Fantasy and Rejection
The Grower's Exclusion and Appropriation of Mexicans in Marketing and City-Planning
The Grower's Fantasy
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The Anglo-American citrus grower embraced twentieth-century industrial practices and ideas, accepting popular notions of class structure based on social Darwinism and hierarchy. Citrus grower's hierarchy is best reflected in their marketing and city-planning illustrating how they felt about their Mexican labor.
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Citrus was a very profitable industry making the growers extremely wealthy. With this wealth, the growers felt a need to carefully craft their image and express their inner desires through photography, marketing, and the landscape. Not only did these images serve as a reassuring means of reinforcing their dominance in the community, but they also served an economic purpose. Since citrus was a highly competitive industry, "the industry's leaders, and Sunkist in particular, carefully crafted a demand for citrus fruit and shaped the citrus belt as a prime tourist attraction"(Hartig, 103). Citrus growers placed a significant amount of importance on marketing, especially their labels. Advertising and labels helped promote "consumption, tourism, and tourist attraction"(Hartig, 103). Attracting tourists was important because it helped create a larger appeal for their products fulfilling the fantasy of California as a paradise and boost tourism to their new communities.
In this highly hierarchical society, while Anglo-growers were at the top, Mexicans were at the bottom. This hierarchy gave rise to a system of paternalism, segregation, and exclusion. Seeing themselves as the leaders of a powerful and lucrative industry, growers "saw themselves as community builders"(McBane, 213). Growers built housing for their labor; however, these houses represented the imagination and desires of the grower rather than the labor living in them. The Mexican labor were provided company housing; however, the buildings were separated from the grower's home and were consolidated into small villages. Housing Mexican labor in "quaint, isolated, sanitized, small villages" growers reinforced their social hierarchy, advancing their domination. (Hartig, 107) Providing cheap company served the grower's interest by maintaining a permanent workforce, lessening the likelihood of strikes for better living conditions and wages, and giving the local elite tighter control on society. (McBane, 214) It was imperative to retain workers because they were already trained in the proper picking and packaging methods to prevent oranges from spoiling. (Moses, 34)
Marketing and Nature
Mexican's Exclusion
Photography expressed the ideals of the grower bourgeoisie class. Not only was marketing a form of increasing the sale of citrus, but it also served as self-expression and desires.
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Most marketing in the citrus industry utilizes an idealized landscape full of beautiful rich citrus trees with the bright sun shining down on them. They always leave out the most important factor that enables citrus to reach the customer, Mexican labor. The pickers would have been just as important as the sun shine, dark rich dirt, and enormous trees full of fruit, but they are rarely in the landscape or imagery.
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A significant number of packaging labels and advertisements place emphasis on nature because it helps reassure the growers' position in society. Nature was used to embody the "aesthetic accomplishments of the grower"(Hartig, 104). Nature came to represent the success of the grower. This visually reinforces while justifies their leadership and domination within society.
The growers also failed to include their Mexican labor force in the images because they saw them as uncivilized. Growers relentlessly pushed for Americanization programs appealing to nativist beliefs. (McBane, 214) If they had included their 'uncivilized' labor force, they would have believed it would tarnish the picturesque and fantasy-inspired imagery. It would no longer be a part of their desires and no longer appeal to their targeted consumer.
Marketing and Spanish Fantasy
Appropriation and Redefining the Past
In appealing a need to foster a thriving tourism industry, create a sense of establishment, and transform their 'uncivilized' workforce, growers appropriated their Mexican laborer's culture and whitewashed it. This created a fantasy-inspired distorted version of the Spanish and Mexican Californian past as a means "to forget-whitewash- both the unpleasantness of recent decades as well as the entire bloody history of the Southwest throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries"(Deverell, 59). With the violent past erased, growers could rewrite the past and make California a new paradise, aiding in their marketing of citrus as a treasure of paradise. Growers appealed to the Spanish past and the missions "to entice settlers and tourists to the state" while providing "a sense of local history." (Haas, 47) Americans were attracted to the Spanish fantasy because it helped tie them to the newly conquered Mexican territories and, over time, disassociating this past to actual Mexicans. According to William Deverell, Americans also felt attracted to Mexican culture because it "came to represent part of the region's exoticism in the eyes of the white tourist and settler"(59). While the imagery is appropriated from Mexicans, many of the images show Mexicans through a historically revised way with many of the figures appearing very pale and entirely like imagined gente de razón or Californio attire. This is not emblematic or representative of the majority of Mexicans who have part indigenous origins and for the most part would have not worn such costumes. This is intentional because the grower does not want to represent the typical peon or servant but rather the perceived top of society of the Spanish and Mexican past which was the Californio or historical revised version. By appealing to this exocitized class of Mexican and Spanish, the grower is establishing a connection to the leaders of the past legitimizing their position in society. This also reinforced their beliefs in hierarchy and a ruling class.
Spanish Fantasy
The priest, the beautiful landscape, and the timeless mission not only tie citriculture with the Spanish past and California fantasy but also entices white consumers to travel to California to visit the carefully crafted historicized orchards. This label from Arrowhead Brand draw a careful and calculated association between California "history" and their citrus product.
Spanish Fantasy
Spanish Man on Looking Aesthetic Landscape
This Californio figure is the embodiment of how the citrus grower wants to be perceived. An appeal to the historically rewritten Mexican and Spanish past helps justify a claim to the land and a rightful inheritance to leadership in Southern California.
The Spanish Fantasy
Fetishization
The few marketing images that depict female Mexicans are fetishized and eroticized. The Sardonyx Brand in particular depicts an Mesoamerican or Native American woman in a flirtatious stance. With many Mexicans having Native American lineage, this image is a romanticized version of their past. This again shows the desires of the growers. The growers admire their past but do not acknowledge their importance as labor and workers.
