ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION



Land and Labor:

Worker Resistance and the Production

of Landscape in Agricultural California

Before World War II



by DONALD M. MITCHELL



Dissertation Director: Professor Neil Smith



This dissertation focuses on the production of landscape as an integral part of the development of social relations of production under capitalism.  Empirically, this

study examines the changing morphology of landscape and its relationship to how powerful social interests are expressed in struggles engaged by marginalized migratory workers, industrialized farmers, and interested governmental agencies in the agricultural fields of California during the first half of the twentieth century.  The arguments are based on historical evidence gathered from the records of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing (charged in 1913 with improving labor conditions for migratory workers), other government sources interested in agricultural unrest in California, and contemporary accounts of agricultural labor relations.  With these records I show that the rural California landscape was produced through continual struggle over the relations of reproduction and production in the harvest fields.  Each round of struggle was not just reflected, but was actively incorporated in the material landscape - providing a base from which struggle was engaged anew.  I show that the production of certain kinds of space and spatial practices, which collectively are incorporated into the morphology of landscape, are central both to subversive worker movements seeking to transform labor relations in rural industries, and to state and capital interests seeking to order and control those relations.



Integral to these struggles (and to the materiality of landscape) are the ways in which landscapes are represented by social groups contesting power within them.  This study  ties struggles over representation to struggles over the production of space in order to examine how landscape morphology develops.  To see a portion of the earth as a "landscape" implies an outsider's view, an ideological ordering of items within that portion of the earth into a naturalized representation which assigns each constituent part (including workers) to its natural place.  Only by breaking through their ideological and material placing can workers or other naturalized groups refigure the landscape more in their own image.  And by refiguring the landscape, social relations may be altered.