This contribution to the “Housewife's Secret Arsenal” intimately explores the domestication of toxicity through two pieces of material culture: a Bracero Program (1942-1964) identification card and a residential gardening business card. Both cards belonged to my father. I use these cards to tell how my father's access to the domestic space of the nation's agriculture fields and into the domestic exterior space of people's gardens in Southern California was predicated on his availability to chemical exposure as a racialized body. In the wake of my father's death from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, both images have been reworked and reimagined with a ghostly imprint of a saturating but barely visible history of toxic exposure. I have reworked each card by adding the chemical compounds for DDT and glyphosate. This entry seeks to query how the domestication of war and toxicity accumulates more for certain bodies and how these histories of exposure might also be reworked to imagine otherwise foreclosed forms of sociality and memory.

This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife's Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.

Latinx, migration, Southern California, residential gardening, herbicide, loss, haunting

What does it mean to live an exposed life?

Let's rephrase the question: Do you live in Orange County?

You know, that place in Southern California defined by its sprawling post-suburban communities (Kling, Olin, and Poster 1995), its Trump-country-via-Barry-Goldwater-conservatism (McGirr 2001), its homes adorned with lush gardens, immaculately trim boxwood hedges, and manicured lawns. I recognize that I am, at least in part, painting the county's landscaped ecologies in broad strokes drawn from popular representations like those of Arrested Development and The Real Housewives of Orange County. Even so, this idyllic picture is inseparable from the region's lasting postwar regimes of domesticity and homeownership, which cemented the domestic exterior as the place where white male heads of households did the work of mowing lawns and various outdoor tasks tackled with their children (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2014). This remains a compelling and lasting fiction despite being chipped away every single day by the racial and gendered labor divisions of the home that have been restructured to create the conditions for the outsourcing of this labor to Latinx residential gardeners. These primarily Mexican male workers head out every single morning across the county to skirt, mow, trim, and primp plant life behind the eponymously named “orange curtain.”¹

Perhaps you have called the “OC” your home for a number of years, during which time you lived in the south Orange County region. Unlike the urban center and racially heterogeneous northern part of the Orange County, south county, as it is referred to, is defined by neighborhoods where homes, as Hector Tobar puts it, are “painted eggshell-white by association rule, like featureless architect models plopped down by human hands on a stretch of empty savanna” (2011, 7). Again, think Arrested Development.

Perhaps you live in one of these homes? Perhaps you received a business card from my father, Juan Zárate?

Maybe you found it jammed between your door and its frame, or sitting at the bottom of your mailbox. Perhaps it was walked over to you as you watered your plants.

I can see him still. With a small stack of cards in his breast pocket, next to his dual tone silver and burgundy pen. He probably carried two cards and flicked them together to make a satisfying sound as he walked near you, to signal his presence in a place where brown men are seen as outsiders unless they are pushing a lawnmower.

The card would have looked like this (Figure 1):

Well, kind of like that. It would have had all the necessary data to have you trust in his services. Most important of which would be his California contractor's license number, which is an indication of a business owner's relationship to the state. With these seven little numbers, a customer can infer that the owner has a social security number through which to apply to the California State License Board and acquire the C-27 landscape license.

I encourage you to look a bit closer. Clearly, something is off here, no?

Maybe you haven't noticed the large ficus glumosa tree for the chemical forest, branching out, spilling over the right side of the card.

Glyphosate.

It is one of the things his work will promise you; he will expose himself to the chemicals necessary to kill your weeds. He'll do it as part of your regularized maintenance needs.

Glyphosate is the primary ingredient in commercial weed killer RoundUp, a recent property holding of Bayer but originally created by Monsanto. A series of court cases in the last five years have juridically linked the product to numerous cases of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma that has impacted the lives and killed farmworkers, gardeners, and groundskeepers.²

It will not be the first time Juan has been exposed to toxics to subtend US domesticity. Nor is it the only time it has been captured in the form of a card.

Go ahead and keep the card. Store it in your Rolodex by neatly stapling it to an index card so that it spins effortlessly. Or shove the card into a binder with translucent plastic sheets; with nine pockets to a page, it can be nestled next to the card of the patriot contractor that promises “America first” veteran quality work.

Months after my father's passing in 2017 from cancer (non-Hodgkin's lymphoma), I asked my mother if we could take emotional stock of some of his personal belongings.

Working through grief, we opened the overhead closet cubbies in her bedroom and pulled down a child-sized Peanuts suitcase.

