Process is ideology churning in plain sight. If we know what to look for, the spinning crankshaft and the up-and-down of pistons reveal the motive of the engine. Political economists of the old school first took the bolts out of process to reveal its social workings. William Petty loved to look over the shoulders of smiths, carpenters, and joiners. He became the first economist. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx were also avid observers of material processes, and so is the geographer Don Mitchell.

Mitchell's process is industrial agriculture in California and how its history is coiled up with the braceros – the 4.75 million Mexican workers brought to California between the 1940s and the 1960s by agreement between the United States and Mexico. Well known but little studied, the braceros have been awaiting their critical political economist – one who would take the doors and hinges off of the enormously complicated and politically rigged scheme that commodified and wrapped them in institutional snares. In They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California, Mitchell demonstrates how fruit and cotton growers complained of a wartime shortage of harvest labor, when what they really wanted was a captive laboring population, made up of people who could not move to other states, change jobs, or unionize. Growers succeeded in compelling law and police power to institutionalize their private interests, influencing the way food is produced in the United States ever since.

There is revelation in the book's amassed detail. The corruption that allowed the most circumscribed and manipulated workers since chattel slavery to replace better-compensated workers operated within the imperatives of capital. Capital is more than surplus value but surplus value advanced to earn more surplus value. Capital is as capital does. Yet capital is merely a social relationship, in which human interaction is organized to maximize capital. Like Marx, Mitchell is unrelenting in his ability to weave together the production process and the imperatives of capital. It wasn't just the braceros who lived in thrall to the process – the growers themselves emerge as surplus-value-generating sharecroppers in fief to the bankers who owned the farmland and whose decisions transformed the landscape. In this way Mitchell elevates his story beyond greed, turning it into history on a Marxian scale.

Mitchell is a geographer, and he describes his book as “a spatially sensitive story about just what happened” (2). The geographical argument is the most important because it ties all the strands of the story together – capital, labor, and land. Mitchell contends that a state-sponsored labor system made possible various kinds of labor process – from short hoes that forced lettuce workers to bend over, making their continued motion visible at a distance, to mechanized field packing that eliminated a slate of well-paid jobs and quickened the movement of lettuce to consumers – and how these processes, in turn, created the industrial countryside of California. It created more than just one industrial countryside, since the bracero program reached into Mexico itself, changed how the international border functioned, and resulted in a migrant infrastructure to house the workers from coast to valley.

I am reminded of something Harold Bloom said of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time: if you try to read it for the plot, you'll hang yourself. The infinitude of the book's proper names, small events, and epic notes making up its 529 pages made me feel a little like Bloom. Yet readers should not despair. Thirteen short chapter interludes provide a theoretical summation of the book, with titles that include “Morphology: Things on the Land” and “Squeezed: Capital's Geography.” The effect is like having Karl Marx, David Harvey, Pierce Lewis, Richard Walker, and Mitchell himself as sympathetic narrators to the archival evidence.

They Saved the Crops is investigative scholarship in the interest of social justice. In grand Marxian fashion it makes a grand Marxian point – that capitalism has depended on government, not an unregulated market – to secure the conditions for capital accumulation and that capital needs reserve armies of human labor and lands unprotected by law as preconditions before it can replicate itself. It is always astonishing and gratifying to see ideology made manifest by the careful deconstruction of economic process. That is the value of first-rate critical geography.