The March of Empire: The Californian Quest for Avocados in Early-Twentieth Century Mexico

ABSTRACT

At the turn of the twentieth century, agricultural explorers from the United States Department of Agriculture, Californian farmers, and the University of California scientists created the agricultural giant that California is today by extracting plant diversity from the Global South and protecting the nascent agricultural industry from outside competition. I define this process as “U.S. agricultural imperialism.” This article analyzes how U.S. agricultural imperialism in early-twentieth-century Latin America gave rise to a lucrative avocado industry closely associated with the Californian landscapes and agricultural identity and disconnected the fruit from its biological and cultural origins in Mexico and Central America to protect local production. U.S. institutions, growers, and scientists developed a thriving industry in the Golden State based on the extraction of avocado germplasm from Latin America while simultaneously banning the introduction of actual Mexican avocados to avoid outside competition.

KEYWORDS:

• Avocado
• plant-breeding
• explorers
• California
• agricultural imperialism

Acknowledgments

I wish to show my appreciation to the scholars and students of the UC Davis Latin American History Workshop for their generous feedback in the early stages of writing this article. I would also like to thank Dr. Erika Rappaport, Dr. Jeffrey Pilcher, and Elizabeth Schmidt for helping me finalize the project and the anonymous readers’ gen erous comments. Their suggestions significantly enriched this piece. This research received grant support from the UC Davis Hemispheric Institute on the Americas, the Tinker Foundation, and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.

Notes

1. Olmstead and Rhode, Creating Abundance, 223.

2. Although it is unclear how the term “alligator pear” was used in the first place, scholars believe it was because of the fruit’s shell resemblance with the alligator’s skin and the avocado shape of a pear. In 1941, the American Pomological Society and the USDA approved the term “avocado” as the translation to the Náhuatl-origin word ahuácatl (aguacate in Spanish).

3. Olmstead and Rhode, “A History of California Agriculture,” 21.

4. For wages, land, and transportation costs in twentieth-century California’s agricultural system, see Olmstead and Rhode, “A History of California Agriculture”

5. Conkin, A Revolution Down on the Farm; Cochrane, Development of American Agriculture; Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory; Sackman, Orange Empire; Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage; Knight, Tropics of Hopes.

6. Harris, Fruits of Eden; Stone, The Food Explorer; Gardner, American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century.

7. Pauly, Fruits and Plains.

8. Kloppenburg, First the Seed.

9. Fullilove, The Profit of the Earth, 220.

10. Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage; Stoll, “Insects and Institutions;” Knight, Tropic of Hopes.

11. Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage; Knight, Tropic of Hopes.

12. Kerr, “The Avocado Industry in Southern California,” 53.

13. Hernández, “Arbol afuera,” 127.

14. Barrett, “The Pilgrimage to Atlixco,” 42.

15. Kerr, “The Avocado Industry in Southern California,” 55. The diversity of avocado strains in California at the turn of the twentieth century was not exclusive to this fruit. Californian nurseries imported different kinds of trees, like oranges, grapevines, pears, and apples, from abroad in vast numbers. Steve Stoll mentions that “between 1810 and 1942, approximately 570 species and varieties of trees -not shrubs, bulbs, vines, or flowers, but trees alone -entered California. Species and varieties of vines imported during the same period numbered 260,” in Stoll, “Insects and Institutions,” 217.

16. McCook, States of Nature, Sharma, Empire’s Garden, Bender, “The Delectable and Dangerous.”

17. Hayland, “History of U.S. Plant Introduction,” 27–28.

18. Ibid., 26.

19. Phillips et al. “Reflections on the United States Department of Agriculture,” 318.

20. Quoted in Hayland, “History of U.S. Plant Introduction,” 28.

21. Egli, “The World of Our Dreams,” 5.

22. Phillips et al., “Reflections on the United States Department of Agriculture,” 350–351.

23. For a thorough study of bananas’ consumption in the United States, see Soluri, Banana Cultures.

24. Charles, “Searching for Gold in Guacamole,” 200.

25. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite.

26. Egli, “The World of Our Dreams,” 79–81.

27. Soto Laveaga, Jungle Laboratories, 10.

28. Fairchild, “Our Plants Immigrants,” National Geographic Magazine, 179 (Emphasis added).

29. Sackman, Orange Empire, chap. 1, Kindle.

30. Knight, Tropics of Hope, 14.

31. Egli, “The World of Our Dreams,” 82–116.

32. Collins, The Avocado, A Salad Fruit from the Tropics.

33. Ibid., 28.

34. Ibid., 29–35.

35. Ibid., 41.

36. For the Maya culture, the avocados were also grown in sacred gardens, and they even formed part of their mythology as Maya people believed that important ancestors became reborn through fruit trees, like the avocado.

