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Grassroots Surrealism : The Culture of Opposition and the Crisis of Development in 1930s California

Abstract

This dissertation examines the upsurge of working-class social movements in rural and urban California during the Great Depression era. As the twentieth century's worst economic crisis unfolded in one of the most rapidly modernizing regions among industrialized nations, Grassroots Surrealism traces how Depression-era Californians made sense of conditions they confronted, pursued self-defined needs and aspirations, and contributed to the making of a broader, multiracial and transnational oppositional culture in the process. It argues that significant currents of grassroots movements in 1930s California advanced a politics of "grassroots surrealism," which rejected the rationalist strictures that dominated modern, Western thought and regarded desire, imagination, and creativity as indispensable political priorities. Rather than reflecting a unifying social- democratic agenda or a homogenizing American identity, California's grassroots surrealists asserted political visions that underscored the interconnectedness and interdependence of global struggles for dignity, against the dehumanizing effects of Western imperialism and racial capitalism. Grassroots Surrealism offers a comparative and relational examination of the struggles of multiethnic Mexican, Filipino, Asian, African American, Native American, and European American working populations in the Imperial Valley's agricultural fields, San Francisco's waterfront, Los Angeles' culture industry, and Mendocino County's Round Valley Indian Reservation. It excavates the under-examined sources of rank and file workers and working-class communities--in oral histories, community newspapers, and expressive culture--alongside the records of union leaders and politicians that have traditionally anchored the field. As it analyzes grassroots politics in forms that ranged from strikes to jazz music across the capitalist landscape--from rural to urban and north to south in California--it reveals how seemingly disparate communities were linked in their myriad struggles against Depression-era capitalism. Ultimately, this dissertation destabilizes dominant narratives of the New Deal by demonstrating that corporatist and social-democratic politics were far from popular consensus. It brings into focus California's place in the global capitalist map, locates multiethnic working communities within that cartography, and shows how their efforts to remake the 1930s were far more heterogeneous, multivalent, and contested than scholars have previously recognized

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