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WorkstruggledeathandgeographiesofjusticeThetransformationoflandscapeinandbeyondCaliforniasimperialvalley.pdf

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Landscape Research

ISSN: 0142-6397 (Print) 1469-9710 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/clar20

Work, struggle, death, and geographies of justice: The transformation of landscape in and beyond California's imperial valley

Don Mitchell

To cite this article: Don Mitchell (2007) Work, struggle, death, and geographies of justice: The transformation of landscape in and beyond California's imperial valley, Landscape Research, 32:5, 559-577, DOI: 10.1080/01426390701552704

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01426390701552704

Published online: 04 Oct 2007.

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Work, Struggle, Death, and Geographies of Justice: The Transformation of Landscape in and beyond California’s Imperial Valley

DON MITCHELL Department of Geography, Syracuse University, USA

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relation between labor, social struggle, and circulation (of capital and bodies) in the production of landscapes. Focusing on California’s Imperial Valley and the stark relation there between living labor and dead laborers, and thus between the trans- formation of nature (the subject of labor) and systems of social reproduction, the paper examines the ways in which the real material conditions for justice—and injustice—are actively built into the ground.

KEY WORDS: Agriculture, California, justice, labor, violence

‘‘Labour is the living, form-giving fire. . .’’ (Marx, Grundrisse, 1973, p. 361)

‘‘. . . by incorporating living labor with their dead substance, the capitalist at the same time converts value, i.e. past, materialized, and dead labour into capital, into value big with value, a live monster that is fruitful and multiplies.’’ (Marx, Capital, 1987, p. 189)

In his classic study of the Columbia River, The Organic Machine, Richard White (1995) productively develops the metaphor of work. He focuses on the way that differently organized systems of energy intersect—the work of the river in its channel, the salmon pushing their way up stream, the fisher-people with their nets along the shore, the concrete pourers, metal workers, and engineers building dams to turn the river’s work into a human use-value, the great power lines marching across the Palouse and mountains to the cities. His point is that the intersection of these different systems of work and energy, together with their historical development and change (over both the short and long terms), structure forms of life and construct

Correspondence Address: Don Mitchell, Department of Geography, Maxwell School, Syracuse University,

Syracuse, NY 13244, USA. Email: [email protected]

Landscape Research, Vol. 32, No. 5, 559 – 577, October 2007

ISSN 0142-6397 Print/1469-9710 Online/07/050559-19 � 2007 Landscape Research Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080/01426390701552704

nature as it is. Nature and forms of life are produced in these interactions and therefore what the interactions are and how they are structured is crucial to how nature and life are produced and transformed.

Putting work—or labor—at the center of theories of life and nature is not new, of course (though White’s development of these theories in Organic Machine is particularly brilliant). Marx, of course, worked from an ontology of labor that similarly tried to understand what he called the ‘‘metabolic’’ relations between nature (including nature-as-energy) and labor. He argued that products of nature are rarely given to us in a form appropriate ‘‘to particular human wants’’ (Marx, 1987, p. 50). Even the fish in the Columbia have to be caught and prepared. Labor creates use-value—useful nature—and thus ‘‘is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life’’ (Marx, 1987, p. 50). Of course, Marx’s point is that while ‘‘useful labor’’ is ‘‘eternal,’’ and a ‘‘necessity,’’ the form it takes is historical and contingent. It is the result of both a long history of struggle (that in most general terms created the present moment) and the more immediate and local struggles that give labor its local morphology.

The critical questions about the metabolic relations between labor and nature, therefore, are ones of intent and form: why is labor done, and what is the shape and structure of the labor process? Under a system of capitalist commodity production, of course, the purpose of labor is to produce surplus value: to make a profit. And in this system, in which profit-oriented commodity production is hegemonic, even reproductive labor is tied up in the commodity-production process. The form of the labor process is determined by struggles over exploitation. Commodity production is necessarily exploitative, or there would be no surplus value. The degrees and modes of exploitation, however, undergo constant transformation (in part through the unyielding pressures of competition). And so too is reproductive labor organized into more-or-less exploitative relations, based in gender, age, race, and other factors.

1

In turn, the production of commodities for exchange—for the realization of surplus value—means that the spatial relationships that govern commodity production are constantly being transformed. Commodity exchange is expansive and so is the scale of social relations defined by it: ‘‘The exchange of commodities,’’ Marx (1987, p. 114) argues, ‘‘breaks through all local and personal bounds inseparable from direct barter, and develops the circulation of the products of social labor; . . . it develops a whole network of social relations spontaneous in their growth and entirely beyond the control of the actors.’’ And because it breaks these bounds and requires what are now impersonal relations, ‘‘Circulation sweats money from every pore,’’ as Marx (1987, p. 114) puts it.

The way circulation sweats money is a question of struggle. As White shows in his study of the Columbia, race and gender divisions ‘‘subdivided the river’’ in various ways. But in particular class struggle was determinant. Or as he metonymically put it: ‘‘How and where men caught fish reflected a class struggle’’ (White, 1995, p. 39). That is to say, where and what kind of productive work was done was a function of where and how people struggled over how it was to be done. The nature of the river—literally—was a function of class (and race and gender) struggles as they

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intersected with the physical and energetic properties of the river itself. Yet as brilliant as it is, one of the shortcomings of Organic Machine as a study of the Columbia as a system of ‘work,’ is that it does not develop enough the degree to which this work is a product of forces and relations beyond the river and its immediate environs. It remains too local a study. Even as ‘circulation’ is a critical aspect of White’s analysis, the scale of circulation is not wide enough. If we want to understand the Columbia as both a space of work and a space of struggle, and if we want to understand how these intersect to produce and transform nature, then it is important to expand the scope of analysis to see how the kinds of local struggles and applications of energy White examines intersect with larger scale processes. White notes in passing, for example, the way that the Bonneville Power Project created new farmland, but he says nothing of how this farmland then required the development of labor sources—the recruitment of labor power— thousands of miles away in Mexico. The local energy stored behind the Bonneville dam, to put the point in slightly different terms, required distant sources of energy in order to be complete.

