The Orange County gardeners of COVID-19: Making breath in landscapes of racial suffocation

Abstract

This article examines Latinx residential gardening in Orange County, California during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic laid bare how the suburban home is a realm of racial suffocation, where the US white propertied subject is secured through unfettered access to the life, not just labor, of racialized and gendered workers of the domestic economy. Despite disposability, residential gardeners' frontline botanical work foments a practice of making breath that, beyond expanding life in the Southern California suburban ecology of lawns, gardens, and property, also crafts more than human mutuality from the grounds of the suburban home. Thinking beyond the paradigm of gardeners' “mow, blow, and go” labor, I track how their more than human mutuality, despite appearing to be pruned back, tarries on other's property with plants, soil, and trees in ways that reemerges beyond liberal humanist categorizations of labor and the human. In doing so, I demonstrate that, despite racial suffocation, residential gardeners' practices of breathing befuddle the aims of racial capitalist COVID-19 inequity.