In California agricultural commodity production,
however, this metaphor of dead labor needs to be
understood in more than metaphorical terms. As
I have already suggested, California agriculture
is structured through violence, the violence done
to bodies through incessant stoop-labor, pesti-
cide exposure, and horrible living conditions, as
well as the violence endemic at the border, in the
home villages, in the campaigns to organize
farmworkers (and resistance to these by grow-
ers), and in the cities and towns that farmworkers
live in up and down the agricultural valleys of the
state (see also Mitchell, 1996; 2001). When we
want to understand how labor is ‘made dead’ in
the fields of California, we need to focus not only
on the immediate conditions and practices of
production (as Miriam Wells does so well), not
only on the technical transformations and innova-
tions that mark the industry (as she also does so
well), but also on the forms of violence (and other
structuring relationships) that exist both at the
point of production and along the whole of the net-
works through which farmworkers travel, daily
and over the life course, to get to those fields
(Mitchell, 2001). The strawberries I prepared and
ate that morning in 1991 told me nothing about
this violence, about those conditions that make
labor dead (all too frequently literally). But the
article about Francisco Bugarin hinted at it.
That article hinted at something else too. It
hinted at the crucial role that the landscapeplays
in establishing the conditions under which labor
is made dead in California. Farmworkers, those
charged with the care and harvesting of my
strawberries, spent their nights on the Bugarin
farm, sleeping in barns and other outbuildings;
on other farms they lived in little caves carved
out of the hillside (Wells, 1996). Such conditions
do not exist despitethe awesome productivity
and profitability of California agriculture, but are
the very conditions of its existence. To under-
stand this point we need to understand two
others. First, the landscape, like the commodity
(or rather, because it is a commodity), isdead
labor. Second, the landscape, again like the com-
modity, mystifies the relationships that go into its
making; it too is ‘a very queer thing’. To make
these points clear will take some explaining.THE LANDSCAPE‘Landscape’ entered the anglophonic geographical
lexicon through Carl Sauer’s explication and
development of the German concept of Landschaft,
first published in 1925.^4 For Sauer, following the
German tradition, the ‘naively given’ object ofstudy for geography was the landscape: the
‘region’ or ‘area’ and the ‘peculiarly geographic
association of facts’ that defined that region or
area (1963: 320). The geographer, for Sauer, was
charged with understanding and explaining (not
just describing) ‘the phenomenology of land-
scape in order to grasp in all of its meaning and
color the varied terrestrial scene’ (1963: 320).
This is still a vital project if, for example, we
want to get ‘behind’ those strawberries and
understand how they are made, for the ‘terrestrial
scene’ is integral to contemporary strawberry pro-
duction, as we have seen. But Sauer was little
interested in contemporary political and economic
issues. He was instead concernedto create a (his-
torical) landscape geography that was fully
objective, and that was shorn of the (naive) polit-
ical orientation and subjectively induced fallac-
ies of environmental determinism.^5 Yet, even so,
Sauer’s landscape geography remained norma-
tive in important ways. His overriding goal was
to use the landscape as a heuristic tool to get at
an understanding of the culture that made that
landscape. Starting from what he called ‘place
facts’ – the things extant in the landscape – Sauer
argued that knowledge about culturecould be
grasped. Sauer’s normative model was simple
and elegant. He argued that in any region, a
‘culture’ went to work on the ‘natural landscape’
and transformed it into a ‘cultural landscape’.
That is, the cultural landscape – or what I am
here calling simply ‘the landscape’ – was a
stretch of humanely transformed nature, but
nature transformed to serve a particular end: the
needs and desires of the culture that made it.
Working backwards from the fact of the cultural
landscape, then, the geographer could see how
nature was transformed and thus learn something
about the culture that lived in and created the
landscape: what that culture thought, what it
wanted, how it lived. The landscape could be
‘read’ for clues about culture and cultural
change.How landscape is madeBy extension the landscape can be understood to
be a product of human labor, of people going to
work on the land to make some thingout of it.
This extension is, in fact, not made by Sauer,
since he never sought to unpack ‘culture’, which
in his argument – and much of the empirical
work that supported it over the course of his long
career – tended to operate as an assumed, or
unexamined, ‘thing’ itself, a reified ‘super-
organic’ entity with rules and logic of its own
(Duncan, 1980). Behind that superorganic entity,238 LANDSCAPE3029-ch11.qxd 03-10-02 10:51 AM Page 238