Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State by Moon-Ho Jung

history, including ethnic studies, Chicano/a history, agricultural and labor history, and the history of California and the West. McKibben argues that migrants of all ethnic and racial backgrounds who came to Salinas and the Salinas Valley viewed farming (even tenant farming) as a way to enter the middle class. Her contention that socioeconomic mobility was available for Asians (or at least their Americanborn children who could own property in California), as well as whites challenges the prediction of McWilliams and Steinbeck that industrialized agricultural production in 1930s California would result in a permanent caste system. This path to middle-class life, however, was still limited by white hegemony. It was only “possible for enough members of excluded groups to move into property ownership ... to make it appear that there was opportunity for all” (95). Spatial boundaries based on race and class exist in Salinas as elsewhere in the state and nation. The unincorporated adjacent community of Alisal, located east of downtown, housed much of Salinas’ poor and working-class families both before and after Salinas annexed it in 1963, becoming increasingly Latino/a. The Latino/a community, as well as the female population, in Salinas and Alisal were long underserved in terms of infrastructure, housing, education, and political representation. By the closing decades of the twentieth century, however, individual and collective activism had managed to secure gains for them in city government and planning, but, according to McKibben, this new sense of belonging was just sufficient to forestall further challenges to white privilege.