The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape

The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (1996)
By Don Mitchell

Synopsis: "This book explores...the connection between the material production of landscape and the production of landscape representations, between work and the 'exercise of the imagination'..."(1). It basically seeks to "connect the shape of the CA landscape to the process of work that made it...and to wed a literature on landscape with that on labor history" (ix). One of main purposes is to interrogate the difference between representation and reality, and to put the reality of labor specifically back in to our understanding of landscape. Book begins around 1913 and travels through to 1930s through a series of vignettes and discussions of various bad working conditions, workers revolts, and the various attempts to disempower workers. Argument is that in order to make something a landscape, the work and labor behind it must be erased (and this has been particularly true of California which was created as a rural agricultural idyll). Landscape is thus inseparable from capitalist geographies based on commodifications of the land. Pain and work is hidden to produce a pretty image. California is shorthand for American Dream. Mitchell wants to reinsert workers' lives into the landscapes, highlighting their struggles. This is a Marxist labor history of California.

Interesting Specifics:

This book is essentially a labor history of the California landscape.

Follows Denis Cosgrove's line of thinking in that the history of landscape was "inseparable from the construction of capitalist geographies based on the full commodification of the land...and the subsequent need to represent ownership (or non-ownership) as a natural order of society" (4).

Says New Cultural Geographers have gotten too wrapped-up in representation and have abandoned "traditional concerns of geographers with material form" (5).

Landscape is "both a work and an erasure of work" (6).

Takes a very Marxist approach in his belief in labor as one of the defining features of humanity.

[I don't fully understand why the production of landscape should specifically hide labor more than other types of goods. Isn't the labor process hidden from the everything?? I guess this alienation is the central point of Marxism - but anything you don't make yourself is a repository of hidden labor.]

Has a great explanation of Carl Sauer and his view of landscape, that landscape "was the sum of its morphological components" - i.e. its buildings, populations, etc - and that one could understand a people by interpreting the landscape they created (24).

Says Denis Cosgrove led the shift in geography toward ideology and image (26).

Landscape as both a thing and a process/struggle (30).

Wheatland Riots of 1913 resulted when Durst farm workers rioted due to horrid living and working conditions; served to made workers visible and to bring labor problems to the public eye. Led to the formation of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing. The CCIH also held to the belief that bad environments led "triggered" innate bad genetic behavior, so they sought to "environmentally correct" for any such "outbreaks." Sought to hinder the anonymous mobility of workers (so common to the rotating crop pattern of CA) by watching them and increasing their feelings of accountability. A way to strip the power of mobility.

In CA, workers have to remain extremely militant in order not to be naturalized into the landscape.

Interacts With:
Ed Soja, Denis Cosgrove, William Cronon (Changes in the Land), "The Reinvention of Cultural Geography,"
This is a corrective both of "new cultural geography" and its focus on image, and of the "old" cultural geography of Sauer and its obsession with untheoretical morphology.