The Gardeners of Eden
The Gardeners of Eden
This chapter examines the work it takes to maintain the private garden paradises of middle-class and upper-class home gardens, focusing on home owners and the Mexican immigrant gardeners they employ. It shows how the immigrant gardener labor system involves a triangle of dreams that connect home owners, route-owner gardeners (who own the trucks and the tools), and the ayudantes (helpers, the paid employees of the head gardeners). The home owners want residential dreamscapes, impeccably maintained home lawns and gardens while the Latino gardeners seek living wages and economic solvency. Everyone is chasing a different dream, and gardens, money, and labor connect them in an expansive web that stretches across the big properties and smaller suburban tracts of Southern California. Relying on audio-recorded interviews with Latino immigrant gardeners, home owners, and a handful of landscape designers, the chapter reveals how paid residential gardening is organized, how it shapes the gardens and ultimately all of us who live here. Ethnic succession and gender succession characterize these changes in residential gardening labor.
Keywords: Southern California, residential gardening, Latino immigrants, immigrant gardeners, ethnic succession, gender succession, gardening labor
California Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
