Paradise Transplanted: Migration and the Making of California Gardens By Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo University of California Press. 2014. 304 pp. $29.95 paperback

Abstract

It is not surprising that so many cultures associate gardens with paradise. For a garden is a utopic space that exists first of all through our imagination. Alas, real gardens—our own, our neighbors’ down the street, or those in public spaces—have the disadvantage of requiring a great deal of time, energy, money, and just plain hard work. As anyone who has spent time planting, pruning, and weeding knows full well, gardening may be a labor of love, but it needs more. As Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo reminds us in her illuminating and provocative book on the gardenscapes of Southern California, the down-to-the earth, dirty hands, and backbreaking work of gardening falls disproportionately to the dispossessed, who labor long and hard not for love but for a living. In Southern California, these laborers are immigrants, middle-class Los Angelenos having deserted the care of their own lawns some decades ago. Early in the twentieth century, these immigrants were Japanese; today, they come from Mexico and Central and South America. Without them, the fervently desired earthly paradise would look more like a jungle. Hondagneu-Sotelo recovers the stories and the lives of these laborers. The landscapes represent much more than the bounty of nature come to fruition—these men, ultimately, who transform the arid into the lush landscapes that we associate with Southern California.