national-scale laws and political economy, and
global markets in which strawberries are increas-
ingly sold. While all these different points of
passage may appear external to the landscape,
they are in fact what constitutes its internal
relations, in the sense that Bertell Ollman (1990)
develops that term in his study of Marxist dialec-
tics (see also Harvey, 1996: Chapter 2).
Violence is a key to the landscape – and to the
points of passage – for a simple reason. It is what
made (and makes) my strawberries so cheap –
and the back garden of my parents’ house so
inviting. More accurately, violence is what makes
laborso cheap, and thusmakes strawberries
cheap. The age-old question wrapped up in the
development of intensive seasonal and specialty
agriculture in California is the one of labor:
where it comes from, how to get more, how to
get rid of it when it is no longer needed. California
farms are capitalized – and have long been capi-
talized – on the assumption of a steady supply of
cheap, often expendable labor (Fuller, 1939). At
its inception in California, intensive farming was
the child of violence (the violence that cheapens
labor) – and investors know that (Daniel, 1981).
Cheap labor – and more of it – is the mantra of
California agriculture. But cheap labor is no nat-
ural commodity: it must itself be made, be con-
ditioned and served up to growers when and
where they need it, and, ideally, for no longer
than they need it.
And so labor organizing is ruthlessly resisted
and laborers are kept moving into and around
the state by the threat of starvation or vigilante
violence.^13 Newcomers, especially those from
Mexico and points south, have to negotiate the
increasingly militarized and dangerous border, a
militarization and degree of danger that make
it prohibitively expensive for workers to cross
again if they are ‘returned’ to Mexico or
Guatemala by the Immigration and Naturalization
Service. The effect of thatthreat of continued
violence is obvious: INS policies both make
workers reluctant to report illegal work and
living conditions to the state (and to seek medical
care for injuries and illnesses sustained at work),
and make workers do all they can to keep from
getting caught, which has the combined effect of
increasing worker powerlessness (Heyman,
1998). To produce the California landscape – the
landscape that allows for strawberries to be
grown so cheaply – requires that labor be made
dead at a range of linked places stretching from
the point of production across the globe.
But how, then, is that landscape of violence,
that landscape constituted through a complex
geography of violence, connected to my relative
ease as I sit in the sun in the town I grew up in?That town – Moraga is its name^14 – had once
been the site of extensive pear and walnut
orchards (pruned and picked, in their day, by
armies of migratory workers). Owing to its prox-
imity to San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and
the growing residential and commercial suburbs
of Contra Costa County, Moraga was subdivided
and developed as an upper-middle-class ‘bed-
room community’ in the 1960s and 1970s.^15 The
town exudes prosperous California suburbia. A
limited mix of housing styles (colonial, hacienda,
ranch) are set within maturing gardens, which in
the early years were mostly tended by young
families, but by the 1980s were more and more
tended by teams of ‘landscapers’. By the early
1990s, Moraga was happy to promote its lack of
racial diversity (one publication of the time
pointed with pride to the fact that it was more
than 95 per cent non-Hispanic white) and the
fact that, among incorporated towns and cities in
California, it had the lowest crime rate. Even with
a fairly severe recession in the California eco-
nomy in the first half of the 1990s, houses were
often selling for a half-million dollars or more.
For a kid like myself, Moraga was in many
ways a great place to grow up (though by the
time we became teenagers, its main virtue was
being within an easy drive of Berkeley and San
Francisco). We had the run of the yards and
streets – and the surrounding hills, too, which
were protected ranchlands that comprised a part
of the local water district. The schools were
excellent and the opportunities such schools
opened up for us were vast. Moraga was the
promiseof California – or at least one version of
it. It was a town of prosperous professionals
and what used to be called petty bourgeoisie,
whose idyll was the old idyll of comfortable
living promised by the California dream. It was
the suburban form of what Kevin Starr (1973),
California’s ‘official historian’, describes as an
achievable Eden of middle-class respectability.
Moraga was – and is – a world away from the
fields and labor camps of Salinas and Monterey
counties.
That is the genius of landscape. For, of course,
Moraga is nota world away: it is only the flip side
of Salinas and Monterey. Listen to how Kevin
Starr describes the promise of the California land-
scape, as represented in the commodities it pro-
duced, in the first decades of the twentieth century:In the color of a plum or an apricot, in the luxuriance of
a bowl of grapes set out in ritual display, in a bottle of
wine, the soil and sunshine of California reached
millions of Americans for whom the distant place would
henceforth be envisioned as a sun-graced land resplen-
dent with the goodness of the fruitful earth. (1985: 128)244 LANDSCAPE3029-ch11.qxd 03-10-02 10:51 AM Page 244