Such conditions clearly are not the result of
a lack of laws and regulations. At least since
1913 when the California Legislature passed the
Labor Camp Sanitation Act and charged the State
Board of Health together with the California
Commission of Immigration and Housing with
enforcing it, labor camp conditions have been the
object of state oversight and regulation.
And yet, in the history and geography of
farmworker housing in California, such condi-
tions as those on the farm of Francisco Bugarin
are more the norm than the exception (Mitchell,
1996). The living conditions on Bugarin’s farm,
while clearly illegal, were, by the standards of
California agriculture in the early 1990s, actu-
ally fairly good. Workers at least had roofs over
their heads and access to outhouse toilets. The
conditions on Bugarin’s farm only led him to jail
because the barn in which many workers were
sleeping caught fire and four workers were
injured, two seriously. In light of the publicity of
that fire, local authorities simply could no longer
turn a blind eye to the illegal living conditions
on Bugarin’s farm. Bugarin, unlike the vast
majority of his fellow small-farmers, and most
of the large ones, was simply unlucky in that his
rather typical housing conditions had attracted
unwanted attention.
Nor, after Bugarin’s plea in May 1991 did
housing conditions for farmworkers improve
across the state of California. In 1997, a reporter
for the New Yorkerfound in San Diego hundreds
of migrant workers living in cardboard shacks in
brush-choked ravines, ‘luckier’ workers living in
barely converted chicken sheds, and still count-
less others packing themselves, a dozen to a
room, into overcrowded apartments in the cities
and towns of the region. Many of the workers the
reporter interviewed were Zapotecs who had been
recruited during the 1980s to a San Diego flower
farm from small villages in Oaxaca, and ‘there
they were enslaved: held in perpetual debt, fright-
ened into submission by warnings about the
Border Patrol, and forced to work sixteen hours a
day’ (Langerweische, 1998: 139). The flower
farmer was eventually charged with slavery and
plea-bargained a racketeering conviction. Like
Bugarin, and in comparison to his colleagues and
competitors, this farmer was simply unlucky.
Citation for breaking labor and labor camp laws is
exceedingly rare; arrest and conviction even more
so. By contrast, debt bondage in California is not
at all unusual, and is very rarely prosecuted.
Workers living in such conditions in the 1980s
and 1990s toiled in an agricultural landscape
that continued to grow increasingly seasonally
intensive. Seasonal labor demand in Californiagrew by about 20 per cent over the 1980s and
1990s (Bugarin and Lopez, 1998: 7). In the early
1990s, according to an estimate by the agricul-
tural economist Philip Martin, some 800,000 to
900,000 farmworkers were needed on a seasonal
basis to fill the equivalent of 300,000 to 350,000
year-round jobs (cited in Bugarin and Lopez,
1998: 9). During these same two decades, new
farm labor contracting systems have been devel-
oped that have shifted the burden for compliance
in housing, wages, work conditions, and immi-
gration laws from many growers to transient labor
contractors (Krissman, 1995; Thilmany and
Martin, 1995). On California’s 77,000 farms, there
could be as many as 154,000 farm employers
(since labor contractors are considered individual
employers and are thus the ‘site’ of inspection),
and in a typical year somewhere around only one-
fifth of 1 per cent of farm workplaces are inspected
(Bugarin and Lopez, 1998: 21).
Francisco Bugarin’s plea-bargained conviction
in 1991, then, was very much a rarity. But the
worlds – the landscapes – that conviction repre-
sented, like the landscape of flowers, debt peon-
age and ravine shanties in San Diego, are not at
all rare. They are all just as common as my
parents’ sunshine-filled, pear-tree-shaded back-
yard in the San Francisco Bay Area. But like my
parents’ suburban house, with its asphalt-shingle
roof, neat painting, and New England colonial
styling, and their garden, with its eucalyptus
from Australia, its pampas grasses from
Argentina, its turf grasses from Eurasia, and its
pears from Europe, there is little purely ‘natural’
in the California agricultural landscape. Like the
lawns and ornamental bushes in the subdivision
in which I grew up, the California agricultural
landscape is highly regulated, both through con-
vention and by law. And, again, like that house in
the suburban Bay Area, lovingly landscaped over
30 years, and by 1991 carefully tended by an
army of ‘landscape professionals’ with their lawn
mowers, leaf blowers,and gas-powered hedge
clippers, the agricultural landscape is a place of
work, of toil, of intensive, difficult labor. The
California landscape, both in its suburban mani-
festations and in its agricultural districts, is a
socialmore than a naturalconstruction, a social
more than a natural fact, a place that has been
made and remade, that is constantly produced
and reproduced, toiled in and toiled over.
And in California, the landscape – both sub-
urban and agricultural – is a product of mobility:
the physical mobility of farmworkers as they
travel around the state looking for work (perhaps,
even, eventually landing behind the handles of
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