Stewards of the Land

Race and Reclaiming Environmental Labor in the American West

Stevie Ruiz

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469693361
• Print ISBN:
  9781469693354
  9781469693347
• Subtopic: Historical Geography

The history of the environmental movement—from environmentalism of the nineteenth century to the environmental justice struggles of the late twentieth century—has often been portrayed as a series of efforts led by white environmentalists. In Stewards of the Land, Stevie Ruiz reassesses the movement and reveals that it has always been a multiracial endeavor. From Southern California berry fields to Japanese American concentration camps, from Chinese cooks in national parks to Chicano Civilian Conservation Corps workers, Ruiz traces how the racialized labor and environmental knowledge of Asian migrants and Chicana/o communities built the material foundations of modern environmentalism.

Stewards of the Land argues that environmental justice was never just a reaction to pollution in the 1970s but has a much longer history tied to land theft, labor exploitation, and the everyday struggles of frontline communities to live and work with dignity. Drawing from comparative ethnic studies and archival research and with a commitment to decolonial praxis, Ruiz recovers the stories of those who labored—often invisibly—to build, maintain, and reimagine environmental spaces in the American West.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Acronyms in the Text
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Migrant Hospitality in the Creation of the Outdoors Movement
• Chapter Two. Contesting Legal Borderlands: Policing Insubordinate Spaces in Imperial County’s Farmworker Communities, 1930–1940
• Chapter Three. Camp Chicano: The Racialization of the Great Outdoors in the Civilian Conservation Corps
• Chapter Four. Infrastructure Schemes: Labor, Logistics, and Japanese American Incarceration at the Colorado River Indian Reservation, 1942–1945
• Chapter Five. The National Land for People Movement and the Chicana/o Environmental Imaginary
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index