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They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California
Abstract
At the outset of World War II, California agriculture seemed to be on the cusp of change. Many Californians, reacting to the ravages of the Great Depression, called for a radical reorientation of the highly exploitative labor relations that had allowed the state to become such a productive farming frontier. But with the importation of the first braceros-guest workers from Mexico hired on an emergency basis after the United States entered the waran even more intense struggle ensued over how agriculture would be conducted in the state. Esteemed geographer Don Mitchell argues that by delineating the need for cheap, flexible farm labor as a problem and solving it via the importation of relatively disempowered migrant workers, an alliance of growers and government actors committed the United States to an agricultural system that is, in important respects, still with us. They Saved the Crops is a theoretically rich and stylistically innovative account of grower rapaciousness, worker militancy, rampant corruption, and bureaucratic bias. Mitchell shows that growers, workers, and officials confronted a series of problems that shapedand were shaped bythe landscape itself. For growers, the problem was finding the right kind of labor at the right price at the right time. Workers struggled for survival and attempted to win power in the face of economic exploitation and unremitting violence. Bureaucrats tried to harness political power to meet the demands of, as one put it, the people whom we serve. Drawing on a deep well of empirical materials from archives up and down the state, Mitchell's account promises to be the definitive book about California agriculture in the turbulent decades of the mid-twentieth century. © 2012 by the University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved.
... From its origins in the mid-nineteenth century, California agriculture has been highly capitalized and industrial. Largely skipping the era of family farms that characterized much early US agriculture, California embraced a businessoriented system built on hired labor and dynamic land markets (Stoll 1998;Walker 2004;Mitchell 2012). The state has thus incubated agrarian capitalism, and "many of the principal features of 21st-century agro-food systems, such as subcontracting, brand names, petro-farming, feedlots, biotechnology, and concrete dams, were pioneered here" 3 A marked decline in trade articles and agricultural experiment station reports reporting on mechanization research and development efforts suggests that interest in this topic slowed greatly across the 1970s. ...
... Yet this correlation between perceived labor cost and mechanization is an artifact of a deeper and older social rift that places growers at the top of a steep hierarchy of racialized and gendered labor power that agricultural social scientists have long documented throughout California's agrarian history (e.g. McWilliams 2000McWilliams [1939McWilliams ] 1999McWilliams [1949; Thomas 1985;Wells 1996;Stoll 1998;Mitchell 2012). ...
... Owner-work relations have taken the form of extreme and persistent inequality in power since the late nineteenth century. As Wells (1996) and Mitchell (2012) argue, the Bracero Program-an agreement between the United States and Mexico, dating to the acute domestic labor shortages of WWII, which allowed certain industries to seasonally import Mexican workers-was instrumental in driving a wedge between those who 'belong' in California agriculture and those who do not. Moreover, by the 1940s, racial formations in California had already ossified the class divide between the white growers who owned land (and farm machines) and the non-white farm workers, many of them migrant, who cultivated the land (Stoll 1998;Almaguer 1994). ...
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Media outlets, industry researchers, and policy-makers are today busily extolling new robotic advances that promise to transform agriculture, bringing us ever closer to self-farming farms. Yet such techno-optimist discourse ignores the cautionary lessons of past attempts to mechanize farms. Adapting the Social Construction of Technology framework, we trace the history of efforts to replace human labor with machine labor on fruit, nut, and vegetable farms in California between 1945 and 1980—a place and time during which a post-WWII culture of faith in the beneficence of technoscience applications to agriculture reached an apex. The degree to which and forms whereby mechanization gains momentum hinges on whether, how, and among whom a technological frame for mimicking human capabilities and supplanting workers coalesces. These frames, we find, vary considerably across crops, reflecting complex interactions of biology, farmer and farm worker behavior, industry supply chains, agricultural research and development, financial flows, and beliefs about labor, race, gender, and immigration. To tease out these complex dynamics, we draw directly from archival evidence to follow the development of cultivation and harvest machines through four cases spanning a spectrum of outcomes—tomatoes, nuts, peaches, and lettuce. In comparing across these cases, we find that although agricultural engineers, scientists, and their boosters framed mechanization as a triumphal narrative of progress in ‘human vs. nature’ conflicts, this techno-optimist rhetoric camouflaged deeper ‘human vs. human’ conflicts, particularly among agribusiness, farmers, and farm workers. We conclude with several insights that this historical study brings to the study of agricultural automation today.
... The second half of the nineteenth century saw waves of migrant workers (Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Indian, and domestic migrants) in the agro-food sector who built the modern agriculture of California; this is an example of an historical moment that has passed, although its structural and institutional legacies linger (McWilliams 2000(McWilliams [orig. 1935Mitchell 2012;Street 2004). California also saw multiple waves of Mexican migrant workers, from the early twentieth century to the period of mass expulsions during the Great Depression (Guerin-Gonzales 1994;McWilliams 2000McWilliams [orig. ...
... California also saw multiple waves of Mexican migrant workers, from the early twentieth century to the period of mass expulsions during the Great Depression (Guerin-Gonzales 1994;McWilliams 2000McWilliams [orig. 1935); again, from the 1940s onwards as a result of the Bracero Program; and right up to the tumultuous Trump era (Holmes 2013;Mitchell 2012;Ngai 2014Ngai [orig. 2004; Minkoff-Zern 2019; Xiuhtecutli and Shattuck 2021). ...
... The history of migrant farmworkers in California from the 1850s, mentioned earlier, is a classic example of this contradiction: workers who are essential but at the same time illegal (Holmes 2013;McWilliams 2000McWilliams [orig. 1935Mitchell 2012;Ngai 2014Ngai [orig. 2004). ...
This paper examines the situation of rurally rooted cross-border migrant workers from Myanmar during the Covid-19 pandemic. It looks at the circumstances of the migrants prior to the global health emergency, before exploring possibilities for a post-pandemic future for this stratum of the working people by raising critical questions addressed to agrarian movements. It does this by focusing on the nature and dynamics of the nexus of land and labour in the context of production and social reproduction, a view that in the context of rurally rooted cross-border migrant workers necessarily requires interrelated perspectives on labour, agrarian, and food justice struggles. This requires a rethinking of the role of land, not as a factor in either production or social reproduction, but as a central component in both spheres simultaneously. The question is not ‘whether’ it is necessary and desirable to forge multi-class coalitions and struggles against external capital, while not losing sight of the exploitative relations within rural communities and the household; rather, the question is ‘how’ to achieve this. It will require a messy recursive process, going back and forth between theoretical exploration and practical politics.
... By identifying the structural drivers of social inequalities, C2C throws into sharp relief the compounding burdens carried by immigrant farmworkers in the United States (US). Farmworkers face the brunt of the capitalist organization of agriculture, including daily difficult and dangerous working conditions, substandard pay and accommodation, legal barriers to labor protections, xenophobia, and racism (Holmes, 2013;Mares, 2019;Mitchell, 1996Mitchell, , 2012. For women, these workplace abuses are worse and, in part, reflect the male domination of agriculture (Kamm, 2000;Preibisch and Grez, 2010). ...
... The first and most well-known agricultural guest worker program was the Bracero Program, a temporary worker agreement between the US and Mexico initiated during World War II, which was promoted to address the resulting agricultural labor shortage. Farmers successfully lobbied to maintain the program well after the war, until its termination in 1964 (Mitchell, 2012;Weiler et al., forthcoming). Lesser known, but important to the history of immigration from the Caribbean, is the British West Indies Program, which continued beyond the Bracero Program and especially served to provide farmworkers to growers on the east coast (Hahamovitch, 1997). ...
... Apart from absolute labor shortages during wartime, however, the underlying issue was (and arguably still is) that it was hard to fill these positions with low wages. Guest workers have strategically been used by growers to suppress worker organizing and resist improving wages and conditions (Hahamovitch, 1997;Mitchell, 2012;Weiler et al., forthcoming). As a result, guest worker polices have reinforced ongoing dependence on a racialized and economically vulnerable immigrant agrarian workforce. ...
Agriculture in the United States (US), long dominated by white male interests, is rooted in entrenched structural inequalities. Prominent among them is the power of growers over a dependable low-wage racialized and gendered workforce that is disciplined with the threat of their disposability. Workers and other activists have long responded with opposition. We advance radical food geography scholarship with a relational understanding of the structural inequalities that farmworkers experience and their resistance through farmworker movements, by centering the perspectives and experiences of activists with an intersectional praxis. We begin with a review of the compounding economic, political, and social inequalities experienced by farmworkers in the US in the context of xenophobic enforcement-first approaches to policing documented and undocumented Latinx immigrants. We then present a case study of Community to Community Development (C2C) in Washington state, an example of the radical frontlines of resistance by farmworker advocacy groups, as they link systems of oppression, especially with regard to class, immigration status, gender, and race. Ultimately, we argue for elevating more intersectional forms of organizing in the food system. In doing so, we encourage radical food geographers to conduct scholarship-activism more open to the many intersections between social position and structural inequality and resistance.
