Out of the "lemons" handed to Mexican American workers in Corona, California—low pay, segregated schooling, inadequate housing, and racial discrimination—Mexican men and women made "lemonade" by transforming leisure spaces such as baseball games, parades, festivals, and churches into politicized spaces where workers voiced their grievances, debated strategies for advancement, and built solidarity. Using oral history interviews, extensive citrus company records, and his own experiences in Corona, José Alamillo argues that Mexican Americans helped lay the groundwork for civil rights struggles and electoral campaigns in the post-World War II era.

| Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part One 1. Lemon Capital of the World 2. Red, White, and Greening of Corona Part Two 3. Boozing and Bootlegging 4. "We Depended on Each Other for Entertainment" 5. Play Pelota! Part Three 6. Bitter Lemons: The 1941 Strike 7. Making Lemonade: The Struggle for Civil Rights |"I'll never again squeeze a wedge of lemon into a glass of iced tea without thinking of this book. José Alamillo's engaging narrative explores the 'spaces of congregation' where citrus workers came together to play and, in the process, learned leadership and organizing skills that carried over into union and civil rights campaigns. . . . Making Lemonade out of Lemons is a clear-eyed, unromantic study of California citrus workers' labor and leisure, a model of lucid prose and complex analysis."—Mary Murphy, Michael P. Malone Professor of History, Montana State University
"Alamillo's work is an important contribution to the field. In describing how leisure activities helped create bonds of community solidarity, Alamillo adds an important dimension to our knowledge of Mexican American history and California history. . . . This book demonstrates how community-based oral history techniques can breathe new life into the writing of history." —American Historical Review
"Making Lemonade out of Lemons, an engaging community study of a Southern California citrus town, shifts attention to the leisure hours of pickers and packers, the realm where they exercised the most autonomy over their lives. . . . Alamillo uses oral interviews and local newspapers to reconstruct the vibrant social and cultural life that working men and women erected out of their employer's earshot."—Journal of American Ethnic History
|José M. Alamillo is a professor and chair of Chicana/o Studies at California State University Channel Islands. He is the author of Deportes: The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora.