Row of apartments for permanent farm workers at the Yuba City farm workers’ camp. Yuba City, California. Burton Cairns and Vernon DeMars, architects. Russell Lee, photographer, for U.S. Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information. December 1940.__________
For those who want to dig deeper, a few additional resources on farmworker housing in California.
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Architectural History
1930s and ‘40s: Garrett Eckbo, Burton Cairns, Vernon DeMars, Corwin Mocine, Robert Royston, Francis Violich
For roughly four years beginning in 1938, landscape architect Garrett Eckbo, employed by the federal Farm Security Administration, worked on the design of almost fifty farmworker camps in California, Arizona, and Texas. As Marc Treib writes in Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living (UC Press: 1997),
In retrospect, the success of the FSA projects might be qualified, but rarely the idealism of their enterprise. Housing by Burton Cairns and Vernon DeMars at Chandler, Arizona, and Yuba City [California] were among the earliest social housing in the United States, cited and published widely. The landscape ideas that complemented these projects—led by Garrett Eckbo and his classmates Corwin Mocine and Francis Violich—matched in energy and zeitgeist the most advanced of architectural ideas. In almost all of these landscape designs, the spatial ideas found in Modernist architectural space were applied to desiccated landscapes or agricultural fields. Versions of Eckbo’s Contempoville were realized up and down the length of California, reduced to an almost pathetic level of means, but with no reduction in the intensity of their spatial investigation or humanity. (pp. 42-47)
Examples of this work include:
Farm Security Administration Agricultural Worker’s Community, Chandler, AZ, 1936-37, Burton Cairns and Vernon DeMars, architects: Architectural Forum, 01/1941, 8-11; Elizabeth Mock, Built in USA, 1932-1945 (MoMA: 1945), 62-63; Alfred Roth, New Architecture (Verlag fur Architektur AG, Eisenbach-Zurich: 1948), 61-70.
Farm Security Administration Housing, Woodville, CA, 1941, Vernon DeMars, architect; Garrett Eckbo, landscape architect: Mock, 60-61; Pencil Points, 11/1941, 709-720.
Farm Security Administration Housing, Yuba City, CA, 1937, Vernon DeMars, architect: Mock, 62.
Mineral King Cooperative Farm, Tulare County, CA, 1938, Garrett Eckbo and Robert Royston, landscape architects; Vernon DeMars, architect: http://exhibits.ced.berkeley.edu/exhibits/show/six-degrees/eckbo-and-royston/fsa-mineral-king; http://exhibits.ced.berkeley.edu/items/show/3641; http://exhibits.ced.berkeley.edu/items/show/3721.
1970s, ‘80s, & ‘90s: John Mutlow
The farmworker housing of John V. Mutlow, FAIA, who is interviewed by David Thurman in this issue of arcCA Digest, can be found in:
Alejandra Simonovich de Seufferheld, “Migrant Farmworker Housing Complex: a Cultural Response to Temporary Affordable Housing,” M.Arch. Thesis, U. Illinois, C-U, 2006, pp. 38-42 [Cabrillo Village, Saticoy, Ventura County, California, 1977, 1986]
New Jersey Institute of Technology, Gallery of High Quality Affordable Housing [Rancho Sespe Farmworker Housing, Ventura, California, 1991, 1993]
Insights
Geoffrey Mahon’s “Desired for their labor, rejected as neighbors. Farmworkers in California face hostile communities” (Los Angeles Times, 2 June 2017) gives a vivid sense of the conflicts encountered in the provision of farmworker housing.
Janet Corzo’s M. Arch. thesis, “Portable Housing for Mexican Migrant Workers” (NJIT, 2008), is a lucidly written, well-researched account of the cultural and economic factors affecting the housing of migrant farmworkers across the U.S., leading to a thoughtful design proposal.
David Tau’s photo essay, “First Light: A Central California Farm Workers Journey,” captures the effect of an obscure state statute on the experience of a family residing in the Buena Vista Migrant Camp near Watsonville, California. “Known as the 50-mile regulation, it says that workers have to move 50 miles or more from the housing center [for three months] to be eligible to reside there the following year.” A waiver to this statute was passed as part of a state budget “trailer bill” in July 2018, but, according to this article in The Mercury News, is seen by some as endangering the supply of migrant housing.
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