My hope in this paper, therefore, is to suggest some ways of expanding the scope of analysis by focusing on circulation, and by focusing particularly on the ways that specific, often local struggles intersect with wider scale processes to determine the morphology of that circulation in the transformation of landscape in a particular locale. The locale that will ground the discussion is not the Columbia, but California’s agricultural valleys, especially the Imperial, and the circulation examined will be not only of commodities, but also of labor. And when the examination focuses on struggle, it will especially focus on those moments when the struggle seems hopeless, lonely, or even non-existent, for those seeming moments of stasis might be the most important of all in determining the morphology of the labor that transforms nature within capitalism. That is to say, what I hope to show in this paper is that understanding how nature is produced and transformed under capitalism requires not just labor as ‘‘living, form-giving fire,’’ but particularly labor when it is ‘‘past . . . dead’’—for dead labor is the shape that not only the landscape, but also the possibility for justice takes.

Holtville

Richard White (1995) shows, so clearly, that any place, and region, is a function of expended energy, that is, of kinetic energy—of movement, motion, circulation. Mobility, of hands and limbs, of whole bodies, together with the movement of rivers and soils and animals is, thus, fundamental, basic. Consider this point, then, from a perspective of absolute stillness, a stillness broken only by the rushing wind (an expenditure of energy that does not feel at all productive). Consider it while the sun beats down on you and temperatures exceed a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Consider it from the perspective not of life, but of death. Consider it while standing on the bare, swept ground of the town cemetery in Holtville in California’s Imperial Valley. Consider it while contemplating, in the hot sun and strong wind, as many as 350 low, brick-sized gravestones that march across the desert floor (San Diego Union Tribune, 4 September 2005; Ellingwood, 2004). There are only two names on these stones, John Doe and Jane Doe, for those who are buried there—those who are no longer

Work, Struggle, Death, and Geographies of Justice 561

able to organize the energy of their own bodies but who are perhaps now giving sustenance to billions of microbes and hundreds of burrowing animals, their once human energy being recycled now for other uses of nature—those who are buried there in Holtville are as anonymous as they are dead (Figure 1). Most are probably Mexican nationals; others are from Guatemala or Honduras. All died while trying to cross the severe desert and dangerous mountains that mark the US – Mexico border region in eastern California. All seem to represent the very antithesis of productive labor, of intersecting systems of energy that Richard White so beautifully revealed (in all their deep complexity and contradiction) in the Columbia basin. All these lives, these hundreds of anonymous dead, seem like such a waste.

And to Imperial County, they seem like such an expensive waste. Taxpayers in Imperial County, which in terms of tax revenue is the poorest in California, pay for an autopsy on the body of every unidentified dead migrant recovered between the San Diego County line in the mountains to the west, to the border with Arizona in the east. The County expected to pay at least $30 000 in 2004 for autopsies alone (LeDuff, 2004). The autopsies are conducted at the insistence of the Mexican government, which claims it cannot afford to offset these costs, in part because it is faced with similar costs for those migrants who die on its side of the border. In addition to the autopsy, Imperial Country taxpayers pay nearly $1 000 for each coffin; they pay for transportation to the cemetery; and they pay for a cemetery plot

Figure 1. What can only be a new mass grave at the Holtville Cemetery. The older part of the cemetery contains individual plots. This newer part seems not to. Photograph by Jay Johnson- Castro, February 2007, used by permission.

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for each unidentified migrant. For some they pay for months of cold storage at a mortuary, while the Mexican government seeks to identify the body – checking with people across the country who have heard nothing since their brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, husbands and fathers started their trek to El Norte. Or, the County is supposed to pay for such cold storage. It is not uncommon to hear local funeral directors complaining that they rarely get reimbursed (LeDuff, 2004).

Next to some of the brick-sized headstones lean old, faded plastic flowers. Near others slouch crumbling wooden crosses placed near some of the graves several years ago by immigrant rights groups. The Holtville paupers’ cemetery tends to draw attention from immigrants rights groups and from journalists. An evocative view of the cemetery and what it means opens Ken Ellingwood’s excellent recent book Hard Line: Life and Death on the US – Mexico Border (2004), for example, and the New York Times has reported on the cemetery (LeDuff, 2004). Activists make it a frequent stop on their borderland tours. But, really, the cemetery is just a small outpost in the geography of death that is the US – Mexico border. In the little more than a decade since the US Border Patrol implemented its much-heralded ‘Operation Gatekeeper,’ a program of border hardening and stepped-up enforcement in metropolitan San Diego that sent illegal border crossers deeper into the mountains, canyons, and deserts of the eastern part of the state (and beyond into Arizona and New Mexico, now the most important front in the on-going border wars), deaths along the border have risen to more than one a day (Nevins, 2002). Between October 2004 and October 2005, 472 border crossers were known to have died; 441 died in the following 12 months. Nobody knows how many immigrants make it across safely; but more than a million undocumented immigrants are now arrested in the United States and deported every year.

2 This leads many experts to guess that at least three million a

year survive the crossing and elude the border patrol. There are, by generally accepted estimates, some 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

For all those who attempt the crossing—not just the dead—there is a clear bodily cost, which besides death is counted in increased assaults, rapes, robbery, severe dehydration, sub-lethal hypo- and hyperthermia, dehydration, exposure, snake and insect bites, infections from crossing toxic canals, and other maladies. There is also a much higher monetary cost as the prices that coyotes charge to usher migrants across the border have risen as rapidly as the danger of the crossing has increased (Andreas, 2000; Ellingwood, 2004; Mitchell, 2001, 2002, 2003; Nevins, 2002). And for those who make it across alive and relatively unscathed, there is every incentive to do all they can to assure they never have to make the journey again: it is just too costly. Many, therefore, truly disappear into the US economy, collecting wages under the table, never reporting employment or other abuses, doing all they can to avoid the scanning gaze of La Migra.

