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Morphology Things on the Land “IT IS PROPER AND IMPORTANT to think of cultural landscape as nearly everything that we can see when we go outdoors,” geographer Peirce Lewis influentially wrote at the end of the 1970s, and it is. But how should we understand what we see? How should we understand the specific patterns of farms (large and small, monocropped or not), irrigation canals, labor camps, packing sheds, and skid row shapeups that comprise the California agricultural landscape? How, in particular, should we understand all these things on the land in relation to the struggles over labor power that comprised the bracero era and that are at the heart of this book?1 To start, it is vital to understand the landscape not just as things haphazardly on the land, but rather as morphology: a shape and a structure. To deploy a “morphological eye,” then, requires engaging in a synthetic practice that seeks not to describe “simply an actual scene viewed by an observer,” but rather “a generalization derived from the observation of individual scenes,” as Carl Sauer put it in his foundational text on “The Morphology of Landscape.” The point is to “establish the character of the landscape and to place it in a system,” to relate the things on the land functionally to both the overall view and the structuring forces at work. Understanding these structuring forces is vital, for a landscape is more than a way of ordering and representing the world (though it is certainly these things); it is also the material basis for, as well as a result of, economic and social activity and therefore a central site of struggle over the shape and structure of the political economy. As George Henderson has established so compellingly, the landscape—as morphology, as shape and structure—plays a vital role in the circulation of capital (as well as its accumulation). It is also, of course, foundational in the circulation, or mobility, of labor (as well as its ability to stay put).2 In order for capital to circulate—in order for it to enter into the production process, come out the other side as a new commodity, and eventually return a surplus to its owners—a landscape must be produced. The circulation of some parts of capital (in the form of money or other financial instruments, commodities , returns on commodities, etc.) requires some other parts of capital be “fixed” in place, fixed in and as the landscape. The built landscape—fixed Things on the Land • 45 capital—regulates what is called the “turnover time” of circulating capital: how long it takes to make a circuit from money form, to productive capital, to commodities , and to returns on those commodities in the form of profit. The built landscape thus develops in relation to (but because there are countervailing forces, including workers’ own efforts to construct a world more to their own liking, not necessarily in total accordance with) the needs of capital circulation at particular moments in time. One of the primary functions of the fpc, as we will see in detail, was precisely to construct a landscape commensurate with the needs of agricultural capital in California, if not primarily the landscape of production, then certainly a landscape vital to labor’s reproduction. As Marx argued , the “maintenance and reproduction of the working class is, and ever must be, a necessary condition of the reproduction of capital.” The arrangement of things on the land—what we see when we go outdoors—sits right at the heart of the dual reproduction of capital and labor power.3 Some of those things—prepared fields, packing sheds, combine reapers (or eventually “monster” lettuce harvesters)—are fixed capital: built so that people can produce. Others are what are called “consumption fund” items—the barracks and mess halls built for braceros, for example—that are constructed in order for people to live: to sleep, to eat, to play, to consume. Some are both: the highways and railroads, for example, that allow for crops to move from field to packinghouse to market (and workers to get from home to field) also allow for people to move about for all kinds of reasons that have little or nothing to do, directly, with commodity production. Those portions of fixed capital and the consumption fund that are relatively immobile, like a packing shed or a permanent labor camp, comprise what David Harvey calls “the built environment ,” which “functions as a vast, humanly created resource system, comprising...

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