... Ultimately, it was the "Bracero" program between 1942 and 1964 that cemented farm work into a racial caste, and imprinted the "not quite human" status of Mexican farmworkers into the core of California agribusiness (Mitchell, 2012;Cruz, 2014:49). As Don Mitchell (2012) argues, this temporary Mexican "guest" worker program systematized extreme exploitation by setting wages far beneath what would be acceptable to "[Anglo-]white citizen workers" and withholding a portion of pay until workers returned to Mexico (millions went unpaid) (Guthman, 2017:27). ...
... Ultimately, it was the "Bracero" program between 1942 and 1964 that cemented farm work into a racial caste, and imprinted the "not quite human" status of Mexican farmworkers into the core of California agribusiness (Mitchell, 2012;Cruz, 2014:49). As Don Mitchell (2012) argues, this temporary Mexican "guest" worker program systematized extreme exploitation by setting wages far beneath what would be acceptable to "[Anglo-]white citizen workers" and withholding a portion of pay until workers returned to Mexico (millions went unpaid) (Guthman, 2017:27). As Caroline Farrell, the Executive Director of the Center on Race, Poverty & & The Environment (CRPE) located in Kern County, noted in an interview, agribusiness has virtually guaranteed that white citizens would not take these jobs today. ...
... As environmental hazards in Kern County have accrued and intensified, their effects have become more broadly experienced. For example, during the Bracero era, the toxic insecticide DDT was sprayed directly on farmworkers who crossed the Mexico-US border (Mitchell, 2012;Street, 2005). In contrast, recent biotechnological breakthroughs facilitate spraying vast swathes of cropland (Kloppenburg, 2004). ...
•Political disenfranchisement and racism form the bedrock of rural California geography.•Environmental justice organizing has built a progressive base in the San Joaquin Valley.•Control over local governance can scale up and strengthen environmental justice.•Opposing populisms in Kern County, CA are situated distinctly in neoliberal crisis.•Resistance to farmworker disposability is being expressed in environmental terms.
... Yet the turn to representation, as Tom Mels (2016) explains, came at some cost to the understanding of landscape as a structured, built form. Mitchell (1996;2003a;2003b;2012), therefore, sought to rehabilitate and reorient Sauer's interest in morphology through the development of historical-materialist analyses of the relations of labour that go into landscape's making, while also remaining attentive to its representational aspects. In this view, landscape is built environment (Harvey, 1982) that both internalises the relations of labour that produce it and significantly determines the conditions of possibility for future labour practices. ...
... (Shorn of this scepticism, the sense of landscape justice as justice-as-fairness is probably the dominant way of understanding the matter; see for example, Dalglish et al [2018].) Put another way, much of Mitchell's work has been less concerned with landscape in relation to justice (or 'landscape justice') than it is with understanding how landscapes continuously instantiate injustice, unfairness and structural violence (Mitchell, 2008;2012), and what sort of struggles might be necessary to combat this. In this Mitchell has not been alone. ...
... Yet the turn to representation, as Tom Mels (2016) explains, came at some cost to the understanding of landscape as a structured, built form. Mitchell (1996;2003a;2003b;2012), therefore, sought to rehabilitate and reorient Sauer's interest in morphology through the development of historical-materialist analyses of the relations of labour that go into landscape's making, while also remaining attentive to its representational aspects. In this view, landscape is built environment (Harvey, 1982) that both internalises the relations of labour that produce it and significantly determines the conditions of possibility for future labour practices. ...
... (Shorn of this scepticism, the sense of landscape justice as justice-as-fairness is probably the dominant way of understanding the matter; see for example, Dalglish et al [2018].) Put another way, much of Mitchell's work has been less concerned with landscape in relation to justice (or 'landscape justice') than it is with understanding how landscapes continuously instantiate injustice, unfairness and structural violence (Mitchell, 2008;2012), and what sort of struggles might be necessary to combat this. In this Mitchell has not been alone. ...
... For white Americans, the veil is presumed to confirm stereotypes or phantasies about blacks or to attest their invisibility" (Goodwin 1998, 284;see also Frank 1998;Puskar 2016;Shiffman 2007;Street 2004;Starr 2004;Wright and Rosskam 1941). In looking at agricultural social documentary photographs of nonwhite field workers in California, the practice of obscuring race and class "through a calculated opaque mask" (Goodwin 1998, 284) is a patent race-class invisibility grounded in long-held cultural norms (D. Mitchell 1996). Social documentary photographers in California from the 1930s onward unveiled problems of an imposed marginalization in their pictures of bodies laboring within the land. ...
... This deepens photographic analysis as a means of defining agencies of "work" and "labor" through juxtapositions of dissimilarities between images and ontologies of the two (D. Mitchell 1996). Specifically in relationship to photography attuned to water issues and California agriculture, these critical reflections reveal a "connection between the material production of landscape and the production of landscape representations, between work and the 'exercise of imagination' that makes work and products knowable" (D. Mitchell 1996, 1-2). ...
... The emergence over the course of at least the last three decades of a concern with nature as a social construct, with justice in cultural geography (and the development of environmental justice from distributional issues to issues of political participation and recognition), all took place in an international scholarly dialogue with developments in the broad spectrum of (critical) social theory and post-positivist philosophy. In geography and other disciplinary fields, some of these have taken a radically discursive route to the study of representations of landscape in imagery and texts (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988), while others have emphasized the importance of a wider array of bodily and physical practices (Wylie 2007), and still others-to revisit the terminology of my introduction-the ideological and material production of the landscape, especially in the context of capitalist society (Mitchell 2012). ...
... The conception of production to which I have been referring above, and which has been adopted and adapted in recent writing on nature and landscape (e.g. Mels 1999;Mitchell 2012), originates from the heterodox Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre. Notwithstanding an important degree of persistence of the landscape and associated signifying practices, said Lefebvre, each historical mode of production (such as feudalism or capitalism) can be expected to produce its own space, conditioned by, and adapted to its special requirements (Lefebvre 1991). ...
Context
The importance of justice is increasingly recognized in environmental policy making. Research on environmental justice offers an important perspective on landscape transformations, both natural and social.
Objectives
This paper asks how current work on environmental justice might contribute to the development of socio-environmental knowledge of the biophysical landscape. The paper explores the relations between environmental justice thinking and the production of a distinctively capitalist landscape.
Methods
The paper builds on a review of environmental justice and landscape literature and, for the empirical part, on archival studies and secondary sources.
Results
The paper shows that there remains a disjunction between landscape studies and the environmental justice literature. It provides a theoretically informed approach of bringing together environmental justice scholarship with the transformations of a contested and distinctively capitalist landscape. By studying changes in woodlands and wetlands on the island of Gotland, Sweden, it uncovers a process of the production of landscape that elicits “deep” historical geographies of environmental justice. The massive exploitation of wetlands and forests shows how an approach encompassing environmental justice in conjunction with forms of resource exploitation and conservation can help grasp changes in the landscape.
... 405-406). The relationship between violence and labor in infrastructural landscapes is most vicserally present in the specter of "premature death" (Tyner, 2019, p. xi); a process (when dying starts) and event (when the dying process ends) that bodies are exposed to as a general condition of capitalism's exploitative living and working conditions (see Andueza et al., 2020;Mitchell, 2012). Doherty's (2017) study of motorcycle taxis in Kampala is instructive here. ...
... And as a social product, infrastructures are alienable from those who produce them; not just in terms of the material outcomes of these labor processes -the roads, pipelines, and cables etc. that may be commodified, privatized, or splintered for the public commons (Gioielli, 2011;Graham & Marvin, 2001) -but the social practices, routines, and opportunities that they make possible. Drawing on the work of Don Mitchell (2000Mitchell ( , 2003Mitchell ( , 2012, I suggest reading infrastructure through a historical materialist lens to highlight how they "always possess a definite 'historical and moral element' which often appears as a set of 'natural' and 'necessary wants' but which is, in fact, a product of past social struggle -dead labor" (Mitchell, 2003, p. 239). Marx (1973, pp. ...
Grounded in the writings of AbdouMaliq Simone and the theoretical project of Southern urbanism, the concept of “people as infrastructure” has radically reframed how we understand and study urban infrastructure as a modality of social practice. This paper begins by appraising the impact that people as infrastructure has had on urban geography and critical infrastructure studies before moving to consider how notions of infrastructural violence can deepen our understanding of the concept’s content and context. In particular, this intervention brings people as infrastructure into dialogue with the Marxist concept of “dead labor” to bridge experiential and structural epistemic readings of infrastructure as human practice and as products of social labor. Doing so, I suggest, provides a novel conceptual and political terrain to: (1) highlight the “living labor” underpinning the production of socio-technical systems; and (2) think through how urban lives and livelihoods may transgress the “infrastructural alienation” generated by capitalist urbanization.
... Yet, the Bracero Program continued well after the war and into the second food regime. Farmers successfully lobbied to maintain the program, which functioned until 1964 as a form of insurance for West Coast farmers in case of labour shortages (Mitchell 2012). ...