3

A small outpost in the geography of death, the Holville cemetery is a huge metaphor for the economy—the organization of energy, if you will—of the Imperial Valley and beyond. What looks like the antithesis of the productive labor, the antithesis of systems of energy intersecting to create something useful out of nature, is, I want to suggest, a crucial part of those systems of energy, and of that economy. The 400 or so yearly deaths along the US – Mexico border, the dozens of anonymous deaths each year (including those in the Imperial), the maiming and injuring of so many more: these are not by-products or unfortunate accidents or a tragic waste.

Work, Struggle, Death, and Geographies of Justice 563

They are instead, the vital foundation upon which the US economy, and therefore the production and transformation of nature is now founded. If a site of work—the Columbia basin or the Imperial Valley—is always a space of struggle, then we need also to understand the absolutely vital role played by these spaces no longer of struggle—like the paupers’ cemetery in Holtville. If the transformation of nature and the production of use and exchange values is always and everywhere a function of the expenditure of labor—the life giving force of living labor, in Marx’s terms—then it is equally, and not at all metaphorically, also a function of dead labor: labor dead in its most literal sense.

Dead Labor and the Reproduction of Labor Power

For his part, Marx used the notion of dead labor almost entirely metaphorically. It is not a less important concept for this metaphorical use, but I do think it is an incomplete one, for the capitalist transformation of nature at least as it is currently configured relies not just on the metaphorical transformation of living into dead labor, but also the outright and systematic killing of living laborers (see Mitchell, 2000).

For Marx, ‘dead labor’ is the labor power—the expended energy—‘congealed’ in a commodity. It is ‘‘labor materialized’’ or ‘‘labor incorporated with its subject’’ (Marx, 1987, p. 176). It is White’s work and energy, but work and energy that has been trapped, metamorphosed from its kinetic back to its potential form. That is, through work, energy is transferred to raw materials and something new is shaped. That energy, minus some waste, is ‘frozen’ or ‘solidified’ in the commodity. Struggle—both direct struggle with materials and the more diffuse and perhaps even abstract struggle that is social relations—is staunched, given body in the form of a commodity.

4 Marx makes it clear that while capital is always a relationship, its form is

always the form of dead labor—labor past, materialized, and realized through exchange (though maybe now represented merely as slips of paper or electronic impulses). In production capital is created and shaped. Marx is at pains to show, however, that at a certain level of accumulation, and given capitalist relations of exploitation, the relation between living and dead labor—usually thought of as a process whereby living ‘form-giving’ labor goes to work on ‘past, materialized, and dead’ labor to create a new commodity (newly dead labor)—becomes one where the dead labor dominates. ‘‘Instead of being consumed by him as material elements of his productive activity,’’ Marx (1987, p. 294) writes, ‘‘they [commodities or materialized labor; that is, capital] consume him as a ferment necessary to their own life-process, and the life process of capital consists only in its movement as value constantly expanding, constantly multiplying itself. Furnaces and workshops that stand idle by night, and absorb no living labor,’’ Marx concludes, ‘‘are ‘a mere loss’ to the capitalist’’ (Marx 1987, p. 294). Dead labor, in other words, comes to command living labor. As such, it demands living labor of a particular quality, and of a particular form.

And yet dead labor of this kind—that is, dead labor congealed into value—is always dead labor—that is, value—at risk (Harvey, 1989). Stockpiled commodities, for example, run the risk of finding no outlet in the market (if, for example, a market is saturated, or if there is an economic crisis); or stockpiled commodities might be under-cut by commodities produced by new, and cheaper means of production or

564 D. Mitchell

relations of labor, and therefore have to trade at below their value. Or stockpiled commodities might spoil, or be made obsolete, or otherwise deteriorate in quality before they can be sold. Similarly, all the value—all the dead labor—frozen into machinery in the factory, machinery so large and expensive that its rates of depreciation are measured in decades rather than years, might be surpassed by new technologies, by cheaper deployments of the same machinery in distant lands, or other processes that make the machinery literally useless—as the residents of deindustrialized steel towns like Youngstown, Ohio, or Johnstown or Homestead, Pennsylvania know only too well (Lincoln & Russo, 2003).

In agriculture—the struggle to directly transform living nature into something useful—risks to dead labor are even more acute. Not just the dead labor materialized in farm machinery or prepared land or elaborate out-buildings is at risk.

5 So too, and

acutely, is the dead labor embodied in the very crops themselves. In his brilliant study, California and the Fictions of Capital, George Henderson (1998) traces through the implications of a fairly simple, but nonetheless startling fact: unlike a lot of other commodities (Reidel crystal wine glasses or Anchor-Hocking whisky tumblers, for example) agricultural commodities (wine grapes or barley and corn) while dead labor, are also living things. Capital, Henderson notes, circulates through all commodities. There is therefore a certain ‘circulation time’ for capital as it moves from the hands of capitalist investors, through the purchase of raw materials, the activation of machinery and the application of labor, into the commodities themselves, on to the marketplace, and then, when the wine grapes and corn, or Reidels and Anchor-Hockings have been sold, and their purchasers are pleasantly tipsy, back into the hands of the capitalist investors. But, unlike in the making of glasses, which can be a continuous process, in agriculture—the growing of grapes or barley or corn, or tree crops like oranges or pears—nature directly intervenes and slows the whole process down. In Henderson’s (1998) terms, and thinking in terms of capital’s smooth circulation through the production and exchange process, nature becomes an obstacle. It is an obstacle because growing requires time, and usually lots of it: months for corn, and years for grapes and oranges just to get established, followed by long months each year as fruit matures.

