Care’s repair, landscape’s labor

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.

Keywords:

• Care
• immigration
• guestworkers
• Latinx
• Latine
• labour
• landscape architecture
• maintenance
• feminism

Care’s faces

Care gave shape to humans. In Roman mythology, the goddess Cura (care), moulded the first human body out of soil and clay, directly from the earth. She pressed and patted the humus into legs, arms, torso, hands, feet, head: human. Earth’s materials gave embodiment. Jupiter’s breath gave the body spirit. All involved wanted to possess the enlivened creature. Saturn settled the matter: upon the creature’s death, Jupiter would keep the soul and Earth would keep the body. But while it was alive, the human being would be beholden to the goddess: Care (Harrison, 2008).¹

For those of us involved in the work of landscapes, it is easy to embrace the idea that she, Care, created humans through working the ground: an origin story based in cultivation. ‘Given that Cura formed homo out of humus, it is only “natural” that her creature should direct his care primarily toward the earth from which his living substance derives’ (Harrison, 2008, p. 6). Concepts of care in landscape discourse seem to fit neatly within this particularly lovely conceit. Here, care means caring-for the earth: the tending to its panoply of non-human species, their webs of relations and interactions, and the matrix of soil, water, and air they inhabit. In the myth, however, this earthly tending is just one aspect of Cura’s labours. The other is her continual presence in the direct nurturing of the human being itself, throughout its life.² Like in feminist discourse on ethics of care (Engster, 2005; Kittay, 2019; Noddings, 1986; Tronto & Fisher, 1990; Tronto, 1993), Cura’s labour supports life-worlds that are distinctly and directly human. Feminist scholars elaborate this grounding concept of caring-for into an ethos of caring-with, where care is a dynamic relationship between individuals (Alam & Houston, 2020; De la Bellacasa, 2012; Haraway, 2016; Tronto, 1993). Here we have caring with the young, the infirm, the elderly, the vulnerable, the stranger, the neighbour, the immigrant; care for the provision of human biological needs to support continued human thriving. Likewise care-giving and care-receiving entail inevitable and uneven power dynamics; caring-with engages the lived experiences and mutable agencies of both giver and receiver as interdependent subjects in relationship (Alam & Houston, 2020; De la Bellacasa, 2012; Haraway, 2016; Tronto, 1993). As Joan Tronto describes, it is a ‘species activity’ (1993, p. 103). This facet of Cura’s caring with and for the human being has been largely shrouded, and remains unseen, in concepts of care related to landscape work.

Largely, we claim that grounding care for the earth and non-human organisms is the basis for which we, as stewards and creators of landscapes, provision human needs and care for human society. This is the logic of 19th and 20th century Western environmental movements and is a primary influence on contemporary landscape production (Cronon, 1991; Olmsted, 2020). The problem with this claim-to-care is the fact that instrumentalist human relations, tethered to processes of production and consumption, cloak any other ethic involved in landscape work. Architecture as a disciplinary model in landscape architecture’s evolution (Abbott, 1988; Baird & Szczygiel, 2007) imbues landscape work with naturalised goals to improve and protect the properties of society’s elites (Fleming, 2019; Woods, 1999). Contemporary designers concerned with social justice might agree that a practice of servicing society’s elites is not enough to justify a life’s work. Care, on the other hand, may indeed be—and is often enlisted in justifying the practices of current landscape production. Yet this care is earthen, only indirectly provisioning care to a diverse range of humans who inhabit and experience improved landscapes.³ Again we must look to the goddess Cura as a guide. Indeed, she cultivates and shapes the earthen. But she is also responsible for the continued and unambiguous care of the human being.

Working-class people directly conduct the work of making and maintaining landscapes, whether they are tending to the landscapes of society’s elites or the landscapes of under-served publics. These workers operate at a great social and spatial distance from those that direct, benefit, and profit from, their work. In the United States landscape labourers are often Latine immigrants or migrants. Their work literally provisions care for living landscapes through growing, planting, pruning, tending, and other immediate physical negotiations. Designers, clients, and communities, instead, commission the care work of others. How might these commissions provision care to those who do the labour? Without this critical caring-with, our aspirations to care are incomplete—Cura’s cultivation of the human remains masked and muted.

