point, as befitting an ideology wrapped up in the
visual technology of perspective. The natural
tendency, therefore, and one only encouraged by
the long history of landscape as a specifically
visualideology, is to look for the facts of a land-
scape’s production within the locally bounded
landscape itself. That was the impetus behind
Sauer’s assumption that evidence of the ‘culture’
that made a landscape could be located within
the ‘place facts’ of the extant landscape; it is
also, arguably, the single defining characteristic
that links together the whole of landscape studies
in geography and related fields. The transforma-
tion and extension that needs to be made – and
the very reason I have sought to show how a
landscape both is likeand isa commodity – is
one of scale. Just as the social relations of pro-
duction that make a commodity like the straw-
berry possible are to be found not only within
the strawberry field itself, but also in the labor
camps nearby, the boardrooms in the cities, the
state capitol, the research laboratories of various
University of California campuses, the produce
markets and grocery stores across the country,
the border (and hence Washington DC) and the
villages, cities, and towns that workers come
from in Mexico and Central America, so too
must we look to these places to understand how
the landscape we see in California has come to
be, and, specifically, what it means for those
‘belonging to it’. That is, to understand the land-
scape in all its material and ideological impor-
tance, we need to find better ways to link the
strawberry fields to my parents’ backyard. And
we need to do so in a way that is sensitive to the
complex material processes that operate not just
locally, but across and within a wide variety of
scales. We need to understand the landscape as
constituted through processes that construct
‘structured permanances’ ranging from the bod-
ies of workers, through the local ‘place facts’ and
on to the regional, national and global economies
and social relations within which it is embedded.
And we need to show how landscapes in differ-
ent places are linked together through the
moving bodies of workers (and consumers), the
moving flows of capital (and commodities), and
the moving targets of regional, national, and
global policy (and its violent enforcement). We
need to show, that is, how the landscapes of
Central Coast strawberry pickers and upper-
middle-class suburbanites are not separate entities,
but part of the same system, a system that may be
highly differentiated and fully contradictory, but
a system nonetheless. We need to understand
that while the landscape is always physically
somewhere, it is also socially constituted both
there and elsewhere. We need to slice open thelandscape, just like I sliced open the strawberries,
to see what it embodies, what it internalizes –
and to locate the other places to which it is
linked, to see where(else) labor is made dead so
that it can continue to be.CALIFORNIA DYINGWhen it is ‘sliced open’, the anatomy – the
morphology – of the California landscape might
best be described as being constituted by a series
of ‘points of passage’ within a ‘network of vio-
lence’ (Mitchell, 2001). By violence, I do not
mean only the metaphorical violence of ‘dead
labor’ as Marx talked about it – the labor ossified
in the commodity. I also mean real, bodily,
physical violence: farmworkers’ hands mangled
by machinery; the gun and knife fights in the
cities and labor camps that are often part of
farmworkers’ everyday lives; the remarkable vio-
lence visited upon migrants as they attempt to
cross the border (rape, assault, and murder, as
well as death by exposure in the deserts and
mountains); and the violence implicit and
explicit in economic dislocation, threatened
starvation, and disrupted families and local ways
of life in the source countries and villages of
California farmworkers. Landscape – as a site or
stage of production and reproduction – is knitted
together by this network of violence. Landscape –
as a ‘way of seeing’ that aestheticizes or erases
the facts and relations of work – knits together
this network of violence. That we are dealing
with a networkis made plain by circulations – of
money, energy, workers – that make commodity
production possible (Henderson, 1999).
Instead of seeing landscape as a localized
‘thing’ – the view from a single vantage point –
landscape needs to be understood as a complex
node or point of passage in a network (cf. Schein,
1997). From the perspective of migratory work-
ersin California, these points of passage include
the place of production, the labor camps and
farm-country cities, the border, the various cities
and villages of Mexico as workers trek north,
and the home region or village. From the
perspective of capital, the strawberry field is but
one point through which capital circulates.
Others are banks, farm implement factories, work-
ers’bodies, and supermarkets. From the perspec-
tive of the agricultural production system, points
of passage might be the soil and plants of the
farm itself, the broader context of micro and
regional climate, the regional marketing structures,
the state research and taxing mechanisms and
laws concerning labor and pesticide use, theDEAD LABOR AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY 2433029-ch11.qxd 03-10-02 10:51 AM Page 243