“The winds of money”: race, work, and water in the Texas Panhandle, 1910-1985
Creators: name: Hege, Sam
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: This dissertation argues that the privatization of groundwater precipitated new forms of white supremacy in the American Southwest. Beginning with the first speculative water market schemes in the West Texas region, I trace how the creation of a new system of water governance has provided fertile ground for far-right conservatism that has opposed movements for justice and sustained Jim Crow policies of segregation and labor appropriation into the late twentieth century. The mining of groundwater, however, also fostered a multiracial history of activism, labor, and migration that has been all but invisible to scholars of the American West. Drawing on oral history interviews and community archives, I demonstrate that post-emancipation Black and Indigenous Mexicano/a protest was constant yet evolved locally based on ecological and economic constraints. Understanding this period of energy transition, with its implications for the modern fast-food economy and climate crisis, is vital to reckoning with how the ongoing legacies of racial capitalism inform movements for environmental justice. Through five substantive chapters, my dissertation interweaves an analysis of the creation of underground property systems and extractive technologies with a place-based study of Black and Mexicano/a migrants, workers, and activists within this transforming landscape. Chapter one examines how racial notions of community shaped the political economy surrounding groundwater extraction. Through an examination of photographs, editorials, and political correspondences, I illustrate how rural land speculators intensified racial disparities by positioning mechanical pumps as anti-state devices that could empower independent white farmers to compete in globalizing agricultural markets. In lieu of access to the energy of a flowing river, however, West Texas farmers made their groundwater resources flow via work. Chapter two, therefore, illuminates how the Bracero program, a transnational workshare agreement, became the linchpin of the Panhandle’s irrigation scheme and how this labor system informed understandings of citizenship, water, and race. I argue that the demand for irrigation work created critical new points of leverage, which enabled Bracero workers and Mexican American activists to pursue safer working conditions and desegregated social spaces. While studies of the scaling of agricultural systems have traditionally foregrounded the industrialized farm as a site of innovation and contestation, I argue that the city played a role of equal significance. Chapter three examines how urban developers in Lubbock, West Texas’s largest urban hub, worked with agricultural producers and scientists to design their city in ways that could accommodate and encourage the region’s irrigation boom. Through urban renewal programs and zoning projects, boosters expanded the potential for agricultural profits at the expense of local communities. These initiatives resulted in the dislocation of hundreds of families and businesses in service of large-scale investments in agricultural expansion and put them in closer proximity to dust, waste, and pollution. Over time, Black and Brown residents leveraged the city’s dependence on their labor and communities by forming coalitions aimed at addressing the inequities at the heart of irrigation expansion. The next two chapters of the dissertation chart the formation of these grassroots coalitions. Chapter four reconstructs how working-class activists in Lubbock attempted to dismantle this agricultural industrial complex through multiracial union organizing campaigns. Chapter five shifts focus to the ways that Black and Chicano/a activists gave political form to the dust and odors disproportionately dispersed in their communities.