Dialectical thought arises because it

is less and less possible to ignore the

fact that civilization, in the very act of

realizing some human potentials, also

damagingly suppresses others. (Eagleton,

2000: 23)

CALIFORNIA LIVING

Sunday 12 May 1991 was one of those days that

makes it obvious why everyone wants to live in

California. The sun was shining brightly, mid-

morning temperatures were in the low seventies.

There was a light breeze that rustled the fresh

green of the pear and eucalyptus trees in the back

garden of my parents’ house, where I was stay-

ing for a time. The vibrant flowers and lawns, the

fragrant eucalyptus trees, and the remnant pear

and walnut trees from the orchards that used to

fill the valley between the golden-brown and

oak-studded hills simply signaled the ‘California

dream’ – or at least the suburban version of it.

So out into the sun I went with coffee and the

Sunday San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle,

still then a rather urbane and witty paper with an

excellent book review and good arts and music

coverage.

Before I got to the reviews, I found buried in

the first section of the paper a short article detail-

ing the story of Francisco Bugarin. Bugarin was

a 77-year-old strawberry farmer in the Salinas

Valley, some 100 miles to the south of where I sat.

A few days earlier, Bugarin had pleaded no con-

test to charges of ‘operating an illegal labor camp

and maintaining substandard camp buildings’

(San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle12 May

1991). Some 40 temporary workers were housed

in a variety of outbuildings on Bugarin’s rela-

tively small farm during the strawberry harvest

a few months earlier. They lived in barns and

sheds, sleeping among machinery, tools, and

canisters of pesticides, the very implements they

used to tend the fields during the day.

Such housing for strawberry pickers was hardly

atypical, and in fact was almost luxurious

compared to some that investigators uncovered

in the region: in the nearby Monterey Valley

during the 1980s, strawberry pickers working

for José Ballín were found living in small caves

that farmworkers themselves had dug out of

the surrounding hillsides (Wells, 1996: 210–14).

On another farm, the Monterey County Health

Department in 1985 found:

50 to 60 farmworkers living in storage sheds, pick-

ups, campers, makeshift cardboard and tin shacks, out-

houses and truck bodies; no adequate or approved toilet

facilities; no potable water from an approved water

system; all food preparation areas were substandard; an

accumulation of garbage, trash and refuse scattered

throughout the complex ... sleeping and living areas

did not conform with the Uniform Housing Code,

California Health and Safety Code and California

Administrative Code; human waste was present inside

and outside of the various living areas; pesticides,

fertilizers and poison baits were stored within the living,

sleeping, and cooking areas; open pesticide containers

and spilled poison baits were within the living, cooking

and sleeping areas; occupants ate their meals while

sitting on and around pesticide containers; and hazardous

materials, including pesticides were stored on the

premises and not registered with the Monterey Country

Health Department.^1

11

Dead Labor and the Political Economy

of Landscape – California Living, California Dying

Don Mitchell

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