37. For more on avocado domestication in Mesoamerica, see Galindo-Tovar et al., “Some Aspects of Avocado Diversity and Domestication”

38. Ibid., 41–42.

39. Ibid., 44.

40. Rosengarten, Wilson Popenoe, 40.

41. Acquaah, Principles of Plant Genetics and Breeding, 146.

42. Charles, “Searching for Gold in Guacamole,” 205.

43. Egli, “The World of Our Dreams,” 97.

44. Ibid.

45. Quoted in Rosengarten, Wilson Popenoe, 10 (Emphasis added).

46. Stoll, “Insects and Institutions,” 217.

47. Phillips et al., “Reflections on the United States Department of Agriculture,” 351.

48. Stoll, “Insects and Institutions,” 218.

49. Sackman, Orange Empire, chap 1 Kindle.

50. Quoted in Ibid.

51. Charles, “Searching for Gold in Guacamole,” 205.

52. Quoted in Rosengarten, Wilson Popenoe, 43.

53. McCook, States of Nature, 26.

54. Ibid.

55. Charles, “Searching for Gold in Guacamole,” 199.

56. Ibid., 200.

57. California Avocado Association, “Fourth Annual Meeting,” 75 (italics in original); California Avocado Association, “Report of the Semi-Annual Meeting,” 66.

58. California Avocado Association, “Report of the Semi-Annual Meeting,” 67.

59. Ibid.

60. California Avocado Association, “Minutes of the Semi-Annual Meeting,” 21–22.

61. Ibid., 22.

62. Ibid.

63. Charles, “Searching for Gold in Guacamole,” 208.

64. Knight, Tropic of Hopes, 83.

65. Kerr, “The Avocado Industry in Southern California,” 59–61.

66. Charles, “Searching for Gold in Guacamole,” 209.

67. Rosengarten, Wilson Popenoe, 58.

68. Egli, “The World of Our Dreams,” 145.

69. California Avocado Association, “Minutes of the Semi-Annual Meeting,” 74.

70. Ibid., 75–76.

71. Kerr, “The Avocado Industry in Southern California,” 57.

72. Hernández, “Arbol afuera,” 153.

73. Knight, Tropics of Hopes, 92.

74. Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage, 64.

75. California Avocado Association, “Minutes of the Semi-Annual Meeting,” 90.

76. Charles, “Searching for Gold in Guacamole,” 212.

77. Ibid.

78. Ibid., 211.

79. Ibid., 213.

80. Ibid., 213–214.

81. Mexican migration numbers cited in Lytle Hernandez, Bad Mexicans, 208.

82. Ibid., 214. Calavo even won the plaudits of Business Week in 1935 in an article titled “Calavo Growers Star as Sellers.”

83. Hernández, “Arbol afuera,” 160–162.

84. Kerr, “The Avocado Industry in Southern California,” 156.

85. California Avocado Association, “Minutes of the Semi-Annual Meeting,” 16.

86. Kerr, “The Avocado Industry in Southern California,” 161–162.

87. Quoted in Egli, “The World of Our Dreams,” 137.

88. See Aluja at al., Journal of Economic Entomology 97, 293–309.

89. Hernández, “Arbol afuera,” 165.

90. Quoted in Egli, “The World of Our Dreams,” 129.

91. Webber, “Honoring the Parent Tree” in California Avocado Association, Yearbook, 49–53.

92. The term “Green Revolution” refers to the agricultural projects that mechanized agriculture, propagated the use of agrochemicals and fossil fuels, and increased food production by breeding high-yielding crop varieties in the mid-twentieth century. For more on the Green Revolution in Mexico and other countries in Latin America see Fitzgerald, “Exporting American Agriculture;” Garrard-Burnett, Lawrence, and Moreno, Beyond the Eagle’s Shadow; Olsson, Agrarian Crossings; Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution; Sonnenfeld, “Mexico’s ‘Green Revolution;’” Soto Laveaga, Jungle Laboratories; Wright, The Death of Ramón González; Lorek, Making the Green Revolution.

93. Quoted in Hernández “Arbol afuera,” 187 (My translation).

94. USDA, Economic Research Service, “Market Segment”

95. Quoted in Hernández, “Arbol afuera,” 187 (My translation).

96. Hammett, A Concise History of Mexico, 310–311.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine; UC Davis Hemispheric Institute on the Americas; Tinker Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Viridiana Hernández Fernández

Viridiana Hernández Fernández is an environmental historian of modern Latin America. Her research interests focus on the many forms in which the transnational movement of people, food commodities, and agricultural technologies change rural landscapes in Latin America. Currently, Dr. Hernández is working on her first book project, “Guacamole Ecosystems: Agriculture, Migration, and Deforestation in Twentieth-Century Mexico,” which challenges the assumption that bureaucrats, scientists, and large-scale farmers were the primary actors in a long path of transformations of the Mexican countryside in the twentieth century.