Chapter 19

The chapter recounts how Americans seized California from Mexican landholders, transforming squatters into owners whose descendants lost their hunger for the soil. Farming shifted from intimate labor to bookkeeping: crops became dollars, land principal and interest, and only the best shopkeepers survived, consolidating holdings into vast, impersonal estates.

Owners industrialized agriculture, importing low-paid foreign labor and replacing diversified homesteads with stoop crops. Many owners no longer saw their land, managing by ledgers, company stores, and debt. Meanwhile tractors in the Plains dispossessed tenant families, driving hundreds of thousands westward, where locals despised the hungry newcomers.

Migrants coveted idle fields yet were barred from using them. Secret gardens were planted and destroyed by deputies, who insisted any successful crop might kindle claims of ownership. In Hoovervilles the desperate debated theft, self-defense, and taking land by force, while swaggering officers harassed camps and staged health raids that burned shelters.

As work shortages bred starvation, stories spread of deadly clashes, including a child killing a deputy during an eviction. The chapter observes that repression strengthens the repressed: great owners arm and spy, ignoring causes while fear grows that a unified mass could reclaim the land. Amid suffering, the poor pool coins to bury a child, revealing kindness that endures even as the narrative warns that prayer may someday give way to action.