Agriculture, Mountains, and a Sea in the Desert

http://maps.google.com/?ll=33.589455,-116.099396&spn=0.696679,1.234589&t=h&z=10 For this week's post I decided to provide a link to a satellite map/image of the Coachella Valley today. In my thesis' introduction I will be describing the geographical location and the landscape of CV to provide a brief history on the creation of the desert as an agricultural space. The Coachella Valley is located in Southern California approximately two hours southeast from the city of Los Angeles. The Valley is part of the Colorado Desert and is surrounded by the San Jacinto and the Santa Rosa mountains on the west, the San Bernadino mountains to the east and the Chocolate mountains and Salton Sea to the south. It extends for 45 miles and encompasses 9 cities—Desert Hot Springs, Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, La Quinta, Indio and Coachella—and other unincorporated communities. The west side of the Coachella Valley, which is composed by the first seven cities, is covered in extremely green, fake-looking and exorbitantly water needy golf courses, sparkling turquoise swimming pools and streets aligned with tall, skinny and clean-looking palm trees. The west is an inspiration, an oasis, pollution- free, sunny skies recreational and popular desert with fascinating landscapes. The east side—Indio and Coachella and other unincorporated communities, such as Thermal, Mecca and North Shore—is covered in date fields, vineyards, orange and lemon trees, cabbage, lettuce and onion fields in addition to many other fruits and vegetables. The proximity of these fields to people's homes result in the buzzing of mosquitoes and bees and their constant and unpleasant bites and stings and the bothersome odor of pesticides. The east is a growing working-class community of predominantly Mexican-Americans, Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants. Besides the east's agricultural and rural landscape, the Salton Sea, the largest lake in California with an area of approximately 376 square miles and a length of 35 miles, is on this side. I will also briefly compare CV to larger valleys in California where the UFW was unionizing farm workers. For example, one of the things I will mention is CV’s proximity to the US-Mexico border and how this presented a challenge for the UFW when trying to organize workers because growers would hire Mexican workers from the border city of Mexicali, just two hours south of Coachella, and use them as scabs or strikebreakers.