Putting Workers on the Map: Agricultural Atlases and the Willamette Valley’s Hidden Labor Landscape

Analyzing Oregon agricultural atlases from 1878 to 1958, I show that, despite these texts’ projection of impartial authority, they function to extend a discourse of natural bounty in which agricultural abundance is linked to inherent characteristics of the land, hiding the role of racialized and disenfranchised laborers in production. Using a combination of Agricultural Census data, historical and contemporary records from farmers and agricultural extension services, and GIS software, I demonstrate a method for reconstructing historical and contemporary agricultural labor landscapes, filling in—at least partially—the spatial absence of farmworkers. Using maps I have produced for a limited set of crops as a case study, alongside worker testimonies and ethnographic accounts, I argue that this sort of counter-mapping of the agricultural landscape can form the basis for an alternative spatial narrative of changing landscapes, replacing the depopulated and bountiful nature of conventional agricultural atlases with maps that reveal the agricultural landscape from a worker’s perspective that centers the hidden the toil and suffering entailed in the creation of Oregon’s agricultural bounty.