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Students and faculty may contact Margarita Zamora Saunders or Tim Held for a research appointment. Alternatively, faculty can visit the Faculty Libary Instruction Program webpage for more information on services available to you.
The Nature of California by
The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America's natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus, many novels, plays, movies, and songs have dramatized the brutality and hardships of working in the California fields. Little scholarship has focused on what these cultural productions tell us about who belongs in America, and in what ways they are allowed to belong. In The Nature of California, Sarah Wald analyzes this legacy and its consequences by examining the paradoxical representations of California farmers and farmworkers from the Dust Bowl migration to present-day movements for food justice and immigrant rights. Analyzing fiction, nonfiction, news coverage, activist literature, memoirs, and more, Wald gives us a new way of thinking through questions of national belonging by probing the relationships among race, labor, and landownership. Bringing together ecocriticism and critical race theory, she pays special attention to marginalized groups, examining how Japanese American journalists, Filipino workers, United Farm Workers members, and contemporary immigrants-rights activists, among others, pushed back against the standard narratives of landownership and citizenship.
Mayo Ethnobotany: Land, History, and Traditional Knowledge in Northwest Mexico by 
Gold, Oil and Avocados by
The past decade has seen major political upheaval in Latin America - from Brazil to Chile to Venezuela to Bolivia - but to understand what happened, ask first where your quinoa and lithium batteries came from. In this fascinating history, roving reporter Andy Robinson takes readers from the salt planes of Chile to the depths of the Amazonian jungle to stitch together the story of Latin America's last decade, showing how the imperial plunder of the past carries on today under a new name.
A strawberry farmer tending to crops.
Ag librarian carrying a two-day-old calf to a slightly drier area on the farm. Photo taken March 2023, Oakdale, CA.