... Both the Bracero Program and the H-2 programs were created in response to strong political organizing by farmers, who claimed they could not find willing domestic workers to fill positions. With the exception of absolute labour shortages during wartime, labour scholars and organizers have argued the issue is not that employers could not fill these positions; rather, employers could not fill these positions given the low wages they were willing to pay (Hahamovitch 1997;Mitchell 2012). Researchers have similarly argued that the Canadian government authorized SAWP is partly responsible for generating labour shortages because this program has allowed wages to remain low while raising expectations of worker productivity, which deters domestic applicants (Binford 2019). ...
As national borders tighten against undocumented migrants, agricultural employers throughout North America have pushed governments for easier access to a legalized temporary farm workforce. Some U.S. farmers and policymakers are seeking to expand the country's temporary agricultural guest worker program (H-2A visa), while Canada's longstanding Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program has been elevated as an international role model because it fulfills employer demands for a stable workforce, enables state control over migration flows and, at least on paper, safeguards workers' rights. However, researchers have documented systemic violations of workers' rights in both countries. In this paper we ask: How do the Canadian and U.S. agricultural guestworker programs measure up against international standards of best practices for the treatment of migrant workers? We draw on a food regime framework to historicize agricultural labour-migration policies in both countries within broader patterns of capital accumulation in the global agri-food system, and we argue that Canadian and U.S. agricultural guestworker programs offer evidence of the substantiation of a third food regime. Finally, we argue that despite differences in the policy environments and structures of these programs, their future expansion would further entrench systemic violations of international standards for the treatment of migrant workers by host country governments.
... Bandes 2000;Conway and Stannard 2016), and landscapes and law (e.g. Blomley 2004;Delaney 1998Delaney , 2013Olwig 2008Olwig , 2009Braverman 2009;Mitchell 2012) have been debated, there is more to be done in combining these discussions (however, about law, space and affects: see, e.g. Pavoni 2019;Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2015, 2019a, 2019b. ...
... Landscapes and their relation to law have previously been discussed in debates concerning, for example, the formation of landscapes through customs and conventions (e.g. Jones 2006;Olwig 2008Olwig , 2009; the mundane uses of landscape in war (Braverman 2009); the struggle over agricultural landscape (Mitchell 2012); the formation of urban landscapes of property (Blomley 2004); and in the conceptual discussions on legal landscapes (Delaney 1998(Delaney , 2013. Our reason for using the concept of legal landscape is first, that legal landscapes have not been overtly discussed although they have much potential for new conceptual openings in analysing legal conflicts in urban contexts. ...
This article addresses the relationships between emotions and the law, and how they define public order and constitute emotional legal landscapes. Using the example of the litigation process of the censorship of Dries Verhoeven’s art installation Ceci n’est pas … we explore the power of individual and collective emotions in acting as a stimulus to the evaluation of the acceptability and legality of artworks in urban public spaces. Verhoeven’s installation was interrupted in Helsinki, Finland, because of public obscenity after a passer-by who was offended by the artwork reported it to the police. This led to a three-year court process, the legal archaeological analysis of which reveals the complex moral geographies in the formation of legal landscapes: the arbitrariness of the interpretation of the law, the significance of time and place in legal evaluation, and the hidden morals included in the understanding of public order. The results show the potential of the concept of emotional legal landscapes in exploring the spatial effects of legal processes, and in revealing how legal reasoning is complex and emotionally laden instead of being carried out by rational legal actors.
... Between 2016 and 2019, only 132,497 work permits were issued, while an estimated 1 million Syrians work informally, while 45% of Syrians live below the poverty line (Danish Refugee Council 2021). This mirrors historical and current practices seen in other countries, like Canada's state-defined agricultural farmworker status (Cohen 2019), the bracero programme of the United States and Mexico (Mitchell 2012) or the cases of migrant workers throughout the Mediterranean Basin (Corrado et al. 2017). ...
This paper examines seasonal migrant farmworkers in Turkey, focusing on the intersection of relations of production and social reproduction under rapidly shifting land and labour regimes. The workers are predominantly Kurds and Arabs of Turkey and Syrian refugees, and experience the intersecting crises of neoliberalism, rural-urban migration and conflict/disaster displacement in amplified ways. With an interest in gendered and generational impacts on youth and women’s labour and bodies, we argue that an analysis of social reproduction should include both intra- and inter-household relations as well as kinship/community and ritual-based dynamics such as marriage and childbearing. We show that the intersecting forces of marketisation, family, kinship and the authoritarian state sustain and reproduce seasonal migrant agricultural labour, capitalising on the exploitation of women and youth.
... In the notable exceptions of work engaging in longitudinal analysis, this is done through historical and archival work rather than lived research and practice. Mitchell's (2012) longitudinal study of California migrant farmworkers from 1996 to 2009, for example, both goes back through historical archives and delves into the bracero period in the history of Californian agricultural labour with which Mitchell was personally engaged. ...
In this article, we explore the extent to which applying embodied, ‘skin in the game’ methods used in infrastructure activism (a contemporary art practice) can help expand the toolkit of methods applied in action research on infrastructures, interactions between humans and more-than-humans and urban socio-environmental processes in planning. In particular, we focus on two cases of infrastructure activism: the Amsterdam Zuidoost Food Forest (VBAZO), in Amsterdam's South East, and the KRATER project in Ljubljana's city centre. In our discussion of these projects, we explore the embodied research practices that infrastructure activists have developed to change not only urban green infrastructures but also researcher-actors’ own perspectives.
... In terms of the logic of capital, landscape transformations that give rise to struggles over dispossessions (such as the new wave of encroachments) represents specific "moments" in a "totality". In abstract terms, capitalist social relations of production, exchange, and consumption require that landscapes are produced and reproduced for purposed ends, centred on commodities and for surplus value appropriation, to assure that landscapes support profit making and economic growth (Harvey 2018;Mitchell, 2008Mitchell, , 2012. In this view, Mitchell (2008) argues that the relations of production are the social driver of landscape transformations under capitalism: ...
A new wave of encroachments is unfolding in Northern Sweden on the lands of Indigenous Sámi reindeer pastoralists. Even if the State and corporations may accept that landscape transformations represent threats to reindeer pastoralists' cultural and livelihood practices, attempts to redress these grievances often involve money to cover costs associated with feeding practices or mechanized transport. This paper considers these landscape transformations as driven by industrial capitalist expansion and underlying colonial relations, examining their broader implications on human-animal relations in pastoral landscapes. We apply an ecologically informed radical geography approach and conduct a content analysis of claims-making instances around the new wave of encroachments and their associated compensation schemes, complemented with basic GIS data. Relying on three cases of public contestations, we argue that encroachments represent threats that disturb, degrade, and destroy pastoral landscapes, and that while counter-hegemonic struggles try to diminish the reach of capital into these landscapes to maintain human-animal relations based on natural pastures, hegemonic actors seek to alter such relations to deepen capital's reach. Although reindeer pastoralists have many allies, we argue that broader coalitions are likely necessary to push for reforms of planning regimes that can enable multi-functionality and sustainability of landscapes in rural areas.
... However, they also found segregation and restrictions to live in cities, leading them to create their own communities in rural areas (Eissinger, 2017). Over time, most African Americans left the communities, and Latinos started to move in; in particular, farm workers who were experiencing inhumane conditions in bracero-era labor camps (Mitchell, 2012). Many of these low-income communities have never been incorporated, lacking fundamental infrastructure such as sewage or drinking water (Flores-Landeros et al., 2021;London et al., 2021;Méndez-Barrientos et al., 2022), and they are often underrepresented, understudied, and underserved (Bernacchi et al., 2020;Fernandez-Bou et al., 2021b). ...
Low-income, rural frontline communities of California's Central Valley experience environmental and socioeconomic injustice, water insecurity, extremely poor air quality, and lack of fundamental infrastructure (sewage, green areas, health services), which makes them less resilient. Many communities depend financially on agriculture, while water scarcity and associated policy may trigger farmland retirement, further hindering socioeconomic opportunities. Here we propose a multi-benefit framework to repurpose cropland in buffers inside and around (400-m and 1600-m buffers) 154 rural disadvantaged communities of the Central Valley to promote socioeconomic opportunities, environmental benefits, and business diversification. We estimate the potential for (1) reductions in water and pesticide use, nitrogen leaching, and nitrogen gas emissions, (2) managed aquifer recharge, and (3) economic and employment impacts associated with clean industries and solar energy. Retiring cropland within 1600-m buffers can result in reductions in annual water use of 2.18 km³/year, nitrate leaching into local aquifers of 105,500 t/year, greenhouse gas emissions of 2,232,000 t CO2-equivalent/year, and 5388 t pesticides/year, with accompanying losses in agricultural revenue of US27 million/year per community for ten years show potential to generate US15,578 million/year) for 30 years and 407 new jobs/year (total 62,697 jobs/year) paying 67 % more than prior farmworker jobs. In the San Joaquin Valley (southern Central Valley), where groundwater overdraft averages 2.3 km³/year, potential water use reduction is 1.8 km³/year. We have identified 99 communities with surficial soils adequate for aquifer recharge and canals/rivers within 1600 m. This demonstrates the potential of managed aquifer recharge in buffered zones to substantially reduce overdraft. The buffers framework shows that well-planned land repurposing near disadvantaged communities can create multiple benefits for agriculture and industry stakeholders, while improving quality of life in disadvantaged communities and producing positive externalities for society.
