Anti-Social Movements: Mexican Americans and Deviant Mobility in the California Inland Empire, 1882–1930

Capitalist development was mapped onto the landscape of the Southwest through railroad routes, labor settlements, and networks of production. In the California Citrus Belt, these infrastructural forms of capital formed the foundation of a growing agricultural industry. Many geographers and historians have explained that this transition required a command over space. In this paper, I will argue it also required control over physical mobility. I will ask, in what ways did the needs of capitalist transformations from 1882-1930 organize people and the relationships between them within the concentrated networks of the citrus industry? How did this establish regimes of acceptable and deviant mobility? And, how did values attached to different types of mobility become mapped onto individual places and bodies as racial distinctions? As a gateway, wherein several trade networks and railroad lines intersected, the California Inland Empire offers a particularly rich site to explore the tensions that manifested over different claims to mobility and its affiliated meanings.