Cultural Geography

How is the labor that is embodied in it made

dead? This is not an easy question to answer,

because, like the commodities that comprise it,

the landscape is fetishized and mystified, hiding

the very processes that go into its making.

Indeed, that is often precisely its point.

What landscape does

The best way to answer that question of how a

landscape is sustained, therefore, is to change the

question: if the landscape isa built, alienated,

and fetishized formconstructed through the labor

of people under conditions established by the

struggles of labor already dead, then what does

the landscape do?^9 One of the things the land-

scape does is, as has already been indicated, to

provide a stage upon which capital circulates (in

and out of crops, for example), and upon and

within which laborers (and their families) repro-

duce themselves. The landscape is the site for the

production and reproduction of social life. Its

homes, shops, roads, factories, and farms, its

fields, forests, valleys, and ditch-banks, is where

life is lived. But as Schein has suggested, the

landscape functions ‘as Bourdieu’s (1977: 82, 79)

habitus: history turned into nature through an

amnesia of genesis’ (1997: 663). Landscape

naturalizes social relations and makes them seem

inevitable. More accurately, landscape reifies

social relations and creates not so much an

‘amnesia of genesis’ as a socially powerful thing,

which in order to be transformed has to be taken

apart, thrown into disarray, literally disintegrated

as a landscape (Mitchell, 1996: Chapter 6). In

this regard the landscape functions not only as a

stage upon which life is lived, upon which the

reproduction of capital and society occurs. It also

functions as reality, as that which is(and hence,

to some large degree, that which can be). That is

to say, one function of the landscape is to display

the normative order of the world.

Consider the case of José Ballín, whose workers

lived in caves. ‘As shocking as outsiders found

these living conditions,’ Miriam Wells reports,

neither the grower nor his workers found them parti-

cularly unusual ... Not only did Ballín himself live in

circumstances that many U.S.-born growers would have

found unacceptable, but he saw his workers’ shelter as

evidence of his generosity. Ballín saw himself as his

workers’ patrón, and he offered many benefits in addi-

tion to wages. He let workers live on his land without

charge, he made small loans to sustain some between

paychecks, and – in response to phone calls from the

border – he paid the coyotefor several reliable return-

ing workers and deducted it from their first paychecks.

(1996: 212–13)

In addition, social workers and activists found it

difficult to organize workers to press charges

against Ballín, not only because conditions were

not unusual, but also because of fear of deporta-

tion by many workers. In this regard, as Schein

notes, the landscape must be understood ‘as an

articulated moment in networks that stretch

across space’(1997: 663), networks that include

the border and the border patrol, labor camps and

hometowns, fields and caves (a point to which I

will return). The landscape thus functions to

make out of the extraordinary and contingent

(caves for living in, debt peonage) that which is

ordinary and necessary – and good (free housing,

help in crossing the border).

The landscape, when uncontested, thus

functions to establish the conditions under

which surplus value is extracted. As I have pre-

viously argued (Mitchell, 1994: 13), the land-

scape defines what is ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ in a

given place and in so doing materially affects the

surplus value equation in a region. To the degree

that the landscape is uncontested, to the degree

that labor unrest can be stilled because of the

sense that there simply is no alternative, then sur-

plus value can be expanded. Landscape is thus a

form of social regulation. The structured perma-

nence that is the landscape both shapes and

regulates social contest (helping to determine

what is possible and what is not, displaying what

is ordinary and expected, and what is not) at the

same time as it is shaped through and regulated

by social contest. This is the political economy

of landscape.

What a landscape means

This point, however, leads to yet another question

it is necessary to ask of the landscape. That

question is the one of what a landscape means.

What does it mean for a landscape to comprise

fields and caves and barns used for sleeping, and

what does it mean for that landscape to exist

cheek-by-jowl with the sort of upper-middle-

class suburban landscape like where I grew up?

Here matters get quite complex. While Anglo-

American geography borrowed its notion of

landscape most directly from the German Land-

schaft, the history of the ideaof landscape, as

Cosgrove (1998) has detailed so brilliantly, is

much deeper and more complicated than the geo-

graphical etymology lets on. With its roots in

Renaissance Italy (among other places), ‘land-

scape’ denotes a particular ‘way of seeing’ (to

use John Berger’s felicitous phrase) wrapped up

in a particular relationship to land understood as

property. That is to say, while landscape as an

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