... However, to precisely classify the image of crops from weeds, some researchers [14], [15] used deep learning approaches such as Convolutional Neural Network, which has a high computational cost and is unsuitable for cloud computing applications. Unlike industrial automation, agricultural applications can be extremely challenging to be fully automated and change the traditional farming method to the high-tech industrial task [16]. ...
Farming¹ is an excellent niche for automation and robotic innovations. The manual farming process deals with many repetitive and tedious tasks. It makes it perfect for applying automation through agricultural robot concepts, AGRIBOTS, which can lead to more effective and efficient farming. The AGRIBOTS can cope with various agrarian tasks such as seeding, watering, harvesting, and monitoring. One of the challenges in autonomous farming is identifying the accurate harvest time. This study addressed the challenge for carrot farms by developing an optimized Fast Library for Approximate Nearest Neighbors (FLANN) feature matching algorithm with a randomized KD-tree index and a Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) algorithm to classify carrots and weeds images. This paper proposes an autonomous, innovative farming approach for small to medium-sized enterprises (SME) with a robotic arm and a claw that can move in the x-axis and y-axis on a gantry crane to precisely automating the seeding, weeding, and harvesting processes. In addition, a web application was developed for farmers to monitor crops conditions such as humidity, temperature, and soil moisture in real-time. They can also observe the whole automated process of planting with the growing period of the corps on the calendar. Finally, a prototype was built and tested successfully to evaluate the overall performance of the proposed AGRIBOT. Over one hundred samples were used to train the classification model that reached the Percentage of Correct Classification (PCC) of 77% and the precision of 88%.
... Agricultural production is framed as food security and national security by politicians, media, and farmers, but also as a volatile and vulnerable industry, requiring constant state support. Immigrant farmworkers, when they are considered at all, are framed as "essential" components of the labor supply necessary to "save the crops" (Mitchell, 2012) but are treated as individually disposable and systematically excluded from rural farm communities. While US agricultural policy during the COVID-19 pandemic focused on supporting the farm "families who feed and clothe the world" (see Kneiser, 2020), farmworkers were overlooked, even as the virus proliferated in cramped farm labor housing. ...
As farmworkers were reframed as “essential” workers during the COVID‐19 pandemic, US growers demanded unfettered access to foreign farm labor. After initially announcing a freeze on all immigration processing, the Trump administration bowed to farmers' demands, granting a single exception for agricultural guestworkers under the H‐2A visa program. Through a focus on H‐2A farmworkers in Georgia, this paper highlights how the pandemic exacerbated farm labor conditions in the US South. The author interrogates these conditions through the lens of racial capitalism, exposing the legacies of plantation political economies and a longstanding agricultural labor system premised on devaluing racialized labor. These histories are obscured by the myth of agricultural exceptionalism—the idea that agriculture is too different and important to be subject to the same rules and regulations as other industries. Agricultural exceptionalism naturalizes the racial capitalist system and informs state responses that privilege agricultural production through the exploitation of farmworkers, remaking “essential” farmworkers as sacrificial labor.
... Farmers successfully lobbied to maintain the program well after the war ended, until its termination in 1964, following ongoing reports of unjust labor practices, evidence that the program was bringing down farmworker wages, as well as reduced need due to mechanization in cotton and sugar-beet production (Martin, 2020;Newman, 2018). The Bracero Program was largely used by farmers in the U.S. West, where industrialized agriculture was most developed (Mitchell, 2012;Weiler et. al. 2020). ...
This article looks at the United States’ federal H-2A Temporary Agricultural Visa Program and reforms proposed by the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. In this policy analysis, we draw on media content analysis and qualitative interviews to compare the viewpoints of farmers, workers, grower and worker advocacy groups, intermediary agents, and politicians. We find that perspectives on the program are dependent upon actors’ level of direct interaction with workers. Moderate-sized farmers and regionally based worker advocacy groups tend to be the most concerned with day-to-day program operations and fair working conditions. In contrast, national-level advocacy groups, intermediary agents, and politicians are less critical of the program and seek to broadly expand farmer access to guestworkers, justifying proposed program reforms with discourses of national food security and immigration reform. Ultimately, we suggest that engaging a food systems lens to understand these policies provides a more nuanced perspective, addressing national food security and immigration as related issues.
... When Don Mitchell (2008, p. 47, emphasis in original) held that landscape is not only "really […] everything we see when we go outside [but also] everything that we do not see", he critically reminded the 'landscape community' to stay alert to how landscape is always more complex than its morphology or material reality implies (Mitchell, 2012;Setten, 2020). By implication, he warned against a prominent trait of much landscape research; that 'reading' the landscape, i.e. to let the visual evidence of culture speak for itself, enables drawing conclusions about its making and meaning. ...
The compact city has become the preferred and mainstream model for urban, peri-urban and sometimes even rural planning in the Nordic context. However, the compact city is increasingly contested as a model for sustainability and may be criticized for a functionalistic perspective on social practices and transitions. Besides, the compact city model is part of increasing transnational or global urban policy mobilities including generic models and strategies, and it may be argued that this contributes to the de-contextualisation of urban planning and development. In this chapter we scrutinize the spatialities of the compact city model and examine how the compact city model has played out in the Nordic context – focusing in particular on Oslo. We ask: how is the compact city developed and promoted as a spatial model? We argue that although the compact city has to some extent been promoted in influential policy circles as a universal model, the compact city in Oslo has some distinct features shaped by the Nordic context. In particular, these features can be attributed to welfare state governance centred on the public sector, yet it is also here we find some of the most significant differences between the Nordic countries. In closing, we discuss whether there is such a thing as a Nordic compact city model, and point to some of its political, social and cultural implications. Is there a pathway for a re-contextualized, relational and grounded compact city model?
... When Don Mitchell (2008, p. 47, emphasis in original) held that landscape is not only "really […] everything we see when we go outside [but also] everything that we do not see", he critically reminded the 'landscape community' to stay alert to how landscape is always more complex than its morphology or material reality implies (Mitchell, 2012;Setten, 2020). By implication, he warned against a prominent trait of much landscape research; that 'reading' the landscape, i.e. to let the visual evidence of culture speak for itself, enables drawing conclusions about its making and meaning. ...
Radical geography came only patchily to Nordic geography, and the development of theoretical Marxist geography was even sparser. But in the radical geography environment at Copenhagen University, a group of geographers in the 1970s developed a vocal and self-assured Marxist theory, which became known as the territorial-structure approach and drew its inspiration from the work of the GDR geographer Gerhard Schmidt-Renner. In this chapter we present a critical discussion of the territorial-structure approach as an example of an early theorisation of geography from a Marxist perspective. We discuss the central controversies that came to surround the approach, and we discuss the territorial-structure approach as a conscious effort to resist disciplinary specialisation and fragmentation of (human) geography. Our aim is not to resurrect the territorial-structure approach, but rather to investigate this theory as an important step towards socio-spatial theory in Nordic geography.
... When Don Mitchell (2008, p. 47, emphasis in original) held that landscape is not only "really […] everything we see when we go outside [but also] everything that we do not see", he critically reminded the 'landscape community' to stay alert to how landscape is always more complex than its morphology or material reality implies (Mitchell, 2012;Setten, 2020). By implication, he warned against a prominent trait of much landscape research; that 'reading' the landscape, i.e. to let the visual evidence of culture speak for itself, enables drawing conclusions about its making and meaning. ...
This chapter focuses on some socio-spatial views by Nordic geographers who have studied the tendencies of politicisation vs. depoliticisation of human/nature relationships. First, I introduce early formulations of politics of nature research by showing the epistemological grounding and argumentation for the political in Nordic nature studies. This is followed by an overview of studies that have focused on depoliticising drives and turns in contemporary human/nature practices. The variations in handling and conceptualising the dominating aspects of neoliberal environmental governance will be described. Thereafter, I address some approaches of research within Nordic geography that are entangled in the processes and actors defending and promoting a (re)politicisation in nature-use. Finally, I discuss the Nordic content and bearing found in the geographical contributions included in this study.
... When Don Mitchell (2008, p. 47, emphasis in original) held that landscape is not only "really […] everything we see when we go outside [but also] everything that we do not see", he critically reminded the 'landscape community' to stay alert to how landscape is always more complex than its morphology or material reality implies (Mitchell, 2012;Setten, 2020). By implication, he warned against a prominent trait of much landscape research; that 'reading' the landscape, i.e. to let the visual evidence of culture speak for itself, enables drawing conclusions about its making and meaning. ...
