The Short-Handled Hoe
The short-handled hoe was used throughout California both before and after it was officially banned in 1975, where employers required workers to use them on sugar beets, strawberries, lettuce, and other crops. Cumulatively, the repeated use of the tool, which required workers to bend over at the waist as they moved down the rows, produced debilitating back injuries that often ended working careers. Agribusiness companies, however, effectively insisted on subordinating the health and well-being of the worker to the machinery of production, arguing that the profitability of the industry depended on the short-handled hoe and that, in any case, Mexicans were naturally suited to it.
Inspired by Ernesto Galarza’s study of the Bracero Program titled Strangers in Our Fields, liberal freelance photographer Leonard Nadel attempted to produce its “visual counterpart”; the result was a collection of thousands of photographs, many of them widely circulated in public and among lawmakers, including long and wide-angle shots of braceros performing stoop labor in the lettuce and pepper fields of the Salinas Valley. Nadel makes visible the role of the short-handled hoe in management’s observation and control of farm workers. Since workers had to bend over while using the tool overseers could see they were resting when they stood up. The tool was thus a means of surveillance that enabled management to adopt a sort of panoramic perspective on the field of production, viewing at a glance a landscape of stooping workers spread across the rows of produce. The short-handeled hoe thus anchored a management perspective that complemented "top-down" aerial gaze of agribusiness.
The tool helped make the worker’s labor visible to the bosses, reproducing an unequal set of visual relationships whereby big growers are the subjects, or we might say “owners,” of the gaze while farm workers are its object. The inequality of these relations of looking were furthered by the way the short-handled hoe required workers to repeatedly reproduce a posture symbolically linked to gendered and raced qualities of abjection such as subservience, weakness, or primitiveness, which implicitly contrasted with the superior class qualities of independence, power, and advanced civilization coded as white and male. In this way the compulsory use of the short-handled hoe and the visual field it presupposed was a means for reproducing, both materially and symbolically, unequal relationships between capital and labor.
Inspired by Ernesto Galarza’s study of the Bracero Program titled Strangers in Our Fields, liberal freelance photographer Leonard Nadel attempted to produce its “visual counterpart”; the result was a collection of thousands of photographs, many of them widely circulated in public and among lawmakers, including long and wide-angle shots of braceros performing stoop labor in the lettuce and pepper fields of the Salinas Valley. Nadel makes visible the role of the short-handled hoe in management’s observation and control of farm workers. Since workers had to bend over while using the tool overseers could see they were resting when they stood up. The tool was thus a means of surveillance that enabled management to adopt a sort of panoramic perspective on the field of production, viewing at a glance a landscape of stooping workers spread across the rows of produce. The short-handeled hoe thus anchored a management perspective that complemented "top-down" aerial gaze of agribusiness.
The tool helped make the worker’s labor visible to the bosses, reproducing an unequal set of visual relationships whereby big growers are the subjects, or we might say “owners,” of the gaze while farm workers are its object. The inequality of these relations of looking were furthered by the way the short-handled hoe required workers to repeatedly reproduce a posture symbolically linked to gendered and raced qualities of abjection such as subservience, weakness, or primitiveness, which implicitly contrasted with the superior class qualities of independence, power, and advanced civilization coded as white and male. In this way the compulsory use of the short-handled hoe and the visual field it presupposed was a means for reproducing, both materially and symbolically, unequal relationships between capital and labor.
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