Abstract
I confess, when I first heard that Mitchell was studying the Bracero Program, I thought, ‘What is there left to do?’ Apparently, quite a bit. Although the Bracero Program, a guest labor program that existed between the USA and Mexico from 1942–64, has been well-documented, its landscape has not. Using the landscape as a framework, Mitchell provides a history of the Bracero Program in California (it operated in numerous western states), while teaching us a great deal about how landscapes are produced.
The Bracero Program is of major significance to California history, agricultural history, labor history and Chicana/o Studies. Through it, millions of Mexican workers entered the USA and established roots that contributed to today’s burgeoning Latina/o population. Equally important, Braceros were a grower’s dream workforce, with profound implications for contemporary agriculture’s reliance on unauthorized immigrant labor. As Mitchell shows, not only could they be paid a pittance, but more importantly, Braceros could be controlled and took the uncertainty out of acquiring an adequate labor supply. Because the Braceros became so entrenched – indeed, they came to define the labor market – their presence precluded the unionization of farm workers and offered California agribusiness ample opportunity to make its power manifest in the landscape.
Mitchell’s central question is: how did the Bracero program impact California’s agricultural landscape? Specifically, how did the landscape change, or not change, over the course of the program? Ultimately, Mitchell concludes: ‘A force for destabilization of working people, the bracero program was also a force for the stabilization of the profitable landscape: it saved the crops – precisely because it destroyed lives’ (p. 422).
The book’s real contribution in my opinion, and what Mitchell excels at, is showing us exactly how the landscape was (un)altered. Through a combination of meticulous research and analysis, he peels back the multiple layers of social relations to illustrate exactly how the landscape came to be. He starts, and returns repeatedly to, the problem of housing. Because of the nature of California agriculture’s labor requirements, specifically, the need for the right size workforce at the right time at the right price, housing was an incessant issue. Should farmers or the state provide housing? What should this housing consist of? Who should maintain it? Who would regulate it? This continuing battle over housing is a powerful example of how landscape is produced through struggle.
An innovative feature of this book is Mitchell’s, ‘interchapters.’ These are several pages between chapters that discuss key theoretical issues, such as dead labor, landscape, scale, violence, and racism.
My one critique is that Mitchell does not give sufficient attention to race. Although he has an interchapter devoted to race and surplus labor, anti-Mexican racism plays a far bigger role in this story. I recall the late Clyde Woods often saying that the Central Valley was California’s Mississippi, but we don’t fully get a sense of this. Nonetheless, Mitchell has made an important contribution to both our understanding of landscape as well as California agricultural history.