In this chapter we discuss how demands for social justice and struggles around social reproduction have evolved in the Nordic “periphery”, placing the struggles within a context of critical socio-spatial theorizing and earlier geographical research on uneven development within Nordic welfare states. We give examples from Sweden of how resistance in the northern periphery increasingly mobilizes around spatial justice and social reproduction rather than mainly around employment. Demands about the right to spatial justice challenge the rewarding of a specific place – usually the urban – of modernity, meaning-making and hub for democracy and resistance. And thus oppose the naturalization of uneven rual-urban geographies. Nordic critical geographers have researched inequalities within Nordic welfare states, including center-periphery divides and conflicts, and examined how these have increased with welfare state retrenchment. Feminist geographers highlight the centrality of battles around social reproduction – the right to environmental security, work, food, housing, healthcare, education, a meaningful and dignified life in both urban and rural places. We identify a tradition of empirically based geographical research on material conditions and changing socio-spatial forms of production and consumption, which suggests a socio-spatial theory useful in an era of crisis and increased privatization of nature and social reproduction.
... When Don Mitchell (2008, p. 47, emphasis in original) held that landscape is not only "really […] everything we see when we go outside [but also] everything that we do not see", he critically reminded the 'landscape community' to stay alert to how landscape is always more complex than its morphology or material reality implies (Mitchell, 2012;Setten, 2020). By implication, he warned against a prominent trait of much landscape research; that 'reading' the landscape, i.e. to let the visual evidence of culture speak for itself, enables drawing conclusions about its making and meaning. ...
Research in economic geography on innovation and regional development is an important and thriving research area in Scandinavia, which has contributed significantly to theoretical and empirical advancements beyond the Scandinavian research environments. This chapter demonstrates how the field has developed and changed its focus over the years, touching upon and developing around central academic and societal topics from deindustrialisation, clusters and regional innovation systems to creativity, green transition and changing regional development paths. The chapter focuses on how research milieus have developed in Scandinavia, how theories, methodologies and methods have advanced and how researchers have worked together nationally and internationally during the last four decades.
... When Don Mitchell (2008, p. 47, emphasis in original) held that landscape is not only "really […] everything we see when we go outside [but also] everything that we do not see", he critically reminded the 'landscape community' to stay alert to how landscape is always more complex than its morphology or material reality implies (Mitchell, 2012;Setten, 2020). By implication, he warned against a prominent trait of much landscape research; that 'reading' the landscape, i.e. to let the visual evidence of culture speak for itself, enables drawing conclusions about its making and meaning. ...
Through tracing what ‘landscape’ has meant, and the political and intellectual work that ‘landscape’ does, we in this chapter explore the shifting nature of Nordic landscape geography. We thereby aim to introduce readers to the role of the landscape concept within Nordic scholarship and critically engage with contemporary debates over the nature and meaning of landscape. Landscape was an important political concept long before the advent of geography as a discipline in the Nordic countries, though what landscape denoted differed between various national and linguistic settings. Based in our mapping of the concept as it has evolved within geography and related disciplines, we centre on three strands of landscape scholarship today: mediations on a particularly ‘Nordic’ substantive landscape concept, attempts to utilise landscape as a concept to influence planning, and attempts to utilise landscape as a concept to grasp environmental issues. Scrutinising these current traditions leads us to primarily underline the necessity of relational approaches to steer the concept away from a problematic and narrow emphasis on the local scale. Yet, and importantly, various relational approaches take analysis in different directions, leading us to also underscore the necessity of critically scrutinising where particular relational approaches might lead landscape geography.
... When Don Mitchell (2008, p. 47, emphasis in original) held that landscape is not only "really […] everything we see when we go outside [but also] everything that we do not see", he critically reminded the 'landscape community' to stay alert to how landscape is always more complex than its morphology or material reality implies (Mitchell, 2012;Setten, 2020). By implication, he warned against a prominent trait of much landscape research; that 'reading' the landscape, i.e. to let the visual evidence of culture speak for itself, enables drawing conclusions about its making and meaning. ...
The development of Nordic gender geography is closely related to societal transformation. The way the gendered labour market is structured and re-structured is a recurrent theme for investigation. In this chapter, we discuss Nordic gender geography since its establishment in the 1980s, with the aim of scrutinising long-term and contemporary trends and challenges. We discern an engagement in issues based on socio-spatial conditions, where agency, identity and intersectional perspectives work together with materiality, institutions and structures. Nordic gender geography thereby contributes with a contextual gender theory, emphasising space as both a designer and an interpreter of gender relations. Regional and local gender relations become a player in the structure-agency relationship, and we argue that socio-spatial gender theorising can modify the idea of universal and all-embracing theoretical explanation of how gender is constructed. Nordic gender geography constitutes a prevailing and growing potential for a significant contribution to gender theory and to socio-spatial analysis of power.
... When Don Mitchell (2008, p. 47, emphasis in original) held that landscape is not only "really […] everything we see when we go outside [but also] everything that we do not see", he critically reminded the 'landscape community' to stay alert to how landscape is always more complex than its morphology or material reality implies (Mitchell, 2012;Setten, 2020). By implication, he warned against a prominent trait of much landscape research; that 'reading' the landscape, i.e. to let the visual evidence of culture speak for itself, enables drawing conclusions about its making and meaning. ...
As an example of socio-spatial theorization within the Nordic context, this chapter is written as an autobiographic narrative of my intellectual development from the 1970s to 2021. It is a story involving a steady positioning in the ‘Nordic’ context, but within that a range of shifts in affiliations, as well as a participation in different intellectual networks – both Danish, Nordic and ‘International’ – all of which have influenced my thinking. The chapter is arranged in four parts: First, a presentation of some Nordic predecessors. This is followed by an intellectual history of what I call theoretical approximations to (a) a non-deterministic social ecology, (b) towards a theory of practice, and (c) an engagement with the formulation of a critical phenomenology – all involving issues of the urban question, of everyday life and of modalities of social space.
... When Don Mitchell (2008, p. 47, emphasis in original) held that landscape is not only "really […] everything we see when we go outside [but also] everything that we do not see", he critically reminded the 'landscape community' to stay alert to how landscape is always more complex than its morphology or material reality implies (Mitchell, 2012;Setten, 2020). By implication, he warned against a prominent trait of much landscape research; that 'reading' the landscape, i.e. to let the visual evidence of culture speak for itself, enables drawing conclusions about its making and meaning. ...
Approaching Nordic human geography as an evolving community of practice with strong historical-geographical legacies, this chapter introduces the two overarching themes of the book. On the one hand, we foreground how geography has been, and is, theorised in Nordic human geography, particularly (but not exclusively) as socio-spatial theory. On the other hand, if often intersecting with the former, we seek to highlight the importance of historical-geographical context in geographical theorising and research. Following from this, and acknowledging that the balancing of these themes differs between the individual contributions, the chapter outlines the approach of the book.
... When Don Mitchell (2008, p. 47, emphasis in original) held that landscape is not only "really […] everything we see when we go outside [but also] everything that we do not see", he critically reminded the 'landscape community' to stay alert to how landscape is always more complex than its morphology or material reality implies (Mitchell, 2012;Setten, 2020). By implication, he warned against a prominent trait of much landscape research; that 'reading' the landscape, i.e. to let the visual evidence of culture speak for itself, enables drawing conclusions about its making and meaning. ...
Throughout its recorded history, the aims of geography have shifted between synthesis and specialized systematic studies. Cosmography, as understood by Alexander von Humboldt and others, presented an ambitious synthesis of climate, topography, biogeography, settlement and human life. Explorations financed by geographical societies gradually led to growth of specialized disciplines, particularly in natural sciences. This broad activity was regarded as geography by the general public and those that established geography chairs 1870–1910. The first professors adhered to synthesis of human and physical geography and found relevant research themes. Initially geography was dominated by environmental determinism, possibilism and a focus on regional geography through synthesis. Gradually specialized research in systematic branches led to a nomothetic shift to spatial science, inspiring models in both human and physical geography. Synthesis of physical and human geography remained an aim within spatial science but provided few integrating research exemplars. Synthesis of physical and human geo-factors was fundamental for the first professors and was seen as a goal for many geographers in the following generations, but has been difficult to attain in research projects. However, present global changes give our discipline new relevance for research on global sustainability.
... When Don Mitchell (2008, p. 47, emphasis in original) held that landscape is not only "really […] everything we see when we go outside [but also] everything that we do not see", he critically reminded the 'landscape community' to stay alert to how landscape is always more complex than its morphology or material reality implies (Mitchell, 2012;Setten, 2020). By implication, he warned against a prominent trait of much landscape research; that 'reading' the landscape, i.e. to let the visual evidence of culture speak for itself, enables drawing conclusions about its making and meaning. ...
