Responsibilities, stressors, and privileges differ from the top to the bottom of this hierarchy. Everyone on the farm is structurally vulnerable, although the characteristics and depth of vulnerability change depending on one’s position within the labor structure. Control decreases and anxieties accumulate as one moves down the pecking order. Those at the top worry about market competition and the weather. The middle managers worry about these factors as well as about how they are treated by their bosses. The pickers also worry about picking the minimum weight in order to avoid losing their job and their housing. The higher one is positioned in the structure, the more control over time one has . The executives and managers can take breaks as their workload and discretion dictate. The administrative assistants and checkers can take short breaks, given their supervisor’s consent or absence. The field workers can take infrequent breaks if they are willing to sacrifice pay, metal greenhouse benches and even then they may be reprimanded. The higher one is located in the hierarchy, the more one is paid. The executives and managers are financially secure with comfortable homes. The administrative staff and checkers are paid minimum wage and live as members of the rural working class in relatively comfortable housing. The pickers are paid piecemeal and live in labor camp shacks. They are constantly aware of the risk of losing even this poor housing.
Among pickers, those in strawberries make less money and are more likely to miss the minimum and be fired than those in apples. This segregation is not conscious or willed on the part of the executives or managers. Rather, inequalities and the anxieties they produce are driven by larger structural forces. While farm executives are vulnerable to macro-social structures, vulnerability is further conjugated through ethnicity and citizenship, changing character from the top to the bottom of the labor hierarchy . Bodies are organized according to the social categories of ethnicity and citizenship into superimposed hierarchies of labor possibilities and housing conditions. The over determination of the adverse lot of indigenous Mexican migrant berry pickers tracks along the health disparities seen throughout the public health literature on migrant workers . The focus on risk and risk behaviors in public health and medicine carries with it a subtle assumption that the genesis of vulnerability and suffering is the individual and his or her choices . This focus often leads to blaming inadvertently the individual victim or their ‘‘culture’’ for their structurally produced suffering . Public health and medical interventions are planned with the goal of changing individual choices, behaviors, and values. The concept of structural vulnerability, on the other hand, refocuses our analysis onto the social structure as the locus of danger, damage, and suffering.
Without such a concept, diagnoses and interventions rarely correspond with the context of suffering and may instead comply with the very structures of inequality producing the suffering in the first place . The concept of structural vulnerability is crucial not only to refine anthropological analyses of the social production of suffering but also to reorient medical and public health attention away from individual behaviors and toward social structures.This dissertation would not have come to fruition without various forms of support and guidance from numerous individuals. First and foremost, my committee chair Tom Beamish has offered insight, patience, and genial advice throughout my time in graduate school. His confidence in me and his attention to my research and writing have proven invaluable for my development as an academic. Catherine Brinkley has built a community of food-systems scholars within and beyond UC Davis, through which I have gained a critical interdisciplinary perspective on the relationships between land, food, policy, and the environment. Through her mentorship and collaboration, I have grown more knowledgeable, effective, and inspired. Drew Halfmann and Stephanie Mudge have generously provided thoughtful, close attention to my scholarship over the years, asking incisive questions and drawing my attention to potential improvements that span the realms of theory, logic, evidence, form, and syntax.
I am profoundly grateful that all of these towering figures have dedicated their time to support my work, and I will strive to emulate their examples in my own mentorship. Special thanks are also due to Noli Brazil, whose instruction and consultations have made possible the spatial analysis conducted for this dissertation, and whose encouragement and wisdom got me through some frustrating roadblocks along the way. Perhaps no one has been more encouraging than Rafi Grosglik, a colleague and mentor whose support has had a profound impact on my scholarship, my ambitions, and my self-perception as a scholar. Alison Alkon, Yuki Kato, Josh Sbicca, and Ed Walker have also contributed insights and encouragement that guided my development and improvement of this project. I am grateful to all of these mentors for going above and beyond their job descriptions in the name of collegiality.This project was greatly aided by the work of undergraduate research assistants, whose interest and energy laid the groundwork for efficient data collection and dynamic analysis. Liliana Valladares, Carly Placencio, Yojo Kim, Theophilus Mok, and Amanda Bui, I am eternally grateful for the time you invested in our collaboration, and I hope that my mentorship has benefitted you as much as your research efforts benefitted this project. Support from peers has also been essential to my survival in graduate school, my intellectual development, and the successful completion of this dissertation. In this vein, I would like to extend warmhearted appreciation to all members of the UC Davis Sociology graduate community, and in particular to Alana Haynes Stein, Kelsey Meagher, Zeke Baker, Bridget Clark, Ethan Evans, Amara Miller, Shaun Geer, Duane Wright, Eli Alston-Stepnitz, Sean Arseo, Chelsi Florence, Zach Psick, Beth Boylan, Beth Hart, Gillian Moise, Christopher Lawrence, Josh Mason, Nadia Smiecinska, Elyssa Fogleman, Yao Lu, Chendong Pi, Ronald Pikes, Nym George, Yiwan Ye, and RJ Taggueg. Your insights, empathy, friendship, good humor, and dark humor got me through the best and worst times of grad school. Day in and day out, Jacque Leaver and the administrators who keep the Sociology Department running have been tremendous