Uprooted to Work the Fields
Letter from Kay in Topaz to Tom in Nebraska (at Univ of Nebraska) dated 1943 April 26.
Ed Kitow got leave clearance somehow to work on a farm in Idaho. We know about this from references to the family by Kay in letters. Ed had experience running a large farming operation of Lettuce and Cantaloupes in Calexico by the U.S.-Mexico border. Chiz had worked as a nurse after receiving a degree at U.C. Berkeley. (Did she help out with the farm operation before?) When they settle in Idaho, she cooks for the farm workers there.
Kay writes that after arriving in Utah, male inmates were immediately being solicited to work in the sugar beet industry because of the work shortage. Paid 70 cents a day after housing and food payments.
Densho Encyclopedia writes that the agricultural worker shortage led to the first forms of clearance to leave the camps ahead of the creation of the loyalty questionnaire which tabulated loyalty based on cultural traits, closeness with Japanese culture, religion and language use. Japanese Americans were a significant segment of the agricultural industry, involved in all levels of agriculture from truck farming to citrus to gardening. The fact of agricultural leave clearance emphasizes the On the one hand, Japanese Americans are seen as likely to commit treason and possible attacks on American soil, and they are also necessary for the production of food in a time when there is not enough of a labor force to harvest the fields. This double standard of not being loyal enough to deserve to remain in their own communities and jobs and loyal enough to harvest the fields in other states presents a comparison to other immigrant labor forces which are demonized for crossing the border without papers and yet make up a sizeable portion of the food production system which makes food so affordable or underpaid.
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