In intellectual histories of geography as well as in international relations, geopolitics is usually the business of great powers, understood as the expansion of hard power through territorial control. However, the existence of a ‘ Geopolitik of the weak’ has also been theorised, premised on the ability of smaller states – such as the Nordic countries – to secure their survival through a wider range of policy instruments. In this chapter, we analyse key themes in the work of two Nordic geographical thinkers deeply concerned with the place and status of their home countries in the era of high modernity – Rudolf Kjellén and Gudmund Hatt. Relying upon their scholarly works as well as relevant public debates circa 1905–1945, we trace the ‘small-state geopoliticking’ of Hatt and Kjellén, identifying three key characteristics of their style of small-state geopolitics: (1) determinism is qualified by voluntarism; (2) space is complemented by future; and (3) external expansion is sublimated into internal progress. In its reconceptualisation of living space as primarily concerned with existential survival as premised upon future progress, rather than outward-oriented territorial expansion, small-state geopolitics emerges as a highly situated, somewhat quaint but nonetheless significant element in Nordic theorising of geography.
... When Don Mitchell (2008, p. 47, emphasis in original) held that landscape is not only "really […] everything we see when we go outside [but also] everything that we do not see", he critically reminded the 'landscape community' to stay alert to how landscape is always more complex than its morphology or material reality implies (Mitchell, 2012;Setten, 2020). By implication, he warned against a prominent trait of much landscape research; that 'reading' the landscape, i.e. to let the visual evidence of culture speak for itself, enables drawing conclusions about its making and meaning. ...
Research on displacement has a long trajectory in Western geography and urban studies. In a Swedish context theory formation around displacement re-emerged in the 2010s as a response to an increasingly heated housing market, increased gentrification and growing homelessness, and as a consequence of ‘renoviction’ processes. Learning from empirical research in Sweden, the Nordic experiences differ from the Anglo-American context, and set ground for a theoretical discussion on how to understand the specificities of displacement processes in (post-)welfare societies. In this chapter we investigate some Swedish manifestations of displacement that cannot easily be grasped by conceptual apparatuses often developed in an Anglo-American context. The process of displacement in a Swedish (and Nordic) context is often more indirect and slower but its eventual outcomes have the same damaging effects on its victims. The chapter provides both an historical and contemporary view of Swedish displacement processes and practices, and we argue that we cannot uncritically import a conceptual apparatus that grew out of other socio-spatial contexts and develop particular understandings of displacement based on Nordic empirical observations.
... When Don Mitchell (2008, p. 47, emphasis in original) held that landscape is not only "really […] everything we see when we go outside [but also] everything that we do not see", he critically reminded the 'landscape community' to stay alert to how landscape is always more complex than its morphology or material reality implies (Mitchell, 2012;Setten, 2020). By implication, he warned against a prominent trait of much landscape research; that 'reading' the landscape, i.e. to let the visual evidence of culture speak for itself, enables drawing conclusions about its making and meaning. ...
This chapter explores the emergence and eventual decline of a distinctive kind of planning-oriented human geography in post-war Sweden and the closely related adaptation of Walter Christaller’s central place theory by geographers such as Torsten Hägerstrand and Sven Godlund. The rapidly expanding Swedish welfare state gave rise to a demand for skills and expertise of a kind many geographers were eager to provide, and Christaller’s abstract framework allowed them to position themselves as producers of socially useful knowledge. Eventually, however, several voices raised concerns about how the focus on planning and the dominance of reductive theories such as central place theory constrained the academic development of the discipline. The end of the expansive phase of the welfare state also decreased the demand for the expertise geographers had provided. In essence, the popularity of central place theory was tethered to a particular historical moment, and it only allowed for rather narrow analyses of socio-spatial relations. Nonetheless, the theory played a key role in the transformation of Swedish human geography into a modern social science, insofar as the comparatively novel understanding of space it provided contributed to the development of more complex and philosophical theories and approaches to geography.
... In this section, we explore how weeds condition the modern agri-food paradigm (FitzSimmons, 1986;Goodman et al., 1987;Mitchell, 2012;Weis, 2007) defined as 'the group of businesses, farmers, and institutions focused on maximising agricultural output using industrial methods and logic' (Gray and Gibson, 2013: 86). We consider industrial agriculture as a dynamic network, composed of a 'heterogenous mix of human and non-human components' (Gray and Gibson, 2013: 87), a system, we shall argue, is irremediably shaped by the unique capacities of weeds. ...
This paper presents a vegetal political ecology of weeds. Weeds have barely been analysed in the burgeoning field of ‘more-than-human’ scholarship, this despite their ubiquity and considerable impact on human social life. We review how geographical scholarship has represented weeds’ material and political status: mostly as invasive plants, annoying species in private gardens and spontaneous vegetation in urbanized landscapes. Then, bringing together weed science, agronomic science and the critical geography of agriculture, we show how weeds ecology, weeds management and the environmental problems which weeds are entangled have critically shaped the industrial agriculture paradigm. Three main arguments emerging from our analysis open up new research avenues: weeds’ disruptive character might shape our understanding of human-plant relationships; human-weeds relation in agriculture have non-trivial socio-economic and political implications; and more-than-human approaches, such as vegetal political ecology, might challenge dominant modes of considering and practicing agriculture.
... The inequality of violence within labor exploitation upon women or BIPOC individuals accentuates necropolitics, and we would argue the historic failures to address these systematic forms of labor suppression are clear cases of violent inaction. Building from the work of Mbembe (2003), Wright (2011), Mitchell (2012, and Herod (2001) we show one more way by which we can understand the complex geographies of labor, in this case through popular culture. ...
All music takes place somewhere. While geographic analyses of lyrics have focused on the geographies of artists and/or particular places and regions of their inspiration, we see a developing opportunity to discuss music as a fundamental component of social resistance. While scholars have discussed social resistance in music as practiced by artists, such a focus has been researched less in regard to entire social movements on a certain topic. We will fill that gap here by discussing the role that labor plays in popular music lyrics. Using a qualitative analysis of historic and contemporary songs, this paper posits that necropolitics – analyzing the source of power over an individual’s positionality and physical well-being – stands at the core of such song meanings. Therefore, as a result, much labor music incites Marxian understandings of capitalism, poverty, and degraded social reproduction. We suggest this assessment offers a deeper insight into such lyrics and also helps explain the anthemic popularity of many labor-focused songs that have appealed to the working class over many decades.
... In no small part, the new organization of farm labor, introduced in the region by the sugar beet industry, helped to change the understanding of just what rural labor was. Farmers were modern employers of employees like urban industrial employers, not yeomen with farmhands who bridged work and communal life (Mapes 2009, 6;Cohen 2011, 54;Mitchell 2012;Flores 2016). While the meaning and sources of rural labor had changed, the laws that governed that labor had not. ...
In the 1960s, farmers pressed trespass charges against aid workers providing assistance to agricultural laborers living on the farmers’ private property. Some of the first court decisions to address these types of trespass, such as the well-known and frequently taught State v. Shack (1971), limited the property rights of farmers and enabled aid workers to enter camps where migrants lived. Yet there was a world before Shack, a world in which farmers welcomed onto their land rural religious groups, staffed largely by women from the local community, who provided services to migrant workers. From the 1940s through the 1960s, federal, state, and local law left large gaps in labor protections and government services for migrant agricultural laborers in Michigan. In response, church women created rural safety nets that mobilized local generosity and provided aid. This article uses Michigan as a case study to argue that these informal safety nets also policed migrant morality, maintained rural segregation, and performed surveillance of community outsiders, thereby serving the farmers’ goals of having a reliable and cheap labor force—ultimately strengthening the economic and legal structures that left agricultural workers vulnerable.
... While changing temporalities and deteriorating environmental conditions reveal complex dynamics in the Mediterranean agro-migration system, the protagonists of this activity, migrant seasonal agricultural workers are often side-lined in political ecology, critical human geography, and climate change adaptation studies (for some exceptions, see Minko -Zern, 2019;Jimenez-Soto, 2020;Klocker, Head, Dun, & Spaven, 2018;Barnett & McMichael, 2018). Yet with their precarious labour being indispensable to "save the crops" (Mitchell, 2012), the livelihoods of the seasonal agricultural workers who labour and harvest these crops with their hands (Rothenberg, 2000) are directly and indirectly a ected by multidimensional environmental and socio-economic changes. This is increasingly the case today after their designation 1 as an exception to the mobility restrictions implemented during the Covid-19 pandemic. ...
... While changing temporalities and deteriorating environmental conditions reveal complex dynamics in the Mediterranean agro-migration system, the protagonists of this activity, migrant seasonal agricultural workers are often side-lined in political ecology, critical human geography, and climate change adaptation studies (for some exceptions, see Minkoff-Zern, 2019;Jimenez-Soto, 2020;Klocker, Head, Dun, & Spaven, 2018;Barnett & McMichael, 2018). Yet with their precarious labour being indispensable to "save the crops" (Mitchell, 2012), the livelihoods of the seasonal agricultural workers who labour and harvest these crops with their hands (Rothenberg, 2000) are directly and indirectly affected by multidimensional environmental and socio-economic changes. This is increasingly the case today after their designation 1 as an exception to the mobility restrictions implemented during the Covid-19 pandemic. ...
