Elizabeth E. Sine's imagination is as wide and deep as the subjects of her first book. While Rebel Imaginaries may be classified as labor history, she aspires to engage with many other fields. Her book is intersectional in the best sense, always exploring avenues to open other analytical possibilities in her examination of working-class people linked by their many struggles for human dignity. The movements Sine analyzes were incredibly diverse, multivalent, and sometimes contradictory, all in keeping with her surrealist (her term) approach. Specifically, she examines the working-class population of California – African American, Native American, Mexican, Filipinx, Asian, White people of many ethnicities, and more – and their oppositional cultures that fought inequality based in various systems including capitalism, white supremacy, nationalism, patriarchy, etc.
In the Prologue, “Capitalism and Crisis in Global California”, Sine briefly yet provocatively suggests how peoples in California, due to the global economic depression, rose up in protests in 1933. She connects California's uprisings to social movements in Barcelona and Managua, India and Morocco, and beyond. She aptly positions California as a central node of national and global events, both in terms of the severity of the economic crisis (the state's official unemployment rate was twenty-eight per cent, even higher than the nation's) and resistance to it from the state's myriad working peoples. Sine's book seeks to reconstruct and connect some of these bold struggles which had ambiguous outcomes.
Sine's introduction, “The Politics and Poetics of Rebellion”, lays out her surrealist, internationalist, multiracial, working-class history of California amidst what was global capitalism's greatest crisis: “fundamentally, this was a contest over the horizons of politics […] The conflict linked local and national events to international and global ones […] Yet, before the dust settled and dreams were deferred, the uncertainties of the 1930s presented a widened terrain of political possibility” (pp. 4–5). The future was unwritten, then, as it remains now.
Sine's book shines when theorizing about the lives, struggles, and movements of poor and working-class Californians – rural and urban and of many ethnicities. Sine deftly brings together a raft of important cultural theorists from Stuart Hall to Paul Gilroy, George Lipsitz to Michael Denning. She positions such better-known thinkers into conversation with lesser-known, diverse Californians including the Black journalist Charlotta Bass, white Trotskyist Stan Weir, and Filipino union organizer and writer Carlos Bulosan.
Of course, history is never as “neat” as theory. History is messy, complicated, and contingent and Sine fully embraces this reality. She thoughtfully, if repeatedly, notes that people's lives and their movements are full of contradictions, competing narratives, and inconsistencies; Sine commendably explores these nuances. At times, though, her desire to tease out the surrealist aspects of working-class Californians in the 1930s pushes beyond the proverbial envelope due to sparse documentation as she builds entire chapters around one or two provocative vignettes.
Sine plots a series of moments and movements in 1930s California, dividing her book into three parts, each with two chapters. In each chapter, Sine examines Asian, Black, Latinx, Native, and White people, off and on the job. The first part, “The Art of Labor Protest”, examines “industrial labor” in the fields (California possessing the country's largest agricultural sector) and on the San Francisco waterfront. In Chapter 1, “Multiracial Rebellion in California's Fields”, Sine explores several important farmworker strikes, particularly a 1930 lettuce strike in southeastern California’ Imperial Valley. Chapter 2, “A Different Kind of Union”: The Politics of Solidarity in the Big Strike of 1934”, shifts to a legendary strike of dockworkers and sailors which shut down Pacific Coast shipping for two months. Sine, like the Big Strike itself, focused on the coast's largest port city, San Francisco, where this massive work stoppage briefly morphed into the San Francisco General Strike, one of the most dramatic worker uprisings in US history.
In Part II, “Policy Making for the People”, Sine examines how social movements sought to shape public policy and electoral politics. In Chapter 3, “Reimagining Citizenship in the Age of Expulsion”, Sine tackles the US government's deportation of about a million people in the 1930s, disproportionately Californians, as well as immigration “reform”. While this horror impacted Mexicans and Mexican Americans more than any other group, Sine brilliantly includes Filipinx and even attempts to force African American migrants back to the South. Chapter 4, “Radicalism at the Ballot Box” explores author and socialist Upton Sinclair's impressive run for the governorship in 1934, built upon his truly radical platform, End Poverty in California (EPIC); here, she focuses on Los Angeles’ predominantly African American neighborhood and its changing politics as a clever entry point to examine the state-wide election and shift from California becoming a Republican stronghold to increasingly a Democratic one.