Carestory

When did care, as a term, begin appearing in relation to landscapes? Joan Nassauer incorporated the term into her early research. In 1988, ‘signs to care’⁴ characterised what care looked like to a group of study participants in their local, rural landscapes. Here she defines care as a ‘global construct of aesthetic quality that is exhibited in different forms in different local conditions’ (p. 1). Throughout her decades-long study on perception of landscapes, Nassauer emphasises the importance of the visual because ‘the etymology and contemporary definition of landscape emphasize visible characteristics of land’ (2011, p. 322). This thread is alive and well in landscape discourse. My colleague, Parker Sutton, researches and teaches on ‘Aesthetics of Care’ in which the public expectations of highly manicured landscapes are problematised against ecological devastation. He suggests alternative maintenance regimes and the resulting aesthetics as practices of environmental repair (2022). This is a direct lineage from Nassauer’s highly influential work.

In the past few years Julian Raxworthy’s Overgrown: Practices Between Landscape Architecture and Gardening (2018) has become a foundational text for designers yearning to connect physically with landscapes through design practices focused on active relationship with plant growth (sometimes called ‘maintenance’ or ‘process’ or ‘care,’ or in Raxworthy’s terminology, working with ‘the viridic’). Raxworthy’s first chapter illuminates the stratification between gardeners and designers. He draws out this long history, as well as the contemporary social and economic antagonisms between them, promising that ‘a landscape architecture renewed by gardening will operate in completely new ways that blur the class divide between the profession and the trades’ (p. 6). Still, the primary focus of the book is not about centreing the expertise and experience of workers themselves—his human subjects are generally property owners—and, as described, the book successfully positions ‘designers and plants as vegetal partners’ (overleaf) in the creation of novel aesthetics and experiences. The class divide may indeed be blurred for the designer, who has in this renewed practice enclosed some of the physical work of the gardener. But increased agency for the working class does not appear to be part of the picture. The plants are the partners, not the labourers.⁵

It’s notable that of the many diverse definitions of ‘care,’ Nassauer lands on two nouns: ‘the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something’ and ‘serious attention or consideration applied to doing something correctly or to avoid damage or risk’ (2011, p. 321). Not included were the verbs listed in the same entry. One in particular, to ‘feel concern or interest; attach importance to something,’ strikes a substantially different tone (World Dictionary, 2011). I can imagine that basing a philosophy of landscape care around affective verbs, rather than more technical nouns, may have propelled a significantly different trajectory for the field’s application of care, which tends to reside in the eco-technical and the aesthetic, and centres inter-species relations rather than human relations.⁶

In contrast, outside of landscape circles, care is human, political, and affective—and most often, female. In her 1969 proposal for an exhibition on ‘maintenance art’ entitled ‘Care,’ Mierle Liederman Ukeles points out the ‘lousy status’ and poor wages conferred on maintenance jobs and links this to the politico-personal of gendered work: ‘clean your desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the fence, keep the customer happy, throw out the stinking garbage, watch out don’t put things in your nose, what shall I wear, I have no sox, pay your bills, don’t litter, save string, wash your hair, change the sheets, go to the store, I’m out of perfume, say it again—he doesn’t understand, seal it again—it leaks, go to work, this art is dusty, clear the table, call him again, flush the toilet, stay young.’

In Ukeles’ proposal, the ecosystem of care work is entangled with social reproduction, of which care is just one part. Eleonore Kofman (2012) describes this intertwined nature of care labour with globalised social reproduction and migration. This is an important fulcrum when thinking about landscape work due to its direct link to international migration. An emphasis on the positive aspects or outcomes of caring for other living organisms tends to obscure the systems of production of which they are part. In landscape, ecology tends to dominate the conversation over social and economic relations.⁷ Ukeles’ work highlights the other, ‘lousy’ aspects of care work. Caring for others’ bodies, or ‘body services’ is marginalised work. These occupations of cleaning, tidying, and remediating what has been discarded or polluted are the lowest on the economic and social ladder (Kofman, 2012). In a globalised economy, this work is often the domain of immigrants. While wealthy economies in the global North experience a ‘care gain,’ households in the global South experience a ‘care deficit’ stemming from the familial disembedding and disruption of migration (Kofman, 2012, p. 155).