This paper engages with a key trope of landscapes as representation: their mirroring capacity. Contextualising the concept of ‘landscape’ within art history, the paper invokes several technologies that have been functional in the recognition of landscapes while themselves remaining invisible. One such technology is a 17th century technology known as the ‘Claude Glass’, which is analysed with the help of Lacanian concepts. The aim of the ensuing analysis is to advance the use of landscapes in public discourses, better to understand the work done by landscapes in different contexts. To illuminate this work, the paper deploys material landscapes formed in Ireland around so-called cilliní – unmarked graves of what were undesirable bodies in bygone decades.
Both farmers and workers utilize guest worker programs to gain access to the transnational food labor economy. Yet such programs reinforce both employees’ and farm owners’ relative lack of power in the global food system. This paper discusses the approaches farmers and workers utilizing the H-2A guest worker program in the United States employ to cope with such inequalities. We assess findings from qualitative interviews in New York state with current and former workers and farmers participating in the program. We find that farmers draw on regional agrarian communities with historically established networks to collectively manage labor acquisition, seasonality, and affordability. In contrast, the temporary nature of workers’ time in the United States limits their ability to establish deep social networks, and workers cope either by increasing their hours and commitment or by leaving the program to work in agriculture without work authorization. These temporal and spatial constraints further diminish worker power within the food system by limiting their ability to effectively organize for better conditions, with consequences for global food system equity.
Critical consciousness is the ability to critically analyse societal inequities and to develop the motivation and agency to promote social change. While there has been a proliferation of empirical work on critical consciousness over the last two decades, this is the first volume to consider how we can support youth's critical consciousness development – their ability to recognize and fight injustice. Leading scholars address some of the field's most urgent questions: How does critical consciousness develop? What are the key developmental settings (such as homes, schools, community programs) and societal experiences (racism, policy brutality, immigration, political turmoil) that inform critical consciousness development among youth? Providing novel insights into key school-based, out-of-school-based, and societal contexts that propel youth to greater critical reflection and action, this book will benefit scholars and students in developmental, educational, and community psychology, as well as practitioners working in schools, community-based organizations, and other youth settings.
When the Bracero (guest worker) Program ended in 1964, California agribusiness seemed to be facing a labor crisis. Growers had lost access to a large pool of essentially unfree labor, and (consequently) unionization in the fields was on the rise. As a result, researchers in the various agricultural divisions of the University of California embarked on a broad effort to reengineer the farm labor process through the development of labor aids; mechanization of pruning, thinning, and harvesting tasks; redesigning fruits and vegetables; and extensive time-motion studies. This article traces these efforts and uses their history to argue that labor and economic geographers should focus attention on how struggles over the labor process are frequently struggles over the ability to shape and deploy the labor supply and not only matters of how work is organized on the shop floor (or in this case, in the fields). More broadly, the article argues that focus on the fine-grained details of innovation in the labor process is vital for a full understanding of fundamental transformations in the agribusiness landscape. As a consequence, the article explains why a set of innovations, which contemporary analysts figured would lead to agriculture adopting labor relations much more like those in more traditionally Fordist industries, actually paved the way for a set of even more highly casualized, exploitative relations than had existed heretofore.
This article presents a historical reconstruction of Mexican labor migration as a result of the Bracero Program from 1942 to 1954. In particular, is analyzed the procedures implemented in the selection of braceros, so that they traveled to agricultural farms and urban work centers in Texas, California, New Mexico, Chicago, and New York. In addition, it is shown cases of corruption in Mexico in the granting of green cards of residence; protests by Mexican workers; the working conditions the braceros faced, and the type of food and housing they had where they were housed. It is described the forms that illegal migration took of the so-called espaldas mojadas (wetbacks), the mistreatment and discrimination experienced by the braceros, as well as the way in which the return of hired workers intensified, and the massive deportation of the so-called sin papeles (illegals) who managed to work in a concealed way in the neighboring country.
Justice has long been central to geographic research but attention to the concept itself has been less explicitly theorized within the discipline. This article specifically traces the ways in which justice has been theorized within human geography. The review identifies commonalities among justice applications within geography, suggesting a shift beyond distributive and ideal theories of justice toward those explicating injustices coming more from bottom‐up approaches. At the same time, it identifies the tendency of geographers to approach the concept of justice through normative‐political approaches rather than normative‐analytical justifications of socio‐spatial phenomena. The paper illustrates the value of both approaches to justice theorizing but cautions that geographers should continue to justify the use of the concept within their work to avoid attenuating it. In ending, the paper illustrates how justice‐oriented geographers can continue to identify why justice is central to their scholarship.
Rural Chicana/o art, a style of politicized Mexican heritage visual culture produced in the United States since the mid-twentieth century, has yet to receive substantial critical attention despite the prominence of agrarian issues in Chicana/o visual culture. This study argues that between 1965 and 1985, Chicana/o cultural producers in the Central Valley created a set of visual material that expressed their fraught—and often invisible—relation to the industrialized agricultural economy taking shape around them, and, in the process, helped establish the farm worker as a primary figure in Chicana/o visual culture. The Fresno scene has made particularly significant contributions to this body of work due to its long-standing position as the economic, cultural, and political center of the grape industry. This dissertation explores how three works—the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA)-led March to Sacramento (1965), Mujeres Muralistas del Valle’s mural at the Parlier Labor Center (1978), and Ester Hernandez’s Sun Mad (1982)—developed by cultural producers in Fresno and its adjoining circuit of culturally rich farm worker towns and cities provide insight into how Chicana/os experienced and represented their place in the civil rights-era agricultural industry. I argue that this triad of visual material, and the wider set of murals, poster art, performances, and domestic and roadside installations from which it grew, demonstrate a form of aesthetic resistance on the part of these artists, an important strategy they utilized to offer alternative historical narratives, register political dissent, and promote rural cultural practices. Ultimately, I argue that the environment has played a major role in shaping the visual culture of the Chicana/o Central Valley—whether it was the use of grape workers highly specialized environmental knowledge in NFWA bargaining strategies, the direct experience of grape harvesting by artists such as Hernandez, or the more indirect influences members of the Mujeres Muralistas del Valle gained through their proximity to the vineyards. This research aims to provide an initial map of how these place-based interventions took shape over time in this particularly fertile Fresno area cultural corridor known as “the grape belt.”
The dire need for an energy transition to mitigate and reverse global warming is inspiring scholars to reexamine political influences on technological systems. The multi-level perspective of the socio-technical transitions framework acknowledges how technological systems are affected by the social and political landscapes where they are built. Energy landscapes literatures elaborate on the socio-technical transitions framework by explaining how the boundaries of landscapes are negotiated in the context of energy transitions. Energy scholars have found that negotiations over the form and purpose of energy landscapes frequently skew in favor of capital accumulation instead of social reproduction. Studies of landscapes in human geography and labor history have shown how the power imbalance energy scholars observed can be corrected by workers and their communities struggling against business owners and the state. Using archival data, I show how U.S. natural gas legislation in the postwar period was intended to limit coalminers’ demands for landscapes of social reproduction. This point matters because the vulnerabilities of industrial capitalism to energy worker organization could be exploited to push for a just and sustainable energy transition like the Green New Deal.
This article assumes the archive is at once a repository of facts as it also is laden with, and implicated in, historically and geographically constituted webs of power relations. The archive can be a benign repository, a powerful interpretive apparatus, an epistemological frame on the world, and often is all of these at once. But understanding the theoretical implications of a problematized "archive" and knowing what that means "on the ground" - in particular cases and sites and empirical examples - are not always the same thing. In order to help rectify that sometimes-disjuncture between theory and practice, this essay presents a story of a racialized landscape that begins with one foray into an historical archive in a very traditional sense - a local repository of government documents. It suggests that the issues and problems explored in this particular case transcend their site, with broader scholarly relevance for a wider audience.
This article examines Lexington, Kentucky's Courthouse Square as a racialized landscape in order to illustrate a methodological framework for landscape interpretation that relies on historical geographical understanding. That framework ultimately calls for interpreting the place of landscape in everyday social practice by drawing on consideration of landscape's role in facilitating or mediating social practice and in expressing personal and regional place-based identities, and on historical description of the tangible, visible scene as the foundation for such interpretations. The framework and the example take inspiration from D. W. Meinig, through his work concerning the interpretation of ordinary landscapes as well as his more extensive considerations of historical geographies of the American experience.
