Politics of Refusal in the “Valley of Refuge”

Three sugar companies colonized Colorado’s Arkansas River Valley in the first decades of the twentieth century. Like other labor-intensive agricultural industries in the U.S. West, the sugar beet industry used race management techniques to differently handle farmers (who were majority white) and farmworkers (who were Indigenous, Mexican, Asian, and Eastern European). Despite great effort, control over farmers, workers, and the land consistently eluded them. This paper will examine how crises—war and environmental events—intensified struggles between the industry and migrant workers. As migrants and refugees fought for their right to say “no” to work in the beet fields, companies sought to capitalize on crisis to exert greater control over migrant workers, especially Mexican and Native American workers. Workers responded in a variety of ways, cultivating politics of refusal that ultimately drew tribal governments, the Mexican government, and the U.S. federal government into the fray. The beet fields were therefore key nation-building sites, where overlapping and competing sovereignties clashed.