For theorists such as Susan Mann and James Dickenson (1978; Mann, 1990), nature-as-obstacle means that agricultural production is either incompletely, or perhaps more accurately, differentially capitalist, since ‘‘capitalist development progresses most rapidly in those spheres where production time can be successfully reduced and where the gap between production time and labor time can be minimized’’ (Mann, 1990, p. 34, quoted in Henderson, 1998, p. 31). Labor time is defined by Henderson as ‘‘the time capital spends embodied in labor’’—that is in working time (Henderson, 1998, p. 31). The problem here is that for much of the production time of most crops, labor is idle and so capital that is embodied in labor is also idle. Little or no labor is needed during the growing period, but significant amounts are needed for preparation and planting and often massive amounts are needed for harvesting. Just as importantly, farm machinery, itself embodied dead labor—value not in motion—also stands idle. Because of this lag time, the kinds of risks I noted earlier for all commodities are doubly acute for agricultural commodities. And not only that, but unlike wine glasses or whisky tumblers working their way down the assembly line, while crops are growing, nature can

Work, Struggle, Death, and Geographies of Justice 565

intervene in a particular direct way: grapes can whither, corn can rust. Moreover, the risk of pests, disease, drought or flood all compound over time. Agricultural crops, as we all know, are vulnerable.

The only choice for capitalist agriculture is to find ways to deal with nature—to struggle with it and at best to bend it in its own direction—since nature is an obstacle that can never be fully overcome. Dead labor may, in capitalism, come to dominate living labor (Marx, 1987), but living nature will always put dead labor—that is, value, capital—at risk. In California the attempts to bend nature towards industrialized agriculture—to decrease the risk of mismatched production and labor times—are well known. On the one side, there is the long history of horticultural experimentation that has created new varietals (and now new genetic configurations) (Sackman, 2005; Stoll, 1998; Walker, 2004); that has led to the massive application of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers; and that has helped organize the state into what Dick Walker (2004, p. 1) calls ‘‘probably the most intensely farmed landscape in the world outside the tropic rice zones and the most prosperous agricultural region of the advanced industrial nations.’’ Together with the massive redirection of water from the Sierra snow pack and Colorado river to the deserts and semi-deserts of the Imperial Valley, the Inland Empire, and the San Joaquin Valley, this horticultural experimentation, this huge injection of capital into agriculture, has made California the leading producer on some 76 crops and a commercial producer of perhaps 300 (Martin, 2003; Walker, 2004). It has created an agricultural landscape of stunning diversity. But it has also created one of high degrees of monotony, as lending institutions and other investors have favored the stability—and the gains in environmental knowledge—that monocropping produces (Guthman, 2004; Hender- son, 1998; Sackman, 2005; Stoll, 1998; Walker, 2004). Crops, in California, are almost never diverse at the scale of the field, and rarely diverse even at the scale of the district. And so, in the words of Steven Stoll (1998, p. xiv), California’s single- crop district-based agriculture ‘‘is an enormous event in the history of the North American environment’’ that requires ‘‘a division of labor and also a high degree of interdependence between regional economies, business firms, government agencies, and individuals.’’

And thus, on the other side, a very particular kind of labor system has been developed to match and work this highly capitalist-intensive, but still nature- dominated agriculture. Carey McWilliams once called California’s agricultural labor system the state’s own ‘‘peculiar institution,’’ and, given high rates of debt peonage, and even the outright use of slave labor at times, his allusion to slavery is often more apt than one might assume. Intensive, industrial agriculture requires massive amount of labor power, but only for short periods of time. For that reason, what Marx (Vol. 2, p. 238 in Henderson, 1998, p. 41) calls ‘‘the natural limitations of the labour- power itself’’ are, like the risks that beset commodities not in motion, doubly acute in agriculture. Just as labor time in agriculture does not match the natural production time of crop commodities, so too does the wage-worker’s own bodily ‘‘production time exceed [. . .] its time as variable capital embodied in labor’’ (Henderson, 1998, p. 41). As Henderson (1998, p. 41) notes, ‘‘Workers are sites of biological processes and energy flows for which capital has only partial substitutions . . . They are themselves obstacles to capitalism. Bodies persist. That they are waged bodies is a capitalist solution. That they are waged bodies is a capitalist problem.’’ The capitalist

566 D. Mitchell

problem of waged bodies, is, in fact, the same as it is for cash crops: how to bend nature—or work around it—so that bodies, or crops, do one’s bidding. But the solution to this problem is different. If the solution to the problem of a mismatch between crop production time and wage-labor work time—that problem of all the time when crops are at risk—is a massive infusion of capital into horticultural experimentation, advances in refrigeration and other means of slowing rot, or the reengineering of nature through canal construction, elaborate drainage systems, smudge pots, genetic modification and the like (Guthman, 2004; Pisani, 1984; Sackman, 2005; Stoll, 1998; Walker, 2004), then the solution to the problem of the mismatch between agricultural labor time and the reproduction time of agricultural labor power is just the opposite: a massive disinvestment in laborers and the constant cultivation instead of a continually different labor force (Daniel, 1981; Galarza, 1964; Majka & Majka, 1983; McWilliams, 1939; Mitchell, 1996). To put that more simply, the solution to the problem of the reproduction of labor power in California has been precisely to assure that it is not reproduced, but instead is continually replaced.

And replaced is the correct word. The seasonal demands for labor in California are staggering. Some 800 000 different individuals may have been hired for farm work in California in the year 2000. But in the peak month (September) there were only 486 000 people working; in the trough month (February) there were 312 600 (Martin, 2003). What this implies is a huge turnover, and therefore a huge surplus army of labor available for farm employers. What it really means is that farm employers usually pay for farm labor-power well below its value (see Fuller, 1939; Furillo, 2001; Martin, 2003), which is defined as the cost to reproduce that labor- power. And what that really means—what paying labor below its value really means—is that farm work is, literally, deadly, or it means that its reproduction costs are paid elsewhere, or that labor power is simply reproduced through the most expedient means, by always hiring fresh labor and counting on it always being readily available—that is, by assuring that the labor force is always turning over and any individual laborer is, on average, completely expendable, a mere embodiment of (fully replaceable) labor power. Of course, in California, the farm labor market is defined by all three of these processes: labor is maimed and killed, labor is reproduced elsewhere, and labor is fully replaceable. These are just different aspects of the same process.

