Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Winter 2011

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 31:1 (Winter 2011).

Comments

Copyright © 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.

Abstract

John and Alex Loos, two brothers who spent their childhood summers working in the beet fields of western Nebraska in the 1910s, suggested that a migrant beet field laborer could become, by the end of one season, "a trusted member of the community."1 It took years of hard work and saving, but field workers could become farmers. Families could own land and work for their own benefit rather than for the subsistence wages of the migratory laborer. Although locals often viewed them with suspicion as outsiders, German Russian migrants were increasingly encouraged to stay to help build the burgeoning sugar beet industry during the 1910s. Later arrivals, increasingly those coming from Mexico, met with fewer such opportunities.2 "We were beet workers, and that was all," said Elvira Hernandez, whose family came to western Nebraska in the early 1920s.3 This stark contrast reveals an important change that occurred around 1920 in the North Platte Valley. The sugar beet industry had expanded to the limits of available land and technology. The Great Western Sugar Company no longer sought to increase beet acreage by renting or selling land to immigrants on favorable terms. Instead, it recruited workers who would serve as a cheap, seasonal labor force and nothing more.

Share

COinS