Before the Sun Rises: Contesting Power and Cultivating Nations in the Colorado Beet Fields

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes how Colorado’s sugar beet industry, one of the most important agricultural industries in the American West before World War II, was built through the expansion of an exclusionary, settler colonial American nation-state and the racialization and criminalization of migrant workers. It does not look only to elites to tell this story. Through multi-sited research in U.S. and Mexican archives, it privileges the perspectives of diverse agricultural working communities. Beet workers contested and creatively appropriated hegemonic and colonial visions of nation, land, industrial modernity, gender, labor, indigeneity, and race. From rural Colorado, they shaped the improvisational nature of state power and American capitalism.