Dead Labor

So, first, farm labor is deadly both in the short and long term. Mortality rates for agricultural workers are more than five-and-a-half times the national average, and the average life-span for farm workers is 49 years compared to the average 74 (Myers & Hard, 1995, in Mitchell, 2001). The working life of agricultural workers is even shorter. In addition, debilitating injury is common. In a single year, 1990, some 5.5% of the California agricultural work force reported acute, disabling work- related injuries.

6 Because so few undocumented, and in fact even few documented,

workers will report injuries for fear of deportation, reprimand, or just because the resources available to do so do not exist, this estimate of 5.5% is likely significantly low. And then there are the chronic injuries and illnesses. Farmworkers, perhaps ironically, have the highest rate of malnutrition in the country (National Advisory

Work, Struggle, Death, and Geographies of Justice 567

Council on Migrant Health, 1995), and highly elevated rates of respiratory disorders, cancer, mental illness, and, of course, chronic back injuries (Arcury & Quandt, 1998). The highest rates of infant mortality in the US are found in agricultural counties. Perhaps surprisingly, about 25% of agricultural work in the US is done by children; but, perhaps unsurprisingly knowing that, children account for a much higher percentage of agricultural workplace fatalities and injuries in California (Bugarin & Lopez, 1998; Wilk, 1993).

These sorts of deaths and injuries are, in some ways, legible. But there is also the slower rot encouraged at the heart of the agricultural labor force that is sometimes harder to see. Between 1975 and 1995, real wages in the California fields and orchards declined at least 20 to 25% (Majka & Majka, 1983; Rothenberg, 1998; Villarejo & Runstan, 1993), and, with the rise of the contract labor system coupled with the California Employment Development Department’s decisions to stop collecting wage information, the decline is probably far steeper than official reports indicate (Bugarin & Lopez, 1998; Wells, 1996). The decline is certainly steeper in crops like raisins and strawberries where sharecropping systems have been reintroduced in recent years. Or consider that wine sitting so prettily in your Reidel burgundy glass, catching the light just so. The grapes from which it was made were quite likely picked by farm hands paid less than the minimum wage: not less than a living wage, which is common enough, but less than the legal minimum wage. In 1998 some 35% of wine growers freely admitted to state agents that they paid below minimum wage. And if that number is the number of those who admit to breaking the law, it is a safe guess that the actual number is far higher (Furillo, 2001).

Given all that I have just said—that farmers rely on a constant over supply of labor, that injury and death are an integral part of agricultural life, and especially of agricultural profit, and that they freely and openly defy state and federal law in their operations—then the reason that lonely paupers’ cemetery in Holtville exists, and is filling so rapidly, becomes clear: it is not a symbol of the failure of the reproduction of agricultural (and other) labor power, but exactly of its success. It is a clear representation of the means by which California growers mediate the disconnection between production times and working times. But it is more than a representation, more than a symbol: it is part of the disciplinary means by which such reproduction takes place. ‘‘In contradistinction . . . to other commodities,’’ Marx (1987, p. 168) has written, ‘‘there enters into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral element.’’ Holtville is history, and morality, with a vengeance. But it is not the sum of its geography. Marx (1987, p. 168) goes on to argue the obvious: that

the owner of labor-power is mortal . . . The labor-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear and death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labor-power. Hence the sum of the means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the labourer’s substitutes, i.e. his children . . .

But, and this is the crucial point, not in California: there is nothing that says that the place of reproduction must be the same as the place of production, or that any given laborers must be reproduced.

568 D. Mitchell

Displaced Reproduction

Which brings us to the second point: in California, agricultural labor has always been reproduced elsewhere. It is fair to say that California agriculture has never locally paid the costs of labor reproduction (Fuller, 1939; George, 1871; Mitchell, 1996; Walker, 2004). Labor has never been paid for at its value. Indeed, California farms are capitalized on the assumption that it will never have to be (Fisher, 1953; Fuller, 1939). From the beginning, labor importation, and especially the cultivation and importation of a labor surplus, has been the rule. This story is well known: it is the story of labor contractors scouring the Chinese and Japanese countryside (and the passage of the alien land law and various exclusion agreements to assure workers remained workers—and as powerless as possible) (Daniels, 1977; Saxton, 1971, but see Chan, 1986). It is the story of contractors advertising back east for mythical jobs and drawing double and triple the number of workers needed for local harvests—as in Wheatland, the site of the famous strike and riot in 1913 (Daniel, 1981; McWilliams, 1939; Mitchell, 1996). It is the story of the direct importation of Mexican workers, sometimes under armed guard and housed in what growers and government agents freely called concentration camps during the First World War (Mitchell, 1996). It is the story of the systematic cultivation of large pools of Mexican labor, displaced by revolution, land reform, and depression in Mexico and brought north in response to the Immigration Acts of the 1920s, displacing local workers, and serving as growers’ dream labor supply—a dream labor supply, that is, until Mexican workers started to organize and strike at the end of the decade, at which time they—and many Mexican Americans—were deported en masse (Daniel, 1981; McWilliams, 1939). It is the story of the Mexican worker’s displacement by white workers tractored out of their farms in the Dust Bowl and enticed west by ingenious advertising and the promise of a better life (Gregory, 1991). It is the story of the Bracero program, when the US government became the creator and regulator of a constant oversupply of labor, in part by always finding ways to see that official contract labor was strongly supplemented by undocumented, so-called ‘wetback’ labor (Calavita, 1992; Galarza, 1964).

7 And now, it is the story of a militarized, but

highly porous border coupled with the rapid restructuring of the Mexican countryside induced through NAFTA and other, more systemic, capitalist, process (Andreas, 2000; Ellingwood, 2004; Nevins, 2002).

