October 14, 2014

Media Summary

“A South-Central Garden Spot again?” (2011)

Known as the South Central Farm, the settlement comprised 14 acres of land occupied by approximately 350 low-income families. A more detailed summary of events can be found here, as well as in a 2008 documentary entitled The Garden.The 2011 Los Angeles Times article echoes the trailer’s depiction of how Latina/o community members saw claims to the landscape, and the right to grow, as a right, and the resulting backlash from the land’s owners, city officials, and other ethnic groups living in South Central. The article devotes time to recounting the 2004-2006 struggle seen in the film’s trailer, and provides the reader with a conclusion to the tale: defeated farmers chose between moving their farms to other parts of Los Angeles, establishing a new community in the Bakersfield area, or quitting the practice altogether. 

The main takeaway from the article lies in filling in the gaps from the closure of the Farm to the present day, with directives on how the space should be used.The LA Times piece continues on the trailer’s narrative by situating the struggle in a more recent light. It reveals that the land, 5 years after the closing of the South Central Farm, remains unused. The piece describes the efforts of the former farming community to buy the land back from owner Ralph Horowitz. In particular, it describes the continued opposition from both city and community officials, ranging from the owner’s asking price of $18 million to then-City Councilwoman Jan Perry’s desire for the buyer to be someone “who would bring the greatest number of jobs to people in the immediate area.” The article situates these claims within the realities of the space: no one has offered to revitalize it (and bring jobs to the impoverished South Central area), and the most productive use of the land was when the South Central farm was in existence. The editorial ends with a call to Horowitz, Perry, and other involved parties to give proper attention to the farming collective's offer, posing the question “wouldn't it be good to have something growing there again?” as a dialogue on entitlements of space and community engagements in producing landscape.

For further reading on the South Central Farmers, see Laura Barraclough’s 2009 study of social movements through the spatial lens of regional racialization here.

Reading Summary:

Mitchell, Don. Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.  Part 2 (110-202)

Chapter 5, The Political Economy of Landscape and the Return of Radicalism

This chapter describes how farmers in the deflationary 1920s chose to control the cost of labor by “minimizing housing and sanitation costs by subcontracting, shifting costs to community at large.” (111) This decision is placed within the frame of immense economic restructuring of California agricultural post-WWI, and in particular, the creation of large corporate farms, marketing cooperatives, through support from national banks (114). This consolidation of capital resulted in California becoming a powerhouse agricultural powerhouse, but also a change in farming practices that encouraged overflows of migrant workers to meet the demands of these growers (116). Concurrent to the privatization was the decline of activist organization like the CCIH, who, through red-baiting allegations, became progressively inept at keeping growers accountable for housing conditions (121). These changes, coupled with the advent of auto camps—migrant car caravans with the dual function of mobility and refuge—fermented political unrest amongst Mexican migrants. Prominently seen in the 1928-1929 Imperial Valley strike and establishing of worker’s unions, these movements were eventually suppressed by a combination of violence, surveillance, and bi-national political maneuvering (128). Still, this new radicalism, and threat to the California landscape, carried into the 1930s.

Lange, Dorothea., Migrant family of Mexicans on the road with car trouble, February 1933), photography, from UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library, http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/calcultures/ethnic_groups/subtopic3b.html

Chapter 6: The Disintegration of Landscape: The Workers’ Revolt of 1933

This chapter continues to investigate the central problem faced by California growers: how could workers, as a result of capital’s needs, be both rooted and mobile to seasonal demands, while ensuring they not have the power of subversion potentially given by such mobility (131). In particular, Mitchell describes how increased migrant subversive action during 1932 and 1933 worked to destabilize growers’ conceptions of a California landscape, and how these growers devised new, often violent mechanisms to limit their expression (133). In 1933, low wage rates—equal to 1910 standards-- and deplorable housing conditions inspired workers and Communist organizers to strike under the banner of a newly established Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union, or CAWIU (134). Through these strikes, workers and growers alike realized the importance of space in their struggles, as a valued prize and place to incite action (140).  The Corcoran cotton strike, demonstrated this logic—CAWIU leaders used workers camps and public spaces across region as organizing platforms, while growers and other local interests targeted these sites through violent action (145). Eventually, state and federal powers intervened, and worked with growers to stop the strike by accepting a 75 cents wage rate (153). In ending, Mitchell cites the 1933 strikes as a testament to the power of migrant militancy, and a revelation of the California landscape’s unstable “naturalness” (155).

