People who lived in Corcoran stayed not only because economic adversity left them stuck in space, but also because they had struggled to make Corcoran their home, building a community that, while organized in a race and class hierarchy, was also a place proud of its small-town ethic of care. Mexicano/Chicano and African American subcultures flourished in the inter- stices of the dominant paternalistic Anglo social structure. Some marriage between Okies and Mexicanos weakened, but did not break down, the division between the two groups, who had, uneasily, allied at the forefront of the 1938–39 labor strikes (Weber 1994; Gregory 1989).14 A single middle school and a single high school educated all the children who did not drop out; indeed, the most academically ambitious kids rarely transferred from Corcoran High School, because of the chance to compete for one of two full-tuition (price unlimited) four-year Boswell scholarships. And finally, nearly every adult in town who was not a Boswell, Salyer, Guiberson, or Hansen had, at some time in her life, if only for a summer, chopped Alcala cotton in the southern San Joaquin sunshine.