colleagues: supportive, understanding, knowledgeable, and accessible. I appreciate all that they do behind the scenes. The Sociology Department also supported this work with Travel Awards, Small Research Grants, and Graduate Program Fellowships, all of which provided financial means for this project’s execution. In the realm of data collection, I am most indebted to my interviewees, who will remain anonymous in these acknowledgements but whose voices I hope I have represented well in this project. I am also especially grateful to David Michalski, Anne Frantilla, Penny Baker, and Damien DeBuhr for taking the time to listen and learn about my project and for lending their expertise to my archival endeavors. As I traveled to gather interview and archival data, Crystal Byrne, Nancy Cornman, and Eric and Yvonne Nelson provided housing and companionship during months of site visits. What could have been lonely and expensive periods of my life were instead friendly and financially feasible because of their support. This dissertation is dedicated to my family, rolling greenhouse tables in particular my mom and grandma who have consistently channeled their enthusiasm and pride my way, so that I never lost a sense of purpose in this work. I have completed this dissertation with the unwavering partnership of my husband Gavin, our daughter Ayla, and our dog Kaia. Gavin, you have been steadfast and understanding, observant and inquisitive, giving me space or stepping in to provide whatever kind of support I needed, whenever I needed it. Kaia, your quiet companionship has been an unrivaled comfort; thank you for being patient with me and for getting me up to move, a productive punctuation to uncountable hours at the screen. Ayla, your impending arrival made for the best motivation to sit down and write, and the image of your wide, wondering eyes kept me on task in the hours when you closed them to sleep.
I am forever grateful for you.Growing and preparing food are fundamental to virtually all human societies, forming the basis of both cultural traditions and social relations. In contemporary society, urbanization has produced a historically wide rift between the production and consumption of food, with an unprecedented share of the population far removed, geographically and psychologically, from the production of the food they consume. However, this distance has never totally defined the urban population. Some level of food production has always taken place in cities, with important implications for the growers, their communities, and urban systems overall . The phrase “urban agriculture” seems, at first blush, to be an oxymoron. This is because, conceptually, “the urban” and its association with dense housing and limited space contrasts strongly with “the rural,” which is associated with open land, crop cultivation, and farming generally . While urban agriculture is more historically ubiquitous than is commonly conceived, with rare exceptions such as the Victory Garden movement during World War II, urban agriculture in the US context has mostly been small-scale and supplementary rather than a prominent feature of making urban life . The seeming oxymoron of “urban agriculture” points toward a critical tension that infuses food production in the city: urban land is expected to serve a purpose other than growing food. This dissertation focuses on the ways that grassroots activists and urban gardeners in three United States cities have advocated for and organized the cultivation of urban land since the 1970s. Over this time period, alongside a general shift in governance away from social support and toward more free-market economic policies, a series of economic crises have brought increased attention to urban food production. Across the country, organized gardening activities have been sustained in many large cities, but the gardens continue to be viewed as temporary land uses in almost every case. Drawing on historical documents and interviews, I demonstrate how urban agriculture has come to be seen as a legitimate long-term use of urban land in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle in different ways that relate to key organizational decisions as well as to the local culture, economic conditions, and policy context. In all three of these cities, and, I argue, in cities around the world, urban agriculture advocates must navigate modern urban political economy in order to sustain spaces that go against typical land use patterns; in the process, they make use of limited resources to build legitimacy for their organization and for agriculture’s place in the urban milieu. Legitimacy, or an audience’s sense that a given entity’s actions are acceptable and appropriate, is an essential feature for the survival and success of any organization. While the importance of organizational legitimacy may seem self-evident, I argue that organizations pursuing their own legitimacy can play an important role in shaping public discourse around the activities they undertake or promote—especially when those activities are not readily seen as legitimate on their own. In this regard, efforts to legitimize and preserve urban agriculture resemble other movements in which less powerful groups seek to transform urban life through the reallocation of resources and decision-making, such as the contemporary drive for community policing and calls to shift public safety funding toward mental health and social services . Regarding urban agriculture, the current resurgence in interest is also part of a wider socio-environmental process in which the ecological limits of modern industrial society are forcing a broad conversation around urban sustainability and resilience . Urban agriculture organizations therefore have an important role to play in negotiating how cities will change in the 21st century. Given the ongoing challenges of feeding urban populations, fostering economic activity, and promoting social cohesion that endure alongside increasing concern for urban environmental health, garden advocates have a range of social problems to draw on in constructing their claims to legitimacy and advocating for greater land access. My dissertation shows that the narratives advanced about urban agriculture’s value have implications for what advocates achieve both in policy and in practice. Using urban land for agriculture has typically required a concerted effort on the part of community members and organizations to secure the land—that is, to protect it from other potential uses such as housing or commercial development.