Four families gained control of the Tulare Lake Basin productive landscape by the end of World War I (Preston 1981; Weber 1994; Mitchell 1996). The Boswell, Salyer, Hansen, and Guiberson clans achieved the transformation “from family farm to agribusiness” (Pisani 1984) by mixing private capital with social and political power. State intervention was crucial to guar- antee the basin’s geography of accumulation. Indeed, under federal, state, and railroad land ownership schemes and public and private irrigation projects, the geography into which they introduced cotton had already been extensively reworked by rural wage laborers into a region increasingly characterized by extensive holdings (Preston 1981; Mitchell 1996). The Jeffersonian ideal of white family farmers tending small, general-production farms, struggled against, but lost out to, the parallel development of large capitalist farms producing commodity crops (Preston 1981; Daniel 1981; Pisani 1984).

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.

The prison had to be territorially integrated with the city in order for Corcoran to receive its share of annual tax subventions from Sacramento