Pineros: Latino Labour and the Changing Face of Forestry in the Pacific Northwest by Brinda Sarathy

Abstract

 Reviews The series tackles big subjects comprehensively in language meant to reach the nonspecialist. Hyde’s contribution demands dedication due to its length alone.And the nature of the subject matter — familial relationships in far-flung places, among several families whose stories are traced across hundreds of pages, coupled with the successes and failures of nationalistic interventions — compels a careful reading. But Hyde is masterful at telling her stories,and the time spent with the text reveals important patterns of indigenous–nonindigenous kinship ties first disrupted and often destroyed in conquest throughout what is now the American West. A reader interested in Oregon history might be tempted to skip to the sections that address the Pacific Coast and John and Marguerite McLoughlin’s family and would be well rewarded for it.But that reader would also miss the larger pattern the book sets out to reveal. Katrine Barber Portland State University Pineros: Latino Labour and the Changing Face of Forestry in the Pacific Northwest by Brinda Sarathy UBC Press, Vancouver, 2012. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 208 pages. $94.00 cloth. $35.95 paper. Brinda Sarathy offers a scholarly analysis of the role of Latino contract laborers — pineros — in the maintenance of federal forests in the Pacific Northwest. Her goal is an explicitly activist one: to expose the exploitation of a largely invisible group of workers in the hope of provoking shifts in public perceptions and government policy. Sarathy’s work combines archival research with the findings of over seventy-five interviews she conducted with government officials, labor contractors, forest workers and their families, and the employees of social service and community organizations serving the Latino population of the Rogue Valley in southern Oregon. Sarathy takes readers very quickly through the evolution of the U.S. timber industry over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the transformative impact of the post–World War II boom years, followed by the application during the 1970s (and thereafter) of a new reforestation regime driven by that era’s shift in environmental values. Oregon’s 1971 Forest Practices Act, for example, contributed to the rise of a booming industry in reforestation. Sarathy notes that both private landowners and public-land managers responded to the new legal exigencies by contracting out the very physically demanding work of planting trees.That labor system evolved from the 1970s through the 1990s — the decades that are the principal focus of the book — starting with native-born “Anglo” contractors and laborers (including for a while some cooperative crews that were driven by environmentalist sentiments rather than by market values), then Anglo contractors employing a growing proportion of Latino workers. After the 1986 Immigration and Control Act, older legalized Latino immigrant contractors harnessed a labor force of both legal and undocumented Latino immigrant workers. Among Sarathy’s more significant revelations in the book is her description of the use of vulnerable, undocumented workers on federal land under federal contract at a time of increasingly stringent immigration restriction. Sarathy presents her most cogent defense of those vulnerable workers, and the most concise statement of her own policy views, in two sentences mid book:“The labour exploitation of pineros is due in significant part to the fragmented nature of policy making: decisions and debates about the‘natural’environment take place separately from discussions of immigration policy and the implementation and enforcement of labour laws. Only by tak-  Reviews ing into account the inextricable relationships between labour and landscape and by accepting Latino immigrants as integral players in forests and rural communities can we hope to have land management policies that promote both forest health and environmental justice” (p. 75). Sarathy effectively demonstrates the pineros’ marginalization, their experience of labor abuses,untimelyorabsentpay,uncompensated injury, and fear of deportation, along with the difficulties they face defending their interests due to language barriers and racial prejudice — including the arguably most benign manifestation of racism in the treatment of Oregon’s Latinos by the mainstream press more as “cultural spectacle” than as full human beings. On that score, Sarathy devotes a chapter to Latino workers’ organizational efforts beyond the southern Oregon woods, ranging from labor unionism — for example, the Pineros...