Landscape care is tied to these global care chains, unequivocably (Kofman, 2012; Lutz & Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2012). It is work linked directly to a wider context of activities. The labour is, in a sense, ‘body services,’ through its relation to the upkeep of organisms, the tidying and cleaning up-after that is necessary to living things. It is la ley, or ‘the law,’ as one Mexican gardener described to me his mission to maintain tidy grounds for his clients, above all other priorities.⁸ As female immigrants have taken on the indoor domestic work of women in the Global North engage in waged labour, so too have male immigrants filled the niche of outdoor landscape work. (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2014). Despite the gender variance, their work operates in the feminine-domestic realm too, in terms of reproducing the environments in which we live out our lives and in which other non-human lives are lived out. Landscape labourers ‘literally…labour so that others can live’ (Seccombe, p. 19). Their pseudo-domestic care labour frees up the labour power of those in upper social and economic stratum. This is social reproduction, not just care. In addition to this so-called unproductive labour, care in this case is also associated with productive labour—which ‘usually involves transforming a material object in the physical world, or engaging with others in an instrumental manner’ in order to produce commodities (Engster, p. 51; Seccombe, 1974). Landscape labourers work not simply on land and enviroment, but on property. Their work thusly maintains not only physical life and labour power (social reproduction), but real estate value (pinnacle commodity production in late capitalism). So, while landscape labourers practice care for landscapes, in what are often subject-to-subject relations, instrumental subject-to-object relations are occurring between them and those that direct, and profit from, their labour.

Though most landscape waged labour is conducted by men (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022), the work is related to the invisibility of women’s unpaid labour through its objective of caring for lives. Similarly it is relegated to obscurity and precarity in the economic order (Franco, 2022). Often—and primarily, in much of the United States—this work is conducted by labourers from Mexico and Central America. These social and economic relations—of the US to foreign-born immigrants; of designers, clients, and publics to labourers who materialise their projects—are distinctly instrumental. Though care, in itself, is not, (Engster, 2005; Haraway, 2016; Kittay, 2019; De la Bellacasa, 2012) care work is implicated in systems of capital production that are instrumental in nature (Kofman, 2012; Lutz & Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2012; De la Bellacasa, 2012). Perhaps this is why, so far in landscape discourse, the face of care has been limited to aesthetics and ecological technologies. I maintain that this care is generic, a ‘care-washing’ rather than a conscious, specific practice of social reproduction entangled in economic, political, and very human relations.

Importing care

In other scholarship, I’ve described in detail the antagonisms faced by immigrant and migrant Latine workers in the landscape trades (Franco, 2022). Here I’d like to consider in depth the more specific case of ‘non-immigrant’ guestworkers, as an important example of contemporary labour practices that echo general tendencies within the landscape industry overall (Franco, 2022; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2014; Huerta, 2012; Valenzuela, 2003). Through this, we can begin to peer under the veil of care ascribed to landscape work.

In bureaucratic terms, non-immigrant workers are foreign residents employed in temporary or seasonal work in the United States. They are defined as nonimmigrants because they are not allowed a pathway to citizenship and they must prove to U.S. officials that they do not intend to stay past the time determined by their visa, usually a maximum of ten months. These H-2 guestworker visa programs ‘ensure a steady supply of foreign workers for industries that rely on cheap labour’ (Bauer & Stuart, 2013, p. 1). The H-2B program, begun in 1986, allows guestworkers to enter for non-agricultural, seasonal labour.⁹ The rates of use of these programs by employers has skyrocketed since then, such that ‘H-2B workers are now essential to the operation of several U.S. industries’ (Zavodny & Jacoby, 2010). Landscaping is the number one industry employing seasonal workers through the H-2B program (Costa, 2022; United States Department of Labor, 2022).¹⁰ More specifically, we can see from the U.S. Department of Labour’s ‘Standard Occupational Classification System’ the range of work related to landscaping represented in the program: First Line Supervisors of Landscaping, Lawn Service, and Groundskeeping; Landscaping and Groundskeeping Workers; Pesticide Handlers, Sprayers, and Applicators, Vegetation;¹¹ Tree Trimmers and Pruners;¹² Grounds Maintenance Workers, All Other; Farmworkers and Labourers, Crop, Nursery, and Greenhouse; Forest and Conservation Workers; Fence Erectors; Segmental Pavers (US DOL, 2022). A total 95 579 guestworkers were approved in just these categories for 2022¹³; this makes up roughly half of all guestworker visas issued. Because of our focus on care tied to living organisms, this number does not even include guestworkers in Construction, or Brickmasons and Blockmasons, Stonemasons, Cement Masons and Concrete Finishers, and other construction work which often has a role in landscape production. It’s clear though, that even with this focused perspective, the presence of H-2B workers in landscape is crucial to the industry’s continued function.

