beautiful) no less than the upward mobility of
professionals like my parents. It is tempting,
therefore, to see the California landscape as fleet-
ing, changing, ephemeral, as, along with Jean
Baudrillard (1988), a mere simulacrum, in which
hypermobility constructs a ‘space of flows’
(Castells, 1996) in which ‘all that is solid melts
into air’ (Marx and Engels, 1998: 38). In this
view the landscape is never stable, never settled,
never fixed.
Yet, as I read about Francisco Bugarin’s
no-contest plea on that Sunday morning, I knew that
the landscapes within which he and his workers
lived (and nearly died) were in many respects
little different from the landscapes of pre-World
War II agricultural California that I was then
reconstructing from records in the archives at the
Bancroft Library at the University of California.
And so the question for me in May 1991, and
the question that remains a decade later, is just
how we can account for the persistenceof the
California landscape, for the persistence of such
obvious injustice and deprivation, for the persis-
tence of an agricultural landscape that is daily
as violent as that experienced by Francisco
Bugarin’s farmworkers in that horrible midnight
barn fire, and frequently even more so as work-
ers have struggled, through organizing, strikes,
and all manner of other forms of resistance, to
change that landscape into something better,
something more just. The answer to that question
resides not just in a theory of the material pro-
duction and reproduction of the landscape, which
it will be the task of this chapter to develop, but
also, more immediately, in the very landscape of
suburban comfort that I was then living in when
I read about Francisco Bugarin. Or, perhaps even
more, the answer could be found, at least in
rough outline, in the strawberries themselves that
Bugarin’s workers were picking that spring, the
same strawberries, perhaps, that soon encour-
aged me to leave the sun of the back garden to go
into the kitchen to wash and slice, so that they
could dress up the waffles my parents and I
would have for Sunday brunch.DEAD LABORThe strawberry, like any commodity, ‘appears a
trivial thing’ which ‘in reality, is a very queer
thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and
theological niceties’ (Marx, 1987: 76) – not that I
was thinking in thoseterms when I washed and
sliced my strawberries on that Sunday morning in- Rather, I was more concerned with the shape
and flavor of the fruit, its color and texture, none
of which, it turns out, are at all ‘trivial things’.^2
The strawberries I was working with may well
have come from the Central Coast region that
Bugarin farmed, since by early May, Central
Coast berries dominate the market, not only in
northern California, but across the country. Over
the course of the post-World War II period, both
the size and shape of strawberries, and the culti-
vation and labor practices that assured their place
in my kitchen, have changed drastically. Berries
have grown larger, more regular in shape, color,
and texture, and less susceptible to spoilage
during storage and transport. They have also
grown less genetically capable of withstanding
pests and disease as cleaner nursery practices and
synthetic pesticides have been developed (Wells,
1996: 183). Or, more accurately, strawberry
varietals have not so much grownas been pro-
ducedto incorporate these characteristics. That is
to say, the fruit I was preparingthat morning – its
very shape and structure– was the product of
countless hours of labor (both physical and
mental), countless years of experimentation, and
countless shifts and transformations in the prac-
tices of planting, maintaining, and harvesting.
While the strawberry may have appeareda trivial
thing, there is nothing at all trivial about the
millions of dollars of research conducted by the
University of California, the years of industrial
structuring and restructuring, and the untold
hours that workers have spent, doubled over,
planting and picking strawberries, all so that I could
have big, juicy, uniform, cheap strawberries
available to me nearly all year long.
The strawberry, as it is being washed and
sliced, says nothing of the labor that makes it; it
merely appears as just what it is, a complex bio-
genetic entity – a berry. Nor does it say anything
of the landscape within which it is produced. In
California, this is a very complex landscape
indeed. It is a landscape of a few large strawberry
producers, hundreds of quite small ones, and a
deeply concentrated marketing and shipping
system. In strawberry growing, plants must be
carefully tended, fields painstakingly prepared,
and picking and packing closely supervised.
Such a need for ‘managerial involvement engen-
ders diseconomies of scale’, according to Wells
(1996: 39). Thus strawberry farms tend to be
relatively small. Small Central Coast strawberry
farms are amazingly productive – and increas-
ingly so. In California as a whole, per acre yield
increased from 3.7 tons in 1946 to 24.2 tons in- In that same period, California’s share of
the US fresh strawberry market increased from 6
to 74 per cent (Wells, 1996: 29).
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