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Dissertation Information for Margo McBane

NAME:
- Margo McBane

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2001)

ADVISORS:
- Norris Hundley Jr.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Mary Terrall
- Valerie Matsumoto
- Ruth Milkman
- Regina Morantz-Sanchez

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: The house that lemons built: Race, ethnicity, gender, citizenship and the creation of a citrus empire, 1893--1919

Abstract: The Limoneira Company and its first phase of founders led the lemon industry movement, set the template for citrus industrialization, and established a legacy that reverberated through the second phase of citrus labor history. The Limoneira Company demonstrates how turn-of-the-century ideals about industrialization and corporate capitalism transformed the nature of farming and the face of southern California. The founders of the company achieved their accomplishments by promoting their middle-class ideas of commerce, race, ethnicity, citizenship, science, and gender. While creating their citrus empire, the Limoneira founders constructed a new male identity. Using this new definition of manhood, the citrus barons consolidated their control over citrus production, by vertically integrating from picking through packing, and by imposing scientific methods on production. In the labor process, they combined notions of control over citrus production, by vertically integrating from picking through packing, and by imposing scientific methods on production. By applying the theories of scientific management and mechanization to the labor process, workers were divided from each other along race and gender lines and from their work along skill lines. Initially white, Chinese, Japanese and Mexican single men were hired because they were considered cheaper to employ and house. By 1910, the company sifted to a more reliable family labor force of Mexican, white, and some Japanese. To control the marketing of citrus, the Limoneira founders joined the producer cooperative movement, becoming a dominant member of the California Fruit Growers Exchange (now called Sunkist). The founders sustained this citrus empire by networking their fortunes and friends. The close familial ties between the Limoneira owners and managers, and between the ranch and community institutions further strengthened the Limoneira's economic sway in the region. These ranchers embraced the opportunity to join the millennial fight to promote white society by serving as civilizing agents to tame the wilds of western citrus production and its immigrant labor force. In the nearby citrus community, the Limoneira owners undertook a campaign of industrial paternalism to convert immigrant citrus workers to Protestantism and to Americanize them into a white middle-class culture. They offered workers acculturation, but not assimilation, segregating workers' residences and schools. Without citizenship, immigrant citrus workers had little opportunity challenge these community decisions. On the ranch, however, they did attempt to express grievances through a wildcat strike. The strike lost due to the divided labor force, but its indicated that grower paternalism and family labor had not mitigated labor unrest.

MPACT Scores for Margo McBane

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-09-10 22:55:48

Advisors and Advisees Graph

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Students under Margo McBane

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None