During the New Deal, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) developed what is arguably one of the most provocative and far-reaching programs for farm workers undertaken by the U.S. federal government to date. Through the Migratory Labor Camp Program the FSA promised to efficiently funnel workers to fulfill the agricultural industry’s labor demands while providing migrants modern, up-to-date housing and services to alleviate the well-documented substandard conditions many faced. Most scholars have analyzed the camps primarily as sites of labor, capital, and state regulation. Rather than view the camp program as simply a government effort to more efficiently coordinate the nation’s farm labor market, this study argues that the services, programs, and activities FSA officials administered in the camps sought to regulate and transform significant and often intimate social and cultural aspects of migrants’ daily lives. By examining the role of the camps’ architecture, medical clinics, nurseries and elementary schools, as well as the “self-governing” camp committees and councils, this dissertation engages in a gendered analysis of labor to reveal how the federal camps were unique dual-purpose domestic and labor spaces. Analyzing the camps as simultaneous productive and reproductive sites allows us to see them as part of a contested terrain in which complex issues of identity, community, citizenship, and labor were negotiated on a daily basis, affecting U.S. farm labor and race relations well beyond the perimeters of the federal camps. / text

Signaling the moon, packing balls of mud, carving a big sphere, cleaning with a giant unwieldy mop, playing with indigo, wrangling cardboard, setting sunflowers ablaze, playing a tune with a soda bottle, taking a walk with other people’s laundry, kindling smoke signals, weaving a bed, cracking seeds all night, listening to sleep, dressing a plant, these are some of the activities that have been incorporated into my work over the last two years. Most ideas begin in the studio and then are realized outside. Many of the tasks mentioned allow me to easily integrate into a crowd, where the project and I go unnoticed and remain indistinguishable from the buzz of day to day life. Other projects however, have been done with more consideration for its secrecy. The narratives that are incorporated in this thesis, both personal and culled from research, attempt to unpack some of the fleeting yet conceptually interwoven curiosities that have propelled me to search for these experiences.

This diploma thesis follows history of camp in Hodonín Nera Kunštát during its existence since late 1930's until nowadays. The work describes changes in use of the camp in context of political regime's changes during the reviewed period. Examination will be subjected not only to the repressive role of the facility, but also to its post-war recreational function and, last but not least, to the current educational mission. The work will be compiled in chronological order using the method of comparison of individual stages of camp use. In certain aspects the issue of camp use will be analysed through perspective of its diverse subjects, in addition to its various stages. The work will be divided into trhee parts, namely the use of the camp as a tool of the state policy punishing, the recreational function and the so-called second life of the camp, that is to say, the period following the recreational educational function of the camp. In this part of the thesis, medial and political messages will be analyzed as a necessary evidence illustrating the complex path of transformation of the Hodonín grounds from the camp to the center of collective memory.