We waded through the affective afterlife of personal ephemera that, as Ana Rosas has extensively and beautifully demonstrated, continues to “[weigh] heavily on [our] hearts, minds, and shoulders” (2014, 5).

My mother recalls that it was originally a brilliant blue. Now, his diminutive companion, because of over five decades of travel on the migrant labor circuit, is pale and worn. Imagine the things it could have held and collected to help him survive as he was forced to leave home for el norte over and over, whether by leaping fences, traversing the Rio Grande, or contracting a pollero to cross him over in a vehicle.

My mother believes that he purchased the suitcase with the money he earned as a bracero guest worker during his stint in the Bracero Program in the early 1960s (his contract in Arizona lasted from 1961 to 1963).

After his passing, Snoopy, we learned, continued to guard over his laminated bracero Alien Laborer's Identification Card (Figure 3).

Surely you sense that something is off on this card, too?

The card consists of two spaces. On the left, a picture of my father, aged twenty-one, shoulders exposed, his chin on a white wooden block, and the rest of his stripped-naked body just outside the frame. The photo is glued to the card and then laminated. Originally, the square to the right was empty—at least I think so.

Presently, reminiscent of the maps my father would draw for me from memory of bracero barracks and their proximate fields of lettuce, it is occupied by a chemical structure.

DDT.

In considering the end of his life, it becomes possible, though no less painful, to note the militarized and toxic currents that girded his inclusion as part of the Bracero Program's (1942-1964) racialized and gendered workforce across the US southwest. As a bracero worker, his labor supported US society and agribusiness accumulation under the guise of satisfying a supposed war-shortage of male workers to pick agriculture commodities during World War II (Galarza 1964; Gonzalez 2006; Mitchell 2012).

This agribusiness fiction, a ploy to bust worker unionization in the fields, created the technoscientific and bureaucratic conditions under which workers were subjectively made and unmade through bodily subjection to a bureaucratic gendering and toxifying regime prior to their entrance into US domestic spaces (Schmidt-Camacho 2008; Flores 2016; Loza 2016; Marez 2016). To eventually pick food from Arizona fields ripe with pesticides, Juan Zárate underwent border inspection at one of the many spatial permutations of the continually evolving militarized US-Mexico immigration apparatus. The enganche centers, where men would be corralled and inspected on the Mexican side of the border prior to being shipped to the domestic geographies of the US, was the first step of bracero subjective unmaking, one, Juan Zárate would often recall, that occurred in the heat of the Sonoran Desert in Empalme.

There, braceros were subjected to a gendering technoscientific and toxic border regime where they were stripped nude, photographed, recorded, and bureaucratically cataloged through the collection of their biodata. Immediately afterward, they were deloused with DDT—a chemical now banned in most of the world because of its cancer-causing effects and disastrous ecological consequences.

The sweat coaxed out of my father's body by the desert heat as a plea to cool his body made the DDT stick—dressing him in white.

To be clear, bracero delousing, distinct from domestic US campaigns meant to protect its white citizenry (Carson 1962), was defined by the biopolitics of the emerging border immigration regime and for extending agribusiness capital. It was not to protect and extend bracero life but to capture them as a disposable labor force—that is, flexible (Chang 2000) and wasting (Wright 2007). It made them into nonhuman commodities—an imported labor force of arms without bodies (brazos means arms in Spanish).

In the wake of my father's absence, I tried to imagine why he would hold onto this identification card, one that, for him, anonymized more than it illuminated, for all those years. What might that document, beyond securing his ability to enter US domestic space as a farmworker, beyond putting food on the plates of Americans, beyond the surplus labor and value for agribusiness capital gleaned from his disposable body, eke in toxic residue. There is a slowness to this. A slowness of pain and accumulated violence; a slowness in the shape of a broken back and leg spasms at old age that have set in from working until the crescent of the moon shines over the curved edge of el cortito in his hand. I imagine his body walking in the furrows, a silhouette in DDT white under night sky.³

The opposite of the supposed concrete work of full human laboring subjects, alien workers are reduced to abstract labor (Day 2016). Their racialized arms float over toxic fields, they are dug deep into soil, they take the shape of the shallow furrows. They come up carrying and emerging; they toss broadleaf lettuce into bins as their time draws toward an eventual expulsion at the end of their four-year bracero contract. They will continue to carry the chemicals—-on their bodies, despite being reduced to arms. My father would forever feel the effect of toxic exposure, like a thousand cuts gained from a lettuce-edge, a kind of racialization coloring his brown skin pink with decades of accumulated Caladryl lotion made layer upon layer in the afternoons.