Mexican nationals outnumber guestworkers from all other nations combined. In the documentation for 2021, the last year on record as of this writing, workers from Mexico accounted for 73.6% of total visas issued, with Jamaica next at 9.2%¹⁴ (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, 2022). The guestworker programs are often a rallying point in political discussions of immigration reform, from both liberal and conservative positions. Employers who utilise the program push Congress to increase the quotas of workers who can be imported while at the same time lobbying successfully to diminish bureaucratic hurdles, even when those regulations are meant to protect the health and safety of guestworkers (Bauer & Stuart, 2013; Zavodny & Jacoby, 2010). Even these few legal protections on-paper are extremely rarely enforced (Justice in Motion, 2020; Bauer & Stuart, 2013; Yeoman, 2001). Exploitation and abuse are rampant. Government officials have described the H-2 program as ‘close to slavery,’¹⁵ a form of indentured servitude without the prospect of becoming a citizen (Bauer & Stuart, 2013). Guestworkers are bound to their sponsoring employer and as such cannot legally obtain other work in the United States if abuse occurs. Likewise, they face deportation, retaliation, and blacklisting if they complain to the U.S. Department of Labour or other enforcement agencies. The exploitation often begins in the recruiting process. Guestworkers may enter into high-interest loans and leave collateral¹⁶ to employers’ brokers to secure a guestworker contract. Often these recruiters, and subsequently the employers, physically capture guestworkers’ legal documents prior to departing for the United States and hold them for the duration of their employment (Bauer & Stuart, 2013; Soni, 2023). Workers often leave the job with more debt than prior to engaging in the work, having to pay their employers room and board, travel costs, and other punitive charges while employed—many of which are illegally imposed, according to the visa program regulations (Bauer & Stuart, 2013). In the past twenty years, employers stole $1.8 billion dollars from guestworkers through wage theft (Costa, 2022). ‘Tethered to a single employer and often unable to return home due to crushing debt, guest workers are extremely susceptible to debt servitude and human trafficking’ (Bauer & Stuart, 2013, p. 13).

These structural incapacities are compounded by the intense day-to-day working and living conditions faced by many guestworkers. Testimony from workers across all trades describe the horrendous and dangerous squalor of company housing; deprivations of fresh food and water; surveillance of communication and activities; limitations to free movement and free speech; and threats of, and actual, physical assault, deportation, and financial punishment for speaking against the employer (Bauer & Stuart, 2013; Justice in Motion, 2020; Soni, 2023). If a guestworker flees for their safety—which is not uncommon—they face arrest, deportation, and debt, along with prohibitions on future return to the United States.

The visa program is structured in such a way that employers may request particular individuals to return year after year. Likewise, seasonal guestwork has become a structured part of the Mexican economy, with guestworkers and their families depending upon this cyclical work in the United States. It is known that employers and recruiters run blacklists of guestworkers who speak out; the North Carolina Growers Association, for example, circulated a long-running blacklist of 17 000 individuals, most of them Mexican nationals (Bauer & Stuart, 2013; Waggoner, 2004; Yeoman, 2001). All of this, along with scant enforcement of regulations, induces a climate of abuse, fear, and silence for guestworkers.