It is now commonplace to say that the future happens first in California, and this book, the first biography of legendary governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, tells the story of the pivotal era when that idea became a reality. Set against the riveting historical landscape of the late fifties and sixties, the book offers astute insights into history as well a fascinating glimpse of those who charted its course-including Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, and the Brown family dynasty. Ethan Rarick mines an impressive array of untapped sources-such as Pat Brown's diary and love letters to his wife-to tell the unforgettable story of a true mover-and-shaker within his fascinating and turbulent political arena. California Rising illuminates a singular moment in time with surprising intimacy. John Kennedy laughs with Pat Brown. Richard Nixon offers the governor a schemer's deal. Lyndon Johnson sweet-talks the governor on the phone and then ridicules him behind his back. And as context for the human drama, key events of the era unfold in gripping prose. There is Brown's struggle with the fate of Caryl Chessman, the convicted kidnapper who gained international attention by writing best-selling books on death row. There is the tale of intrigue and politics surrounding the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, and the violence and horror of the Watts Riots in 1965. Through the story of the life and times of Pat Brown, we witness an extraordinary period that changed the entire country's view of itself and its most famous state.
This innovative history of California opens up new vistas on the interrelationship among culture, nature, and society by focusing on the state's signature export-the orange. From the 1870s onward, California oranges were packaged in crates bearing colorful images of an Edenic landscape. This book demystifies those lush images, revealing the orange as a manufactured product of the state's orange industry. Orange Empire brings together for the first time the full story of the orange industry-how growers, scientists, and workers transformed the natural and social landscape of California, turning it into a factory for the production of millions of oranges. That industry put up billboards in cities across the nation and placed enticing pictures of sun-kissed fruits into nearly every American's home. It convinced Americans that oranges could be consumed as embodiments of pure nature and talismans of good health. But, as this book shows, the tables were turned during the Great Depression when Upton Sinclair, Carey McWilliams, Dorothea Lange, and John Steinbeck made the Orange Empire into a symbol of what was wrong with America's relationship to nature.
Operation Wetback of 1954 is typically understood as a U.S. immigration law enforcement campaign that resulted in the deportation of over one million persons, mostly Mexican nationals. This article, however, uses research conducted in the United States and Mexico to trace the decade-long buildup and binational history of Operation Wetback.
A lavishness of scale and an extraordinary diversity of crops, orchards, and vineyards characterize the intensively developed, irrigated agriculture of the San Joaquin Valley. The complexity of its patterns and environmental problems, its diverse ethnic groups, and the adaptations and human decisions from which it is always evolving make the valley a place of excitement, subtle beauty, and grandeur with crucial importance for the society and economy of California.
The development of large-scale lettuce production in California's Salinas Valley illustrates the tensions between technology and nature and provides a starting point for understanding the complexities of supplying vast quantities of quality fresh produce to consumers in distant markets. The case of iceberg lettuce shows that the industrialization of agriculture was largely idiosyncratic, and the level of industrialization possible for any specific crop varied, depending equally on the nature of the commodity and the willingness of consumers to purchase it. The emergence of lettuce cultivation in the Salinas Valley during the inter-war period highlights how early growers harnessed organizational techniques, transportation infrastructures, and technological and scientific knowledge to transcend both the ephemeral nature of lettuce and consumer taste. Yet, these very same factors also limited the success of valley growers after World War II, despite the best efforts of growers and agricultural researchers to improve lettuce quality.
The first years of World War II were marked by a series of battles in and over the fields of California. Workers struggled with growers, growers struggled with the state, and federal and California bureaucrats struggled to gain control over the anarchic labor conditions that marked California agriculture. The introduction of a guest worker program – the bracero program – that brought farmworkers from Mexico to the harvests of California and other states, brought these battles to a head as growers ought to secure their traditional access to ‘cheap labor’ and their presumed right to control the farm labor process in the state. This paper examines these battles to show how growers fought – and managed – to preserve a landscape of great power and profit. The paper argues that the agricultural landscape extant at the beginning of the war shaped the nature of these multifaceted struggles, even as it was an object of those struggles.
Seeking to establish a base for organizing California farmworkers, the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU) between 1948 and 1950 led a strike against DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation, the state's preeminent farming operation. Featuring several new developments—among them huge car and truck caravans of strikers that were described as ‘the world's longest picket line’ and a secondary boycott of DiGiorgio products that inaugurated a tactic that would later become a cornerstone of the farmworker movement—the strike was the first substantial challenge to California growers since the collapse of the farmworker movement a decade earlier. While these aspects are often mentioned by historians, there is another less understood but more profound dimension to the strike that revolves around a documentary film Poverty in the Valley of Plenty. Angered by its portrayal in the film, DiGiorgio won a libel case against the NFLU, suppressed the film, forced the union to withdraw and destroy all surviving prints, and for the next generation sued anyone caught showing Poverty in the Valley of Plenty. A watershed in labor and legal history, this tactic extended the law of libel from printed words to images. Presenting a fuller and more complete exploration of this critical chapter in the evolving relationship between photography, farmworkers, and labor organizing, this essay explores the way DiGiorgio eliminated unfavorable visual information, curbed First Amendment rights of free speech, augmented vigilante raids and accusations of communism as tactics of farmworker union smashing, undercut the NFLU's boycott, and substituted an entirely fictitious and benign picture of life and labor at its Bear Mountain ranch. Not until the Delano grape strike 25 years later did farmworkers succeed in finally getting their picture across to the public and using it to develop a boycott that turned the tables on California agriculture.
The impetus to labor geography—putting workers and their practices and interests right at the heart of our analyses and making these ontologically prior in our theorizing—is the right one. Because this is the right impulse, work in labor geography has tended to over-valorize both the ability of workers to shape the landscapes of capitalism and the long-term efficacy of any such “shaping”. Arguing from a specific case—the struggles over agribusiness in California in the immediate post-World War II California—this paper seeks to understand those moments when workers are all but powerless. It argues that those of us interested in politically charged and politically efficacious labor geographies need to retrain our focus as much on the structures within which workers live and work as well as on the actions undertaken by powerful forces within capital and the state whose interests are served by various forms of worker powerlessness.
Abstract Rural sociologists have seemingly moved away from an active interest in the plight of migrant farmworkers and the centrality of their labor in the development of U.S. agribusiness. Answering Pfeffer's (1983) call to analyze the different forms of agricultural production, I focus on the key formative period of what I refer to as the U.S. capitalist agricultural labor process. During the United States-Mexico Bracero Program, 1942–1964, U.S. agribusiness employed a coercive factory regime, introduced mechanization and increased work hazards, and employed a dual wage structure to keep Mexican contract workers at a serious disadvantage to advance their own collective well-being. This study relies upon archival and oral history research to challenge the existing theoretical approaches to the labor process in capitalist agriculture and provide a theoretical explanation that more closely relates to U.S. post-war agricultural production.
In this essay, I examine interlocking political, economic, and cultural processes involved in the continuous reproduction of the structural violence that affects migrant farmworkers in the United States. Excluded from rights and protections afforded other workers, migrant and seasonal farm labor—a social class comprising mainly undocumented Mexican and Latino persons—endures endemic poverty, poor health outcomes, and squalor living conditions. This structural violence is sustained by government neglect and illegal hiring practices and liberalized production regimes that benefit multinational corporations and large-scale agricultural producers, putting migrant workers in harm's way. Emphasizing the importance of the phenomenology of perception to the anthropology of structural violence, I argue that this system is also underpinned by a mode of perception built on specific understandings of alterity and community. The setting for this article is rural North Carolina, where I have conducted 16 months (2004–07) of ethnographic field study on tobacco farms and in farm labor camps. Among growers and other locals, I find that the faces of migrants do not compel infinite responsibility, as in the face-to-face interaction idealized by Levinas. Instead, an essentializing discourse of culture portrays migrants as “other” and “outside,” equates them with trash, and makes them available for various kinds of blame. I develop the concept of “faciality” to take account of how social power overlaps with perception to legitimize patterns of social subordination, economic exploitation, and spatial segregation. I also examine everyday tactics of resistance among migrants, who take command of the stigmatizing quality of vision to morally indict manifestations of structural violence. In this study, I enhance our understanding of the dialectics of domination and subordination in U.S. agriculture, which provides fruitful ground for theorizing the dangerous constitution of structural violence in the context of transnational labor migration and international agricultural restructuring.
It has been more than 25 years since Peirce Lewis (1979) laid out his “Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the
American Scene.” Lewis’s axioms were designed to help us better see how, as he put it (complete with italics), “all human landscape has cultural meaning, no matter how ordinary that landscape might be” (p. 12). The axioms, Lewis suggested, “seem basic and self-evident,” even
if “what seems self-evident was not obvious to me a few years ago” (p. 15). By restating what he took to be obvious, Lewis’s
sought to provide a set of simple guidelines for understanding the meaning of the cultural landscape, and for using that meaning
– gleaned from “reading” the landscape (that is, careful observation and inductive reasoning) – to come to some conclusions
about American culture. For him, aesthetic judgments about the landscape were secondary.
Between 1890 and 1914, California agriculture rapidly shifted from extensive to intensive crops, emerging as one of the world's major suppliers of Mediterranean products. Based on an analysis of new data on price and quantity movements, this article calls into question the traditional emphasis on changes in transportation, water, and labor market conditions as explanations for California's transformation. It argues that increases in fruit supply outpaced increases in demand and that declining farm interest rates and biological learning played crucial, if relatively neglected, roles in the intensification process.