Ruiz, Vicki L. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1987.
The author’s study is “centered on the historical experiences of Mexican women canning and packing workers in California during the 1930s and 1940s. It explores the connections of work, culture, and gender as well as the relationship between women’s networks and unionization.” The author’s purpose of writing this book is to tell what it was like to be living as a Mexican women working in southern California cannery and to compare how the Mexican women lived with other types of ethnicity women.
The book is divided into six chapters and some chapters include tables or illustrations. The six chapters are “Community and Family, the Cannery Culture, UCAPAWA and California Agriculture, A promise Fulfilled: UCAPAWA in Southern California, Women and UCAPAWA, and Death of a Dream.” The first chapter talks about how women lived with their families and when younger ladies had to leave school in order to work to contribute to their family. The…show more content… Mrs. Romero wrote “Cannery Women, Cannery lives is an outstanding addition to the historical literature on labor. It provides a new perspective of the conditions minority women endured in their employment and family lives.” William Flores another scholar, thought different about this book. He said, “I was frustrated by the authors’ omissions of some important matter. Ruiz’s decision to avoid ‘the quagmire of debate’ over communist influence in UCAPAWA is understandable (xvii), but interviews with rank-and-file union members might have illuminated that debate.” Mr. Flores had a negative view of this book, he thought that the interviews contrasted the argument Ruiz was going