Cultural Geography

The promise of California was that that ‘fruitful

earth’ was easily within reach of the middle

classes including all those ‘easterners’ hoping to

make a new life out of the rural/suburban idyll at

the edge of the continent. But such a dream is the

deception of landscape.^16 For Starr, the develop-

ment of ‘fruit culture’ out of the ruins of the

worldwide nineteenth-century wheat boom

nurtured the values of responsible land use, prudent

capitalization, cooperation among growers in the matter

of packing, shipping and marketing. Above all else,

fruit culture encouraged rural civility in the care of

homes, the founding of schools, churches and libraries,

the nurturing of social and recreational amenities which

stood in complete contrast to the Wild West attitude of

wheat. (1985: 34)

This is not quite right. ‘Fruit culture’, as we have

seen with the case of strawberries, did none of

these things. Or, more accurately, the degree to

which it did them was only by separatingplaces

like Moraga (where such things existed) and

Salinas (where they did not, at least for straw-

berry pickers) in the realm of ideology, while at

the same time closely connectingthem in the

realm of economic interdependence. The whole

point of the landscape is to forestall the dialecti-

cal thinking necessary to uncover these connec-

tions, and to show, as Eagleton (2000: 23) puts it

in the quotation with which I opened this

chapter, that civilization (Starr’s ‘civility’), in

allowing for human achievement and comfort,

only does so by suppressing the dreams and aspi-

rations, the very life chances, of countless others.

Or to turn that around, Moraga stands as the

proof that out of violence and repression comes a

good– the good of comfortable suburban living

for so many. The difference between the patri-

cian landowners Cosgrove studied, who oversaw

the very invention of landscape so that they could

live at their ease (encouraging rural civility), and

my own family was only one of proximity, in

both geographical and division of labor terms,

to the point of production. Our ease has been

spatially removed from the strawberry workers’

repression, so now even the markers of it do not

really need to be hidden; they can be obscured in

plain sight as the suburban landscape tells us that

our comfort never has to be interrupted by their

bodily destruction. The landscape integrates by

dividing, by separating, and by obscurring. And

by distance: by placing oppression not just

behind the well-tended copse of a manor house,

but hundreds of miles away – or even across the

globe. Yet Moraga is a landscape connected to

the agricultural landscape in another sense. It is

now actively cultivated and maintained by

contingent workers, most of them Mexican or of

Mexican descent, and many now ‘settled out’ of

the migratory stream that brought them into the

US and the fields of California. It is possible

that some of those who mowed and edged my

parents’ lawn – the lawn I set my chair on that

morning in May 1991 – had been or would later

become strawberry pickers. Or if not that, then

harvesters and tenders of other fruits and vegeta-

bles, janitors in the nearby office parks and

professional buildings that allowed Moraga to be

such a successful bedroom community, or dish-

washers in the newly trendy restaurants of

nearby Lafayette and Walnut Creek. The Moraga

landscape is made possibleby many of the same

people (or same types of people) as the straw-

berry landscape. Moraga is one of the points of

passage and networks of violence through which

immigrant workers pass as they knit together the

California landscape.

But more than that, the Moraga landscape is

made possible in another, perhaps less direct

sense, by the networks of violence and points of

passage that constitute the strawberry pickers’

landscapes. Cheap fruit and vegetables, cheap

staples too, in part make possible the hyperin-

flated house prices of the Bay Area economy.

That is to say, the reproduction costs of families

like mine (and thus the ability of profit to be

made from ourlabor) are held down by cheap

food costs. Our good California living is subsi-

dized by the daily California dying (the violent

repression of organizing, the dead labor integral

to commodity production) that marks the

California agricultural landscape.

CONCLUSION: DEAD LABOR

AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

OF LANDSCAPE

How, then, should ‘the landscape’ be conceptua-

lized within geography? What is its ontological

and epistemological status within our systems of

knowing the world? Ontologically, landscape is

best conceptualized first (though not exclu-

sively) as dead labor. That is to say, the land-

scape is a social product, it is something made.

And it is constantly remade. But to say the land-

scape is constantly remade is not to imply that

it is always and fully in a state of flux. On the

contrary, the landscape must also be understood

as a ‘structured permanence’. As Harvey devel-

ops Whitehead’s philosophy of ‘permanences’, a

permanence is not only the ‘practically inde-

structible’ object described earlier, but also, and

crucially, a ‘system of “extensive connection”’

in which ‘entities achieve relative stability in

DEAD LABOR AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY 245

3029-ch11.qxd 03-10-02 10:51 AM Page 245