th century, involved mowing down rows of planted beets with small hand hoes to remove excess plants. This type of work was, and still is, considered “stoop labor”, a term that describes the hunched-over position the work requires. Beet thinning was incredibly labor-intensive, and children in the fields weren’t spared. As my mother recalls, “I remember my hands getting so … just sore. And I couldn’t close them anymore because of holding the hoe and just going and going because the fields are miles, miles long. And you work from sunup to sundown.”

Beet work wasn’t only painful – it was also racialized. Fred Cummings, a Colorado sugar beet farmer and executive, pulled no punches about just who should do beet work when he addressed a congressional hearing on immigration in 1926: “… there is not a white man of any intelligence in our country who will work an acre of beets … I do not want to see a condition arise again when white men who are reared and educated in our schools have got to bend their backs and skin their fingers to pull those little beets.” As he saw it, lawmakers really had only one choice in the face of potential white racial degradation: to “let us have the only class of laborers who will do the work”, a class that consisted of Asian, Mexican and Indigenous farmhands.

It was no small wonder, then, that a grueling farm labor camp would be seen as a suitable place for incarcerated Japanese Americans. Originally built in 1939 by the now defunct federal Farm Security Administration, Caldwell was created as part of a nationwide system of camps to house displaced white workers after the Great Depression. While these workers were the first to live in the camp’s “barracks”, they were free to come and go and had greater labor protections in the fields around Caldwell.

But with the outbreak of the second world war, things changed. The Caldwell labor camp was soon repurposed to house detained Japanese Americans and to satisfy the US military’s thirst for sugar.

In March 1942, ​​President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9102, which ultimately removed Japanese Americans from their homes on the west coast to concentration camps. Just weeks before, the secretary of agriculture, Claude R Wickard, had demanded that the US produce an unprecedented number of sugar beets to provide fodder for explosives.

This unprecedented demand for sugar caused panic among growers nationwide who anticipated historic labor shortages. To guarantee production and profits, the military, state governments and growers all envisioned newly incarcerated Japanese Americans as an “available” labor force. They created the Seasonal Leave Program (SLP), which took Japanese Americans away from larger camps like Minidoka in western Idaho, which housed an estimated 9,000 people, and shipped them to smaller labor camps like Caldwell to plant and harvest sugar beets.

As the more than 30,000 Japanese Americans in the SLP between 1942 and 1945 would come to know, smaller labor camps were no less controlled than the sprawling complexes. In 1942, an agent of the United States Employment Services in Idaho reported: “The Japanese are not under armed guard but are under surveillance either in farm labor camps or on ranches. Deputy sheriffs are assigned to the camps and the movement of the inmates is restricted, particularly at night.”

Even with thousands of captive laborers, the sugar machine kept churning, bringing even more non-white farm laborers to Caldwell. In 1943, the Caldwell labor camp also became a labor depot for the Bracero program, a US-Mexico pact that brought thousands of Mexican men to the US as migrant farm workers. In 1943, the first braceros came to Caldwell to work the beet fields alongside Japanese Americans in the same prison-like conditions.

For all intent and purposes, they too were now “inmates”. For many in the SLP, the trauma of the farm labor camps is inseparable from that of the larger concentration camps. As Taka Mizote, who was first incarcerated at the larger Portland Assembly Center camp with her family and then at the SLP labor camp in Nyssa, Oregon – only 25 miles from Caldwell – reflects: “When I think about it, I think, ‘Oh that’s almost unbelievable how we survived under those conditions.’”

When my family arrived in Caldwell, there were visibly reminded of farm labor’s carceral history. As my late uncle Marcus Zavala, who was born in Caldwell in 1968, recalled: “There was a prison light in the middle [of the labor camp], you know? They had that type of setup in a lot of places where we would go up to – not only Caldwell. We would go up to Washington and Oregon and work the apples. We would do the cantaloupe, oranges, grapefruits, lemons and limes in Texas. In Idaho, it was mostly either potatoes or beets. But it was the same [labor camp conditions] everywhere.”

My family experienced the long afterlife of Japanese incarceration in Caldwell, as systems of surveillance and control didn’t disappear when Japanese Americans were permitted to leave after years lost to injustice. The historical and experiential overlap between Japanese Americans and Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Caldwell starkly illustrates how farmworkers in the US are treated as a particular class of prisoner outside prison walls.

Today, all that remains of the Caldwell camp’s original architecture is a lone, abandoned barrack. I journeyed there in 2021. I found it with the help of past residents who still live in Caldwell, whose population is now more than a third Latino.

I stood inside that barrack, running my hands along the walls. And I saw why my mother would recall her time there as a prison sentence. Though my family made a home there, it was an institutional home made of flimsy slab board, with only a single window looking out at farmland where generations toiled to make sugar for bombs.