The Road to the Wilderness Runs Through the Fields

The road you have been driving passes through two landscapes that most visitors experience as separate things.

Highway One Forty follows the Merced River canyon from the San Joaquin Valley floor up into the Sierra Nevada foothills, through the towns of Merced and Mariposa, before it reaches the park entrance. The valley behind you and visible from the lower stretches of this road is one of the most productive agricultural landscapes in the world: stone fruits, dairy, almonds, garlic, row crops grown on land where summer temperatures regularly exceed one hundred degrees and the water to irrigate them is pulled from an aquifer system that has been in measurable decline for decades.

That agricultural landscape was built by Filipino and Mexican farmworkers, and by workers who came through the Bracero program, the federal guest-worker initiative that brought more than four million Mexican agricultural laborers to California and other states between nineteen forty-two and nineteen sixty-four. The organizing work that Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers conducted in the nineteen sixties and seventies was centered in this corridor and the communities like it up and down the San Joaquin Valley. The farmworkers they organized were working in sight of the approach to the most celebrated wilderness in the United States.

The wilderness and the agricultural labor economy exist in the same geography and have almost nothing to do with each other in the official tourism narrative. The park literature does not mention the fields. The labor history of the fields does not mention the park. The people who picked the food you probably ate before this trip may have worked within twenty miles of where you are now.

That adjacency is not accidental. Both landscapes were built. One of them is called natural.