[Libs-Or] May 26 Lecture on hop picking cultures in the Pacific Northwest at the OSU Library

[Edmunson-Morton, Tiah]

Please join us for a lecture on Thursday, May 26th at 2:00 PM in Willamette West in the Valley Library on the Oregon State University campus.

The speaker will be Dr. Ryan Dearinger, Professor of History at Eastern Oregon University, who will be presenting a talk titled, “Hop Picking Cultures in the Pacific Northwest.” Dr. Dearinger completed his term as Special Collections and Archives Research Center Resident Scholar last fall, and an abstract of the work that he conducted is included below.

If you would like to know more about our collections related to hops and brewing history in Oregon, please visit the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives page at http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/ohba.html. Contact Tiah Edmunson-Morton at edmunsot at oregonstate.edu with questions.

***

This project addresses a topic that has eluded scholars of working-class history, race and ethnicity, immigration, and the environment: seasonal hop-picking labor throughout the Pacific Northwest.  It explores the shifting cultural bridges and walls of the nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. West through a close examination of the hop industry in the Pacific Northwest. The hops which today give this region its distinctive character did so as early as the nineteenth century, but for an altogether different reason. The Northwest’s hop industry featured a seasonal, low-wage labor force that was notable for its diversity. Americans, American Indians, European and Asian immigrants, children, entire families, tourists, and even German Prisoners of War toiled as hop-pickers in the Pacific Northwest, carving out spaces, cultivating hop cultures, and creating sites of inclusion despite the persistent segregation of fields, tasks, and opportunities.  For some of these indigenous peoples, immigrants, and native-born citizens, hop-picking promised both labor and leisure.  Hop growers promoted the tedious picking as “work in nature” that combined leisure with economic, physical, and community benefits.  In turn, settled and itinerant populations from the Puget Sound to the Willamette Valley and beyond constructed cultural traditions and identities through the cultivation of this unique crop.

Over time, the cyclical boom and bust nature of the hop industry, shifting ideas about the value of hop-picking, and dominant narratives of white American labor, citizenship, and leisure merged with ongoing anti-immigrant campaigns to transform the Northwest’s hop fields—physically and metaphorically. Analyzing work, workers, protests, and violence, along with community reactions, this project unpacks the ways in which diversity morphed from an opportunity into a threat in the hop yards of the Pacific Northwest.  In the process, it addresses a host of significant historical questions.  If a specific region identifies a resource as emblematic of its cultural distinctiveness and key to its economic prosperity, how should it depict the labor—the people—engaged in its cultivation?  To what extent was labor diversity something to market or applaud as unique to a region?  How did hop-picking complicate the labor versus leisure dichotomy?  While hops were praised by regional and national leaders as a uniquely American resource, hop-picking eventually garnered the reputation of being exhaustive, undesirable, and poorly compensated work.  What explains such a change in experience, perception, and portrayal?

***

Learn more about the SCARC Resident Scholar Program at http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/residentscholar.html


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