Martial Cottle Park Visitor's Center

Cottle Park was once called Cottle Ranch and it was the workplace of many Japanese American and Bracero workers. The former work farm is now a visitor's center that helps to share the complex history of immigration in the United States along with the treatment of Japanese American detainees and immigrant workers known as barceros. Cottle Ranch does this by representing two different stories on migration through the lenses of the Braceros and Japanese Americans. The Braceros were Mexican guest workers who would work on farms and ranches like Cottle Ranch throughout the United States for a farming season, then were sent back to Mexico.

According to Erasmo Gamboa, among all the farms where the Braceros worked, machinery accidents and low wages were commonplace with any attempt at strikes being met with violent resistance from the growers. They were seen as cogs in a machine to be replaced when broken, and this shows how the migration process had an active role in making sure that profit was maximized in the agriculture industry. The farmworkers were not provided tools in order to prevent them from harming the crops, forcing them to bend their backs throughout the day. This is a prime example of the farm growers not caring about the workers. Race was what brought the Japanese Americans to these fields, and it was the farming corporations that benefited. 

Growers saw Bracero’s and Japanese Americans as a workforce that could be removed at any time as migration enforcement could bus the bracero back to Mexico and replace them with another bracero. Japanese Americans had only two choices: either become a farmworker or stay in an internment camp. The owners of Cottle Ranch benefited greatly from this type of labor.

The Bracero’s lived and worked on Cottle Ranch, but the behind that adds a new layer to the story of Cottle Ranch. The Bracero contracts granted them government protection to stay in the United States despite not being naturalized citizens. According to Natalia Molina, the question of citizenship and what it means to be a citizen can be blurred depending on race or ethnicity. Mexicans, due to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, were considered legally white. Despite this, Mexicans faced several efforts by lawmakers to restrict their citizenship with mass deportations due to being seen as “menial.” This is where the Bracero Program comes in as it serves as the ideal program to regulate who can come in and out of the United States. This is why the United States issued Operation Wetback, which saw the mass deportation of thousands of naturalized Mexican Americans while increasing the amount of Braceros to work in the country. Racism overcoming legality is the legacy of the Bracero Program, as well as Cottle Ranch. 

The United State's war with Japan in 1941-1945 caused the relocation of thousands of Japanese Americans to internment camps. Robert Aitken and Marilyn Aitken state that thousands of Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps throughout the Westcoast. Out of all the legal battles over this, the most prominent one came from a decision by Chief Justice Harlan Stone. He stated that the internment camps were legal because Japanese Americans cannot be citizens of the United States, and any Japanese Americans born in America were citizens of Japan. His justification for the decision was because Japanese Americans had not assimilated into the white population . When they got to the internment camps, many were sent to work on farms due to the agricultural worker shortage, including Cottle Ranch. As Scott Kurashige states, the Japanese Americans became scapegoats for people's fears of Japan.

This shows how lawmakers, and the population as a whole, have historically used the migration laws of the United States as a weapon against minority groups that they see as undesirable. The Braceros are a clear example of this fact. The situation was similar for the Japanese Americans. Japanese immigrants were the easiest target for people to take their fears out on because, as the Supreme Court Judge stated, they were not white; it did not matter that many were natural-born citizens. This shows how immigration is directly tied to race in America. If an immigrant is not white, then the legal system that was supposed to protect them can instead persecute them. The Braceros and Japanese American's became scapegoats for racism, with the legal system failing to protect them due to their race. This has become a common occurrence throughout the immigration experience in American history.

Overall, Cottle Ranch explores the legacy of how the migration system failed to protect the Braceros and Japanese Americans from corporate power and racism. The two groups had notable differences between them. The Braceros were invited to work in the agricultural industry while Japanese Americans were forced to do so; the Japanese migrated from Asia while the Braceros migrated from Mexico. Yet, despite being so different, both groups ended up in the same place on the fields of Cottle Ranch.

Adams, Ansel. “Farm, Farm Workers, Mt. Williamson in Background, Manzanar Relocation Center, California / Photograph by Ansel Adams.” The Library of Congress. 

Aitken, Robert, and Marilyn Aitken. "Japanese American Internment." Litigation 37, no. 2 

(2011): 59-70. 

Gamboa, Erasmo. “Braceros in the Pacific Northwest: Laborers on the Domestic Front, 1942-1947.” Pacific Historical Review Vol. 56, no. 3 (August 1987): 379–98.

Higgins, Floyd Halleck. “A Photo of Braceros Arriving in Salinas, California, in a Pacific Greyhound Line Bus, 1942.,” 1942.

Molina, Natalia. “Birthright Citizenship beyond Black and White.” Essay. In How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2014. 

Goodman, Adam. “Coerced Removal from the Great Depression through Operation Wetback.” Chapter. In The Deportation Machine, 37–72. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2020. 

Kurashige, Scott. "Japanese American Internment." In The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles, 108-31. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008.