Movement and imagery : the work of humans, honey bees, and advertising for California almond production

In what ways do the experiences of human workers and honey bees shed light on the intensive labor that is performed to meet the demands of California almond production? What does an interrogation of the visual representations of place and production processes tell us about the cultural reproductions of race, labor, relation, and health? In this thesis, I use archival and digital visual material to explore themes of placemaking and movement within California’s almond industry. I urge for a contextualization of present-day U.S. agricultural practices that accounts for the settler colonial histories of California and I argue that California landscapes were romanticized through the bolstering of almond orchards as a site of beauty and temporary leisure in the twentieth century. I argue that recurring depictions of white male almond farmers and their nuclear, multigenerational families, work to reassert the sentimental nostalgia that the evocation of “the family farm” elicits - effectively misrepresenting the industry at large, by overshadowing necessary networks of (human and honey bee) movement through workers’ embodied labor, the movement of machines, and the movement of the almond products between facilities, freeways, and freights.