What does toxic exposure mean in the absence of being legally granted a proper body (Spillers 1987)? What does it mean when you are imported—made—into arms without a body? I'm left wondering, still, how his Bracero ID would come to serve as an originary marker, a kind of harbinger, for an approaching lifetime—decades—that would abound my father's life with domestic toxic exposures; from his continued work as a farmworker to his labor as a residential gardener in Orange County.

In May of 2019, these two cards were (re)created for an experimental installation and collaboration between the UC Irvine Center for Ethnography (https://www.ethnography.uci.edu/) and the Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE; https://worldpece.org/), an open-source digital platform for “multi-sited, cross-scale ethnographic and historical research” (PECE, n.d.). The exhibit comprised visual products by scholars, primarily anthropologists, interrogating the visuality of toxicity, how it plays tricks, hides, can be coaxed out, or is at times already seemingly ever-present.

It was for this collaboration that both images of my father's cards were reworked and reimagined, redacted and annotated (Sharpe 2016) with ghostly imprints centered on life. They are saturating but barely visible and yet might tell an intimate history of militarized toxicity and exposure. In those cards, I place the chemical compound for glyphosate (Figure 1) and DDT (Figure 3) back into the frame. Even so, I still do not fully understand how I feel about making “visible” the connection between his bodily toxic burden and his work. Visible for whom? What can this kind of visibility tell us about him? What must remain beyond the frame of each card—redacted?

Am I insisting on my father's exposure as an avenue by which to better understand the laboring regimes under which he worked and that stridently required his erasure, his work unheralded?

Am I also to imagine that militarized toxicity was not visible before this attempt at ethnographic art? Certainly, it was felt by me, by him.

Centering affective knowledge for toxic exposure means something different in the face of medical uncertainty—the not having a decisive and clear explanation for his exposure (Murphy 2006). This is a kind of exposure that is felt as a militarized border-making, an exposure felt as subjection to the chemical force of making people into agriculture commodities and exposure felt as mist carried onto his brown skin from applications of weed killer to maintain properties immaculate, week after week.

He did not die from heart failure.

Visibility and affective knowability can operate on different registers; my father knew intimately the manifestation of exposure on his body, he felt it. I felt it when the official cause of death was listed as cardiac arrest and not a worn body from decades of farm work and residential gardening's domestic regimes of gendered labor and toxicity. He died from racialized exposure to a white supremacist settler and imperial power, not to the failure of his heart in the last instance—he still wanted to go home, to his last breath.

You can still have these cards; you can still use them and call on his life.

All images in the exhibit were uploaded to PECE by their authors. There, a community of users can engage and, using one of the platform's tools, annotate the images (Fortun and Adams 2019). While the exhibit for which the images were created has ended, my father's cards live on in PECE.

I think these images are only partially successful in capturing how war is domesticated. I say that because as a migrant subject, my father, like other migrant subjects, felt the brunt of the domestication of war, its militarized provenance unspooled across the spatial logic of the US-Mexico border. It was in the state management of his racialized body, and I'm certain also to be found in his understanding of war's domestication as a process predicated on, regardless of legal status or legal document carried in tow, his availability to dispossession, displacement, and as a container for slow and deadly toxic dissipation. This is a felt knowledge, a kind of synesthesia, where his body felt, registered, the meaning and failures of a so-called better life, a fiction shorn from the fabric of a cruel optimism (Berlant 2011).

¹ I want to point to a resonance with Natalia Duong's piece in this volume's special section, particularly for the way that “Orange,” both in its creation (Agent Orange) and its continual remaking (Orange County) requires and expects racialized bodies to endure forms of toxic exposure and labor. As Duong notes, Vietnamese refugees were dangerously housed in areas close to where Agent Orange was tested and service workers were hired to clean the laboratories where Agent Orange was developed. See, Natalia Duong, “Homing Toxicity: The Domestication of Herbicidal Warfare,” in this issue.

² Press coverage of these legal cases has been extensive; see Associated Press (2019).

³ The short-handled hoe, known as el cortito, was a tool used to discipline farmworkers. Unlike the standard hoe, el cortito forced farm workers to bend over as they cut with one hand and harvested with the other. When a worker stood it would immediately notify an overseer or manager of their pause from work. See Jain (2006).

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Salvador Zárate is a cultural anthropologist and ethnic studies scholar who studies Latinx migrant labor and racial ecologies in Southern California. He received his PhD in ethnic studies from the University of California, San Diego, and is currently an Assistant Professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He grew up working as a residential gardener for his father's company in Orange County, California.