What all these eras in the history of California labor procurement hold in common is that much—in fact most—labor power is reproduced elsewhere. Costs of child- rearing, education, much health care, care for the elderly, food and shelter for much of a worker’s life—all those things that are essential to labor power because, as Henderson says, ‘bodies persist’—are borne not in California but in Mexico, or Japan, or Arkansas or even in Sweden. Predominantly these days, of course, it is Mexico that bears these costs, and which, in essence, provides a massive subsidy to American, and especially Californian, agriculture. This is not to deny that waged work in California fields doesn’t work back on the Mexican homeland, sometimes to quite positive effects. Remittances pay for new housing, improvements in schools, support of elderly parents or young children—but they never do so fully (Rothenberg, 1998). Remittances, and other exogenous economic and social forces, also uproot people by the millions, sending steady streams north to attempt the

Work, Struggle, Death, and Geographies of Justice 569

border crossing in hopes of landing a job that, however bad, might be better than what they do not have at home. California agriculture plans on this. It always has.

Replaced Labor—Remade Landscapes

And that brings us to the third point: fresh labor always is available to California agribusiness. While many growers prize their skilled laborers—those who are best at carefully trimming strawberry plants (Wells, 1996) or pruning walnuts—they also simply want abundant workers at harvest time. And they want those laborers to go away when the picking is done (since settled labor, not working, is a burden, an added cost of production, even if such costs are pawned off on local taxpayers). And here, the border—that zone of danger and death and struggle—plays a crucial role in regulating this supply of labor. By being open, it allows large quantities of labor in; by being deadly, it assures that labor is largely powerless (Mitchell, 2001, 2002; Nevins, 2002). It also—and this is obviously socially and economically contradictory and a key area of intra-capitalist struggle—tends to trap de-powered workers on this side of the border, creating exceptionally large pools of surplus labor. The contradiction, of course, is that this can tend to localize the reproduction costs of the surplus army. The answer, equally as obvious, has been to assure that such surplus labor is always ‘illegal’ and therefore ineligible to much of the even minimal benefits—schooling, hospital care, labor-law protection, elder care—normally available to those resident in the US.

8 This contradiction is clearly evident in the

graveyard in Holtville. As the New York Times reports, burying unidentified, undocumented border crossers is expensive, and it is straining the budget of what the Times calls the poorest county in California (LeDuff, 2004). But here’s the contradiction: that poorest county is, in fact, the tenth richest in terms of agricultural production—down from its high-water mark of second place in 1959, to be sure, but still, by US and global standards, staggeringly productive and wealthy (Walker, 2004). The problem, of course, is that the taxpayers of the Imperial, are shouldering more than their share of keeping California—and America—awash in below-value labor.

If we want to understand the Holtville cemetery—if we want to understand this place no longer of struggle within the larger spaces of struggle—then we need to understand it in this context. It is a node in a network of relations of production and reproduction that extend from the employers in the north and east, south into source villages of Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras (Mitchell, 2001). It is where migration and the flows of capital—those embodiments of dead labor, those congelations of energy—become landscape: literally. They become the landscapes of the fields and of the ramshackle towns that comprise the region. But they also become the landscapes of the cemetery. The cemetery no doubt marks the keenest failure imaginable of the reproduction of labor power at least from the view of the workers themselves: it is after all a site of death, a site that represents anonymous, brutal, undoubtedly excruciatingly painful death; a site that stands as mute testimony to the end, not the beginning, of dreams, the only representation there is of the bitter, rapid disillusionment the migrants must have experienced as their dreams turned to dust, their lives extinguished in a system that desperately needs, if not them (for they are

570 D. Mitchell

truly expendable), then millions just like them. In that way it also represents the real success of the California labor reproduction system, at least from the point of view of capital.

We often imagine the contemporary landscape to be defined by ephemerality and mobility, and the emphasis I have been placing on energy and circulation seems to confirm this. But there is no better place to understand the point of this ephemerality and mobility, this constant circulation of capital and bodies, than from among the headstones in Holtville. For there, it becomes clear, the landscape—this transforma- tion of nature—and the social relations that it shapes and is shaped by is not only ephemeral and mobile. It is also of a horrific permanence: the permanence of death. It is dead labor of the rawest sort. It is where all that is solid that melts into air, as Marx famously described capitalism, is made solid once again. The cemetery, in this sense, is part and parcel of a system of social reproduction that extends across borders and throughout the region.

Imperial Valley: Desert Landscape, Desert Justice

Part of a hemispheric, or even global, network of circulating bodies and capital, the cemetery is also very much part of the Imperial Valley. The Imperial is a place where the formidability, the inhospitability, of the desert becomes clear. This is a formidability and inhospitability that has long been recognized. Rich in minerals and crossed by the transcontinental railroad, the Imperial nonetheless remained very sparsely populated by Euro-Americans and Mexicans to the end of the 19th century, and the border running through it was little more than a line on a map (see Andres, 2003). Yet, pockets of sand dunes notwithstanding, it was the home to vast slopes and plains of rich alluvial solids, and its exceptionally long growing season gave it a potential for off-season fresh vegetable growing on a massive scale hardly possible elsewhere in the US. All it lacked was water (and once water was there, the labor to plant and pick the abundant crop that surely would follow). The question for early 20th century speculators and boosters, therefore, was how to harness the water of the Colorado River, bring it west and make the desert bloom: the question was how to harness this organic machine to the wants and needs of capital (Henderson, 1998; Hundley, 1992; Pisani, 1984; Worster, 1985).

And, as George Henderson (1998) so brilliantly shows, it was capital that called the shots in the Imperial, but it was in particular, speculator’s capital (see also Andres, 2003). At first speculation centered on creating a settler-farmer frontier, but the river seemed to have other ideas. Periodically over its history (and as is now well-known), the river rerouted itself: instead of emptying into the Gulf of California, it reversed course and emptied into the below sea level Salton Sink. The original irrigation plans called for making that northward flow permanent, and controlled. The California Development Corporation thus built some sixty miles of canals both in the US and in Mexico and by 1905 there were some 120 000 acres of irrigated land in the Imperial Valley and the white population had grown from 2 000 to 14 000 (Henderson, 1998). To expand this irrigation, the US Reclamation Service cut a bypass in one of the canals just south of the border in 1904. Within a year, the bypass had been overwhelmed, and the flooding Colorado threatened to make the Salton Sink its permanent terminus—which, whatever its ecological

Work, Struggle, Death, and Geographies of Justice 571

effects, would clearly ruin the dream of making the desert bloom as an agricultural wonderland.

