A really really cool political agroecological story, in the end, it was ongoing as I needed to complete the story so I was advised to alter the project. This was good because I was finding that I couldn't tell the story of the whitefly without providing an account of the region's staggering crop diversity, which necessitated an account of labor processes and labor struggles AND an account of irrigation and the Salton Sea.
Well, hell, the story of the region's initial efforts at irrigation was a 50 year one (1850-1900), the story of the efforts to establish reliable and control recalcitrant ecological conditions, labor supplies and communal spaces was a violent 40 year one - almost wholly dependent on state and federal in/action (1901-1941), the story of massive agricultural concentration and profits - probably the most capitalistic agriculture in the world at the time - was a 30 year one (1942-1972), and the story of the return of major ecological problems - from super-saline irrigation water to ever-more robust and diverse pests, labor problems - the UFW and labor violence returned to pre-Bracero Program levels, and community re/development crises was a 20 year one (1973-1993), and - though this isn't in the dissertation because I completed my research in 1993 - the restructuring of nature, labor and space that followed was pretty much a ten-year one - with NAFTA, a second border crossing, explosive retail and residential development, two new state prisons, and state-mandated rural-to-urban water transfers that offered land-owners the prospects of income from water rights rather than agricultural production (1994-2004).
I LOVED the way the stages (pretty much with little or not finagling) worked out and argued that environmental histories of the region almost universally ignored labor and community history, that labor studies completely ignore ecological issues and the community studies of the region absolutely ignored nature and labor. Furthermore, almost all the agricultural economics simultaneously naturalized nature, labor and social spaces while treating them like legitimately commodified inputs. In short, everyone - no matter how political, applied or academic - was ignoring everyone else's stuff and everyone's work was producing partial and contradictory strategies, policies and practices as a result.
Of all the things that blew me away, there was a left populist ag economist who worked for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics in the early 40s who did this amazing study that showed not only that 1) the second the Hoover Dam and All-American Canal were completed - effectively every farmer in the Valley sold their land and moved to a local city, to the coast or to the Central Valley - no a farmstead in the place survived and 2) that almost immediately rather than rotate crops (there are two to three growing seasons a year in the irrigated desert), growers would rotate - growers would sell their land to another grower who specialized in managing the production of the next crop. As you might imagine, this report never saw the light of published day, though it was deposited in Bancroft Library at Berkeley - and made me giddy for about six weeks.
When I got to MSU, they told me to drop the project and work on Michigan issues - and I not knowing any better at the time - listened, reducing the publication count, not getting the book out, and reducing the likelihood of bringing in grants (since, among other things, I was also pretty much told that labor processes and ecological crises in MI agriculture were not (to be) studied by sociologists at MSU. Then I was told to do empirical, not theoretical work, since my theoretical work was too closely tied to my advisor and was, therefore, suspect - something they never suggested to folks who continued to do surveys with mentors...
The region is an absolute trip and flush with more contradictions than I could have imagined existing anywhere. My very best interviews, informants and discussions were with the secretary at the Imperial Irrigation District library, with an economic entomologist at the Cooperative Extension/Ag Exp Station Farm, and with snow birds at Slab City. If I could have stomached spending six months away from the woman I'd fallen head over heals in love with, and if I' dhad the money, I would have done a great deal more ethnographic work. Just from the four week/week+ trips I made, I have stories galore.
I know WAY too much - from having read way too many technical documents - about the Salton Sea and far far too much about the survey that produced the US/MX border, the politics behind the flood that produced the Salton Sea and all sorts of other stuff, too.
Alan
On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Aug 4, 2010, at 1:19 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> > my work on the Imperial Valley
>
> What work? A good friend of mine from college came out of the Calexico
> aristocracy (i.e., her grandfather named the place, along with Mexicali, and
> ran a private army for the Chandler family in Baja). Can't believe what a
> godforsaken place it is - the air stinks of ag chemicals, you can't drink
> the water (or even brush your teeth with it) because of all the toxic
> runoff, and it's always like 105 degrees. Always interested in hearing more.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319