Solar Flux: Remaking landscapes, labor, and environmental politics in California

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From 2015-2020, massive booms in solar power and high speed rail reconstructed landscapes across California’s San Joaquin Valley. Globally rare alliances of construction unions with environmental justice and immigrant movements won breakthroughs in regional politics. How did construction workers reshape their power in response to the booms–and what formed their politics in this extraordinary direction? This dissertation argues that construction worker power hinged on unions’ capacity to reproduce the workforce for urgent landscape transformations, while labor alliances were driven by shared political exclusion and common household struggles over social reproduction of the region’s working class, Mexican-American majority. Drawing on five years of ethnographic and archival research, I compare the Fresno-Madera region, where these construction labor-immigrant-environmental justice alliances prevailed at crucial moments, to the Bakersfield region just to the south, where limited household ties, unstable overall employment, and conflicts over oil fractured potential coalitions. In conversation with environmental justice, Marxist feminist, and Marxist geography approaches–including Gramscian interpretations of Clyde Woods, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Matthew Huber–I develop a theory of environmental leverage, explaining how landscape transformation and the labor involved can challenge or entrench hegemony. The breakthroughs made by San Joaquin alliances in winning municipal office, jobsite power, and infrastructure redistribution help show how working and oppressed people can build pressing climate transitions by their own blueprints.