CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Talamantes, Daniel |
|---|---|
| Title | Azorean Migrant Women in Central Valley, California: An Embodied History of Labor during the Great Depression |
| Summary | Leaning into new social histories and microhistories, my thesis evinces the women of Azorean diaspora in the Central Valley of California with a particular focus on their embodied labor in dairy farms during the Great Depression (or, 1930s United States of America). With this embodiment framework, I attempted a narrative analysis and descriptive account of the subject by situating two oral histories and five autobiographies within archival data gleaned from government censuses, CALTRANS monographs, Department of Agriculture periodicals, newspapers, magazines, and films produced during this period. My findings weave together the narrative of Anne Korte, my grandmother’s sister, with her chores as the thread that stitches patchworks of rich, complex, and unique agricultural historical processes in California’s Central Valley. Through my findings I explore a paradoxical hybridity: how the modernization and centralization efforts of federal and state programs furthered the dissolution of struggling dairy farmers yet opened opportunities for Azorean women’s autonomy. It is also my aim in this study to problematize labor, its value systems, what it really defines, and who gets to determine what it is. Lastly, it is my desire to antagonize the modernist discourse/epistemologies (maybe even cosmologies) of progress, naturalism, and technological advancement and their material affectations/consequences. |
| Supervisor | Lafferton, Emese; Jones-Gailani, Nadia |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/talamantes_daniel.pdf |
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