Purifying Environments: Managing Waste and Building Morality in New Deal California

• In Event: In the Swamps and the Fields, in the Toilets and the Churches: Where Environmental and Religious Histories Meet

Abstract

Between 1935 and 1943, the Resettlement Administration and its successor, the Farm Security Administration, built and operated a series of fifteen fixed-site camps for predominately white migrant farm laborers up and down California’s agricultural valleys. These camps were built to shelter residents from the elements, to protect them from violence, and to give them access to the rudiments of modern sanitary living. This paper examines the religious and moral assumptions that undergirded the RA/FSA camp system’s approach to managing camp residents’ waste. It engages, too, with the ironies that arose from attaching such significance to training migrants to use modern toilets in environments that regularly exposed the limits of modern sanitary systems. By weaving together religious and environmental histories, this paper encourages scholars in both disciplines to think creatively about the place of religion and the religion of place in their work.

Author

• Jonathan Ebel, University of Illinois