The story of re-containing the Colorado has often and very well been told, 9 but the

outcome deserves restating. With the hole in the canal repaired, Henderson (1998, p. 180) argues, the ‘‘Valley finally got its water, but the accompanying structures and institutions were not those of the small-farmer empire’’ the early speculators had envisioned. What it got instead was a particularly extreme version of what the California Commission of Immigration and Housing called ‘Fordism in the Fields’ (Mitchell, 1996, p. 116). Some of the land in the Imperial was owned by absentee landlords, worked, as much as anything, like branch plants in far-flung industrial empires; but much of it was leased land farmed by proxies of giant, diversified agricultural producers—the prototype of much of California’s agro-industrial structure to this day (Liebman, 1983; Walker, 2004). Farm labor was increasingly Taylorized, and a spatial division of labor marked not only the specific Imperial landscape, but also the Valley’s place within the larger California agricultural landscape. For example, the H. P. Guerin company, one of the big growers in the Imperial, owned only some 1 300 acres of its own farmland around the state in the 1930s, but it still managed to employ a labor force that averaged 1 240 workers a month (and 2 150 at peak harvest time) who commanded some $1.5 million in wages, and who across the state picked and packed some 12 different crops ranging from lettuce, peas and carrots, to soft fruits, to sugar beet. H. P. Guerin did all this, in the Imperial and elsewhere, by working out specific lease arrangements with more than 30 separate farms and orchards and recruiting heavily for labor in the Philippines, Mexico, and elsewhere—and by assuring that this labor kept moving: traveling up and down the state as different crops matured in different locations at different times (Mitchell, 1996). H. P. Guerin (and others) put labor into circulation just as surely as they put capital into circulation. The circulatory paths for labor often began and ended in the Imperial, the gateway to the Mexican countryside where labor was reproduced.

As with any modern industrial system, the Imperial agricultural landscape—that first and last stop on the California migratory trail (Andres, 2003; Daniel, 1981)— was quite violent. Besides, and because of, the violence of malnutrition, poisoning and injury already noted, the Imperial Valley saw violence of a more direct sort. It was (and to a large extent remains) a home (both permanent and temporary) to a large and militant Mexican working class that organized much earlier and more fully than elsewhere in the state, perhaps because it was such a key location on the labor circuit and because the industrialization of agricultural production was so advanced (Daniel, 1981; McWilliams, 1939). In 1928, Mexican workers in the cantaloupe fields struck. Growers responded by decrying the ‘foreignness’ of the Mexican and Mexican-American workers and supported government attempts to deport them—all the while organizing Filipino strikebreakers and warning that they were mobilizing ‘‘thousands of Mexican workers who are ready to come to the Imperial at short notice and seize your work’’ (quoted in Mitchell, 1996, p. 125). The strike quickly ended, but labor unrest arose again two years later when communist- led unions were successful at organizing Filipino and Mexican workers together. The strike that resulted was exceptionally violent—on the part of growers, who eventually broke the strike by a combination of direct violence and getting the

572 D. Mitchell

Mexican consulate to falsely promise land grants to any workers who returned to Mexico. These strikes were crucial to establishing not just the shape of Imperial Valley agriculture—the morphology of dead labor—but also the landscape’s success as a capitalist frontier (Mitchell, 1996).

This point was driven home with double force in 1933 – 1934, during the lettuce and pea harvests. Egged on by syndicates of large growers, smaller, leasehold farmers in the Valley, who were feeling the depression keenly and whose fixed capital costs for desert farming were high, responded to strike threats with awesome violence. As the historian Cletus Daniel (1981, p. 228) wrote:

Nowhere did farm employers and local authorities bring so much enthusiasm to their strikebreaking activities or pursue a course of violence and terror as single- mindedly and purposefully as in the Imperial Valley. The vigilantism that flourished there in 1934 was not just a strikebreaking expedient, but the highest and most graphic expression of regional and class patriotism.

That is to say, the very ability of growers to exist as a class—as a class of capitalist investors—was dependent on the ability to violently break strikes: or, as is more often the case now, to assure they never happen.

To put this in the starkest terms: the tenuous nature of making the desert bloom, to say nothing of the exceptionally high capital costs (for water, fertilizers, storage, transportation) meant that the reproduction of capital—and of course the reproduction of the agricultural landscape—required driving to as low a point as possible the cost of reproducing the labor that plants and picks the desert- blooming capital. And, as the Imperial pioneered in its strikes of 1928 through 1934 a key way to lower those costs is to geographically externalize them: to send workers packing their bags when the picking and packing of crops was done—only to be repatriated years later, perhaps, as an anonymous John or Jane Doe, found bloated or mutilated in the desert, sometimes along the very roads and trails by which their grandparents were ‘deported’ when they became too militant a few generations ago, and only to be buried in that anonymous graveyard in Holtville.

Spaces (No Longer) of Struggle

In The Organic Machine, Richard White urges us to understand the landscape in all its materiality, in its very thingness. This thingness is, he makes abundantly clear, the product of human work, ‘‘and it is our labor that ultimately links us to the river. Our labor, our energy, is the nature in us. And we harness it, just as we harness nature, to social purposes . . . Human history and the history of the river,’’ he concludes, ‘‘have merged to create the modern Columbia, which is at once a natural and social space’’ (White, 1995, p. 112). J. B. Jackson (1984, p. 150, quoted in Schein, 2003, p. 201) sharpens the point. ‘‘No landscape,’’ he wrote ‘‘can be comprehended unless we perceive it as an organization of space; unless we ask ourselves who owns or uses those spaces, how they were created, and how they change.’’ For Rich Schein (2003), this means we have to consider the normative

Work, Struggle, Death, and Geographies of Justice 573

implications of landscape—to consider, perhaps, what Marx called ‘‘the historical and moral element.’’