Sine's gaze in Part III, “Expressive Culture and the Politics of the Possible” is both wider and more surreal. Chapter 5, “The Art of Opposition in the Culture Industry's Capital”, stays in Los Angeles, the country's cultural capital and an economic behemoth, as she examines community theater, public art murals, and music. Chapter 6, “Native Jazz and Oppositional Culture in Round Valley Reservation”, heads far north, to rural Mendocino County, to explore the musical, religious, and working lives of indigenous Californians, victims of some of the most awful, genocidal chapters in all of America's centuries-long, sordid treatment of native peoples. The thoughtfulness of these tantalizing and diverse topics are credits to Sine theoretical and investigatory powers.
At times, however, Sine relies too heavily on the secondary literature which reinforces the notion that some subjects, especially parts of Chapters 1, 2, and 4 have been well-trodden. For instance, in Chapter 2, Sine contends that the Big Strike was an important example of social movements emerging from below – including opposition to mainstream unions and their conservative leaders – and belongs to a series of labor struggles in the 1930s that broke down ethnic and racial barriers that previously bedeviled most unions. While convincing, these claims have been long accepted. Considering her thesis, she could have made a stronger case for how radical and anti-establishment the dockworkers’ 1934 victory truly was. Yet, she discussed the union-controlled hiring hall and “low man out” system for just part of one paragraph in the chapter's conclusion. Also, since she spent a large part of the chapter highlighting the potential danger of Black strike breakers, she could have more fully explored the antiracist policies quickly implemented by the new union.
Notably for her thesis, many topics Sine covers occurred in 1934 or earlier, which is to say prior to the so-called Second New Deal that emerged in 1935. While appreciating how the entire New Deal greatly benefitted tens of millions of Americans, she notes how it also reinforced existing nationalist, racist, and sexist traditions and, indeed, further embedded them into America's new, albeit partial, welfare state. The rise of the military industrial complex during and after World War II further constrained the sorts of creative, bottom-up, multiracial movements that had emerged in early 1930s California (and elsewhere). Sine, however, is hardly the first scholar to make such claims. Labor historians Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein made this argument in 1988, namely, that the New Deal's labor relations board and then the war created a heavily bureaucratized, conservative labor movement highly dependent on legal tactics that radically undermined shopfloor, rank-and-file activism that had animated the 1930s labor upsurge in California and across the country.
Sine commendably unites rural and urban social movements as well as puts Mexican, Filipinx, and Native histories into conversation. Too often, as she rightly notes, the histories of ethnic groups are treated in isolation. Similarly, the book does an excellent job of examining California's “multiracialist politics” (p. 10) and ably teases out the “politics of surrealism” (p. 11) embedded in them though she could have more fully examined the theme of internationalism which the book's introduction claimed was central. While many workers examined were immigrants and/or had ties to places beyond the US, for the most part Sine examined fixed on California and US politics. One notable exception was Sine's excellent discussion of David Alfaro Siquieros, the Mexican revolutionary artist, who ignited the LA mural scene during a six-month residency in 1932–1933. The coverage of Siquieros injected a potent dose of transnationalism into LA even after the government refused to renew his visa and local elites had one of his murals painted over – whitewashed, literally and figuratively.
Building upon the possibilities of surrealism as a revolutionary movement, Sine's creative use of historical events and movements of 1930s California results in a book worthy of deep reflection. Her imagination about the many possibilities of people's movements ably repositions some familiar historical moments. This book should be read by those interested in labor and social history, American studies and ethnic studies, and US history more broadly.
