ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights community relationships with the environment in explaining the violence. It focuses on the economic, cultural and environmental context to understand why xenophobia exploded into physical attacks on a particular migrant population. The chapter demonstrates how a society's cultural relationship with the natural environment is an essential factor in understanding the experience of migrating/immigrating peoples in a new region. It looks at the impact of environmental nativism, a dynamic where the "protective" fearful responses of nativists are directly tied to natural resources and national cultural attachments to the natural environment. The chapter re-examines the anti-Filipino riots using this environmental lens, and in doing so deepens our understanding of why incidents of nativist violence flare up at certain times and places. The social dynamics in rural regions of early 20th century California were notoriously volatile.