If ‘importing’ workers seems like a stretch of the term, consider the guestworker marketplaces that employers use. On websites¹⁷ such as www.labour-mex.com; www.maslabor.com; www.mexicanworkers.biz; and others, labour brokers advertise people as commodities for export. Employers can select age, nationality, and gender preferences as they shop. Discrimination, of these workers for sale and the U.S. workers employers must prove do not want the work available, is inherent to the guestworker program (Bauer & Stuart, 2013; Yeoman, 2001). The instrumentality of this system is clear, as expressed by the following landscape employers who rely on guestworkers to run profitable operations and praise the program in a publication sponsored by the United States Chamber of Commerce (Zavodny & Jacoby, 2010):

The H-2B program has provided us with legally-authorized, reliable workers… They pass their pre-employment drug screen, show up every day and are willing to work extended hours and weekends, when necessary. (Manager for a horticultural service firm headquartered in Ohio)

If we are not able to get legal seasonal workers, we have only 2 choices: #1 Hire illegal, undocumented workers, #2 Go out of business. (Landscape and irrigation contractor in Kansas)

These statements are notable because they are so commonplace and seemingly innocuous. But this type of refrain from employers evidences an explicit and unselfconscious imperative to derive profits from the use of precarious labour. Employers, in these interviews at least, do not consider alternative approaches such as improving wages and working conditions to attract native-born workers. This instrumentalist attitude is a result of the long-standing expectation and embrace of economic migration from Latin America, which is unsettlingly naturalised throughout the United States. In the case of guestworkers, it also has bureaucratic legitimacy. In the public mind, the reasons for economic migration are not consciously linked to the economic imperialism of the Global North in the Global South. People driven north from their homelands because of ecological and agricultural devastation, war, political instability, and violence are more accurately described as survival migrants, and these conditions are a direct byproduct of the continuous, still-present, European and North American extraction of wealth from Mexico, Central, and South America (Blackburn, 1997; Dorninger et al., 2021; Galeano, 1997; Hickel, 2021; Knight, 2002; Mehta, 2019; Petras, 2004). In This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, Suketu Mehta astutely sums up the connection between migration and colonialism: ‘We are here, because you were there’ (2019).

The work that these, primarily Mexican, guestworkers engage in runs the gamut of landscape production, from the horticultural to the ecological.¹⁸ Landscape architecture, and design, is not excluded from this domain. They mow lawns and golf courses, water plants in greenhouses, plant seedlings in nurseries, plant saplings in tree farms, dig and transport trees and shrubs, remove invasive plants from conservation areas, install sod, remove sod, dig trenches, grade terrain, plant meadows, prune ornamentals, install rain gardens, lay fencing and pavers, apply herbicides, and so on. They work in rural propagation sites, urban garden centres, parks and plazas, wilderness areas, and residences in all parts. This is physical labour that supports landscape spatial production at all scales, at its very foundations. Without it, human-designed landscape change would be untenable. If an ethic of care in landscape simply means care for ecology and nothing more, then relations of human domination may be acceptable. If, however, we wish to practice a fully-fleshed version of care, we must look to Cura’s other face: the site of cultivation and care for the human being.

Care’s repair

As Donna Haraway states, ‘nothing comes without its world’ (1997, p. 137). This suggests that if care is a raison d’etre for landscape endeavours, we must look at the whole of ‘its world.’ For me, this at least means the world of work created for landscape labourers through landscape production. The instrumentality of the human-to-human relations—played out in hierarchies, domination, and exploitation of labour—must be addressed. Mehta describes the inevitability of increased migration in a globalised world battered and unevenly impoverished by capitalist relations. Landscape production is currently dependent on these processes of displacement. Migration is convenient to the production of landscapes in the United States; it is a labour pool at the ready, a process of social reproduction continuously bringing forth workers for the U.S. economy (Gonzales, 2013; Ortiz, 2002). Can we talk about care in regard to landscapes without caring about immigration? Can we, as a discipline, relate to migrant workers with care, or solely through a lens of instrumentality?

In ‘Rethinking Care Theory’ Daniel Engster builds upon feminist care discourse and argues that care is itself a moral obligation, not ‘only one practice among many that individuals might choose to perform or not depending upon their tastes—which is exactly how most philosophers and many people have traditionally viewed it’ (p. 57). Likewise, this is where care seems to land in landscape discourse and practice. But care not only involves sustaining organisms and ecologies; care is ultimately the foundation of human relations and of human society. Can caring for ecologies teach us about caring for each other? Engster also makes the argument that caring is a duty that must be afforded to total strangers for whom we have no emotional bonds. What ultimately makes us human ‘is the care we receive from others’ (Engster, p. 59) and ‘we therefore all depend on the caring of others for others to produce the individuals with whom we can become friends, marry, form partnerships, cooperate, and engage in sociable and productive activities in society at large’ (p. 60).

