Secretary of Agriculture Correspondence Records

(The Secretary of Agriculture, or at least where they used to be...)

I’ve spent the last few days going through the records of the Secretary of Agriculture (RG16), and have been pretty disappointed at what’s there. Before coming to D.C. I had found a number of records in the online catalog that referred to “Foreign Relations – Immigration.” I figured these probably dealt with Mexican immigration / labor relations, so I was pretty excited by the prospect. Thankfully I put them off until the end of my time in D.C., since I didn’t really find much useful in the records.

I will say that the finding aides for this collection are well organized and kept-up, much easier to use than just about any of the other collections I’ve looked at this summer. Each year is divided into a number of boxes with the same keywords. You find the boxes you need, and it lists the necessary stack locations for the call slips. Finding the boxes was the easy part though. Once I got them, I found that the file for immigration was pretty slim in the best of years, and almost nonexistent in the others. For one thing, most of the papers in these files are copies of “continuity forms” – basically cross-references to other files. Trying to track down all of these other files and boxes would be an entire research project in itself. As far as what was left in the folders, most of the correspondence was personal letters from people attempting to immigrate to the U.S. The response from the Secretary of Agriculture typically stated something to the effect of, “Apologies, but we don’t have any control over immigration, or responsibilities under the Immigration Act, try State, Justice, or INS.” After looking through about ten years of these types of letters, I gave up.

But hey, I came to D.C. to figure out what collections would work, and which wouldn’t, so it’s good to know that I’ll need to look to the Dept. of Labor (among other places) for records about Mexican labor immigration, rather than Agriculture…