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Abstract
In contemporary landscape discourse, an ethic of care is grounded in caring for the earth. This ecological agenda is the basis for which we indirectly provision human needs. It is not yet care that directly centres the human being. In fact, the work we claim as care is very often conducted by Latine workers whose labour is conditioned by the instrumentalist relations of capital. Herein I detail the U.S. landscape industry’s dependence on the H2-B guestworker visa program, and site labour exploitation at the heart of today’s landscape work. Thus, maintenance on our claims to care through landscape production is critical. Frameworks of caring-with set forth from feminist discourse can guide this politico-personal ambition of unambiguous care for landscape labourers. We’ve judiciously tended to one face of our caring labour—the cultivation of ecological life. Now we must unveil another aspect: the cultivation of flourishing human relations.
Acknowledgements
My sincerest gratitude to the editors at Landscape Research and the peer reviewers for their generosity, openness, and contributions to refining this work: thank you!
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This fable comes from the Roman mythographer Hyginus, appearing in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and relayed by Robert Pogue Harrison in Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.
2 The line drawn between “human” and “nature” is derived from Western, Eurocentric ontologies. Because we are thinking with frameworks of care involved in landscape labor within a Western, Eurocentric society, this is the view I respond to—not for its legitimacy, but for its dominance.
3 There are certainly convincing arguments for the autonomy of “nature” and its right to thrive independent of human utility. Still, it is more typical in contemporary production of landscapes that human use and benefit are used as the ideological and financial drivers for implementation, rather than post-humanist discourse centered on the rights of nature.
4 Or “cues to care,” Nassauer’s later refinement of the term.
5 Though I am pointing out an absence of attention to laborers in the totality of the book, I am indebted to Raxworthy for igniting my own research into the topic of labor and greatly admire his work.
6 While I believe inter-species relations are a rich area of grounding for landscape practice, I don’t believe we have yet fully analyzed human relations in landscape work. These charges need not be mutually exclusive.
7 This is in alignment with landscape architecture as an elite practice. Ecology is much more palatable to elite clientele than are issues of economic justice, social equity, and marginalization of human beings.
8 This phrase made known to me by a jardinero from Oaxaca named Ignacio, during four days of embodied research working alongside a small crew of Mexican gardeners in Los Angeles. This research will be published in the forthcoming “Migration and Maintenance: Mesoamerican Making of Landscapes in El Norte,” in the book Landscapes in the Making (Dumbarton Oaks).
9 After splitting into two separate programs, the H2-A guestworker visa applies to agricultural laborers only.
10 Landscaping is followed by construction, forestry, seafood and meat processing,
traveling carnivals, restaurants, and hospitality (Costa, Citation2022).
11 This category having the most obvious health risks embedded in the work, through the direct handling of toxic chemicals. All these jobs, however, have a greater degree of risk than much indoor work.
12 Within this category, the job title often includes “Climber” (US DOL, 2022).
13 This is derived from singling out these categories in the U.S. Department of Labor Performance Data. The total number of guestworker visas for 2022 was 211,254 (United States Department of Labor, Citation2022).
14 Guatemala made up 3.5% of guestworkers; Honduras 2.3%, and Ukraine, 2.3% (United States Department of Labor, Citation2022).
15 At first glance, this seems like an exaggerated claim, or at least exaggerated language. But the scholarship on contemporary forced labor, slavery, and human trafficking is dense, and shocking. For unsettling details on forced labor in architecture and construction, see Saket Soni’s The Great Escape (2023) and ongoing work from the design research collective Who Builds Your Architecture?
16 Often the collateral is critical to life, such as deeds to land and homes that their families currently live in.
17 As of this writing, these websites are active. However, because of the precarious and exploitative nature of visa brokering, recruitment agencies often go under, change names and branding, and/or are replaced by others.
18 Though at times the work is based in the paradigm of “native ecologies,” most often working-class landscape laborers are not adequately trained in native species identification or ecologically sound maintenance practices, their training perfunctory at best and revolving around maximization of profit margins.
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Michelle Arevalos Franco
Michelle Arevalos Franco’s research commits interdisciplinary design practice to the intersecting projects of social and ecological justice and is grounded in her Mexican roots. Her recent publications focus on Latine immigrant labour and the construction and maintenance of landscapes. She is an assistant professor in landscape architecture at The Ohio State University. She was a landscape designer at Oehme, van Sweden & Associates in Washington, D.C. and holds a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Prior, she was program director of The Richard Avedon Foundation in New York and received a bachelor’s of fine art (magna cum laude) from the University of Arizona.