In Holtville, the normative implications—the normative implications of how human history and natural history have combined—seem obvious. The very fact of the paupers’ cemetery—the fact that as a landscape it just is—tells us much about contemporary systems of production and reproduction. It tells us that our current means to create an abundance of food—and an abundance of surplus value—is based on a horrible waste of lives, which is at the same time a necessary waste of labor power. It tells us this system of food production—this ability to grow both crops and capital in enormous quantities—subject as it is to crisis and tumult, nonetheless is made possible by a system of social reproduction that is hemispheric, if not global in scope.

10 It requires a vast, almost unimaginable, level of uneven

development at all scales—from the local (where the dead lay buried) to the global (where now more than three billion people live on less than $2 a day). Of the Columbia, Richard White (1995, p. 109) writes that dams, hatcheries, cities, ranches, and other human edifices are not ‘‘ugly and unnecessary blotches on a still coherent natural system. These things are now part of the river itself.’’ Similarly, the Holtville cemetery is not, as the Times puts it, ‘‘another small, hidden cost of illegal immigration’’ (LeDuff, 2004); nor is it some sort of an unfortunate part of the California agricultural system and the Imperial landscape: rather it is part of the system itself, just as necessary as pesticides and the genetic modification of tomatoes.

The struggle over landscape establishes the conditions for production and the realization of value precisely because the landscape is a lived—and died—in space. It is the landscape that makes life, and death, possible, and so its social organization is the best evidence for how we live and die—and to what end. Landscape, in other words, both expresses and naturalizes differences. Ideologically, the landscape is a means of saying: this is how they live; this is what they need; this is who they are. Ideologically, in other words, the landscape represented precisely the form of justice as it actually is. The graveyard in Holtville makes this ideology clear: it tells us much of what we need to know about the value of Mexican and Central American labor in and to the American economy. But it also seems to say, this is their problem; it is their problem that they are so desperate that they will do anything to get across the border and to the land of opportunity, even though they know, no doubt, that wages and work conditions are often very bad indeed. It is they who are voting with their feet.

Yet read differently, the cemetery also makes clear that any landscape of reproduction exists within a system of reproduction, one that in this case stretches from the villages of Mexico or Guatemala to the restaurants of Chicago, the meatpacking plants of Kearny, Nebraska, or the vineyards of Sonoma. The paupers’ cemetery in Holtville does not stand alone.

Instead, the dead labor interred at Holtville is the precondition of our plenty, of American nature’s munificence: this is how we live; this is what we need; this is who we are. It tells us that this organic machine, this live monster that is fruitful and multiplies—this space of struggle and justice—that is capitalism is built by assuring that there are always at the ready spaces no longer of struggle, spaces simply waiting to be filled with the dead labor of millions.

574 D. Mitchell

Notes

1 It is often forgotten that Marx was very clear that any of his major concepts—like exploitation—

always ‘contained’ their opposite—for example, mutualism. That is a key aspect of his dialectics. Thus,

competition necessarily always includes elements of cooperation, exploitation includes mutual benefit:

neither competition nor exploitation are possible without cooperation and mutualism.

2 Death counts are regularly reported in the press. A good analysis of the issues, causes, responses, and

unreliability of data related to these deaths is GAO (2006).

3 Like all branches of the immigration and customs services in the United States, the Border Patrol was

reorganized after 11 September 2001, and made part of the Department of Homeland Security. It is

now called Customs and Border Protection and is housed within the chillingly named Immigration and

Customs Enforcement (ICE) division. It remains universally referred to in English as the Border Patrol

and in Spanish as La Migra.

4 In Science in Action, Latour (1987) argues that the shape of any thing (including a scientific idea or a

revolutionary drug like penicillin only materializes to the degree that ‘‘controversy’’ (struggle) is

resolved. A thing, Latour says, is that which resists: that which resists reshaping by some other force.

5 This is the root of the classic ‘‘agrarian question’’ raised by Kautsky. An excellent recent analysis of

this question—which is the question, as noted below, of why agriculture remains differently capitalist

than other kinds of production is Guthman (2004).

6 Calculated from data in Arcury and Quandt (1998), Martin (2001) and Mitchell (2001).

7 Bracero literally means one who works with her or his arms—a field worker. Bracero was the generally

accepted name given to the program of Mexican labor importation that lasted from 1942, when it

started as a wartime emergency program, until 1964 when Congress, under pressure from activists,

unions, and non-Bracero-using farmers, finally cancelled it. ‘Wetbacks’ were workers who entered the

US illegally during the same period. They were so-called because many crossed the Rio Grande,

wading and swimming, to reach the US. These days, many undocumented workers in California try

to swim the All-America canal; drowning in its waters has become a major cause of death on the

border.

8 In spring 2006 immigrants and their supporters staged a series of massive demonstrations around

the United States in favor of immigrants’ rights. The nativist backlash was immediate and furious.

Among other effects have been stepped up immigration raids by ICE. In Upstate New York, far

from the Mexican border, there have been repeated raids on dairy farms, vineyards, and cabbage fields.

Often, these raids have led to the incarceration of the parents of young children born in the United

States (and thus citizens) who are simply ‘‘left . . . without either parent for days . . .’’ (Bernstein, 2006,

p. 22).

9 Perhaps nowhere more colorfully than in Harold Bell Wright’s (1911) enormously popular novel The

Winning of Barbara Worth, which is expertly examined in Henderson (1998). Less florid accounts may

be found in Hundley (1992); Worster (1985).

10 This is a point missed in Michael Pollan’s (2006) otherwise excellent examination of contemporary

foodways and politics, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

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