As a place to begin labouring towards reformation of landscape work in the United States, we can start by acknowledging Shannon Mattern’s ‘three enduring truths’ of maintenance and care (2018, n.p.): 1. Maintainers require care; 2. Caregiving requires maintenance; and 3. The distinctions between these practices are shaped by race, gender, class, and other political, economic, and cultural forces. Daniel Engster’s three virtues of caring are imperative to our forward motion: 1. Attentiveness, or an awareness of situations that call for a moral response; 2. Responsiveness, which is a dialog with the subject of care to understand their needs and their response to care; and 3. Respect, which entails incorporating the reality that others are knowledgeable about what they need, and that these needs are important.

The virtues of caring provide a reference to guide this repair of care for the maintainers that conduct landscape labour. This is the beginning of attentiveness. Incorporation of the need for a moral response in landscape work, in reference to immigrant labour, is necessary within the managerial class of the landscape trades. Landscape architects, clients, and broad publics who glean benefit from landscape production—who buy plants and trees, who restore wetlands, who rip out sod to install native meadows, who genuinely care for the earth—need realise that their social and economic connection to landscape workers is not so distant. They are intrinsically tied by processes of production and consumption in a capitalist, global economy. Knowing this is essential, as is educating oneself about immigrant labour, about guestworker programs, and about the people who conduct the work. Attentiveness can mean activism and advocacy. It can also mean caring to investigate, asking questions, and doing the hard work of knowing where to apply pressure. Do contractors, subcontractors, nurseries, growers, and others enlisted in landscape production utilise guestworkers? What are those workers’ living, working, and financial conditions of employment? Are they cared for?

The second and third virtues, responsiveness and respect, build upon attentiveness. Here, the scale of attention is focused on the needs and desires of individual labourers. Absent contact with labourers, this is impossible. Landscape work operates at various scales. Some scales foreclose any opportunity to be responsive to individual labourers’ needs—and lock designers, clients, and communities into an instrumental system of landscape production and consumption, without space for human-to-human care. This choice implies an absence of respect, in Engster’s definition, in that those individual human needs are not worth addressing. Responsiveness and respect consequently require careful consideration of the scales of work one is engaged in—and what relations are supported or sacrificed therein. While landscape work that posits large-scale ecological or social benefit might possibly fulfil those promises, it is worth reflecting on whether the means justify the ends—when those projects are dependent on exploitation of human life through precarious labour practices.

All three virtues of caring are also related to agency and power. Systems based in production and consumption employ a division of labour wherein one class conceives, another executes, and yet another enjoys the fruits of the others’ labours (Holloway, 2005; Hoyles, 2005). But this alienation is just one thread in the cloth of landscape labour. In many ways the work itself—tending, weeding, pruning, mowing, being outside, actively caring for life—has the potential to be fulfilling to the human spirit (Harrison, 2008; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2014; Hoyles, 2005). Recall Cura’s first human gravitating to the cultivation of the earthen, to that which formed their own body.

Alas, we are caught in the chain of capitalist production and consumption, with labourers at the bottom. We are all involved in the business of making paradises—landscapes ‘where things pre-exist spontaneously, offering themselves gratuitously for enjoyment’ (Harrison, p. 6)—places without resistance or responsibility. Robert Pogue Harrison suggests we could leave the creation of paradises behind and realise our ‘potential to be become cultivators and givers, instead of mere consumers and receivers’ (Harrison, p. 10). This means, at least, becoming partners with people, and not just plants; transforming instrumentalist relations with landscape labourers into living relations of care; cultivating inchoate agencies. As in feminist ethics of care, this is political, personal work. It strives to chip away at the deprivations found in divisions of labour, and to break cycles of landscape production and consumption. In this project, we repair human relations alongside ecological ones, and cultivate gardens of flourishing and sustainable relationships through the promise of our ‘vocation of care’ (Harrison, 2008). This is the full face of the goddess Cura, unveiled.

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).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

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.

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, 2022).

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, 2022).

14 Guatemala made up 3.5% of guestworkers; Honduras 2.3%, and Ukraine, 2.3% (United States Department of Labor, 2022).

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.