AHA Session 148
Friday, January 9, 2026: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Wilson Room (Palmer House Hilton, Third Floor)
Chair:
Dana J. Simmons, University of California, Riverside
Papers:
Session Abstract
How did access to food critically shape foundational social and political movements of the long 20th century? This panel proposes an examination of key moments in the history of food justice movements and their relationship to broader impulses of political activism across the United States. In 1930s Los Angeles, households of Mexican origin that received welfare, including food assistance, faced repatriation. Dr. Janett Barragán Miranda finds that much of the data used to illustrate hunger excluded the Mexican-origin population, with such hunger denialism having lasting implications for Mexican communities in California and beyond. The economic perils of the Depression led poor people across the United States to mobilize in opposition to practices of power. As Dr. Dana Simmons illustrates, hunger helped catalyze political reform amid the backdrop of the Great Depression. Through sustained coalition-building, a cohort of sharecroppers, miners, unemployed people, women and Black activists and Communist Party members, organized Hunger Marches under the banner, “Fight - Don’t Starve.” By the 1940s, food sovereignty activism gained a foothold in the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, where Arkansas sharecroppers designed their own health surveys to document the nutritional implications of food scarcity. Dr. Dana Landress argues that the union mobilized these health surveys to promote greater autonomy in sharecroppers’ food cultivation practices amid the backdrop of WWII. By the 1960s, Black women civil rights activists were transforming neighborhood grocery stores into arenas of intense struggles for Black freedom in Chicago and beyond. Dr. Bobby J. Smith II illustrates that such activism was led by Black women preachers in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) Operation Breadbasket in Chicago. The Women of Operation Breadbasket merged womanist thinking with food activism to facilitate a multidimensional civil rights agenda with the racialized politics of food at its center. Through these case studies, our panel proposes to bridge the long history of 20th century food activism, exploring how local environments, political processes, and working and living conditions prompted specific kinds of food justice interventions across the United States. Collectively, the papers draw out salient themes in contemporary discussions of food sovereignty, and the ways in which historical legacies of food activism come to bear on the ongoing struggle for food justice in the present moment.
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