International News Photos, Inc., Pickets on the highway calling workers from the fields, 1933 cotton strike) photography, from UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library, http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/calcultures/ethnic_groups/subtopic3b.html

Chapter 7: Reclaiming the Landscape: Learning to Control the Spaces of Revolt

This chapter carries over the centrality of space in as a mediator of power in describing how growers and local officials established preventative measures to subdue migrant militancy seen in the early 1930s (156). Post-1933, the CAWIU organizers continued to organize in the Imperial Valley, but growers, taking lessons learned from the Corcoran strikes, made concerted efforts to destroy the organizing potential of labor camps through a combination of vigilante aggression and state interventions (led mainly by the health ordinances of the CA Division of Immigration and Housing). (161-62) Concurrently, growers and state commissions argued over the amount of rights maintained by workers, leaving questions of free speech and right to protest as easily controllable and dependent on the whim of capital’s interests (158). In response to the 1933 strikes, Alameda Country District Attorney—and later Supreme Court Justice-- Earl Warren devised a strategy to establish rational control of labor and prevent outside agitators for igniting dissent (164). Known as the Alameda plan, this initiative gave preference to local unemployed labor and passed ordinances prohibiting use of public space for protest, and was lauded as a replicable success across the state (167). Carried out with equal success by Sheriff John Miller in Brentwood, Mitchell demonstrates how multiple stakeholders were invested in keeping migrants hypervisual (through surveillance and violence) as to make sure their actions could not disrupt the California agricultural landscape for all invested in its “natural” depiction (173-75).

Chapter 8: Workers as Objects/Workers as Subjects: Re-making Landscape

The next chapter delineates how migrant struggles and growers’ need for control shifted under the New Deal era’s increased level of federal interventionism and changes in the racial makeup of California labor force. Akin to changes in the Border Patrol discussed in previous blogs, California’s agriculture came under the scrutiny of New Deal agencies like the California Relief Administration (CRA), and later, the United States Resettlement Agency (RSA). Undergirding these shifts in was a reaction to the influx of white migrants from the Dust Bowl regions, who were racialized by growers as less tractable than Mexican and Filipino workers, and therefore more willing to fight back (176) The motivations for these agencies echoes sentiments by Warren in Alameda County—creating rational methods for dealing with migrant labor (178). The RSA worked to establish government camps that could provide logical solutions to labor strife through providing better housing conditions, easier modes of surveillance, and democratic engagement for camp residents (183-85). While the government lauded these camps as an objective demonstration of federal order, growers under the Associated Farmers bureau tried many times to circumscribe freedom of pubic space for their workers (189-89). Ending the narrative in 1942 with the rise of the Bracero program and WWII industrial boom, Mitchell returns to the idea of labor reproduction as a historical and geographic process, and the work-intensive act of making landscape work-free (195).

Conclusion: The Lie of the Land

Mitchell ends his book with a summation of how the California agricultural landscape is seen, both historically and in the contemporary moment, as a beautiful icon. He implores the read to engage critically with the landscape, recalling the various narratives in his study to show how the “perfect” image of California is a negotiation of systems of control within capitalist economies (199). He ends with a call to go beyond the attractiveness of the landscape by making it ugly with the histories of migrant militancy and lived experience that inextricably created California.

Analysis:

In comparing the LA Times editorial and Mitchell’s book, I find it prudent to juxtapose how each group of farmers negotiated claims to grow, with particular focus on how ideas of work and race buttressed their arguments for owning the landscape.

Linking the two claims is the idea of work as a way to claim the right to produce. For the South Central Farm, residents took great pride in successfully creating a viable green space from the urban decay of South Los Angeles. This commitment to working the land, and the various investments it entailed, were crucial to their organizing tactics. Similarly, the California growers in Mitchell’s account lionized their ability to create productive beauty out of the state’s geography, and used their work as rationale for stamping out migrant insurrection and limiting the mobility of workers at large. Whether in deserts of the Imperial Valley or the lowlands of the Central Valley, the farmers used a hard-work ethos to justify violent tactics.

Underlying the opinion piece and the stratagem of growers and government officials in Lie of the Land was the desire for logic. For the article, the rationality is crucial to its ask of Ralph Horowitz, Jan Perry, and other city interests. If the South Central farm was the most viable use of the space, and if not other groups are interested in buying the land, then why not let the farmers grow? This claim to logic is echoed in the creation of government labor camps during the New Deal era, as a response to private vigilantism and increased fear of migrant mobility. While the minutia of rational thinking is radically different for each case, logic nonetheless carries a high degree of currency for enacting spatial claims to grow.  

All together, the positioning of the South Central farm story with Mitchell’s account allows readers a glance at how positions of grower are incredibly fluid, and more importantly, how struggles for space continue to exist. Lie of the Land, like the works of Molina and Lytle-Hernandez places our contemporary understanding of the South Central farm within a historical context of how people have engaged in defining and claiming California’s diverse agricultural landscape. The LA Times piece invokes recognition of how labor and capital are intertwined in the contemporary landscape, and adds new layers to the palimpsest originated by growers and laborers in the 1920-40s.

Questions:

In the South Central Farm, issues of environmental justice were crucial to organizers’ claims for place. Can we see antecedents of environmentalism in The Lie of the Land, and if so, to whose benefit?

What difference does regionalism have in claims to grow for the two pieces? Is there an explicit urban/rural divide? 

How can we see the two pieces as a story of the racialization of labor in California history? Do these stories affirm or disrupt ideas of who owns capital and who gets to claim space?